In Touch with the News

From the moment he left his desk at the Korea Times in Seoul last June, Managing Editor Choi Byung Woo was plagued with troubles. The amiable, book-loving newsman had hardly started his tour of Southeast Asia when British plainclothesmen nabbed him in Malaya for asking searching questions of a British naval officer at the bar in Singapore's Cockpit Hotel. The embarrassed police quickly established that asking questions was Choi's business; he chuckled and headed for Formosa. Early in September Choi was one of the first newsmen to hit the beaches of beleaguered Quemoy, safely wading ashore under a heavy artillery barrage only to suffer a severely bruised hip when his jeep rammed a truck.

Back in Formosa, Choi was packed off to recuperate at Peitow, a sulphurous spa near Taipei. There Choi woke up one morning to find he was paralyzed from the hips down. He telephoned a friend at Taipei's Friends of China Club. "I'm at Peitow, and I'm paralyzed," he said, and added--in his awareness that Peitow is a famed carousing place: "Please don't laugh."

In a Seventh-day Adventist hospital, Choi gradually lost his paralysis. Last week, when the ban on correspondents' trips to Quemoy (TIME, Sept. 29) was lifted, Choi limped over the hill from the hospital and headed for the docks, after sending a plaintive note of apology to a friend: "I will take care of myself and try not to be foolish."

Choi had no chance to do anything foolish. He was aboard the LVT that swamped with eight Chinese, Japanese and Korean newsmen aboard in a high sea off Quemoy's Liaolo Beach. At week's end the Chinese Nationalists listed him as missing. Newsman Choi's last words before going over the side: "I can't swim very well, but I'll try."

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