[6.25 기획]“내게 주어진 마지막 책무”...아들과 전우 자료 찾아 나선지 20년, 인천 소년병이 기록하는 6.25<br /><br />The three years of the Korean War in the early 1950s affected every aspect of Korean life... and even teenage students joined the army to fight in the war.<br />One of those student soldiers is now in his late 80s and has been collecting data to document the history of his fellow comrades.<br />With him,...Choi Jeong-yoon walks through the lives of student soldiers.<br />South Korea's western port city of Incheon was once a ferocious Korean War battlefield where in 1950, UN forces counter-attacked the North's military.<br />Here is a special place striving to capture the lives of forgotten war heroes.<br />In this dental clinic, a man who joined the army while just a student has collected information about the lives of 200 Incheon middle and high school students who fought as soldiers alongside him.<br />"When situation got worse after the Chinese army came in, many young students joined the volunteer corps to protect their homeland. After four years of service, I was discharged as the war ended."<br />Lee was one of 2 thousand students who walked 500 kilometers to Busan to join the army.<br />As the memories of that time were getting blurry, Lee wanted to know exactly what happened to those young men.<br />He traced the footsteps of each individual with just a recorder in his hand and the help of his son who made space for him at his dental clinic.<br />On his journey, Lee came across abandoned graves and heartrending stories of fellow comrades.<br />"All those people I met... they didn't like thinking about the past. The memories are just too painful. But they testified. I keep searching for the history. That's the last duty I have in this world, so people remember what we did."<br />With thousands of articles and pictures from the 1950s, the Incheon Student Soldier Archives opened in 2004 and were officially registered as a museum 11 years later.<br />"These people died to protect our freedom and democracy. They're no longer alive, but with the archives, their lives persist in our memories."<br />The father and son will keep working to give names to those who died in battle and fill in the missing pieces of history.<br />Choi Jeong-yoon, Arirang News.<br />
