The Reluctant Communist by Charles Robert Jenkins, Jim Frederick

new house in Daeyang-ri. It was more remote than the last house, more than an hour drive down a dirt road from the nearest turnoff. It was a nice house, with many small rooms. Again, the leaders were gone for days and weeks at a time, but now we didn’t even have officers coming by for English lessons, so we were mostly just left by ourselves for a few months until a colonel who stopped by learned by chance from one of us that we knew how to make fishing nets.
    A few days later, he showed up with forty-four pounds of nylon string and said the Organization needed our nets. That was a bit of a benefit, I suppose, being given so much nylon, considering that usually we scavenged our nylon from the linings of old automobile tires. But we quickly came to hate being given so much nylon, since it seemed like the whole time we were there that all we did was make fishing nets. Once you get good at it, it is not difficult to weave the one-inch holes with your little bamboo needle, but it is hard on your eyes and hard on your back. They told us that we had to make five hundred meters (about 550 yards) of net. And we had to do it in about a year’s time. That was almost impossible, but we did it.
    We had learned to improvise some of the materials we didn’t have. Back in the previous house, we would scavenge lead from old car batteries, melting and shaping the sinkers ourselves to weigh down the bottom of the nets. But here, we didn’t have a junkyard nearby, so we made the sinkers out of clay that we would harden in a fire. Likewise, back at the old house, we actually had enough access to wine bottles to make the floats for the top of the net out of real corks. Here, we had to cut the floats from pine bark instead. We had become experts in backwoods fishing wisdom, such as this: What is the secret ingredient to toughen up your nylon net, transforming it from something that will last for a few seasons into something that will last for a few decades? Pig’s blood. After you have finished weaving your net, take the whole thing and soak it in a vat of fresh pig’s blood. (Yes, a few gallons of pig’s blood can be hard to find, but the benefits are great enough that it is worth befriending a butcher, or buying and killing your own pig, or doing whatever it takes.) Once the nylon fibers are thoroughly soaked, let the net dry in the sun. After it is dry, steam the whole net on a stove in a large pot partially filled with water. (Keep the net out of the water by placing it on a few pieces of wood inside the pot itself.) Once the blood has fully cooked into the nylon, take the net out and let it dry again. When you are done, the net will be shiny, black, slick, resistant to snags, and very strong.
    Near our house, there were a bunch of other houses. They were all off-limits. A leader told us, “See that road? Don’t go down it. See that house? Don’t go near it.” We didn’t know who lived there, but we guessed they were filled with Republic of Korea Army prisoners. One day, Abshier and I were at our house. Dresnok and Parrish were at the lake, which was about three hundred yards away over a hill. About a week or two before, we had seen the army digging a hole on the side of the mountain. Dresnok and Parrish came back and said, “Hey, the hole is now a bald spot of dirt. Let’s go check it out.” We walked over there, and a dog was digging up the fresh dirt. That’s when we saw them: two dead human feet sticking right up out of the ground. We didn’t believe what we were seeing, but we took a closer look, and sure enough, there was no mistaking it. From the size of the grave, about two by five yards, it could have held five to ten people, depending on how deep it was. We decided to get the hell out of there and leave it alone. We swore we would never tell what we saw. A few days later, however, we saw a woman running down the hill from where the grave was. She was screaming her head off, and we knew exactly what it was all about.