Sixty years ago this month, a 21-year-old South Korean soldier named Lee Jae-won wrote a letter to his mother. He was somewhere in the middle of the peninsula, he wrote, and bullets were coming down like "raindrops." He said he was scared.
The next letter to arrive came days later from the South Korean military. It described a firefight in Paju, near the modern-day border between the North and South, and said Lee had been killed there in battle. His body had not been recovered.
"We never doubted his death," said Lee's younger brother, Lee Jae-seong. "It was the chaos of war, and you couldn't expect to recover a body."
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