U.S. pianist Bernstein reminisces about his experience as soldier during Korean War

By Park Boram

SEOUL, June 24 (Yonhap) -- After more than 60 years, Seymour Bernstein said he still cries when leafing through diaries he kept during his military service in the 1950-53 Korean War, revisiting the memory of wartime horrors he witnessed as a 23-year-old foot soldier.

"We were on the deck of a ship gliding into Incheon harbor on April 24, 1951," the 89-year-old renowned American pianist said in his press meeting in Seoul on Friday.

The three-year war was about one year into its course when Bernstein landed in South Korea, a remote unknown Asian country for which the then-fledgling musician was inducted to fight at the age of 23. "Do you know why I remembered that day? It was my 23rd birthday."

He was one of the hundreds of thousands of troops sent from 16 foreign countries to help South Korea to repel the invading North Korean troops and their Chinese allies.

The retired pianist and composer and some 70 other Korean War veterans and families are visiting South Korea this week on a commemoration program by South Korea's Ministry of Patriots & Veterans Affairs.

"I looked out to the coast of Korea in the morning with a steel helmet, dressed in army gear and my M1 rifle at my side ... I was terrified, going into a war and I said to myself I don't think in my whole life I would ever be so frightened again," Bernstein said, recalling his landing in the country.

He was trained as a infantryman and started his one-and-a-half-year service on foot, but his musical talent later landed him a position as a military pianist. His tour of duty featured some 100 wartime musical performances in Seoul, Daegu and Busan both for United Nations troops on Korean soil as well as local soldiers.

Those wartime performances involved moving "a piano into the base of a hill so that if shells come over we wouldn't be injured," the white haired musician reminisced.

The civil war ended its three-year bloody battle with an armistice in July 1953, leaving the two Koreas technically at war with each other till this day.

In the meantime, Bernstein returned to his home in New Jersey before coming back to Korea three more times for concerts and teaching music besides the latest trip.

"I saw Seoul reborn out of the ashes of the despair ... I think that to see how Korea rebuilt itself culturally, politically and financially; it is one of the models of the whole world," he said. "It gives me enormous pleasure to know that I had a part in it."

The Korean War experience was part of the pianist's stories told in a 2015 documentary film, "Seymour: An Introduction," directed by American actor Ethan Hawke.

"I started to cry because I remembered seeing body bags of my dead soldiers," he said of a documentary scene in which the director captured him tearing up while reading a packet of diaries written during the war. "When I read this ... horrors of the war came back to me and I just cried the whole day."

"It was not only the horrors of the war, but the intimacy established with the students and some of the Korean people who helped me," he added.

On Monday, Bernstein is to give a piano performance to his fellow veterans and other South Korean audience, once again evoking the tunes he played against the backdrop of gunfire.

"I can't think of anything more terrible than war ... it grieves me to know that people have not become civilized that there's something irrational in humans that want to kill and cause harm to other people," the musician said.

Differing opinions and intolerance for them make a war unavoidable, he said. "But the musical language is the same, so I found that that is my means of making contributions to other people through music."

pbr@yna.co.kr
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