A Bridge for Andong

Andong is a town (normal pop. 40,000) on the upper Naktong River in southeastern Korea. Last March, when Colonel Fremont S. ("Tom") Tandy, 50, and his 32nd Engineer Construction Group arrived in Andong, they found the place more than half destroyed. The townspeople were most concerned with the bombed- out ruin of the Bridge of the Rising Buddha. It was Andong's major link with the coast of the Sea of Japan, some 60 road miles away. With the bridge out, Andong and several million inhabitants of North Kyongsang Province were having great trouble getting their food in.

One day, County Chieftain Lee Jong Hee presented himself to West Pointer Tandy with a request: Would the Colonel kindly give the people of Andong a new Bridge of the Rising Buddha? Said Tandy: "You supply the materials and the labor; I'll supply the engineers." Tandy assigned two crews of four G.I. engineers each. Each crew worked a twelve-hour shift. Lee supplied several hundred laborers--welders, carpenters, concrete men, a blacksmith.

Old Rails & Packing Crates. Lee's men scrounged 2,000 lengths of rail from bombed-out spur lines and abandoned mine railways. From the steel rails the welders fashioned a supply of I beams. The Koreans went out into the hills, returned with 1,500 bags of cement hidden there by the Japanese almost six years before. For forms, they used old packing crates from Tandy's supply dump. For cribbing, the Koreans borrowed thousands of railroad ties from the Andong-Taegu railway line, returned them promptly when they were through with them.

The workers stripped the armor from destroyed allied and Communist tanks to use as bearing plates, delivered 400 tons of gravel to the bridge site, and dredged 500 tons of sand from the Naktong to make sandbags. For more than two months the work went on, at night under the light of powerful searchlights supplied by Tandy's engineers.

White Flowers & Dyed Paper. One day last week the G.I.s and the workers of Andong tightened their last bolt. The laborers swept the bridge and the Andong fire department gave it a good hosing down. The bridge railings were festooned with strips of G.I. toilet paper dyed red, white & blue. On a wooden platform near the Andong end of the bridge sat Engineer Tandy and local dignitaries, including indefatigable County Chieftain Lee. Behind the wooden platform sat the G.I. engineers and their Korean fellow workers, each wearing in the buttonhole of his fatigue shirt the day's badge of honor--an enormous, floppy, white paper flower.

The Korean national police band played its own version of The Beer Barrel Polka, while near by another band added to the din by banging vigorously on tattered drums and rusty cymbals. The Andong middle-school chorus, girls dressed up in white smocks and blue pleated skirts, boys in little white caps, blue shirts and white trousers, sang the U.S. and South Korean national anthems. Then, amid cheers, Colonel Tandy cut the ribbon, formally opened Andong's new bridge.

The Bridge of the Rising Buddha had risen once more, and food for Andong's people was soon rolling across.

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