The Boy in the Bag: The Story of the Korean Child Who Escaped the War in a Colombian Battalion’s Travel Bag

It was an open secret, whispered for seven decades. The unresolved story of the Korean boy who came to Colombia hidden in the duffel bag of a soldier who fought in the Korean War, as if he were contraband merchandise, obsessed Andrés Sanín. The journalist wanted to learn more about the odyssey of this “rescue operation” and what had become of the life of that boy, whose identity was split between two worlds. From that investigation springs The Boy from the Duffel Bag (Planeta, 2025), a non-fiction book that delves into one of the greatest intimacies of the Colombian Battalion.

Sanín stumbled upon the story, which he often thought was a myth, by chance. “I was doing a report on a war veteran who had taken several photos while in Korea. Before meeting him, I read an article that briefly mentioned the existence of this boy. It sounded surreal to me,” explains Sanín (Bogotá, 45 years old) via video call from Washington, where he has lived for a year. That veteran confirmed that it was all true: a comrade of his, named Aureliano Gallón, had brought a minor —about seven or eight years old— out of his country to “rescue” him from the war. Sanín is still unsure whether to label it as a rescue, smuggling, or even kidnapping. Once in Colombia, Gallón adopted the boy and named him Carlos Arturo.

Thus began a search, not without several obstacles, to find out what had happened to the boy. Some media outlets, such as El Tiempo and El Espectador, collected some leads at the time. The boy grew into adulthood and served as a soldier in the Colombian Army. He got married and had two children. With this foundational information, Sanín began asking veterans who had accompanied Gallón on the ship that returned the Colombian Battalion after fighting in Korea. “That was the first obstacle. There was a considerable temporal distance, coupled with the psychological state of many of them, who returned with traumas that led them to evade memories and even doubt their own reality,” he asserts.

Fortunately, thanks to the support of the Colombian Association of Korean War Veterans (Ascove), Sanín found Ramón Rojas, a former soldier who had many of the answers to his questions. “He was the one who dared to talk to me the most and did so with great sincerity. This story is often romanticized: the tale of soldiers who saved a boy from hunger and other abuses, and they lived happily ever after. But it’s not that simple. These people condemned him to live another type of violence in Colombia and to suffer from uprooting and always living divided,” he asserts.

It was thanks to Rojas that the journalist got in touch with Yunc, Carlos Arturo’s son. He was just one person away from finding the boy from the duffel bag. However, to his dismay, he arrived too late. Carlos Arturo had passed away. The story could no longer be told through its protagonist but through his son. “He saw my interest in the case and slowly started to open up, which was very difficult for him. We began to reconstruct the father’s story, and he didn’t even have all the pieces of the puzzle,” says Sanín, who, despite all the setbacks, assures that he never gave up. “If I didn’t tell it, no one was going to tell this story. This is a tribute I wanted to pay to the forgotten war and a forgotten character.”

The book is structured in three timelines. One of them, in the present, details the process of memory restoration: the searching in newspaper archives and the personal files left by Carlos Arturo: letters, photos, and documents. Much of this collection was done during the 2020 quarantine. “I felt like a kind of detective. I had a board with photos connected by a red thread. It was a refuge for me during that time.”

In parallel, Sanín delves into Korea in 1953, where over 5,000 soldiers joined the Colombian Battalion to fight against North Koreans and Chinese, who sought to implement communism across the border. Through interviews with Rojas and other surviving veterans, the author reconstructed key moments: the battle of Old Baldy, the first contacts of the soldiers with the Korean boy (there is no single version of how Gallón found the boy), and the complex operation to hide him on his return to Colombia.

The third timeline occurs in the late nineties, during the week when Carlos Arturo returns to South Korea, 50 years later. The South Korean public television network, KBS, discovered his story and wanted to bring him to his country in the hope that the man —born with the name Yung Ucheol, according to the most reliable accounts— could reunite with his blood family.

Sanín admits that the book “was a triumph with a taste of defeat, like the Korean War itself.” While he built the story of Carlos Arturo like no one else had, with dozens of sources and a long archival investigation, he feels that there are still many gaps that even his text cannot cover. “I feel like there are still loose ends and a lot of work to be done. At one point, I even thought about getting on a plane and going to Korea, but at some point, I had to find a conclusion,” he notes. From the idea of writing this book to its publication last February, five years passed.

To fill those gaps in the story, Sanín uses a tool often censured in journalism: imagination. “I, in addition to being a journalist, am a lawyer and hold a PhD in literature, so I navigate different codes. I wanted to confront my own limits and use imagination and hypotheses to cover those gaps. It remains a non-fiction book, but it made me understand that not everything has to be black and white,” he suggests.

Despite these unresolved issues, the author is confident that the volume opens a “very necessary” discussion in Colombia about the violence and the wounds it leaves, like those that Carlos Arturo once had and that are replicated in his son, Yunc. “We are fragile subjects, and yet we continue to divide ourselves along invisible lines, like the 38th Parallel. This case is not only about the war but also about the echoes it reproduces in families, even in the present,” he summarizes.