DEERING — It's been more than 60 years since David Cliffton returned home after fighting in Korea, but the fate of a young boy he met near the front line has been nagging at him for decades, and he just wants to know what happened to the child he called “Joe.”

In 1948, at the tender age of 17, Cliffton enlisted in the Army instead of waiting to be drafted after his 18th birthday.

Cliffton grew up in Nebraska and had a knack for making engines run. He took that talent with him into the Army, where he was challenged to come up with nontraditional solutions for mechanical problems that occurred in the field. He was a kind of automotive MacGyver who could fix a truck using everything from cardboard to his own shoelaces, and that talent got him out of some pretty tough spots when he was sent to Korea in 1950.

Cliffton, who recently received the Korean Peace Medal from the government of South Korea, was one of the “Chosin Few,” a group of men who found themselves facing off with the Chinese in the Chosin Reservoir during a 17-day battle in below-freezing temperatures in November and December of 1950.

During the battle, 30,000 UN troops were surrounded by 65,000 Chinese soldiers and had to break through the Chinese line in order to escape. Both sides suffered massive casualties.

One of Cliffton's most vivid wartime memories is of finding a truck filled with American troops who had been killed at Chosin and had frozen. Cliffton managed to fix the damaged truck. With help from others, he loaded it full of the bodies of some of his fallen comrades, and another soldier drove it away. Decades later, Cliffton was sitting in a restaurant in Natick, Mass., wearing his “F Company” hat when a man came up and shook his hand and said, “You guys saved my life.”

The man had been seriously wounded at Chosin and could only move his eyes, so he was mistaken for one of the dead and loaded onto the truck, Cliffton said. But the man remembered watching a soldier rig some line across the windshield of the truck before it drove away, bringing him to safety.

“That was me,” said Cliffton. “I had a guy sitting on the top of the truck feeding fuel into the line that came down across the windshield into the carburetor because the pump was gone.”

The story still gives Cliffton goose bumps, but it's the image of a wounded 9-year-old boy that continues to haunt him.

After Chosin, Cliffton and F Company withdrew in order to regroup before the next battle and set up camp. The men started to notice a young boy who came to the camp alone and fed himself by scraping at the bottom of the ration cans after the soldiers had eaten. He wouldn't let anyone near him, but he was limping and the limp grew increasingly worse as the men watched him over the next few days.

Cliffton and his buddy Frank Dodd from Iowa finally got fed up with not being able to help the child, so Dodd attempted to distract the child while Cliffton tackled him.

“I'd rather fight a grown man any day,” Cliffton said of his struggle with the boy. “He bit and scratched and hit me. It was the worst fight I'd ever been in, and I'd been on the front lines.”

But the men managed to wrangle the boy and get him the medical attention he needed. Through a Korean interpreter, they learned his story.

“The North Koreans had captured him and his father, mother and sister. They shot his father right in front of him, raped his mother and sister and then shot them,” said Cliffton. “The boy ran away, but they shot him right through both calves. But he escaped.”

The boy became known around the camp as “Joe,” and Cliffton said that “he stuck to my elbow like he was glue and went wherever I went.”

Cliffton spend six months at the camp with the boy, but when he left to come home, he lost all contact. Now, 60 years later, he just wants to know what happened to that child.

“He'd be around 74 years old now,” said Cliffton. “I want to know how he is, if he survived, what happened to him.”

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Nancy Bean Foster may be reached at nfoster@newstote.com.