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In 1938, an 18-year-old Korean man named Yang Kyoungjong was conscripted into the Japanese army. Korea was under Japanese rule and Japan needed soldiers, so Yang was sent to the Kwantung army in Manchuria, northeast China.

A year later, he was fighting the Russians at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol and was captured as a prisoner of war. After a few years stuck in a Soviet labour camp, in 1942, Russia became desperate for soldiers and began forcibly conscripting its prisoners. Yang was, for a second time, recruited into a fight that was never his.

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In 1943, he was sent west, more than 7,000 kilometres away from his home, to fight for the Russians against Germany at the battle of Kharkov in Ukraine, where he was captured as a prisoner of war once again.

In 1944, he was — you guessed it — forcibly conscripted into the German army and transported even farther west to France. There, he joined the 709 Infanterie Division and was posted to defend the port of Cherbourg, in Normandy, on D-Day.

As the Allies successfully took over the beaches, Yang was captured once again, this time by British forces. He spent some time in an English prisoner of war camp before being sent to a camp in the United States, where he’d spend the rest of the war.

The war over and no longer a prisoner, Yang had almost been shipped around the entire globe. He decided to stay in the United States, becoming a citizen and living out the rest of his life there until he died in Illinois in 1992.