by TONY KIM
In the spring of 1951, American patrols from the 7th Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division made their way to a war-torn village just north of Seoul. It had been a little less than a year into the Korean War and, already, carnage and destruction were widespread across the divided nation.
This particular village had been horribly ravaged by the fighting between the United Nations Armed Forces and China-backed forces, but, still, the arriving GIs looked for survivors. One house smelled so rotten that the soldiers weren’t even going to bother checking. Luckily, one soldier decided to look, anyway, only to find 5-year-old Kang Koo Ri, who was “naked, hungry, terrified and silent, crouched against a wall,” according to LIFE magazine photographer Michael Rougier.
Meanwhile, flies were swarming around a heavily decomposed body of a woman who had been dead for a few days—the body was that of Kang’s mother.
In an oral history account uploaded to YouTube, Korean War veteran Max Hale, who met Kang at the orphanage he was later taken to, says that an Army chaplain told him how the boy was too weak to walk and how even as tears were streaming down his face, he did not make a sound.
Photojournalist Rougier would go on to document Kang in a now-famous article and photo essay, titled “The Little Boy Who Wouldn’t Smile.” A recent “Behind the Pictures” feature on LIFE magazine’s website recalled the tale. Some 61 years ago this month, the Korean War ended in an armistice. Rougier’s touching pictures often show Kang alone with nothing but a stick and a somber, empty expression on his face. “The feeling grew among everyone at the orphanage,” Rougier wrote at the time, “that getting Kang to smile was the most important job they had—it was as if his return to health and life were dependent on it.”
On the last day of Rougier’s assignment, Hwan Shin Sung, Kang’s constant companion at the orphanage, asked the boy what he wanted most in the entire world. Kang replied that he wanted to “play with the machinery of the ‘jeepu’ [Jeep]” and a ride in the car, according to Rougier’s article. Upon promising that he could, Hwan told him to smile and, finally, it happened: the smile everyone at the orphanage had been waiting and hoping for.
The story, however, does not end there. A year later, Hale drove to the Bo Yook Won Orphanage in Daegu, where he immediately saw a grinning Kang Koo Ri. He took a picture of the smiling boy and fittingly dubbed it “The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Smiling,” according to a column he wrote for the Nebraska-based Lincoln Star Journal.
In 1956, LIFE reported that Los Angeles resident, Mrs. Cordelle Lefer, adopted Kang, after being so moved by one of Rougier’s pictures of the orphan. LIFE is now asking readers for any information on where Kang is today.
For more on the LIFE story and to view Rougier’s pictures, click here.
Photos by Michael Rougier/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
