His name is Noh Nong-Joo, and he is a librarian in Suwon, South Korea. But to a band of Canadian veterans of the Korean War, he was ‘’Willie Royal’’, a waif they sheltered from the havoc of the battlefield until he was placed in an orphanage. In the summer of 1951, the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR) was in action north of Seoul. The front was so fluid the unit was on the move every few days. A member of the unit was surprised one evening to hear whimpering in a nearby rice paddy. He found a Korean child, flopping around in baggy pants and an enormous tunic cut down from British battle dress. On the Tunic breast was stitched the name ‘’Willie.’’ ‘’We took him in, dried him off and bedded him down for the night,’’ says Arthur Leslie of Dartmouth, N.S. ‘’Next day I served him a meal. It sticks in my mind because I had given him a large portion of chicken. He’d eaten his fill and just sat there rubbing his tummy and looking down at his mess tin. He couldn’t throw the leftovers away.’ The boy knew his name, and the soldiers guessed he was about six. Willie did not know the name of his obliterated village. His parents were dead. He had an older brother and sister but did not know (and still doesn’t) what had become of them. The RCRs took Willie in and quickly taught him to distinguish shoulder badges so that he would hide whenever he spotted an officer, for they were under strict orders not to shelter civilians. He slept on the seat of a truck under blankets provided by Leslie and Conrad Lanteigne, a vehicle mechanic from Caraquet, N.B., who became the boy’s teacher. Willie moved with the battalion, usually hidden in the back of a half-track. ‘’All you could see,’’ recalls Lanteigne, ‘’were two little black eyes – cute and sad and scared all at the same time.’’ By autumn, there was no longer any need for Willie to hide, and he lined up at meal parades, mess tin in hand. He had trouble with English pronunciation but showed a disconcerting ability to say the wrong words very clearly. One day, Lanteigne took him to a workshop 20 kilometers behind the front, warning him to sit quietly at the checkpoint where military police would examine Lanteigne’s work orders. The police check passed without incident, but as the jeep started up again, Willie leaned out and shouted, ‘’Meatheads.’’ Lanteigne kept moving. Another time, a British Army show was entertaining the RCRs and a female singer asked the CO, Lt.-Col. Robert A. Keane, about the ‘’cute little boy.’’ Keane beckoned Willie over but the child, confronted by a woman, fell silent. When Keane coaxed him to talk, Willie finally shouted a popular military expletive. Lanteigne soon received a crisp order to ‘’teach that kid better English.’’ In March 1953, with the war’s end in sight, Lt.-Col. Peter Bingham, 1st battalion CO, asked the padre, Capt M. K. Roberts, to find a home for Willie. Roberts contracted Anglican bishop Arthur Chadwell of Seoul, who told him the orphanages were overflowing ; it would help Willie’s chanced if the soldiers could cover some of his costs. They dug into their pockets, for $2000, and the bishop used it to start a bank account for Willie’s education. Willie turned out to be a clever ambitious boy. Winning scholarships to Seoul’s Choongang University, he studied library science and went to work in 1970 for the agriculture ministry in Suwon. He married Kim Yong-Soon, a nurse’s aide, in 1975, and they have two daughters. On their living-room wall is a plaque with the RCR insignia, given to Noh Nong-Joo by the regimental association. In the summer of 1987, Willie visited Canada, meeting some of his old benefactors at a reunion of the Ontario regional branches of the Korean Veterans Association of Canada in Cambridge, ONT., and calling on Conrad Lanteigne at his home in St. Bruno, QC. Lanteigne had kept a souvenir all these years, a pencil size samurai sword a soldier had brought Willie from Tokyo. The blade was very sharp. Lanteigne thought it a stupidly dangerous gift for a small boy and had taken it away from Willie. Now 35 years later in St. Bruno, he offered it to him. Noh Nong Joo accepted with gratitude. It is a keepsake he will treasure from a vaguely remembered childhood with the Canadian Army