Former POWs Jose Hinojosa, left, and Billy Brown visited Camp Red Cloud during a tour of South Korea this week. (Seth Robson / Stars and Stripes)

CAMP RED CLOUD, South Korea — A pair of U.S. military veterans crossed “Freedom Bridge” on Monday, re-enacting the walk they took from North to South Korea more than 50 years ago as newly released prisoners of war.

Both Jose Hinojosa, 75, of San Antonio, who served as a corporal with 2nd Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division, and Billy Brown, 72, of Houston, who served with 1st Battalion, 1st Regiment, 1st Marine Division, were taken prisoner by communist forces during the Korean War.

This week, the two returned to South Korea for the first time since the war as part of a tour group of 32 Texas veterans, mostly Marines.

The visit to the Freedom Bridge, where POWs walked across to freedom in 1953, brought back memories for the veterans.

“It has been 50 some years since I saw it,” Hinojosa said of the bridge. Captured fighting in an area known as the “Punchbowl” near the Demilitarized Zone in July 1951, he spent 25 months as a POW and was released in August 1953.

“It was a hell of a feeling walking across again. It was like a flashback,” he said Tuesday.

Hinojosa, who also served two tours in Vietnam, remembers looking across the bridge toward South Korea and feeling excited to be going home.

Brown, captured on Oct. 9, 1951, and also released in August 1953, said his first walk across the bridge was the end of a tough struggle to survive the brutal conditions of captivity under the North Koreans.

Walking across the bridge Monday, he shared memories of his time as a POW with his son, who came on the tour to support him, he said.

“I never talked about the war until 10 years ago,” Brown said.

Shortly after he was captured, the North Koreans took Brown’s boots, he said.

“All I had was a dungaree jacket and pants. It started snowing two weeks later. I went through October and November until Dec. 12 before I got some other clothes. It was the coldest I have ever been,” he said.

For two months Brown marched north to a POW camp, struggling to stay alive in the cold. He played mind games, he said, telling himself he was burning with heat as he shivered in the snow.

Another returning veteran, Carlos Ballard, 74, also of Houston, served during the war as a corporal with Marine Air Group 12 at a base called K-6, south of Seoul.

Ballard is the former president of the Texas department of the Korean War Veterans Association; 1,756 Texans were killed in action during the war, he said.

He said he thought of returning to South Korea many times over the years but was on his first trip back this week.

“There are a lot of memories here and I lost a lot of friends, some who I grew up with at school,” he said. “People encouraged me to come back and seek some kind of closure to the war but I don’t think that is possible.

“You don’t bring closure to this type of thing in your life.”