At the end of the Korean War, thousands of prisoners from both sides faced a choice - whether to return home or remain with their captors. David Hawkins was one of a handful of American GIs who chose to go to China.

"I don't think it ever occurred to the US or the army that there would be GIs that would choose to go somewhere other than their own country," Mr Hawkins says, more than six decades after he fought communist Korean and Chinese soldiers in the frozen mud along the 38th Parallel.

When the war ended in 1953, tens of thousands of Korean and Chinese prisoners of war chose life in the US over their own homelands.

But America, in the grip of anti-communist fervour, was shocked when 20 of its own young soldiers defected to China....