Instead of being grateful, the younger brother grows to resent Jin-tae's efforts and suspect that he's only doing these things to garner glory for himself. In an attempt to get his younger brother out, Jin-tae proceeds to volunteer for every dangerous mission to both spare his brother from the risk and in the hopes that he be decorated enough to be able to request Jin-seok's discharge. When he returns to find that Jin-seok has been loading onto the train, Jin-tae goes in search for him only to be taken away to serve as well, even though the policy was for only one son per family was be drafted.
When the family becomes refugees, they seek to flee by train and when the elder Jin-tae is gone getting medicine, Army officials come along conscripting all men 18-30 years of age. Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War is the story of two brothers - Jin-tae (Jang Don-gun), an uneducated shoemaker, and Jin-seok (Won Bin) a frail student whom Jin-tae works to pay for his education - living in South Korea in June 1950, mere weeks before the Communist North Korean forces stormed across the border, throwing the nation into war. However, it could be regarded as the one hot moment at the start of the Cold War as the competing ideologies of capitalist liberty and socialist totalitarianism squared off around the 38th Parallel in a war that inevitably pitted families against each other for no reason other than the differing politics of their rulers.
