THE COMMAND BUNKER UNITED STEAKS FORCES SEOUL CITY
BUDDHA'S BIRTHDAY
21 May 1980

 

Dear Kid, Well here I am, and there you are.

 

It has been a wild couple months. I was a little shell shocked when I got back home. It was very strange; I mean, part of me was still out in Iran someplace and then there was Grand Rapids, still snoozing along like nothing was going on. The trees and the dogs still the same, Ma and Pa a little grayer, but all-in-all as though time never moved forward.

 

Hard to figure. Then, I get to Korea and walk into a government being taken over by the military, things tense, just as they have been for thirty years. Interesting, but a little fatiguing.

 

When I was home I tried to do everything and see everybody. A mistake, I think, because I had enough on my own mind without getting all wrapped up in the myriad careers, and successes, and failures. I had about five mad affairs, didn't do too well on the only one I cared about, and generally burned out whatever sparks were still glowing from the back burner of my life in the United Snakes.

 

It was funny, as I had got so many things running along in my mind that I never followed anything to a logical conclusion. Just hopped here and there. Boston, and Detroit, and Salt Lake, and San Francisco. Frantic calls right up to the moment I materialized in L.A. for the KAL flight back home to the strangers and the mad honking little cars.

 

Oh well, maybe I will live in the Snakes again sometime. Till then, I will just remember the vignettes. Some of then were great, some pathos-filled, and some just dumb. I am looking forward to unpacking a duffel bag sometime and saying "Well here I am. The Rolling Stone may cease it's perpetual motion, and the moss grow thick and green on the upward side." I wonder if that is possible? There was a Jerry Rafferty song (this came up in two separate conversations, on both sides of the Big Pond) that summed things up rather nicely.

 

We used to play it in the Red Horse Cat House in Cubie Point, down in the wild-west Philippines. The tropical sun would be outlined behind the palms on the green and black ridges. The farmers would be burning off the luxuriant growth and the smoke and the yellow glow of the fires contributed to the thick incense- smell, and the cold sweating bottle of San Miguel, and the red winking navigation lights of the gray airplanes going round and round in the touch n' go pattern.

 

The Carrier looking toy-like in the thicket of masts and antennas. "You know he's never going to stop moving...."

 

To avoid getting too self centered in this thing, I wanted to say I am tickled by the way you are doing. I'm glad Royal came to you, demanding your talents, and that simultaneously you are making money from the dramatic Art that you love. There is nothing more satisfying. I have a book (some where) that should be in galleys now. It was a rare moment to heft

 

 the thick manuscript and wonder at all the words. A marginal novel, I will say, utterly unmarketable in any conventional sense. A slapstick noire detective novel set on an Aircraft Carrier? Absurd.

 

Still, the satisfaction of getting it together was immense. Perhaps the next book will be better.

 

And that is why I think you are one of the richest people I know, because you get that good rush right home, at work,on the boards.

 

So there that is. Here, the Military has taken over the government, has taken over the courts, and shows no signs of letting go. How the people react will determine whether I fly out on KAL at the end of my little year (nearly 1/12th done already) or ride out on a helo with the tanks going in the other side of town. I tend to think that they will take things with typical Chosen stoicism, as do most of the old timers. The incidents and con-incidents are interesting, and the job is at least in the center of things, (in-so-far as any Yankee can be.)
They ran us up to the Joint Security Area last week, to Know Our Enemy, and look at him in the flesh. We drove past the old steam locomotive pointed north on the rusty and severed tracks. Across narrow and rickety Freedom Bridge across the Imjin River. From the heights you could barely make out the 40 meter statue of the Great Leader Kim Il Song, plated in real gold. The giant North Korean flag hung limply from the massive mast rising out of Propaganda village, facing a similarly listless ROK banner rising from Freedom Village.

 

Then into the DMZ, past the land mines and over the great 4,000-meter scar that divides the Republic from the Godless North. We went briefly into the Military Armistice Commission building, and I stepped behind the conference table into North Korea. The communists gazed in the window to ensure that we touched nothing, and the Yankee guard were starched and pressed and every bit as fanatical as the funny Asians in the Russian uniforms.

 

We motored slowly past the Stump of The Tree which will not need trimming (in this world, anyway.) The Bridge of No Return, where the POW-packed trucks rolled up in 1954 from the North and the South. The ragged figures received the set piece briefing: "You may now cross the Bridge; Or, you may not cross the Bridge. It is your decision, but it must be made now and it is irrevocable,"

 

That day, I think, must have been gray. Last week it was just a tired little single-span over a turgid and muddy stream with a guard post and a truck parked at each end.

 

The Major and the Lt were bludgeoned to death where our bus turned around, and the stump interferes not at all with the view from the guardpost now. Well, I am going to not think about all that today. It is a long drive by tank, and I mustt say that the weather is too nice for that. I will go drop this in the mall, catch a bite to eat, and roll downtown for some sightseeing and a good dinner at the Naija Hotel.This will all pass soon enough. I am a land-owner now, as I trust you have heard (or at least I will be when the next 68 payments have rolled by) and it is nice to play with the type of house to build.
Take care of yourself, kid.