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BOQ BUNKER
SEOUL 27 MAY 79 Dear Guys,
I got your kind postcard last week sometime...or was it this week? Hard to tell with the cities falling and the troops moving about in their fashionable tanks and smashing designer fatigues.
It has been a great crisis thus far. I will recount the various intricacies as soon as I vent some spleen.
This, you understand, is a joint command. I have been 'Standing the Watch' in the Command Bunker this week. The training schedule is a little behind; every time I came in to study there was a new Martial Law Proclamation, or the arrest of an Infiltrator, or the Fall of Kwang Ju.
"Look here, Socotra, it is pronounced Kwong-jew, not "Kwaang-ju."
"But we pronounced it that way for years and nobody minded."
"It matters here. You are in Korea!"
So there I was, flat on my back under the desk at fourteen feet below ground level. I was passing down the watch to the young First Lieutenant who was to relieve me. I was over by the air status board, and started in a discussion about a long distance flight the North Koreans had made from someplace up north down to some place near the DMZ.
"So this IL-28 Beagle drove on down from Umpty-Dong to...." I said.
The First Lieutenant boldly cut me off: "Planes don't drive places. Boats may drive places, but airplanes fly."
"Oh yeah. So this guy flew down here and drove around for a while..." That tore it. The young man began to boil. I mean, here he was, straight from a real operational base like Carswell, Texas, with B-52s and everything and this Navy puke is telling him about airplanes. I mean really.
We got through two more map-boards and things erupted. He explained to me that he was in the By-God Air Force, and us ship drivers were incompetent jerks.
Ah me. I am not what you would call a real military-type guy. In fact the bulk of the 'time of my life' out on the Skidway I was moaning and bitching and plotting to get off it. Back to someplace safe, on dry land. How strange to want to break somebody's teeth in defense of the Fleet, and Naval forking Aviation in particular.
A scene from Dr, Strangelove flashed through my mind. "Gentlemen, Gentlemen, this is the War Room."
So it was Fear and Loathing in the Bunker. I am in the middle of a six pack right now, recuperating with the stuff I gave up last month so I could give this distasteful job my best shot. C'est la Vie. Been here an unpalatable month, and I am almost hoping the North goes ahead and does it. Speaking of which, I am at least getting my Slice of History lesson.
Things began to disintegrate almost from the first day. Was it only a week ago Sunday that I walked into the Bunker to see the three-stars puffing earnestly on their pipes, the CIA hastily phoning the Embassy, the one-stars going batshit to emphasize their importance,
The power groupies and the analysts were franticly blowing smoke into the congested atmosphere. The shit had hit the fan.
The ROKs had gone out of control, and the man in the drivers seat. Gen Chon Tu Hwan, had determined the only thing he could do about the student demonstrations was to come down on the kids, and hard. His troops swarmed onto campus and arrested eighteen of the leaders in what had been unchallenged sanctuary. Then the word swept through the Bunker that Emergency Marshall Law was going into force at Midnight, and anyone caught rumor-mongering or non-main streaming was going to pay a heavy price indeed.
Well, the weekend passed in Seoul with nary a squeak from the kids. Downtown, by the train station, the black berets wheeled in a show of force, bayonets fixed, and the children shrieked in mock terror, and left the field to the Special Forces.
No trouble in Seoul.
But down South there was another kettle of Kimchi altogether. Now, realizing that the Seoul-City folk view the South as a land of rubes, hicks, manual laborers, and general non-sophisticates, and that the views from Kwaang-jew are likewise acerbic regarding the Northerners, it was only to be expected that the E.M.L. wasn't going to be welcomed with open arms. I don t think General Chon could quite have featured what the complete reaction was going to be.
We in the United Snakes Forces don't have the story in it's complete and unvarnished gory details. The ROKs who work in the Joint Command were cut off almost as thoroughly as we were from the full partnership, which is tenuous even in the best of times. One thing was sure: they didn't want us to know what they were going to do, as our old-maidish niceties would only interfere in putting down the communist-inspired desire for Democratization with the boot-heels of Mainstream Thought.
The first try at calming the situation, which at first was just a few dozens of thousands of demonstrators, was to drive in the tanks and fix bayonets.
For some reason, this appeared to be counter-productive. Obviously the Non-Mainstreamism was of a most virulent sort. It called for a firm dose of Dr. Chon's magic elixir. At one point, they were calling for Cobra gunships to put down a march on a provincial prison. Oh lordy, me. You have read the story in the Stars n' Snipes by now, and my mind couldn't help but wonder at what a decade can bring.
In the late Sixties, (by which, of course, I actually mean 1971 and 72) this was the kind of crap that enabled Ho Chi Minh to fight the war in the United States, and win it politically. We got all confused and tried to fight it on the ground in his country. Well, you live and you learn.
(I have to note here, I have had a most interesting line of conversations with an individual who shall remain nameless. He was involved in the military intelligence assault on the Weathermen and the Panthers in the San Francisco Bay Area. By now I am sure that you are aware of the once uttered threat to "Blow up some Pig Fascist Military Complex" on the West Coast. That gave the Services carte blanche to get into the mass federal assault on the anti-war movement. I was most favorably impressed with the news that- and did this one fascinate me- that the Panthers operated a clandestine manual Morse net in the beloved United Snakes.....
Using Chinese Cipher codes. And the ruble-laundering that brought all kinds of neat electronic gear to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)....but I commence to wander a bit far afield. It is, non-the-less, damned fascinating to hear that all the paranoid fantasy of the times was in no small part true. We were being duped by Moscow and Washington both. It has a certain symmetry to it that I can appreciate as a former Global Analyst without portfolio to the Navy's finest Air Wing. Plus I really enjoyed the story of the SDS demonstration coordinator with his $478 dollar Motorola walky-talky being lit up by a room-sized military jamming device that produced Radio Frequency burns from his ear to his buttocks).
So where was I? Railing about a war lost ignominiously, or the Air Force? Ah, yes, so there we were in Kwaang-ju City. The rioting sprea< through out the Cholla Province. The Students (what a catch phrase tha-is, these daysl) were at one point in possesion of thousands of weapons, APCs and all tha trucks they could drive. They said that if they were denied passage across one of the local bridges one click away from the Air Base, they were going to occupy one of the ROK Army family housing areas. The stories, rumors, of the dead were scraping a half thousand. Certain irresponsible parties announced that the joint ammunition storage area at the Air Base had to captured. A word of commiseration for Col Ouster, the aptly named U.S. Facility Commander at Kwang-ju. He was about up to his ass in 'gators. The State Department had all kinds of things to declare to the hapless man, I don't believe he has had much sleep the last few days. The entire foreign community that got the propensity to move dem happy feet was his personal baby. Of course travel was cut off. What of the determined folks who refused to leave their brass and their rugs? What is a poor career man to do? So I sat on my ass- quite literally- and watched the thing go down in a flurry of phone calls from Washington to Seoul. "What's going on now?" asked DIA
"I'm having a cup of coffee. How about you?"
Literally in the dark. I went down to the Naija Hotel for one of my two days off last month. (Hey, I thought I was on land!) and looked at the Armored Personnel Carriers with the heavy-starched guard in the turret as immobile as Buckingham Palace and the M-60 light machinegun dead down the centerline. The people cruising by, seeming not to notice.
Sends tingles down the spine, you know?
Then the talks began, and a sigh of relief began to settle on the American community. At last, sweet reason. Things had to get better. Oh yup yup yo. A rumor began just about the same time that the Prime Minister (Which Cabinet? you ask, after all, there have been two in the last week) went down there to open negotiations. This particular one went something like: Wait them out. Then storm the city. Wait till the: are tired, and hungry, and the working people are beginning to want Peace, the only thing that really matters in the world. Then bring in a few brigades of selected troopers in the dead of night. And thus shall order, and the slow process of Democratization be truly fulfilled.
For all the dramatic, but largely boring, responsibilities of Briefing Cyclical Flight Ops on the ship, I must say that one evening last week I had the power to kill with just a phone call. But that is a bit dramatic. You live in this fairy-land of rumors and classification for long and it starts to seem almost like it is real or sumpin. So this morning I walked into the Bunker about an hour early to try to make sense of all the computer print outs. And it was the second shoe hitting the floor. The ROKS were going in, and it was to be the decisive move.
Well, we shall see about that.
But Seoul radio announced the city was secured by 0530. Military casualties were described as 'light.' No civilians were reported injured, A few Rebels were killed. The trusty Watch NCO spoke the wisdom hard-learned in other climes:
"A suspected Vietcong is one you shot at. A confirmed NVA is the one you caught in the head."
Well, my name is Uncle Wiggley. Keep your heads down, Vic |