06 June 2003

D-Day

Well, it D-Day again for the 59th time, and I always think of my Uncle Dick launching out of his base in Lincolnshire in support of the troops going ashore. It was not a long-range mission, just over the Channel and back. But he lost one of the four engines on his B-17 on take-off. Safety rules told him to orbit and burn down fuel, dump his ordnance safely in the water an return to base. He said the hell with it, only invading the Continent once, and pressed on to the objective. It was a bridge that provided access to the beaches, and his job was to ensure the Waffen SS tanks could not respond to the invasion forces until they consolidated their positions. He flew over one of the most astonishing spectacles in human affairs. The bunkers are quiet now, but the crosses still stand on the bluffs above the beaches.

Some folks in Congress wanted to bring the troops home, finally, they said, after the little contretemps over the Iraq business. I say let them lie where they fell.

It is hard to believe that only a decade after that invasion we got tired of the bloodbath in Korea and froze the line of combat generally along the 38th Parallel. They did that in the little Butler Hut in the middle of the Joint Security Area at Panmunjong. It is a half day tourist jaunt to the JSA these days. It costs 40,000 won. The DMZ is actually only about an hour from Seoul . Driving north you pass I Corps HQ and under highway bridges aren't what they seem. They really are dykes with 50-ton keyhole pieces that look like spans which are designed to have explosives knock out the support and drop down and seal the road south.

The announcement that we are pulling out was telegraphed by Paul Wolfowitz a couple days ago when he was in Seoul, but the formal joint press release came yesterday, timed to coincide with D-Day here. The American delegation that brokered the deal s were led by the wonderfully named Richard Lawless, Deputy Sssistant Secretary of Defense for Asia-Pacific Affairs. The release says we are going to get out from under the range of the North's long range artillery and move to Osan, Taegu and Chinhae all the way down on the south coast. The cherry blossoms are quite stunning there, and the place was a Russian and later a Japanese naval base.

The pullback from the DMZ has apparently been planned for months and is another one of those Rumsfeld transformation things. The way things are now are not dissimilar to the situation at the declaration of the Armistice. There are 650,000-strong ROKs and more than a million North Koreans deployed near the 2.5-mile-wide DMZ. Most of the 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea are stationed between the DMZ and Seoul, which is also within range of North Korean artillery. If the redeployment keeps our kids from being slaughtered in the first minutes of a conflict I am all for it, but naturally there will be unintended consequences. Rummie is determined to break paradigms, but I am a creature of habit.

We are pulling out of Saudi, thank God, but we were only there for twelve years. Rummie also wants to pull out of the Old Europe where we have been for 60 years and move to New Europe to he East. But what got me this morning is that he wants to rip down my old Hooch on South Post of Yongsan Garrison in Seoul. The press this morning reports that residents have complained that the sprawling 8th U.S. Army headquarters in downtown Seoul occupies prime real estate, screws up the traffic and is an embarrassing expression of U.S. influence in the Land of the Morning Calm.

I could wax eloquent about life under Marshall Law on Yongsan, trying to find a PX cab just before midnight. Missing curfew and being on the run all night, hiding from patrols. The accidental firearms discharge out my hooch window, thankfully into the dirt and not into the hooch next door, or the rock-throwing incident on my buddy Dale's last night in the country and waking up with a monstrous hangover to realize that he was gone and I was still there. Or whistling extra loud in the darkness relieving the watch in the old Japanese Command Bunker to ensure that I didn't startle the Ghurka Guard and get my throat slit your throat, or the monsoon rains and Aiji-ma, the nice cleaning lady at the Hooch who got run down by a Seoul bus.

There is no schedule for the pull-out, since that would only give the North some opportunity for political theater. So for this morning, this D-Day, the 2nd Infantry Division remains headquartered at Camp Red Cloud and Camp Casey, north of the I Corps HQ at Ouijambu on the dangerous side of the Imjin River.