20 January 2003

Morning in America

I was wintering in Korea in 1981. It was cold there, bitter numbing cold so pervasive that we were authorized to wear a thick thermal jacket with our uniforms. Walking to the concrete entrance of the old Japanese bunker where the watch center was located, I made sure to make a lot of noise, whistling and scarping my feet to make sure the Ghurka guards who had the security rotation at the headquarters knew I was approaching. The last thing I wanted was to startle one of them and wind up with one of their long curved knives against my throat.

It was bad enough to be in this nation under martial law. I had not asked for the assignment. But the Service had asked me to do it. I was a cheap move and I was out here already. I agreed, thinking I could do a year standing on my head. There were murmurs that a fine follow-on assignment would be my reward. But Washington, in those infrequent moments I could get a phone line out of country and they were working, seemed to be vacillating on the issue of my relief.

The Headquarters wanted me to stay for another year. I could feel Korea starting to suck me in.

The time zone made communications difficult. We were either thirteen or fourteen hours out of phase with North America, depending on the imposition of Daylight Savings Time. I preferred to operate on Greenwich Mean Time, which was a constant in the universe. The simple rule was that if you were awake, they weren't.

With two years deployed to the Indian Ocean from Japan, this had been my third Christmas in Asia. The Hostages were taken halfway into my assignment there, and I will never forget the mighty ship turning suddenly north from our best economy speed on the way to Australia and the hull shuddering as the shafts began to turn to "full ahead."

We orbited off Iran for ninety days as we built up forces to do something. Anything.

With four years of President Carter's commentary of doom and limitation and the failed mission at Desert One behind us, I was not feeling sanguine about anybody's future, not the hostages and particularly not mine. I was pleased with my comrades, serene in the knowledge that we could do whatever was necessary. It seemed that Washington was particularly clueless.

I expected the usual stuff at the office. A series of unrelated occurrences on the DMZ, perhaps some activity on the Maritime Demarcation Line- Extended which marked the eastern frontier in the Sea of Japan. It was early for the infiltration season. Certainly the MiGs would be flying out of Pukchang and perhaps the IL-38 Beagle bombers. There would be some rumors flying about General Chon, and if it was a bad day, perhaps the Indications Center would be filled with senior Korean officers looking for a place of refuge from the Ministry of Defense down the street.

I cannot tell you specifically what the weather was like in Seoul that morning, but I am confident that it was dark when I went to work. At least I can give it a two-out-of-three. Both the morning and the night shifts began in the hours of darkness. Only the Eve shift that started in the late afternoon. We were a midnight ahead of the inauguration that would happen at noon on the 20th in Washington.

It was warm there. Korea was slipping into the evening. Everything happened on the watch as I expected, no surprises. I listened for the double sonic boom of the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance plane on the late afternoon pass along the northern border of the Republic as I walked back to South Post. It is quite unlike anything you have heard. "Boom," heartbeat. "Boom."

The clouds over DC moved out to the south as the darkness deepened.

They say the winter sun broke through during the inaugural ceremony, sending the temperature to 56 degrees and making it one of the warmest inaugural days ever recorded.

President-elect Ronald Wilson Reagan of California became the 40th President of the United States after midnight our time. I might have been at Sam's Country Western Club enjoying a Crown Lager. Sam's was billed as "The Best in Korea." It said so on the sign outside at the top of the hill.

I didn't really think Sam had any serious competition. But I liked Miss Kim, all of them, and might even have heard the new President promise "an era of national renewal." I was in favor of that.

What I didn't know that night was that the 52 American hostages, held 14 months, took off from Teheran in two Boeing 727 airplanes at 12:25 P.M., Eastern standard time, the very moment that Mr. Reagan was concluding his short speech. They cleared the Iranian Air Defense Identification Zone around forty minutes later, headed for Tunis. Mr. Reagan said that he did not believe there was "a fate that will fall on us no matter what we do."

He said he believed in a fate that will fall on us if we did nothing. I contemplated that with the first Marlboro of the morning. Morning in America had been one of the campaign slogans. If I was awake, they were going to sleep back there. But it sounded good to me, whatever.

I was already there.