30 May 2007
Currents
Americans are famous for living in the moment. I am in one now, swilling coffee in my aerie high above the pool on the west end of Big Pink. I am dealing with the effects of a power surge from the big electrical storm that fried the amp on my home theatre system. I am cautiously optimistic that I will survive.
I saw a Chinese-manufactured stereo component that I should be able to wire into the flat screen and the cable box and be back watching bogus reality shows in no time.
I looked blankly at lists of things I need to do to leave the country for a while. In this brave new world, that includes checking the airlines to see if the idiot who flew to Europe with incurable tuberculosis was on their planes. There are more checklists than I can deal with, and that is the next moment, or the one after. Even if we ignore them, all the moments that pile up behind have a certain imperative, and there are those for whom they are never left behind, forming a palpable wave from past to future.
That is a positively un-American way to sail through time. It causes problems for us in the here-and-now when we encounter cultures whose present is comprised of a great sine wave that does not comport itself with our series of independent digital spikes, set to the atomic clock.
For example, the history of naval ships in North Asia is known, end-to-end, by those who live there, but not by the nation that dispatched them. The USS Pueblo- People's Museum #5- was captured in part because of institutional amnesia about the bold audacity of the northerners. 1968 could not remember the events that began with surprise and misconception eighteen years before.
General Doug MacArthur, to the extent that he is remembered at all in this My Space era, is known for his great success in the daring seaborne invasion at Inchon, the port city on the great Han River, and gateway to Seoul. The shallow mud-slats of the west coast of Korea are essential to the tale, so bear with me as we peel the onion, layer by layer.
A trip to the Spring of 1950 feels like a hallucination. The Secretary of Defense of the time, Louis Johnson, had just attempted to eliminate the Marine Corps from the budget as irrelevant, and was uncertain about the future of the Navy.
In the Spring of 1950, Congress was more afraid of South Korean President Rhee-Syngman's bellicose rhetoric than that of Kim Il Sung. Rhee was a hard-liner who had spent three decades outside the country when it was under Japanese occupation, and had been installed through indifference by the new conquerors. The line drawn across the Peninsula at the time of the Japanese defeat was one of convenience, intended to be temporary, but made American policy-makers think there were two Koreas when there was only one.
An intemperate remark by Secretary of State Acheson suggested that the southern part of the Peninsula was outside America's sphere of strategic interest. You know, the usual. Later, we would think of one Vietnam, when there were three, and a single Iraq when there are at least three.
The savage conflict on the Peninsula does not have benefit of a real name. The memorial to the troops on the National Mall calls it “The Forgotten War.” In the Republic of Korea they call it by the date the Northerners invaded in June of 1950, or “6-25.” The North and its allies have their own names, but even the Chinese have come to call it simply “The Korean War.”
We are coming around to the same term, since there are no careers remaining to be ruined by the failure to secure a declaration from the Congress that America was at war, and sufficed with the euphemism “Police Action,” as though it was deploying the LAPD Ramparts Division to bust some perps.
On June 25th, 1950, the North Koreans swarmed south across the 38th Parallel, equipped with Soviet T-34 tanks. They swept all before them, the forces of the Republic melting away, uncertain of their loyalty in some cases, and overawed in all of them.
The United Nations forces- they were called such only because the Soviets had inconveniently boycotted the Security Council and Chaign Kai-Check's man occupied the China seat- were balled up in the last toehold on the peninsula around the port city of Pusan. A bold stroke was called for, once the United States decided to stand and fight, and Douglas MacArthur was exactly the man to lead it.
MacArthur is a complex figure, and I will not attempt to deal with the aspects of his legacy. His experience in the island-hopping campaigns of the Army's part of the Pacific War against the Japanese had given him confidence that a sea-borne invasion could re-take Seoul, and cut off the Northern armies from behind.
His serenity about the operation approached the level of the divine. There was no time for detailed rehearsal of the operation, nor in fact had many of the units involved ever trained with one another at all. The seas approaches to the landing zone at Inchon consisted only of two restricted channels, “Eastern” and “Flying Fish,” The current within them was perilously quick, running up to eight knots, and the tidal change on the mud flats ran up to thirty feet.
The anchorage was small, and the harbor was protected from the tide by high stone seawalls. One of the commanders said afterward that the planners “drew up a list of every natural and geographic handicap-and Inchon had 'em all."
Fortune does favor the bold, at least sometimes.
On the 15th of September, Operation CHROMITE struck the North Korean rear in overwhelming force and with complete surprise. Joint Task Force SEVEN, with four aircraft carriers and more than three hundred support ships sent more than 70,000 Marines ashore.
Seoul fell in September to the advancing UN forces, and Pyongyang in October. The road to the Yalu River and Manchuria was open, and appeared undefended.
I talked to a Marine whose unit actually made it to a bluff above the river in late 1950, when I worked in Seoul precisely thirty years later. He told me that it was pretty view, but they couldn't stay long. Someone had miscalculated the Chinese reaction to the great advance, and was going to intervene in a manner almost as decisive as the Inchon landing.
There were three more sad years of fighting over yards, not kilometers, and in the end the stalemate began, almost where it began along the 38th Parallel.
The North Korean port of Nampo was far behind the DMZ, and the muddy tidal flats of the Taedong River, so much like those of the Han at Inchon, protected the North Korean capital at Pyongyang from approach from the sea. Driving down the broad un-peopled boulevards there a few years ago, a DPRK official told me that the last time the Americans had left this town, there was nothing left that stood taller than a meter. Driving under a heroic arch, I was suitably impressed. The more so, since no one appeared to live there.
We still don't understand why amphibious operations get people so riled up in Korea, and that there was one before Inchon. No one appears to know why a musty battle flag hanging at the Naval Academy has sparked a controversy that is echoing today through the halls of Congress.
How Senator Wayne Allard and presidential hopeful Governor Bill Richardson got mixed up in it will have to wait till tomorrow.
If I can remember, of course. I am so in the moment, you know?
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com