Across the River
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I did not sleep well. Perhaps it was the persistent ache from my leg, or the pinched arches that are still getting accustomed to the heavy roller-skate boots. It is warm again, and it is time for blading around the perimeter of Big Pink. I am listening to Dan Damon on the BBC in the warm glow of on incandescent light. Dawn is still hours away. Train crashes in North Korea, gigantic explosions observed distantly from north of the Yalu.
Thousands of households destroyed is all that the Dear Leader’s people will say. “A hundred dead” they say. It does not make sense, and of course the toll will be much higher.
There are rumors that perhaps this was an attempt to get at the Dear Leader as he transited this very station, returning from a secret State Visit to Great China. Could it actually have been such an act? An orchestrated train crash, cargoes of fuel oil and fertilizer meeting at high speed to create a monster mass of unimaginable explosive power?
The North finds it hard to unbend, and for now it is just wild rumor. The truth will be out, some day, but meanwhile the correspondents must look across the river and imagine the truth. The North will tell its own tale on Radio Pyongyang. I have a thick volume of some of their better lies and distortions from the year I lived there.
One thing is certain, at the beginning of this particular tragedy in the Land of the Morning Calm.
It is difficult to look across a river and see the truth.
I was sitting in the Alert Center of the United States Forces in Korea one time. It was a small bomb-proof room down a steep set of concrete stairs. The building had been a bunker, once, part brick of Imperial Japanese construction, and part a hodgepodge of post-war additions put on by the UN Command.
A senior Marine officer was visiting us and he was looking at the walls.
On the south side of the room was the watch console. I was the Team Chief, and had the middle position, in-boxes for important correspondence, and a black telephone. Behind me was a large box that contained our KY-4 secure telephone on which we could speak frankly to anyplace in the world. The Commander in Chief on the Peninsula had a similar model in his garage on the compound.
To my immediate left sat the Signals Sergeant, a senior non-commissioned officer who had years of experience analyzing the North Korean target, in touch with all the NSA elements and stations, and with the Republic’s analogous organization.
Above him was the television that ran nineteen hours a day, from sign-on at 0500 to sign-off at midnight with the playing of the Star Spangled Banner and the Host Nation’s anthem. In the correct order.
We watched soap operas on the TV during the day. In the days before CNN there was always the chance that they would cut away from regular programming and inform us of breaking news. When there were no senior officers in the room we would turn up the sound and watch “As the World Turns.”
There was a teleprinter in the guard lobby upstairs that ran Reuters and the AP wire in long roles of yellow paper. Sometimes on the weekends we would forget to collect them, and the paper would be strewn across the lobby, all the news you could walk on.
To my right sat the Watch NCO, who collected the yellow paper and collated it, and collected the messages from the communications center, stapling things properly, logging them correctly, and then handing them to me to read. Or perhaps take action. I had a pad on which I kept notes, since I was expected to provide a situation briefing to anyone who might visit the center.
I was prepared to brief the Marine, but he seemed lost in thought, gazing at the walls.
You could smoke inside buildings, and often on the Watch that was all there was to do. You could tell how long we had been on watch by the number of stubbed-out butts in the ashtray.
Our console faced the walls on the other three walls. There was recessed lighting get the ambient light in the Center soft, and brought up the color of the charts carefully shielded by Plexiglas that we could mark on with grease pencils, and then scrub away when the day’s activities were done.
The Signals NCO would get long rolls of chatter from his sources. It was raw information, not processed intelligence like what came from the Message NCO to my right. For chatter of interest, he would take a ruler and carefully tear off the relevant portion.
Then he would rise and take a grease-pencil and plot the path of aircraft in flight on a large-format map of the Peninsula. It had all the air divisions marked, and highlighted bases of interest.
“Routine training by Mig-21s at Pukchang” he would say, or “IL-28 Beagles on strip alert.” I would dutifully note it on my pad.
Next on the wall was a high-detail map of the DMZ. We would mark suspected infiltration attempts on it, and firefights, and the Tunnel Neutralization Team provided us the best guess of where the North had dig through the adamant rock to position their invasion tunnels.
The Corps boundaries were carefully marked. Four-Two-Five-One-Seven, as I recall, and the Eight Special Corps to the rear, the commandos who would drop on us fat low-altitude from the AN-2 propeller planes the Russians had given the North.
The lean Marine was looking at the somewhat less detailed map that showed the whole peninsula. It was my favorite map because it showed the whole divided nation, It showed Cheju-do Island in the south, in the Straits of Tsushsima where the Japanese destroyed the Russian Fleet. It showed Pusan City, where the Americans and the ROKs hung on in the first days of the disastrous retreat. It had detail north through Taegu and up through Seoul and across the DMZ and into the mystery of the North, all the way to the Yalu River and the border with the Red Chinese.
And the sea approaches, of course, which is why we had this map. We would make the estimated positions of the motherships, loitering to drop the semi-submersible speedboats of the sea-borne infiltrators who came when the season was right.
“Good hunting there,” said the Marine softly. “A lot of Deer.” He was lost in a reverie.
I thought I knew what he meant, thought he was clearly looking at the wrong place on the map. Everyone knew that the DMZ had become an ironic nature preserve, so deadly that man could not go there except as an ambush team.
The wild game was not subject to harvest there, except by the periodic detonation of land mine, and there was a diversity of wildlife not seen anywhere else in either Korea.
It was quite unique. The increasing population had eliminated most of the wild space in the South, and it was totally gone in the North, since there was not much to eat there even in those days. But the Marine wasn’t looking at the swath of the Demilitarized Zone.
“Sir,” I said helpfully, “The DMZ is much further south.”
He turned, acknowledging us really for the first time. He was taller and older than I had noticed. His eyes were deep pools out of the indirect lighting on the map.
“No,” he said. “There was good hunting up here on the Yalu. That is where we got in 1951.” He pointed to a bluff above the Yalu. I looked at him, humbled. That was the year I was born.
“We had positions there after we took Pyongyang and pushed north. We hunted the deer to supplement our rations in the fall. We could look over the River and see into China. But we could not see what was coming.”
His eyes were far away. “But we could hear them the morning they came. They had those goddamn bugles. It was a long walk back that winter. And goddamned cold.”
“Yessir” I said, stumbling a bit to cover my embarrassment. “It is hard to see across a river sometimes.”
Copyright 2004 Vic Socotra
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April 22, 2004
DailySocotra
