Author’s Note: It has been an interesting year for us all. I discovered a button on the iPad that revealed “unread” messages. There were a surprising number of them, mostly covering the period of early February of this strange year. I must have missed a couple weeks as the COVID excitement was just hitting its stride. There were other things as well. The laptop claimed- a bit shrilly, I thought- that it had not been backed up in almost a year. I looked at what might be lurking in the digital dust and this one popped up. It appears to have been written by a 29-year old military kid, serving in a nation across the vast Pacific some forty years ago. Stranger still, it appeared to be me. Of late, our faithful correspondents have registered their opinions of the current plague, and the struggle about the coming election. Point Loma, Marlow and Arrias have registered their opinions on what seems to be going on, and what is likely to happen. We live in this world, adapting to its curious new rules and expectations. We will deal with that as it comes. But for a moment, let’s take a look at how strange the ever-changing world presents itself. More on the present, presently. In the meantime, meet the man who married the Field Marshall’s daughter.

– Vic

15 May 1980

The Field Marshal’s Daughter

It was cold this morning. Late Spring, so the window had been left wide open. I awakened at 0500 in darkness. No dawn yet. I had the horrible feeling I’d overslept; that I was late for the early shift in the Command Bunker. I had just had a particularly vivid dream and my pulse is racing. I had fired again and again, the 9mm Browning bucking in my hand there on the concrete border. The woman had gone round-for-round with me. I kept forgetting how to bring the slide back to engage the magazine. She didn’t. She had me outgunned. In the end, she was subdued by green-clad men that I knew, wrestled to the ground. In the dream-state I gathered that the television show was just about over; time for the closing credits. Was I late for work? I looked up from my bed, fifty clicks south of the DMZ, in a Hooch on a Post in a big town. I have the morning off. No work until late this afternoon. The curtains blew gently in the freshening breeze ahead of the seasonal monsoon.

That was the second dream of the day. The first played itself out during my post-work nap. Shift work is hard on the system and the intelligence cycle goes on 24×7. The version we work in the Bunker is 2-2-2 and 4. We start with two Eve shifts, coming in at 1500 and out again in time to hit the clubs before military curfew. Then transition to a couple Night shifts, in at 2200, out by 0800. Those were brutal. Then two Days; in at 0700 for the turn-over and interact with the day-workers until the Eve shift crew shows up.

Four days off between watch-strings sounds like a lot, but working your way around the clock in eight days wears you down. Being burned out the first day, and having to work the afternoon of the last day of break means it isn’t one. Dreams come during the process, but I don’t remember many. Shift workers are all a little nuts.

It was funny just how real the dreams had been. The one in the afternoon had startled me. I was so deep in it that when the phone began to ring and my feet hit the cold linoleum floor, I was yanked physically all the way from Home, a journey of five thousand miles. I had actually been there, I had seen my dog, and was ruffling the fur on her neck and stroking her long collie-nose, looking into those liquid brown eyes. When I awoke the dog was still dead and I was still in Korea.

I debated the question of rising. I could just roll over. The mound of blankets was a snug and secure place. Security is good, national and otherwise The morning outside was chill and the floor would be cold on bare feet. I savored the dream for a while, rolling it over in its astonishing Technicolor. Enjoying the middle-ground between REM and the first cup of coffee. It’s a pity you couldn’t plan the dreams in advance. I snuggled down under the thick covers and let the dream go, colors beginning to fade.

I pulled the covers over my face and wandered through the week.

Spooks. I had run into a nest of Spooks. I had peeled an onion, walked right into somebody else’s secret world. I understood the rules of mine. It was linear and military and I knew what marking to put on the pictures and documents. This was something completely different. I wasn’t sure what I had seen, what was true, and who was real.

I was pretty sure I knew at least one true thing, which is what author Hemingway said he was after. Maybe it was enough to know who one of the Services was. I was pretty sure the girl was from the KCIA, or Korean Central Intelligence. The rest was problematic. Particularly Jim.

It began with the idle hours around lunch before trudging toward a night shift.

I was awake and dreading the shift to come. I dressed in uniform and walked uptown to avoid thinking. I saw Captain Terry headed off post and walked along with him. He was a good guy, Army, to be sure, but in the same shift predicament I was. We crossed the wide boulevard and headed up toward the bustle of the shopping district that adjoined the Post.

The Hamilton Hotel is a strange place, and of course I am talking about the Old Hamilton, not that chromium monstrosity with the shopping mall underneath it. In the day, it had been the only western-style hotel in the Itaewon district of Seoul, the only place for Garrison rats and visiting firemen to stay. Consequently, it became a haven for Hookers, hucksters, and just incidentally, a target for intelligence collection. Garrulous drunks are a great source of reporting, and if that means that the reporter has to spend the Company’s money hanging around a bar all afternoon, that is just one of the costs of doing business. Might even find someone with a weakness, a potential New Source.

There was money around for recruiting, and one of the hazards of the trade is the idle hours sitting around bars looking for likely prospects.

All in fun, just between Allies, you understand, I mean, our host nationals would never target us, would they?

At last count, I knew of five friendly Services actively working Seoul. You had to assume North Korean sleepers, and the Russians and Chinese and God only knew who else. This was a crossroads city on the edge of three empires. At a minimum there were eight groups of human intelligence collectors all reporting on each other.

I know that now, and probably should have thought about it then.

The hotel lobby had been crowded with Americans. The tourists were carrying sacks of treasure gleaned from the shops of Itaewon. One optimist had eight sets of Korean sneakers around her neck. Many had quilts under arms, and four or five brass objects, cranes or dragons, clutched in hand. Captain Terry and I walked past the coffee-shop and took the elevator to the second floor. The entrance to the Adam Bar was concealed behind some shrubbery. Don’t ask me why it is like that. It is just one of those fractured Korean things.

The Old Hamilton had come down sadly in the world. The stucco was stained. The furnishings shabby. The carpets appalling. The men’s room needed a new urinal mint. And now that the place was down on its heels, and there were better places to stay, the only people who went there were spies on the expense account. This was a way to write off the drinking and thinking of other wars in other places.

The central point of tradecraft is to be alert and to understand what is happening around you and what is about to happen to you. One of the oldest and most reliable tools for disrupting someone else’s situational awareness is alcohol. The Adam Bar is a nice little place with artificial rocks and bamboo screens. A discrete staff. Charming nooks. I assume it was wired. I knew what people talked about, and the drunker they got, the more interesting stuff flew around. I assumed somebody is listening. Because they can.

Terry and I walked in and took stools at the bar. Trade was slow. Terry ordered a couple beers. I knew we were in trouble when they appeared over the smooth black surface. They were giant liter bottles. “Oh no,” I said. I had to work later. One beer maybe….but this was one in two’s clothing. No one ever has just one beer.

“No sweat, buddy” said Terry. His body-clock was exactly 180 degrees out from mine. He was just coming off shift and the world for him was new. I was going back on and the world was ending. “Just one and back to the Yard.” He forked out three thousand won for the beer.

He had just conducted an intense twenty-minute negotiation over the cost of a dress for his daughter back home. He bargained like crazy over about fifty cents, and then throw away the bundle on cocktails. Go figure. I had a few sips, lit up a Marlboro and waxed expansive on the great Issues of the day, which we faithfully read about in the Pacific edition of the Stars and Stripes. The topics can be far ranging. We settled upon Zimbabwe as a nice, safe subject. It was not in our area of responsibility and thus we didn’t follow it in the classified traffic. Not that there was much, but we retained an active interest. There might be a question during one of the briefings about renegade Rhodesians.

Ian Smith had just decided to pull the plug on the break-away white minority ruled Rhodesia. It was interesting, and there were issues. The civil war had been a fascinating sideshow for years, with exotic units like the Selous Scouts and Grey’s Rangers, plenty of money flowing from South Africa. There were colorful atrocities on both sides. Since our portfolio included North Korea and the Russians, there was no danger of inadvertently blurting out something secret in a dark public place.

Our tribe of Spooks are the talkative kind. We analyze stuff and then we tell it to somebody. We are not in the business of keeping secrets as much as we are of telling them. Of course, it is supposed to be limited to those who are entitled to hear.

The secret world is a strange place, and not everyone is what or who they seem. At that moment, for example, a case officer over at the Embassy was using me as a “source” inside U.S. Forces, even though I had never told him anything that wasn’t appropriate. The pressure was on for any kind of reporting after the Korean Government’s brutal put-down of the Kwang-ju uprising. We had not seen that one coming, the request from the Republic to transfer the Special Forces off the DMZ on the Kimpo Pennisula and what they did when they got to Cholla Province. No one likes surprises.

I considered the case officer a well-meaning dolt. The chance of my telling him anything insightful, aside from who was going to win the Michigan-Ohio State football game, was about nil. But Spooks are about collecting, whether it is good or not. Someday it might be good, so collect sources, collect gossip, always collect. As far as my prediction on the game, I would probably be wrong. Nature of the business. But I’m sure he wrote it up anyway.

The artificial darkness of the mid-afternoon Adam Bar was conducive to expansive conversation. Captain Terry and I got rolling on the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe issue in a hurry. I had read that Mr. Robert Mugubwe had laid on a special Air Zimbabwe flight to attend Marshall Tito’s funeral in Yugoslavia. He dragged along an entourage of eighty, many of whom had been shoeless guerrillas only months before.

By way of contrast, Maggie Thatcher, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, flew tourist-class and took an entourage of two. Mugubwe had been in the U.K. attempting to extort aid from Mrs. Thatcher just a couple weeks before. I was beginning to gesture. “And what about Joshua Nkomo?” I demanded. I could feel the power beginning to course through me. “That fat pig is in charge of the State Research Bureau, and Idi Amin stuff is starting to happen already!”

Terry took a stately position on the prospects of renewed civil war, and the tawdry spectacle of the Union Jack going up the flagpole in Salisbury to wave limply for a few weeks before coming down for the last time. Then the Brits would hand the keys over to Mugubwe, empire over, exit stage left. Terry was of the opinion that civil war wasn’t going to happen, and that all the commotion would die down and things were get sane. We argued about that, me contending that Mugubwe couldn’t change his stripes, and that once a Marxist, always a Marxist. Whatever he said, he was going to wind up confiscating the land from the white minority. He just couldn’t steal it yet.

The level of beer in the liter bottles got lower and lower. We wound up in Kenya and Malaysia, debating the possibility of a colonial power beating an authentic independence movement like the Mau-Maus. I was hectoring on the successes and failures of counter-insurgency, and the lasting benefits of English Common law in East Africa when a polite cultured English voice broke in. I hadn’t noticed him in the haze of Marlboros and darkness. He was an imposing figure, of an age, but with eyes that seemed to glow in the darkness.

“Excuse me, hate to barge in on you Chaps, but I fought in Kenya and Malaysia, and I just wanted to say that I found your discussion fascinating.”

Chaps? Oh, shit, I thought. Terry had an excuse, but for me it was expansive too early in afternoon.

That was how our encounter with Jim began. I’m still not sure which level of Jim I understand. Intelligence is largely about peeling onions. Each layer has an access and a reality, related to but not necessarily true to the layer beneath. Sometimes layers are just covers. I have been in Korea long enough to have met people from most of our Agencies and a good number of theirs. We all have our quirks and our manners. Our Service guys are pretty straightforward. Some are the classics, Hawaiian shirts, short hair and sunglasses. They stick out, protrude. Seeing them in some town with a looming crisis almost shouts out that the 82nd Airborne or the SEALS are thinking about you. In a deeply personal way. Company spooks in the field are the Real Deal, case officers working a string of sources. NSA guys tend to be anti-social, since they don’t have to talk to you to know what you are thinking. NRO Spooks are real secret, but they hide in different places and are doing you from space, so why would you care? NIMA is just looking at your picture, comb your hair. And all the rest of them, the drug spooks and the Justice spooks and the commerce spooks are the sideshow crowd. Mainstreamers don’t worry about them, unless you have branched off and are on the wrong side of the money.

Jim was an operational Army spook, or that was part of the legend. Either that or he was a dream as vivid as I had ever had.

I’ll give you the dossier as I heard it. He allowed to 48 years of age. His blue eyes twinkled behind military-issue glasses, the ones so ugly we called them birth-control goggles. No sensible woman would look twice at someone wearing them and they shouted “Army.” A give-away. But he was very properly attired in a coat and tie, smoking a thin menthol cigarette and holding hands with an attractive Korean girl with a Vidal Sassoon haircut only a few years out of date. We saluted our common interest in East Africa and raised a toast to “hale-fellow-well-met.”

“Tupshi-da!” said Jim.

A mistake. That term means “chug-a-lug” in Korean. Which is why Koreans are such good fun at parties, at least for the first hour or so. We had committed. Jim seemed to have one of those bottomless wallets, which produced tall brown bottles at progressively shorter intervals.

Jim shared his life and it was a roller-coaster. It started with a hitch in the Coldstream Guards, and a subaltern’s life in the disintegrating Empire. It then passed through the dim reaches of Suez to Kenya and Malaysia. Thence to the climes of Korea, wracked by conflict. Further to ignominious capture, to China, to a POW camp. In chains. The professionals were hard nuts to crack, the Brits and the Turks. Not like the amateur Yanks. Military chain of command even behind the wire. As the Chinese removed each Senior Ranking Officer, those left consulted lineal numbers and replaced him. The Yanks, by way of contrast, just sort of sat behind the fence and wondered what was going on.

“There was a case,” I said to Captain Terry “of three Turkish Privates left in the compound. They figured out who had signed up on what days, and the one who had been a Private the longest took command. Drove the Chinese crazy like that. Pretty soon they had Turks and Brits scattered all over, trying to break the military units up, and they started again as soon as two prisoners got together.”

“Quite right” said Jim in a clipped tone. “Then one day an NKVD Major showed up with the Chinese guards. The Senior Ranking Officer got us all together and told us we were for it unless we went for the wire that night. So, 17 of us went for it and 4 got across.

“You did what?”

“Walked out of China. We didn’t know until we woke up one morning in a rice paddy and saw rifles leveled at us. I looked at the weapons and didn’t know what to think. They were British .303s. We thought the Chinks had grabbed a group of our guns. That was the first time I heard Thai.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said “You had walked out of China and into Thailand?”

“Quite right. Surprised us, too. We thought we had crossed over into Laos someplace. We thought we forded the Mekong, but p’rhaps it had been the Kwai. Didn’t have anything in the way of maps, don’t you know.” He polished his glasses and asked the Korean girl whether she still remembered him. Her Sassoon waved emphatically. She professed to not speak much English. “They stuck us in Butterworth down in Malaysia for five weeks R&R and then back to the line in Korea. They did things differently in those days.”

I can smell a line of bullshit a mile away. I had checked on several key points and asked him a question in Thai, which he handled adroitly. He appeared to be quite genuine, except for the career decision he took after Korea. He had returned to England and completed his Masters degree, and then joined the U.S. Army as a private soldier. He got up and wandered off to the latrine. “Terry,” I whispered “either this guy is what he says he is or he is something even more intense. Head’s up.” Terry needed some help. He had briefly slumped, head-first on the bar.

I needed to be moving along and I had places to go and duty to do. I arose from the stool and decided to make a stop in the head to off-load some of the beer. I was standing next to Jim when he leaned over. “One thing about that cross-border operation I was telling you about….”

“Say Jim, if there was a place in all of Korea less secure that this one, I don’t know where it is.’ I waved at the false ceiling.

“Quite right. Good show.” We wandered back to the bar. Captain Terry was staring blankly into space. He was clearly overwhelmed at this juncture. I was nearly late for work. We exchanged addresses and agreed to meet the following afternoon.

All I had to do was get through the evening.

It was not what you would call a memorable watch. It passed as they all do, interminable minutes slowly accumulating to eight hours; hearing the National Anthems of the Republic and the Mother Country at 0200 sharp when the television went dead for the night. No flaps, no shooting incidents, no unidentified personnel in the DMZ, no infiltrations, tunnel activity or naval excursions by the NK Forward Guardships. Quiet as a tomb. The hours dragged, and I thought about Jim’s world, and smoked at the desk, gazing across the gray carpet at the wall-length illuminated charts of North Korea.

The watch always ends eventually and this was no exception. I turned over responsibility to my relief in record time (“Nothing Significant to Report, All clear in the fourth-third-first-and-second corps-areas. See you, I’m outta here!”) in record time and slouched back over to the Hooch to sleep away the morning. The skies were clear and the light breeze refreshing. It was a pity to have to waste daylight asleep.

Some hours later I awoke with the characteristic feeling: disorientation, thirsty, and out of sorts. The body is designed to work and then sleep at night. The body never really gets used to shift work, at least mine doesn’t. Some people seem to thrive on it. We have senior NCOs who had been doing this an entire career. For me, though, the revenge of my body is cumulative and subtle. You cannot work around the clock once a week for long and not end up with a sort of constant fatigue, a short temper, and the continuing hallucination that you are living in a military dictatorship surrounded by foreigners jabbering in an unintelligible language.

Or maybe I was living in Seoul.

Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com