by Ian Slater
“Perepi”—”TV!” somebody shouted. “Migook”— “American!” Chun pulled the stock into his shoulder, aiming high as if readying for a lob shot, but the moment the cameras were gone or their view blocked by the wall, he intended to fire straight into the crowd. And if it zapped one of the protesters full force on the head—”Tough tit!” Accident.
“Wedge forward!” came the command, and Chun fired.
* * *
Four of the half-dozen leaders of the riot, all members of the DRP, Democratic Reunification Party, were at the Secret Garden at the time, but this wasn’t known until film of the incident was replayed several days after by police. By then it was too late. The two KCIA men at the garden entrance never stood a chance, swept along in the irresistible tide of students and riot police — much of the crowd lost from view in the gardens, where giant billows of tear gas enveloped the ginkgo trees and evergreens like morning mist, many of the students, eyes burning, stumbling blindly into the lily ponds, the riot police now in “free run,” clubbing as they went, leaving the dazed and fallen to be arrested or clubbed again and dragged away to the buses by the more lightly equipped National Police regrouping in the rear.
The younger of the two KCIA men, his voice drowned in the cacophony of screaming students fleeing from the gas, was knocked down, still holding his coat, his other hand reaching into his shirt pocket, extracting his KCIA card. The next instant he was trampled underfoot, warm blood streaming down his face, unable to see. He lost consciousness.
By the time he was picked up, his KCIA card lost in the stampede, and put in an ambulance, the only available emergency ward was at Severance International Hospital; all the others were already overflowing from the citywide riots that now included Songan University as well. Badly concussed, the agent also had six ribs broken, minor cuts and abrasions, as well as a split on his left forehead requiring ten stitches. In plain clothes, being mistaken for a protester, he was put in a room under police guard, after X rays were taken.
* * *
A UPI — United Press International — stringer, celebrating Independence Day with relatives from Kwangju in the southwest Cholla province, had taken his visitors up on the cable car to the top of Namsan, or Nam Hill, to escape the muggy, tear-gassed atmosphere of the city, relishing the cooler temperatures atop the observation tower that rose another four hundred feet above the nine-hundred-foot hill. With the vast bowl of the city stretching all around them, he pointed southward to the site of the old 1988 Olympics on the far side and to the nineteen bridges that spanned the Han River.
Looking northward through the coin telescope, they could just make out the tearoom and restaurant atop Pugak Skyway, and beyond it, blue, smoky ridges that obscured the DMZ. The wind shifted, clearing parts of the city previously hidden by tear gas, and off to the southwest, they could discern the suburban sprawl running either side of the Han spreading westward to the harbor and industrial clutter of Inchon twenty miles away. Beyond Inchon there was a metallic glint, the Yellow Sea, separating Korea from China, broken here and there by the gray slivers of American warships.
The stringer excused himself from his relatives and called the four emergency wards closer to the city center before phoning his contact at Severance International around 9:40 a.m. Yes, said the contact, a nurse’s aide, there was something she could tell him: A young man — name on the security card Lee Sok Jo— brought in about an hour ago had just died. Brian hemorrhage, they thought. After repeating the name to make sure he’d got the spelling right, the stringer, exiting the booth and adopting the fourth level, or tone, due the most elderly of his relatives, excused himself to make one more call — to UPI’s downtown office. He could feel his pulse racing. With a civilian dead, he knew it was no longer just another riot. It was now, as his American colleagues would say, “a whole new ball game.”
Within minutes the name “Lee Sok Jo” was on the wire services all around the world and being simultaneously broadcast on Seoul’s four major radio stations and the U.S. armed forces network in Korea.
By midafternoon, students at all eighty-seven colleges and universities throughout the ROK had declared “war” on the government for its “massive brutality.” Within two hours the riots were nationwide. By 3:15 p.m., despite official denials, Lee Sok Jo had become the latest martyr of the struggle against the “oppressive imperialistic regime of the South Korean government — puppets of Washington.” When fumbling bureaucrats finally discovered that Lee Sok Jo was not a student but had in fact been a KCIA agent, this information was deliberately withheld by the government, for fear it would be seized upon by the students as further evidence that security agents were being used as agents provocateurs and spies against them.
It was a gift to both the leftists and the Democratic Reunification Party. The police could not contain the riots, beaten back by hails of pavement stones and Molotov cocktails. Scores of police and students were injured, some seriously, the worst fighting occurring around Myongdong Cathedral, eight blocks southwest of the Secret Garden, the gardens themselves now all but deserted.
Agent Chin called the vendor in from Chamshil and replayed as much news and police video as he could get his hands on. Not surprisingly, no matter how many times Chin “froze” the film, zooming in for a close-up, the vendor couldn’t pick out the stranger he’d seen in the Myongdong from the crowd, particularly as many of them were wearing either blue or white gauze masks as protection against the pepper gas. Whether the North Korean agent had reached a phone in the gardens during the night and enlisted the leftists’ help in getting him out of the gardens, or whether he’d simply lucked out, Chin would never know.
* * *
By 4:00 p.m. the situation, especially around Myongdong Cathedral, was rapidly getting out of control. Exhausted riot squads, Chun among them, charged repeatedly through choking, riot-strewn streets, only to find themselves reeling under new onslaughts of stone and fire, many driven back so far, they ended up crashing into the long “congo” lines of arrested students who, heads bowed, holding one another’s waists as ordered, were snaking through the rubble, herded by National Police to waiting paddy wagons.
At 4:15, a momentary hush, not unlike those experienced in the midst of a village shaman’s incantations, suddenly descended upon the feuding students and police. Even the endless swirl of humanity about the pagoda-shaped Namdaemun, or Great South Gate, slowed to a crawl, as a Buddhist monk, in his early twenties, assumed the lotus position, poured kerosene over himself, and struck a match. For a second his saffron robes were as one with the flames, his charred torso curling into the fetal position like burnt paper.
Immolations by several other monks in Kwangju and in the always politically discontented “Cinderella” province of South Cholla injected more tension and violence into the increasingly chaotic scenes of Seoul. Finally at 9:00 p.m. that evening, South Korean President Rah felt he had no option but to call in the army. For the first time in ten years, rioters were confronted with live ammunition.
The troops were ordered to fire overhead and did so, but several, firing just as a new hail of projectiles rained down upon them, instinctively lowered their weapons, their volley tearing into the panicked crowd. Two students were killed, seven badly wounded. Several Democratic Unification Party leaders were arrested, along with most of the known leftist leaders, a few of whom the riot police had nabbed in their sweep through the Secret Garden. The government announced it would put them on trial for insurrection.
KBS, the Korean Broadcasting System, Yonap, and Kodo, the Japanese wire service, together with the three American networks and the BBC foreign service, had it all live.
In Washington, it was now 8:00 a.m. — too late for the visuals and sound bytes to run on “Good Morning America” and its ilk, but in plenty of time for the networks’ much more influential evening news broadcasts.
The arrests triggered further riots. Leftists and Reunification Party members under house arrest now called for general st
rikes, but Rah’s government was determined not to give in.
At 10:05 p.m. Radio Pyongyang reported that it was deeply distressed by the situation in the South, and described in glowing terms the earlier arrival at Panmunjom of the more than ten thousand “peace” marchers from the South. Pyongyang television then showed pictures of the North and South Korean students joyously greeting one another, and then as dusk had fallen, bidding each other farewell in a moving, nostalgic rendition of “Uriuisowon’un-tongil”—”Our Wish Is Reunification.”
* * *
Major Tae and his guards, having watched the rally from the southern side of the DMZ, were convinced that more students were now heading south than had arrived in the DMZ that morning. A perfect opportunity, Tae thought, for the NKA to slip infiltrators across. Accordingly he ordered the ROK’s DMZ unit at Panmunjom to halt everyone on Unification Highway after they had cleared the DMZ and to carry out a thorough identity check.
The students, objecting vehemently, as he knew they would, were incensed enough to fight, but the ROK troops stationed along the DMZ were heavily armed and less tolerant than riot police. Besides, now that it was dark, student leaders knew television coverage would be minimal and so advised their fellow protestors not to resist the U.S.-ROK search but rather to show dignified solidarity in the face of the “imperialist lackeys.” Despite the downpour of a thundershower, the single file stretched out for over two miles, inching forward, each student being searched for arms and false papers.
The thing that most struck American commentators at the time as well as the South Korean reporters was the fact that despite its obligatory use of Communist rhetoric, Pyongyang radio had for once shown some political sophistication and even, perhaps, goodwill, in publicly counseling the students during the Liberation Day meet at Panmunjom not to provoke a confrontation, clearly intimating that the North did not wish to do anything that might undo forthcoming negotiations concerning the possibility of peaceful reunification between the two Koreas.
At midnight, as usual, “Pyongyang Polly” came on the radio announcing the evening’s reading: verse by “the venerable and much honored grandfather of our great and respected leader, Kim Jong Il,” the poem “Pine Trees on Namsan,” ending with, “I will be unyielding while restoring the country, though I am torn to pieces.”
* * *
“Major Tae!”
There was a long silence, Tae busy with paperwork as the last hundred or so students were being processed. “Yes,” he asked, pulling yet another file toward him. He was tired but relieved that, after all his apprehension, another Liberation Day had come and gone without any military incursion from the North to shatter the fragile peace.
When he looked up he saw a guard, drenched by the rain, reluctant to enter, water still dripping from helmet and boots. But as Tae rose, a smell, or perhaps it was the way the soldier moved, told him something was wrong.
“Well — what is it?” demanded Tae. The guard turned, motioning to someone outside.
A figure appeared. Mi-ja. She pushed back a wet strand of hair. It was a small gesture, but Tae could not tell, her eyes in deep shadow, whether she was looking directly at him or not. But in his fury, his humiliation, he interpreted the gesture as one of defiance. He made as if to speak, stopped, then turned away. “Search her.” He paused. “She’s no different from the rest of them.”
“Yes, sir.”
When the guard had taken her away, Tae sat staring straight ahead at the small map of old Chosun—Korea, “land of the morning calm”—but he could not see through tears.
CHAPTER NINE
As Liberation Day had ended, a spectacular sunset of huge, towering, cream-white cumulonimbus edged with gold, the men of the American Second Infantry Division Platoon manning OP (Observation Post) Fort Dyer were at “stand to,” normal procedure at sundown all along the DMZ and a drill that was as old as the Roman legions, as soldiers stood armed, silent, straining to hear or spot any movement in the rich green valley of rice paddies below that was turning soft black in the dying light.
Sgt. Elmer Franks, standing on the trench’s wooden duck-boards, was looking through the periscope binoculars. He could see nothing beyond the wire. Soon he would move over to the big infrared scope; no color in the picture, but contrasting black and white shapes were enough. The problem with the infrared scope, however, was that it was not passive, so that rather than simply picking up infrared emitted by a target, it needed to project an infrared beam, which in turn could be picked up by the other side — if they had the right equipment. To cover their bets, the Americans at Fort Dyer also had a “TI,” or thermal imager, which was passive and through which radiant heat from beyond the wire would show up in opaque sections, like white blobs on an X-ray film.
Overhead storm clouds began crashing into each other, lightning spitting in the distance. Franks looked through the TI.
CHAPTER TEN
Two hundred seventy miles south, night mist shrouding her, the fast guided-missile frigate USS Blaine, part of the Seventh Fleet’s carrier screen, sliced an oily calm between Korea’s southernmost point and Japan’s Tsushima Island off her starboard bow. As the ship left the warmer waters of the East China Sea, heading north into the Sea of Japan, the sweet smell of land wafted by, momentarily subduing the rubbery smell of the bridge. It was a routine patrol, and Ray Brentwood, the tall, thirty-seven-year-old Annapolis-trained captain of the Blaine, was on the bridge halfway through the eight-to-midnight watch.
For a moment Brentwood found himself thinking of his wife, Beth, their two young children, and of Lana, his sister in New York, whose last letter to him was full of unhappiness about her marriage. His eye caught sight of the sign — REMEMBER THE STARK! — taped to the bulkhead, and he immediately put all thoughts of family out of mind. He’d drawn the sign up himself and had copies posted throughout the ship. The Stark, a U.S. guided-missile frigate of the Perry class, like the Blaine, had been attacked in the Straits of Hormuz in ‘87 by an Iraqi jet firing two Exocets. Only one of the missiles had gone off. One was enough. Thirty-seven U.S. sailors killed, ass-kicking all down the line, the captain court-martialed, and behind all the official inquiries, families and friends devastated by the loss.
The sign on the Blaine was the young captain’s exhortation to his crew to keep sharp, not to let the boredom or fatigue of a Far Eastern patrol dull efficiency, to remember that for all the wondrous “gizmology” aboard the USS Blaine, and wondrous it was, the first warning that a missile was going to hit the Stark had not come from the ship’s state-of-the-art SLQ-32 radar but from a man—the Stark’s forward lookout — who saw the Exocet’s blue exhaust ten seconds before it hit. Above all, the sign was a reaffirmation of man over machine in the most mechanistic age in history.
At the end of his watch, before going down to the ward room for a snack, Brentwood made his way to his cabin, drew the green drape shut, tossed his cap onto the bulkhead peg, and sat down at the bare, gray metal desk to perform his weekly duty of writing home. He smiled at the snap of the four of them, taken a few months before during the spring, when they had visited Beth’s folks in Seattle, across from their navy home in Bremerton. They were all in gaudy-colored shorts, young John, four, bribed to grin with the promise of a Big Mac, Jeannie’s seven-year-old smile trying to be sophisticated, despite the missing teeth. Beth, petite, brunette, didn’t like the photo. “Unfair,” she’d proclaimed good-naturedly. “Ray’s eyes are so nice and blue. Healthy-looking. Can’t see mine for the bags. Aghh— look at my hair!” Said she looked worn out, “too pale… a hundred and four,” instead of thirty-four, which her mother said was par for the course, seeing as how the navy had moved them four times in five years, and with two young ones. “Divorce,” her mother had added ominously, was highest in the navy-forced separations its major cause.
Nevermind forced separations, he’d told Beth jokingly; it was tough enough when you did get together. With the kids at this age, trying to make love was like planning
D-Day. Impossible before ten o’clock at night, by which time Beth could only flop exhausted in the living room, needing an hour of Ann Landers and anything that moved on TV to unwind. They’d tried getting Ray’s mom to come to Bremerton from New York to “see the kids”—run interference — but she said she “couldn’t stand the rain.” What she meant was she couldn’t stand the strain — didn’t like baby-sitting and having to read the same bedtime story fifteen times, with interminable cries of “toilet” and “thirsty.” Ray didn’t blame her, didn’t blame the kids, missed them terribly — said so in his letter each week. But next leave, damn it, he and Beth were going to take off. A couple of days up on the Olympic Peninsula, a little place like La Push, cottage by thundering green-white surf, the smell of dead intertidal life giving off that fresh “ozoney” tang, and craggy, pine-covered mountains sweeping down to the sea. He and Beth in bed — all day. Then chilled cans of “Oly”—none of the diet stuff. Make love till they couldn’t do it anymore.
He felt the ship alter course slightly.
Strangest thing was, he couldn’t picture her face clearly after a month out, her facial expressions blurred in memory, precisely when he thought they ought to be clearest.
The voice tube’s hollow whistle sounded.
“Captain here — what is it?”
“CIC, sir — immediate.”
Brentwood grabbed his cap from the peg and headed for the Combat Information Center one deck below the bridge.
“What’ve we got?” he asked, entering the blood-red cave of winking consoles. “Bogey?”
“Not sure, sir,” reported the first officer. “A blip from five thousand feet. Hundred miles from us. Very fast, then nothing but scatter at sea level.”
Brentwood looked at the situation board. The carrier Salt Lake City was a hundred miles behind them. “Downed aircraft?” asked Brentwood.
