by Ian Slater
For some inexplicable reason, Tae found himself noting the time, seven minutes to ten, and it struck him how it was an illusion that such situations as he was now in take a long time to resolve, that, in fact, most of the firefights over the relatively open ground would be over quickly — it was only in the hills and mountains, where the terrain lent itself naturally to defense, that a single engagement could stretch into hours, days, and even months. He heard a flapping noise, then more thunder in the distance — artillery or real, he couldn’t tell. It began raining heavily and the flapping noise ceased. It had been the huge 100:2 scale map of Korea in the hut’s briefing room, shredded by the wind but now sodden with rain and flattened against the wall, a large strip, where the Yalu River had marked the border between China and North Korea, missing.
“They’re gone!” said the colleague in astonishment. “I don’t see anything mov—”
“Soryong?”
It was coming from where die NKA had set up the mortar, but like the lieutenant, Tae couldn’t see anything, and there was something odd about the voice. For a moment Tae’s ears, ringing from the sounds of battle, couldn’t tell what it was.
“Tae Soryong! Major Tae!”
“How…” began the astonished lieutenant. “How do they know your name?”
“Everyone knows my name,” said Tae.
The lieutenant wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to be more terrified than he was, for it suddenly dawned on him that in the battle swirling about them, presumably all along the DMZ, this brief pause about the lone Quonset hut might have been a conscious decision by the NKA. They wanted Tae. Tae admitted it was possible. It would explain the poor shooting, the AK-74s going high into the hut — merely to keep heads down until the political officer reached their position. But how about the roof? the lieutenant asked Tae. “The mortar shell?”
“A lucky shot,” said Tae. “Or unlucky. Depends on your point of view.”
The NKA officer’s voice was starting up again, and Tae realized what was strange about it — it was coming over a battery-operated megaphone, or some kind of loudspeaker mounted on a vehicle. The voice was explaining in English to any U.S. or ROK soldier within or without the hut that the Army of the Democratic People’s Republic had no wish to hurt Major Tae. They simply wanted to talk to him. “Comrade to comrade.” And if his friends cared about him, and themselves, they would stop “all resistance.” It was all quite hopeless anyway, the voice told them — the entire sector was surrounded.
“Give us the major, Comrades! There will be a big reward. The major will be safe. Otherwise…”the voice warned, it would be “very bad” for everyone.
Inside the Quonset the lieutenant laughed nervously. “I could earn a few won,” he said, adding just as quickly that, of course, he didn’t mean it — it was only a joke. Tae nodded understandingly. He knew it was a joke.
Tae heard something clattering above them on the roof and lifted the M-60, ready to fire.
“Loose guttering!” the lieutenant said hurriedly.
Tae was watching the jagged circle of steel-gray sky. Why would they want him? Surely the names of the ROK’s top counterinsurgency agents in Pusan, Taegu — wherever — wouldn’t be any use to them now. Unless, like a long line of conquerors before them, they wanted to teach a quick lesson to the occupied population — to show unequivocally that whoever opposes the Party in thought, word, or deed, whoever dared oppose the beloved leader, would be publicly denounced and executed. To demonstrate conclusively that underground resistance was futile. Tae vividly recalled old villagers telling him how the British and American soldiers had feared the North Korean guards more than the Japanese, the cruelty of the North Koreans so infamous that the mere threat of handing prisoners over to the NKA had been enough for the NKA’s allies at the time, the Chinese, to quiet their most intransigent American and British POWs.
“They’re waiting,” said the lieutenant, sweat trickling down his neck.
“I know.”
“Tae Soryong! Major Tae!” came the tinny voice. “You have five minutes to surrender — or your comrades will die.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In a revetement area six miles south of Uijongbu, tank troup commander Lt. George Clemens, field glasses scanning the luxuriant green of paddies and blue mountains beyond, felt his skin itching, an infallible sign, as if he needed to be reminded, that he was in an acute stage of excitement. After all, this moment was what he had been trained for, dreamed of, and wanted all his adult life. Since he was a boy, the behemoths of the battlefield, from the huge, cumbersome monster pillboxes on tracks that were the first tanks in World War I, lumbering across the fields of France, to the blitzkrieg Panzers of Rommel’s North Africa Corps churning up the sand in the Western Desert, had awed him. They were for him like a ship, self-contained, an island of war — above all, free to move. And everyone knew the tanks would decide the ground battles, despite what all the air boys said about the deadly saturation fire they could unleash from choppers and ground support fighters. He was sure that once the battle was joined, the confusion of smoke and dust cloud would mean, particularly at night, that for all the fancy arsenal of the air-to-ground missiles, the fight would end up like that of a dogfight in the air, tank against tank, the very kind of dogfights the experts said would never happen again after World War II because the planes were so fast, so modern. Until it happened all over again in the skies over Vietnam. One on one.
His M-1 tank, the Abrams, was the best main battle tank in the world. The Brits had tried to better it with the Challenger, the West Germans with the Leopard, but in the last five years it had been the M-1 that had consistently won NATO’s Canadian Cup, the top tank gunnery competition. It was enough for Clemens that the tank’s design, from its long 105-millimeter gun to its low profile and sloping armor plate hull which mitigated all but a direct hit, put it ahead of the others in its class. Other features that made it exceptional were the C02 laser range finder and air-conditioning to insure longer crew endurance times. Clemens had grown up with the M-1, from the early days of congressional heat because of cost overruns, the months of the temperamental test engines, till now. He had kept the faith. Above all — and this, rather than any technical explanations, is what had won most congressmen over — there was the experience of sitting in an Abrams, its fifty-four tons accelerating from zero to twenty miles per hour in six seconds, moving over rough terrain at forty miles an hour, dust flying, the engine roaring but not screaming, and that turret, steady as a billiard ball on green baize, its low body, hence low silhouette, riding on a cushion of independent suspension, the likes of which had never been seen before. It was a thrill not easily forgotten. Apart from the sheer ascetic beauty of it, it meant that the M-1 at top speed, fifty miles per hour, could fire as if it were standing still when in fact racing at a speed that had once merely been a dream in what some experts had thought was a mad designer’s eye.
As Clemens waited, then saw the green-brown camouflage of the first P-76, the “tin can” of the NKA, appear on the Uijongbu road, he almost felt sorry for them, until he remembered how murderously and mercilessly they were shelling Seoul, killing American and Korean women and children indiscriminately.
* * *
Tae had always been prepared for invasion, and as he had a plan for his family, he had one for himself, his plan predicated on the assumption that in most men’s lives the glass would be half-empty rather than half-full. Even so, it was no comfort amid the rage and dust of battle that he had long predicted an all-out attack by the North, for in the end each man who had taken the oath of loyalty to the ROK would have to make his own decision, the line between surrender and cowardice often so nebulous in the split second of combat as to have little meaning. He saw the lieutenant in front of him quaking at the thought of surrendering. Now only one hope remained: not that the ROK or U.S. Army would counterattack — both were in disarray — nor did he suppose the NKA would treat him kindly. The war within a family was the
most ferocious, the most unforgiving.
His only hope, he believed, lay in the cyanide issued to all front line intelligence officers. The safest place for this, Tae had discovered, was not the teeth — most people ground their teeth at night — or in the wristwatch, for the Communists would take this, not so much for its material value but because a watch in solitary confinement was a comfort. Often it was the only thing by which one could measure the passing of the hours and seasons — sometimes the years. The very act of measurement, of recording a day at a time, was a way of staying sane. The orifices of the body, too, were unreliable, not only because they were often searched by the enemy, but there would always be danger of a capsule or, in this case, a small chewing-guM-1ike strip of concentrated potassium cyanide, breaking in the body, releasing its poison accidentally.
Tae had studied the problem as diligently as he had the matter of the different lengths of chopsticks. In this case it was a German research project into tunneling, mine, and avalanche disasters that had caught his eye, wherein German scientists had tried to find out the most reliable place to insert a small microchip “beeper” to send out a signal in the event of a cave-in. It had been discovered that the most reliable place on the body was a worker’s boots, for unlike shoes or any other form of clothing, these nearly always remained, no matter how many tons of debris or harsh treatment the body had suffered. It wasn’t a foolproof plan, of course; in battle, boots were often claimed as bounty, particularly in peasant armies, and besides, a man without footwear was more a prisoner than if you put him behind barbed wire, unable to run very far in bare feet. And Tae also knew that footwear was sometimes removed for purposes of torture, but generally, except for their laces, which, like a prisoner’s belt, were removed as possible instruments of suicide, boots, he knew, were left to prisoners of war for a very down-to-earth reason — namely that in the heat of battle, moving captives quickly required it.
At considerable expense, Tae had a fake heel made, and in it placed a cyanide capsule, the NKA knowing that such was the prerogative of any ROK intelligence officer privy, as Tae was, to sensitive counterinsurgency material. Tae then had a small, flexible, gumlike sliver of potassium cyanide, developed by the Americans, sewn within the double-layered tongue of the boot, where, even if his NKA captors searched the boot, flexing it, feeling for hidden razors and the like, the gumlike strip would bend as one with the leather. It was for this reason that, despite the shock and smell of battle, the clouds of phosphorus tear gas and the hiss of spent shell casings in the monsoon rain, an extraordinary island of calm lay within him, for the major carried with him, if it became necessary, the ultimate choice in any man’s life, the choice of the moment he would die. He prayed he might not have to, of course, but if, as American colleagues were fond of saying, things got “too rough” and he felt he couldn’t keep the names of the top antiinsurgency agents in the South from being given to his NKA captors, then it would be his moment, not theirs.
He looked at his watch. The five minutes they’d given him were almost up. Of course, they might shoot him there and then, but he doubted it. Then again… He placed the M-60 on his desk, glanced up at the surly sky for a moment, then walking to the door, asked the lieutenant to open it. Frantic with fear and the sense of urgency, the lieutenant jerked the door handle toward him as Tae raised his arms. The lock on the door, always temperamental, wouldn’t give. When finally it gave way and Tae walked out, hands high, he heard the lieutenant coming behind him, murmuring in shame but more in relief, “It’s the right decision, sir.”
The NKA squad leader, in dust-covered green and khaki battle uniform, his face a smudge of camouflage paint, waved for Tae and the lieutenant to come over toward them quickly. The NKA were very professional, no friendliness but not the rage that Tae knew the front line troops often exhibited under fire along the DMZ. The squad leader — up close he reminded Tae a lot of his younger brother in Seoul, an accountant — had Tae manacled, hands behind his back, and scribbled a note on the label that one of the others had looped loosely about his neck. The squad leader detailed two men of the squad to take Tae to Fourth Division HQ immediately. Now four other men, two Americans, two ROK who had only reached the slit trench a hundred yards or so behind Tae’s hut before they came under fire, took their cue from Tae and surrendered. These four, as well as Tae’s lieutenant, were also manacled, and the NKA squad commander bayoneted them, their severed heads stuck on posts around the Quonset hut. It was very important, the squad commander reminded his eight men, that they use the bayonet as much as possible, as a round not fired in action was a round wasted.
He then ordered them to collect all weapons and ammunition in the area that had been abandoned by the “imperialists,” mostly ROK soldiers hastily retreating, ridding themselves of anything that might inhibit them as they ran to catch the last trucks and jeeps out of the area. While most of the machine guns had been spiked and were of no immediate use, they would be collected by mop-up teams and sent back to Pyongyang to be melted down to make new weapons for the Democratic People’s Republic. The M-16 rifles, many of them intact, along with ammunition clips, would be immediately used to arm comrades overrun in the South as they were given the simple choice: join the NKA or be killed.
News of the decapitations at Panmunjom, the squad leader’s superiors knew, would quickly spread through the fleeing ROK regiments and bring the NKA many new recruits. In this the NKA was aided and abetted by General Cahill, who ordered news of the atrocities to be beamed via the three U.S. high-resolution K-band satellites to show the world the kind of people he was up against, believing that it would help galvanize the American public’s support for Korea’s defense. What in hell was Washington doing anyhow?
As far as his shattered local communications allowed him, the general also beamed news of the atrocities to his retreating American regiments. The message here was more brutal: Apart from total victory, the only way out of Korea would be in a body bag.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Supported by 2,063 guns, including over two hundred Soviet-made 203-millimeter Corps-level howitzers which the South Koreans did not even know the North possessed, the invasion front now stretched seventeen miles from Kim’s tank and rifle regiments in the west to his four divisions east above Uijongbu.
A Newsweek reporter filed a story about how the big Russian-made 203-millimeter howitzers — part of the price Moscow had paid Kim Il Sung for sending a small but politically highly symbolic contingent of NKA “volunteers” in 1979 to aid the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — were all mobile, with self-contained tractor-trucks and sixteen-man crews, who were laying down huge variable-bag charges and high-explosive shells at a round a minute, hurling each two-hundred-pound projectile over seventeen miles into Seoul. When the story reached Newsweek’s Tokyo office, en route to the United States, an editor did not consider the part about the circumstances under which the USSR had given the North Koreans the guns to be of “general interest,” and that section was cut as being too dry. In fact, the circumstances under which the guns were given by the USSR to the NKA would have profound implications within the next seventy-six hours, not only for the beleaguered U.S.-ROK forces in South Korea but for the rest of the world.
Meanwhile the world looked on, stunned by the rapidity of the NKA advance and the concomitant humiliation of the Americans. In one brilliant move, primarily through the use of the tunnels, the NKA had not only succeeded in launching an attack beneath and beyond the DMZ in several places, but in doing so, had now trapped over ten thousand “forward troops” of ROK-U.S. command, which had included Major Tae and his intelligence unit. In what was already being called the “squeeze box,” caught between Kim’s troops, who were overrunning the DMZ, and his four crack divisions — over fifty thousand attacking farther south from the tunnels — the zone between the two NKA armies was to be a killing ground unless the surrounded Americans and South Koreans could somehow fight their way out through an escape corridor blasted out by
the U.S. Air Force.
It was a dim hope, for at the same time as the Backfires’ attack on Pohang was taking place, all the major air bases throughout the South, including those at Ulsan and Pusan, thirty and sixty miles south of Pohang, were attacked by small, mobile heavy mortar units of activated NKA infiltrators trained in the 124th guerrilla units. At Kwangju in the southwest, an infiltrator group was caught in the process of setting up an eighty-one-millimeter mortar for a concentrated triangle of fire — fifty rounds for the mortar neatly stacked in carefully prepared and camouflaged dumps. This early alarm saved the six F-4 Phantoms normally parked at Kwangju, but the other airstrips came under withering twenty-six-rounds-a-minute heavy mortar fire, effectively destroying the core of the U.S.-ROK’s air interceptor defense, a defense that in the 1950–1953 war had blunted the NKA’s dash southward to Pusan.
The ‘50-’53 war, however, and Vietnam, particularly the North Vietnamese Communists’ siege of Khe Sahn, had taught the NKA and the 350,00 °Chinese volunteers in that war that while enemy air power alone could not win a conventional war, its ability to play havoc with your supply lines and to resupply its own troops, giving them valuable breathing space even to the point of enabling them to mount a counterattack, could be formidable. For General Kim the only answer to this was the present byorak kongkyok— “lightning war”—in which the primary objectives, the enemy’s air bases, had been taken out by the NKA’s own air strikes or, as in most cases, had been rendered inoperative so swiftly from within that the United States, even with its massive reserves in Japan and its B-52 bases in Okinawa, would be unable to catch its breath before Korea was lost.
