The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  —Telegraph Pole seems different. He has no spirit.

  —They say he’s better. He’s not ranting anymore, right?

  I thought differently. He had gone to another world he could never return from. After three visits to the other prison, his body seemed emptied of any soul. He no longer remembered me at all. In any case, he served out his six-year sentence and disappeared.

  We all have lines we shouldn’t cross. In prison, these moments of crisis are inevitable. When you first start your sentence. When you’ve spent a few years in your private cell. When a few years turns to nine or ten. When your wife leaves you. When a family member, but especially your mother, dies. When your children are sick or something bad happens to them. When a guard you hate is reassigned to you. When you’re wrongfully punished. When you’re scooping up dog food with your mouth in a windowless, dark cell with your hands tied behind your back. When such things happen, you cross a certain boundary. A soul that can’t withstand it leaves the intolerable space of the body and creates a new, lonely world for itself.

  ~

  After the three-and-a-half-year turning point had passed, the authorities relaxed their grip on me. With regular prisoners, they would raise their ranks or move them to easier positions in the factory. With political prisoners, they’d start by being strict with us and eventually, after we “adjusted,” would raise us to “model prisoner” level. Of course, once inspections began, the rules for prisoner management would briefly change. It was the authorities who decided what adjusted meant. It was too much to ask a “democracy activist” to change his stripes overnight, but as long as a prisoner wasn’t too combative and could discuss compromises with the authorities, there was a chance that treatment would improve. I felt like a military conscript in his final months, trying to stand outside the rules for the last lap of his term.

  We’d call the rich and powerful prisoners “tiger skins” and their opposite “dog skins.” Prisoners who broke the rules were known as “foul hitters” and their opposite were “straight hitters.” I was moving from hitting straight to hitting fouls. They say that tiger skins and dog skins originated from rich prisoners wrapping themselves in expensive blankets in winter, while the poor ones huddled under old military-issue blankets; however, it’s not just blankets that make the military and prison similar for me. Insofar as military service means obeying strict rules and regulations for a set amount of time, it, too, is a prison that confines us at the peak of our youth. Just as a prisoner waits for their release date from the moment they are sentenced, so a military conscript awaits the date of discharge, ticking off the days one by one. An optimist would say that anyone who successfully endures a prison sentence might come out stronger than before, much as an awkward young man after a three-year conscription may emerge as a true adult. The point is that, whether in prison or the army, what matters is your capacity to endure it.

  11

  Deployment

  1966–69

  Eight weeks of boot camp in Jinhae and four weeks of infantry training in Sangnam will turn anyone into a rough and tough “man of the seas.” The training methods were modeled after the US Marines, but life inside the barracks was drawn from the Japanese military, where harsh discipline, or bbatda, was the rule. On a nearly daily basis, the drill sergeant indoctrinated us to see ourselves and our fellow soldiers as an ironclad band of comrades, whereas the enemy was no more than a ragtag mob.

  There were all sorts of slogans posted around the barracks. We had the classic “Once a marine, always a marine,” as well as “The ghost-catching marines,” “Invincible marines,” and “You toughed it out another day, brother” written in yellow paint against a red background. In less than two weeks, the trainees, steeped in an overwhelming feeling of solidarity and belonging, shouted in unison that the marines were the greatest of all the military branches.

  When I was in the US during my exile, a Korean man who lived next door and owned a dry-cleaning service asked me to come “say a few good words” to the local Korean marines’ association. I protested that the whole world knew I was a “troublesome element” who had been to North Korea and back, and I still remember his answer: “Once a marine, always a marine, and there can never be a troublesome element in the marines.”

  It’s common to think that military policemen look dapper in their uniforms when directing the traffic or patrolling the streets. But behind that façade is a barracks life that’s built on tears and sweat. If you don’t shine your shoes until you can see your face in them before morning inspections, you have to lick the sole. The brass buckle of the cartridge belt must be polished every day so your face leers back at you like a fun house mirror. You have to crease your trousers just right, taking care to stick a rice grain on the inside before ironing so the crease stays tight. None of your superiors do these things.

  Once I finished with specialization training, bringing my total time in training to a year, I started from the bottom of the ladder in my unit. Until a new recruit came in below me, I was in charge of taking care of all my superiors’ uniforms. My eyes opened automatically at 4 a.m., and I began my day by shining shoes and ironing uniforms. If they thought their shoes weren’t shiny enough, they made me lick the soles and ordered me to “plant my head.” This meant bending over to form a triangle, supporting myself with my feet and forehead, my hands behind my back, in a position we in the marines called “Wonsan bombing.” “Begin bombing!” they’d shout, and we’d reply, “Yes, sir!” and assume the position.

  Of all the disciplinary measures I was subjected to, the most creative was “stick to the bunks,” “nylon sleep,” and “mosquito banquet.” The first of these were usually issued a day after family visits. Trainees, when the first leg of training was over, were allowed one family visit. My mother and older sisters brought meat. Training makes you crave not only meat but things you wouldn’t have thought twice about before, like rice cakes and pastries, whatever fills your stomach. You barely say hello to your visiting family before swiftly unwrapping their packages and gobbling up the food, and you’re so full later that you stumble through the group runs, barely managing to shout your refrains and sing along. The staff sergeants knew this, and because there’d been cases of conscripts getting sick overnight from overeating, they made us all throw up after returning from visits. They stood us in a row, admonished us for a bit, and ordered us to “stick to the bunks,” which meant placing your booted feet on the bed frame and bending over. Three minutes of this was usually enough to bring up whatever we’d eaten. We went to bed only after we’d cleaned up the mess and been assigned a week of bathroom-cleaning duty.

  Eventually I got my transfer orders: the combat division in Pohang. Farewell, “Misery Corps!” I thought. I slung my duffel bag over my shoulder and left for Pohang, not knowing that my new division had already been designated for deployment to Vietnam. Combat training began as soon as I arrived. We put on our field gear and powered around the East Sea in a tank landing ship and went up and down mountains in search of North Korean operatives, who were said to pop up in Gangwon Province at the time. Then came August of the following year.

  Our entire battalion was ordered to enter a special jungle-combat training program. We knew where we were headed after this. I was posted as a rocket artillery gunner in the company weapons section. The company leader was a graduate of the Naval Academy. He once mentioned a short story he’d read in Sasanggye, and I blurted out that I was its author. He seemed mildly impressed.

  The weapons section had a reputation for being one of the easier posts. It was draining to run with cartridge belts slung across your shoulders, and the equipment and artillery were very heavy as well. But the rocket launchers were light, aluminum cylinders that could be disassembled into two parts and slung over either shoulder. While the other troops panted up the hills during high-ground attacks, chasing after tanks, all we had to do was set up the launcher and rest for a bit. If an officer asked what we were doing, all we had to say
was, “Yes, sir, we have assembled our rocket launchers and are standing by to fire.”

  One morning, on the way to combat training, we were passing the division’s south gate near downtown when I noticed a woman dressed in hanbok standing at the three-way intersection. As the trucks slowed down and snaked around her, I realized it was my mother. Later, I heard that she had requested a visit but was told to return after the evening’s tasks were over, so she had decided to stand near the gate and see if she might catch a glimpse of her son.

  I leaned out of the truck and shouted, “Mother! I’m here!”

  My mother ran a few steps toward me, waving her hand. The ranking officer on our truck took pity and ordered it to stop.

  I shouted again, “We’ll be back in the evening! Request a visit at the guardhouse over there!”

  “All right! Have a safe trip!”

  My eyes were hot with tears. In some ways, this good-for-nothing son of hers was the only man in my mother’s life, at least up until I married and had children of my own. She wandered everywhere just to keep track of the child who had been thrown into this bitter world. Even when I thought she had run out of strength, she somehow always managed to travel a long way to find me. Seeing my mother aging by the day, her shoulders narrower than I remembered, I would curse myself under my breath: You rotten bastard. That evening I sat across from my mother at an inn, a home-cooked meal set between us. Pulling the bones from the fish for me, she said, “When you’re on the battlefield, make sure you pray to God. I will pray, too. The Lord will make it so that not a single hair on your head is harmed.”

  She gave me a pocket-sized Bible before she left. This was the first time she had explicitly urged her faith on me. The older she became, the more she relied on her religion.

  My rocket launcher training partner was a guy nicknamed the Chieftain; he had dark skin and a nose like an eagle’s beak. He would later lose both arms stepping on a booby trap in Vietnam’s Batangan Peninsula. I will never forget the sight of him, usually so bright and carefree, screaming in pain as he was flown out on a helicopter, his poncho spattered with blood.

  There’s another soldier I think of when I think of the Chieftain. He was a short, smart signalman named In-su who always begged me to tell him funny stories during breaks. Even in the transport ship to Vietnam, he was quick to lift a bit of bread or ham for a discreet snack in the middle of the night. In-su would die during an ambush operation in Vietnam, his whole body shredded by shrapnel, when the drowsy soldier marching behind him accidentally fired his grenade launcher into the air. The three of us had been best buddies since jungle-combat training. Never will I forget the few months we had together.

  The Chieftain and I first became friends during the night-combat training course. We shared a two-person tent. We were always hungry; we would lay there at night talking about all the things we used to eat. Because he worked in the mess hall, I guess, the Chieftain had a knack for describing foods so vividly that he could practically conjure them up from words alone. We would get so absorbed in his stories that by the time the food was ready and headed for the table, we’d be nearly out of our minds. Having survived the ordnance unit, on top of all the other hardships he’d suffered in life, the Chieftain was skilled at soothing others even when he himself had nothing.

  We ate chicken for the last four days of the night-combat course. The Chieftain had snuck out to a poultry farm a good ten or so miles away and brought back six chickens. We hid them in a secret storage locker in the squad, which involved hanging them by the feet between the pine trees, covering them with a poncho, and having others take turns guarding them with the promise that they’d get a share of the meat. We got up in the middle of the night to fry the chicken in our steel helmets. At night when we went out for map-reading or nighttime ambush training, the Chieftain would do his best to procure whatever he could for us to eat, like turnips the size of our forearms, unripe watermelons, and young sweet potatoes.

  He shook me awake one night when the rain was pouring down. Underneath his poncho were three pairs of brand-new army boots, never worn. I rubbed my fingers along the sharp edges of the soles and wondered if the Chieftain had raided the actual division ordnance warehouse.

  “The Signal Corps got fresh supplies today.” The Signal Corps was across the street from the training grounds. He must have slipped into the barracks and snatched the boots. “I hid them underneath the plank and was so scared someone would discover them that I haven’t eaten all day.” I realized that a joke he had played earlier, lying on a plank in the tent and pretending to be sick, had been because of the boots.

  A deployment party was held as soon as we boarded our ship at Busan Harbor. As always, the officers, staff sergeants, and others went down to the pier and stood in a row as bureaucrats and other important people gave speeches, with high school girls waving flags and a military band playing a triumphant march. I was lying in my assigned bunk on the ship. The other soldiers leaned over the rail, watching the Oryukdo Islands and Busan Harbor disappear over the horizon.

  Most of us had no idea why we were going to war. We were probably relieved to escape the pressures of barracks life and excited to be setting off for some place new. Some were looking forward to the deployment pay. And to the food. All we were fed in the regular units was bean sprouts in a salty broth, rice with flat barley mixed in, and pickled turnips; but the deployment training grounds served bean sprout soup with fish and what we jokingly called a “whole chicken”—a hard-boiled egg. That was a lot in those days. The strict rules had turned into friendly cajoling, and while training itself was hard on the body, it was less stressful on the mind than trying to make a living. The ideas embodied in martial lyrics such as “I marched to the jungle to stamp out the red scourge with our colors held high” did not change until soldiers came home in ruins; for some, the ideas never lost their shine, even as they themselves became old reserve soldiers. When veterans returned to their hamlets with their pathetic discharge boxes containing C-ration cans and a few electronic appliances, their fathers would sing drunkenly about “the Southern Cross of this southern country” and lament to their permanently crippled sons, “How is this any different from when those Japanese bastards dragged me to the South Sea Islands during the Pacific War?”

  There was a friend of a friend whose name I’ve forgotten, but let’s call him Im Cheol for now. Cheol was majoring in English at some university; I’d met him only a couple of times over drinks, on nights when he’d tagged along with one of our other friends. I vaguely remember talking with him about George Orwell’s participation in the Spanish Civil War and the film For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on the Hemingway novel. Someone mused, “If we’d been in Spain, it stands to reason that we would have sided with the anti-fascists. And during the Pacific War, student conscripts should have deserted or actively served the Allies. So what does that mean for us in Vietnam?”

  We didn’t say anything more but were silently agreed: It’s the same here as during the Japanese occupation. Then Cheol said: “In any situation, there is a limit to how much you can take. As similar as our situations were, Korea was still divided into North and South, and we couldn’t make the same choices we would have made in Spain in the 1930s.”

  I remember him to this day because of his death. I’d just transferred to another battalion when I happened to run into him, in Vietnam of all places. It was a Sunday morning, when everyone had gone out to the city and I was alone doing laundry and writing letters. I was about to cross the street to the store for some military-issue makgeolli when a truck stopped right in front of me. “Why, isn’t this Hwang-hyeong!”

  I didn’t recognize him in uniform. Only when he said his name did it finally dawn on me who he was. He had been conscripted to provide additional soldiers to marines deployed in Vietnam. Luckily for him he spoke English, which placed him in a US Marines unit. He worked at the American barracks near the division’s eastern gate. I visited him there on the weekends. They ha
d good mess hall food, and his office was big and quiet. He would have the radio on low and read stacks of books. I had seen him only a couple of times after entering special training and had forgotten about him by the time I was in Vietnam.

  After I was moved from the Chu Lai front to Hôi An, I met an administrative soldier I knew who worked at brigade headquarters. He was in the US Military Assistance Advisory Group and belonged to an intake below Cheol’s. I asked him how my friend was doing, and he answered in a low voice, “Didn’t you know? He died after entering special training.”

  Facing a shortage of English speakers in deployment, the Korean leadership had ordered an increase in language specialists, which resulted in Cheol being forced to apply for active service. He had to receive special training; it seems he made up his mind during the week of night-combat training. He must have squirreled away an extra bullet at the firing range. On the day he received his orders, he went down to the training camp at Molgaewol, got drunk, locked himself in one of the toilets at the far end of the sports field, put the barrel of the M-1 rifle in his mouth, and fired. They say he pulled the trigger by fitting a wooden stick through the trigger guard and stepping on it with both feet. “The unit kept it all under wraps and things were pretty dark for a time. I think it was dismissed as a shooting accident.” Up until that point, I’d thought of Vietnam as merely another post that I’d happened to stumble into while being swept up in whatever situation was at hand; but the news about Cheol set off quiet ripples of change inside of me. Soon, I was taken out of the infantry and put into investigations at Danang, and would only come face-to-face with Cheol again in the naked truth of war. What I remember about the boat ride to Danang is the taste of the fist-sized oranges, their rinds stamped “California” in black letters, and stealing a tub of ice cream and sharing it below decks. After the Korean War, anything made in America was like treasure from heaven. I remember, too, the Western cigarettes we bought from the PX the first time we received American military chits as on-board spending money, and the footprints on the toilet seats from soldiers unused to sit-down toilets. The Filipino crew members whistled at us and taunted us for being no better than circus animals.