The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  And then came my turn to spend a night in Tam Kỳ. A guy in the same patrol squad as me, who’d arrived in the country six months earlier, said he’d worked on a military base in Pyeongtaek. A sergeant, he spoke English well and was clever but never took undue risks. He behaved pleasantly to everyone lower in rank, which meant that everyone wanted to work alongside him. One day he whispered to me: “Let’s go out to Tam Kỳ and have some fun, like the Yankees do.”

  “But what if we get caught by the gunnery sergeant?”

  “Don’t worry about it. He spends every weekend with the main forces. And remember, some of us are getting sent out on a mission next month.”

  What he meant was that a large-scale joint operation with US forces was starting in a month, and rumors were spreading that the base soldiers would be ordered to report back to their original units. We finished our work that afternoon, skipped the 6:30 dinner, and headed out the west gate to wait. A Korean civilian who worked for Pilkor Electronics showed up in an army truck and stealthily made his way to the checkpoint. The sergeant waved; I assumed they knew each other well. With his discharge date approaching, the sergeant was probably working with the civilian to make some cash on the side to take home.

  We got in the truck and headed into Tam Kỳ. Technically speaking, entering the village was prohibited after dark, but as long as you made it back before midnight when the gates were locked, everyone looked the other way. If you weren’t specifically ordered to stay in the base, then that was as good as getting permission.

  The civilian headed straight to a building that I took to be his regular spot. The owner and a group of men who had been waiting inside came out and quickly unloaded the truck. There were cases of beer and Salems—given the heat, menthol cigarettes were the favorite of the Vietnamese. The deal complete, we were led inside, where I saw several partitioned rooms with curtains for doors.

  Five women dressed in áo dài stepped out and lined up in front of us, and we each took our pick. Our selected partners sat next to us, and we drank beer and talked in a mixture of awkward English and Vietnamese and hand gestures. I still remember the name of the woman I chose: Song. I wonder if it was based on a Chinese character. We went into a room dimly lit by a candle and lay next to each other on a bamboo bed.

  As night deepened, the sounds of a nearby ambush rang out. I heard star shells being fired from 81 mm mortars, the rat-a-tat of machine guns, and the whomp-whomp of helicopters flying back and forth. In other words, a quiet night on the front lines.

  Through our limited communication, I learned that Song’s husband was a Vietnamese soldier somewhere on the front. But each time his platoon moved, he changed wives or took on an additional family. Song had a newborn daughter who was being cared for by her parents. She had just turned twenty.

  Her work complete, I lay still as she kissed me all over my face and said, “Sleep. Sleep. Don’t worry.” She seemed to have noticed that I’d grown more nervous as the sounds of fighting grew closer. She blew out the candle, rested her head on my chest, and reached up to stroke my hair. I soon fell fast asleep. We slept in each other’s arms until the sergeant came to get me the next morning.

  A few days later I found out I had the clap. I wasn’t mad about it, though. Instead, all I could think about was wanting to take some medicine to her, too. I was given a week’s sick leave, since this sort of thing was practically a daily occurrence on the front, during which I got regular shots and hung out in the barracks, racking my brain for ways to help her get treated. Following inspection, my patrol leader rewarded me with ten punitive swats. The pain in my groin had me waddling around with my butt sticking out, much to the amusement of my fellow US soldiers, who whistled and mimicked my walk.

  Four people in my unit were ordered back to HQ to be sent out on field operations. There was Sergeant Im from the Jeolla region whose face was tanned dark, Sergeant Park from Busan, Corporal Shin, and me. We were placed in a battalion that went inland from the eastern coast of the Quảng Ngãi front, with Americans to the east and Vietnamese to the west. This operation, on the Batangan Peninsula, probably involved securing the region of the port cities of Danang and Hôi An from attack. With battalion headquarters personnel and the last tank landing ship, we went up the shoreline of the peninsula. There were two warships off the beach acting as bombardment reinforcements.

  The first thing we had to do was establish the battalion headquarters on the beach, after the three company units had finished their missions and gone in. We dug a trench facing inland and built a bunker with sandbags in front and behind. We placed our heavy artillery there, installed a circular wire face in the front, and buried Claymore land mines back and front. It was a bunker and rest stop in the safest part of the beach. A company of soldiers took turns guarding this base. I was lucky, having arrived later than the rest, and was given guard duties for a month. Whatever happened after that, I had a month of guaranteed safety.

  We were posted in the front dugout and bunker only at night, for guard duty; one squad remained during the day for guard duty, with the rest killing time around the bunker. The four of us were placed in the same platoon and spent most of our time together. During ambushes, we dug into the sand to stomach-level, put up posts and a roof of palm leaves, and covered the ground with ration boxes and ponchos. Over that we put down mats acquired from a nearby village and a military blanket and liner.

  When we came back from guard duty, we would relax, cooling ourselves in the ocean breeze for a moment before sleeping all morning. We woke around lunchtime, which meant ripping up a ration box for fuel and cooking rice and stew in a cartridge box. Our food consisted of both American and Korean rations. The American stuff we ate as snacks, or added the canned meats, like ham or sausage, to the Korean kimchi and mackerel pike cans, thus creating a fusion stew that would later be known as budae jjigae (army stew).

  One day, when I happened to be in charge of the food, I woke at noon and put some rations together over a fire, then went up to a sandy hill with a spade to do my business. It was a perfect place for that purpose, because you could see the ocean for miles and the breeze carried away the smell.

  I had dug a hole and was leisurely going about it when I saw that the cartridge box below was about to boil over. Damn, I thought. I had forgotten to leave the lid open a crack to let the steam escape, and now all that good stew was about to explode.

  I had quickly done up my trousers and was running down the sandy hill when I heard a sharp whistling sound. I instantly hit the ground and heard a sharp, dry crash, like hundreds of windows shattering. My back was covered in sand. I lay there for a while with my face down as wet clumps of sand continued to rain down around me. When I looked up, the air was white with gunpowder smoke and stank of sulfur. I couldn’t hear a thing. I thought it was too quiet all of a sudden. Only when I saw the cartridge box lid flip open and pieces of kimchi scattering all over the place did I realize I’d gone deaf.

  I could see Im and Park running and shouting. I collapsed on the sand. Only then did it occur to me to turn around and look at the hill I’d run down. To my astonishment, the hill was gone, replaced with mounds of sand and fragments of palm trees. The other soldiers ran up to me and shook my shoulders, but aside from my sudden deafness, I was okay. We stayed low as we scrambled back to the bunker.

  We learned much later what had happened: a warship near the shore had accidentally fired its cannon. It was a targeting error. After we learned it wasn’t an attack, we went back to where the hill had been to find a big pit. Had I paused one second longer or been on flat ground, I would have been incinerated. But the soft sand and slope of the hill had absorbed the explosion, and the shrapnel had scattered much higher up and gone into the ocean instead of into me. My hearing slowly began to recover after an hour. The pit ended up being used to burn trash.

  Though we were only defending a minor coastal base, there was always the possibility of an enemy attack at night, which necessitated taking shifts one s
quad each on the line of defense, spending all night in the front dugout. But aside from two surprise attacks that did not amount to much—as the guerrillas of the liberation front were seasoned veterans who knew to reserve their energy for more strategic battles—the only time I saw our so-called enemy in the flesh, albeit at a distance, was during a patrol in the middle of the day. Our company was divided by squadrons before being sent into different zones; the jungle broke off into a stretch of green rice paddies before becoming jungle again. In the middle of the rice paddies squatted a guerrilla having a bowel movement. We could tell he wasn’t a farmer, despite his black pajamas and conical hat, because of his gun and cartridge belt.

  As the entire platoon hit the ground and began to shoot, he leaped up and zigzagged down the paddy at full sprint. Despite all the ammunition he was carrying, he vanished into the jungle in no time. The soldiers were always saying how hard it was to target a moving man. When they joked that he didn’t even have time to wipe himself, I laughed, too. To us, he was not so much a human being as an animal that we’d missed while hunting.

  ~

  At the battalion I was reunited with the Chieftain and In-su the signalman, with whom I’d become friends during special training. The Chieftain and I were both corporals, and In-su was a sergeant. One day, a leading platoon that had returned to base to replenish personnel and supplies came back with a body in a poncho. The bloody mound of flesh was In-su. It had been a peaceful day with no fighting. They had almost arrived at their trench when someone accidentally set off a grenade launcher; the grenade flew into the air and fell straight back down, landing near In-su. The others suffered only minor injuries. That’s how absurd fate is in war.

  A month later, it was my company’s turn to go out on operations. We were to assist the American and South Vietnamese troops in clearing the settlements and jungles that ran from the western outskirts of Quảng Ngãi to the eastern part of Highway 1. Three companies were also taking turns setting up their defense trenches and securing the environs. Unlike the army, the marines avoided using large amounts of ammunition to sweep wide regions but instead made surgical encroachments on the ground. This meant the sacrifice of many men and the need to be constantly on the move.

  In general, booby traps were buried around the villages that soldiers were likely to pass through. The guerrillas used everything for their booby traps, from grenades to all sorts of handmade bombs, shells captured from our side, and anti-tank mines. They were designed to explode when stepped on or when triggered by a trip wire.

  The guerrillas also used more primitive booby traps. The most common were bamboo spikes smeared with poison, a method they had used since their resistance against France. One wrong step and a bamboo spike would pierce the sole of your boot and go clean through your foot. This quickly led to debilitating swelling and, given the tropical humidity, rapid gangrene. Even if you made it to medical care, you usually lost your entire foot. But at least that only affected the person stepping on the spike; if the danger were a land mine, entire platoons marching nearby could be wiped out. Consequently, the rule was always to advance in three platoons: left, right, and center. If a village came into view, whichever of the left or right platoons was better positioned would break formation, go around, and cut off one side of the village. The other platoon broke to cut off the other side, while the center platoon prepared to invade.

  Platoons remained connected by radio. Each platoon advanced in similar fashion, in which a more experienced soldier led from the front, covered by a couple of other troops behind him. As it progressed, the platoon divided further into squads and a rearguard, since no one knew from which direction the attack might come.

  The lead soldier’s primary mission was to look out for booby traps. If one was spotted, he would raise his hand for the others to halt and then go to work with a helper to disarm it. He also had to watch for signs of ambush ahead. Though taking the lead meant being the first exposed to the dangers of booby traps, it was actually less dangerous as a position when the enemy was in front of us. Normally the enemy would wait until our troops came closer and allow the lead to pass through their initial defenses. If the lead did not find any traps along his own path, it was not uncommon for a clumsy soldier to set off a different booby trap only a few steps away.

  When a booby trap did go off, the jungle filled with noise, screams, and gunpowder. Everyone dropped to the ground in surprise. Once we got back up, we would see the victim mangled, his limbs perhaps hanging from the branches, and whatever remained of him screaming and trembling. We would quickly administer first aid and radio a helicopter to lift him out. Our eyes would fill with blood and murder. In this state of near insanity, we entered the villages.

  During the peace talks in Paris launched in 1968, North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front (NLF) presented several cases of civilian massacres conducted by the American troops and coalition forces. But it was difficult to distinguish regular military behavior from guerrilla warfare in regard to the atrocities carried out in the countryside and cities. In the mid-1960s, the US military undertook a combat strategy in which all jungles, paddies, and even villages located outside of US-designated safe areas were declared free-fire zones. The roads were simply broken lines between points of defense.

  Every foreign soldier knew that, at night, anything he aimed his rifle at, or basically everything outside his trench, was enemy territory. General Westmoreland described this aspect of his operations as “leopard spots.” By this he meant that he viewed not only armed fighters but also hostile Vietnamese citizens as the enemy, and that foreign troops were surrounded by them. However, no war that brands a whole people as the enemy can ever be called a just war.

  To this day, I still cannot freely talk about everything that I witnessed. But even the American reportage coming out of the region at the time makes it clear what we did. There were soldiers who collected the ears of those they claimed were Viet Cong—for all we know, they were just ordinary farmers—and wore them around their necks, and young soldiers who took photos of themselves holding up severed heads. Women were raped and murdered, and there were even cases of grenades being pushed inside women’s vaginas and set off, or live snakes being shoved inside of them. Like hunters on safari, machine-gunners in helicopters on patrol would bet on how many farmers they could down as they walked along their irrigation ditches.

  The Mỹ Lai massacre was just one of the many acts of cruelty on a mass scale that were perpetrated during the Vietnam War. Such acts were also committed by Korean troops. I believe it was the internalized violence from the Korean War and onward, exacerbated by the Vietnam conflict, that enabled the slaughter of civilians in broad daylight several years later during the pro-democracy protests in Gwangju. Korea’s lack of reflection on our role in the Vietnam War is especially shameful in the light of our eagerness to point out Japan’s atrocities, when condemning the violence of one Asian nation against another.

  “Fry them all!” was an order often issued when we suffered a higher number of casualties than usual. Some units made a point of setting an example by killing every living thing in the village, not only all the people but every cow and pig, even the chickens.

  Here, I must ask myself: does the fact that I was a mere witness to atrocities exempt me from moral judgment? Is it possible to objectively witness any of the many atrocities going on in this world? In battle, I firmly believed that there were no such things as ghosts. But when I was discharged, and returned to civilian life, and interviewed the witnesses of the Sinchon Massacre to write The Guest, I changed my mind about the existence of ghosts. Those “hauntings” are nothing less than the memories and guilt we have buried within ourselves, the other face of history that has been erased from our lives.

  When the Chieftain was blown up by a booby trap and both his arms were torn off, his scream pierced the jungle’s canopy and went up into the sky. His cries soon subsided to whimpers. After first aid, he was taken away in a helicopter, and w
e found the village we’d invaded was empty. Thankfully so, otherwise we wouldn’t have left anyone alive.

  We scattered and followed the layout of the village to find appropriate cover like houses or rocks or half-fallen walls, securing the area in waves. There was a tiled structure in the middle of the village that looked like a town hall or a temple, which a sergeant and I were the first to approach. The sergeant covered the entrance as I leaped inside, firing off a few shots before taking cover. As I ducked down, I felt a humming, like a machine being turned on, and the interior, about twenty pyeong wide, abruptly turned pitch black. The air filled with a mass of flies. Inside the temple were about thirty corpses of men, women, and children that were decaying into all sorts of unrecognizable forms; the flies covering them had lifted when I came bursting in.

  After the initial sweep, the breaking company entered the area for cleanup duty, which was usually given to lower-ranking soldiers and newbies just arrived in Vietnam. The bodies and body parts were picked up and deposited in a hole dug with a forklift. The relentless rain and heat accelerated the decay, often swelling legs to twice their normal size; they burst like plastic bags full of black liquid when accidentally stepped on. The brains splattered on walls like tofu had long since dried, making it hard to wash away their traces. Our double layers of work gloves ended up soaked through with a thick black fluid that resembled soy sauce. The more bodies piled up, the more red-black everything turned, and the swarm of gathered flies would grow so thick that the pile seemed to be covered by a moving blanket.

  “Work over; at ease!” Once that order came through, we would gather to drink water from our flasks and chomp down on ham and sausages from our ration cans. If someone happened to walk up to the pile, we frantically shouted, “Go around! Go around!” but it would be too late. The flies rose into the air and attacked our rations before settling back down on the bodies. But we soon learned to accept and adapt. That was the mark of those who’d survived. Flies were a mere annoyance; we would shoo them off with one hand and tear at our rations with the other.