The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  The war perpetrated by the Americans in Asia was a more direct and material hell than the metaphor of civilization in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The teeming flies and the hot sun were both the form and content of the Vietnam War. Compared to this, humanity was a luxurious abstraction.

  When you open your eyes at dawn and peer out of the trench as the damp fog lifts in the heat of the rising sun and your field of vision slowly widens, you begin to make out bodies in the dimness. Large rats and lizards dart in and out of the ragged holes torn in the corpses. Anyone who has seen such surreal sights cannot recreate them, even in dreams. The subconscious rejects it; only the active senses take them in before distorting and erasing them, to allow the viewer to continue with everyday life.

  In prison, too, the subconscious files away difficult experiences by resorting to metaphor. At some point, when I started to forget certain words and had trouble finding the words for what I wanted to say, an older woman began appearing in my dreams.

  I can’t see her face. It’s covered in darkness, like black ink on a photograph. She stands inside the cell door and laughs sometimes, talks to me sometimes, and crawls in under my cold blanket. When I wake at dawn after sleeping beside her, I feel queasy and am seized by a mysterious feeling. She isn’t my first love, or the kind of actress one sees in the magazines that are available in prison; this plain, stout woman with no face who comes looking for me is no ordinary dream.

  Rattled, I went out on exercise hour to consult some of the long-term prisoners who were at their cleaning shift. These were model prisoners who had received sentences of more than ten years.

  —This middle-aged woman keeps appearing in my dreams. Does that ever happen to you?

  —Oh, that woman? She shows up about three to four years into your sentence.

  —I can’t see her face.

  —You’re in for a treat. She’s probably the guardian spirit of this area. All the long-term prisoners know her.

  I found it reassuring that I wasn’t the only one who knew her, but the uneasy feeling intensified.

  In dreams, I wandered through countless rooms and corridors and went through numerous gates and doors, trying to find a way out of prison. At the end of a dark tunnel and stairwell, I would come across a place that looked like a shop in an express bus terminal. The faceless woman was the owner of this store. When I asked her how to get out of there, she cackled heartily.

  —You’ve still got plenty of time left on your sentence, what’s the rush? Have a little more fun with me first. Ha ha!

  After my release, it occurred to me to do some research on her. As I wrote a few lines about the vision in the middle of the night, I suddenly realized with a shock who she was. She was my mother, rooted in my subconscious. For long-term prisoners, the last person to come visit them could only be their mothers. Just as we called for our mothers whenever we were afraid as children, the subconscious calls up the one woman we can rely on through the long years of isolation and loneliness, erasing the face of this “haunting.”

  The internalized wounds of war are no doubt wrapped tight and stored deep down inside my memory. To this day I am scared to death of large, blue dung flies. In my dreams, they hum on the windowsill and blot out the sun.

  I was reassigned to an ambush squad that had secured a small traffic post. Since our brigade had shifted north, the boundaries of our defense zone had expanded, requiring additional personnel to secure the larger area. The monsoon arrived, and with it came enemy attacks; we received orders to keep moving north to defend some of the region’s major cities. HQ’s idea was to hand over the area we’d already secured to South Vietnamese troops.

  The withdrawal planned since the beginning of the month had begun, and the entire brigade was sent into different areas, company by company. As the marine brigade began moving from Chu Lai to Hôi An, the men leaving later were to defend the brigade’s headquarters before handing it over to the South Vietnamese government; I happened to be one of the last to leave. This was my final combat experience in Vietnam, described in my short story “Tower.” But unlike in the story, our mission was not to guard the tower. It was to secure a traffic point where Highway 1 and another strategic road met, ensuring the safe passage of the South Vietnamese troops.

  We held the guardhouse for two days as guerrillas attempted to infiltrate every night. On the first night, they merely approached to a certain distance and fired at us until dawn. On the second, a larger contingent arrived with rockets around midnight. We set up a line of defense, with Claymores and a semicircle of barbed wire, putting our men in a horseshoe-shaped formation. We had automatic rifles, grenade launchers, and two M60 machine guns for personal firepower, and the brigade headquarters supplied us with 81 mm mortars. The artillery fired flares and pounded the coordinates we called out for them. We could hear the rifle shots of the enemy so close by that they were echoless and raw.

  At dawn, the enemy bypassed us, blew up a nearby bridge, and retreated. Our squad likewise withdrew back to brigade headquarters when the American forces’ highway patrol appeared. We’d been in trenches around the guardhouse, but two rocket blasts had injured three soldiers. We put them on a truck, returned to headquarters, and left with the last of the retreating forces by helicopter to Chu Lai’s piers.

  Only when we arrived at the new brigade base, located just outside Hôi An, did we realize that the Tet Offensive, as it became known, had been launched by the North Vietnamese. Day after day, enemy shells flew into our as-yet unsettled line of defense. We jumped into the trenches whenever a bombardment began, trenches that were filled with rainwater up to our chests. Three or four hours we would spend in that long bath, sometimes dozing off.

  On the side of the company that provided food and ammunition to each battalion and company base lay a wide, sandy expanse with the jungle beyond; this company always sustained the heaviest attacks. We called out coordinates, and our rockets mercilessly rained down 105 mm mortars that gave off a terrifying sound. The enemy would go quiet, then start broadcasting in Korean. At night they played popular Korean songs and appealed to us in quite convincing fashion: “Why must you become Yankee mercenaries just for a few measly dollars? Tomorrow you must lay down your guns and go back home. Next, we’ll play Nam Jin’s ‘Did I come here for the tears?’ for you.”

  Into the brief lull where no rockets fell would come a song. We listened in silence, staring out at the jungle beyond the sands. All we saw was darkness.

  At that point an officer would come to his senses and shout, “What are you all doing! Call out the coordinates!” The coordinates would be called, and the battle would resume. The deafening noise continued, lights flashed, and smoke billowed from the jungle. During the next quiet interval the speaker babbled on again: “Please, let us cease our rockets. Let us not slaughter innocent civilians!”

  In the midst of all this, we were informed that the North Vietnamese troops had occupied downtown Hôi An and we were pegged to fight them. My fellow soldiers and I were cleaning our guns at the time. We were going to enter the city by helicopters and trucks. The 105 mm mortars continued to hit targets across the river. But these were only loud bangs, and above the empty sand fields and the barbed-wire fence and the forest was just white sunlight coming down in waves. Several companies and battalions were connected by narrow military roads that were flanked by low walls of sandbags and barbed wire on either side between the remaining copses of jungle, which looked like paper boats floating on water. We heard a menacing burst of fire coming from a tall tower, the kind installed at every traffic control point on the roads. A jeep blew dust as it ran through the passage between the sandbag walls toward our company. It came to an abrupt stop in front of the barricade, which a soldier pushed aside. As the dust settled, I could see the occupant. He wasn’t wearing camouflage. He was in the dark pajamas the Vietnamese wore, combined with the wide-brimmed hat worn by the Burmese special forces. The driver was dressed the same way. There was a machine-gu
n seat in the back with no one manning it; the magazine had been taken out and the gun was swaying at an angle.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” demanded the company commander of the man in civilian clothes with no insignia or uniform. The man did not remove his opaque sunglasses or salute the officer as he proffered a document. “We’re here to fetch a transfer.”

  The company commander scanned the papers. He called out my name, and I clambered out of the trench. My hair was pressed flat from the steel helmet and I was looking about, confused, as I walked up to them. My knees were showing over my boots where the hem of my fatigues had been cut, and thread was coming off them like tassels.

  The commander waved the papers in his hand. “This puts me in a bad position … If you take all our experienced soldiers, who will fight the battles? We don’t have anyone who can take the lead now.” He was speaking to the man in the jeep as if he were head of military personnel. I was already in full gear, except for my helmet.

  The man took off his Burmese hat and fanned his chest with it. “Any man who crosses the firing line becomes experienced.”

  I have described leaving the front and transferring to an investigative desk job, where I would confront an even more elusive truth about war, in my novel The Shadow of Arms. I had been suddenly plucked from hell, without a clue as to what was going on. At the front, no one can predict their immediate future. That afternoon, in the battle to recapture Hôi An, the largest number of casualties was sustained by the brigade that I had left barely an hour before it was sent to fight.

  Later, I learned what had prompted this sudden transfer. My mother had seen the address on my letter from the front and realized my duties were particularly dangerous. She recalled that a young man who used to live in our neighborhood was now a colonel or captain on Baegnyeong Island, in the western sea. She went to see his family for his current address and somehow managed to get a seat on an irregular ferry that crossed the passage once or twice a month.

  Our former neighbor was amazed to see my mother turn up at what was then the western front against North Korea, where civilians were rarely authorized to visit. He promised her to do what he could to mobilize his connections and get me transferred. That was the end of the previous year, only two months prior. Since I had gained previous experience at the American base in Chu Lai, my transfer to Danang’s Korea–US joint investigative unit was not difficult to accomplish.

  If I witnessed extremes of death, violence, barbarism, and the human condition at the front, my work as an investigator of Danang’s black market led me to realize the full scope of the war America was waging.

  My first duty at the joint investigative unit was to understand how the PX really worked. Next, I was given the task of monitoring Danang’s underground commerce. I was, to borrow my colleagues’ phrasing, dropped slap into the middle of a “dokkaebi market.”

  Danang was an island surrounded by the North Vietnamese People’s Army and the NLF, and daily life on this island was governed by a special economic system. The most powerful currency was the US dollar, but it was the vouchers issued by the US military command that ruled the market. The occupation forces and their environment were bound to replicate American consumerism, and the PX was the source of all luxury and consumer goods. In addition, the supply depot held the very survival of the city in its grasp with its control of vegetables, meat, tea, coffee, chocolate, alcohol, and cigarettes.

  In the marketplace, the warring sides had no choice but to trade and conspire together within the rules. The darkest form of trade involved weapons, but a whole range of various goods was involved in the hierarchy of the market. A-rations referred to uncooked vegetables, fruit, and meat, while B-rations indicated lightly processed or prepared foodstuffs. C-rations were completely processed foods like cans and field rations. There was often corruption by individual Americans working at the PX, but I became sure there was also a separate financial office dealing with the economic operations. They used A-and B-rations, as well as prized products like beer and cigarettes, to manipulate prices.

  As operations continued for two months, the supply of fresh vegetables and other staples from the countryside dwindled, sending market prices through the roof. The people living in Danang were military families, bureaucrats, merchants, and ordinary civilians. They participated in the black market for a taste of American consumerism. The American military used the profits from these under-the-counter transactions to pay their local workers’ wages, and occasionally switched vouchers to recover dollars that had disappeared underground.

  Soldiers and technicians from third-party nations also jumped into the black market. The South Vietnamese forces and managers dealt in combat food and weapons; their customers were, of course, the NLF who collected taxes from merchants. During the monsoon season, the coalition forces and NLF opened C-ration cans together even while fighting each other. If, for example, the South Vietnamese forces were issued new weapons like grenade launchers, a few always got sold on. When America’s peace settlement construction project was underway, countless aid goods flooded the market. Cement and slate for houses, powdered grains and animal feed, food, and enough weapons and gunpowder to arm a neighborhood militia poured in. I learned much of this from my predecessor and became aware of it myself on the job.

  I used to sit in a corner of the marketplace wearing fatigues, but with no rank insignia or cap. Sometimes I wore a shirt and cotton pants, or Vietnamese civilian wear, and sat in a teahouse or tavern in the market. I was taller than most Vietnamese, and the children would follow me around calling me pileukddang, which means “Filipino.”

  I got to know a middle school teacher at a teahouse in Danang. When he learned I was Korean, he probably thought I was a civilian technician or similar; he once brought up an article in an English-language paper and demanded, “Why are you murdering poor Vietnamese children in the countryside?”

  “First I’ve heard of it.”

  “It was reported in our English-language newspaper. Everyone is angry about it.”

  “Do you support the Viet Cong?”

  “I hate anyone who kills innocent civilians.”

  Our conversations went nowhere. I couldn’t think of anything to say to him. Such exchanges kept me awake at night. I regretted having come to Vietnam.

  We bumped into each other at the teahouse in the afternoons, and once we became better acquainted, we criticized the Americans together. We both thought the other had got the better end of the deal. He spoke of how the peace settlement plan had seized land from subsistence farmers, driven them out, and made powerful people the new landowners. At the market, I began to understand the true face of this war. This is what I wrote in The Shadow of Arms:

  What is a PX? A Disneyland in a vast tin warehouse. A place where an exhausted soldier with a few bloodstained military dollars can buy and possess dreams mass-produced by industrial enterprises. The ducks and rabbits and fairies are replaced by machines and laughter and dances. The wrapping paper and the boxes smell of rich oil and are as beautiful as flowers.

  What is a PX? A place where they sell the commodities used daily by a nation that possesses the skill to shower more than one million steel fragments over an area one mile wide by a quarter mile long with a single CBV. A nation capable of turning a three-hundred-acre tract of jungle into a defoliated wasteland where not a single plant or animal can survive, in under four minutes.

  What is a PX? It’s Uncle Sam’s attic, the old man who makes appearances at villages the world over garbed in the Stars and Stripes, a Roman-style dagger in hand as he brandishes a shield with the motto: “America is the world’s largest and greatest nation.” It is the general store of the cavalry fort, frequented by whores and ministers and arms smugglers who join hands in transforming the natives into ridiculous puppets, intoxicating them and exploring new frontiers of vileness.

  And the PX brings civilization to the filthy Asian slopeheads who otherwise would go on living in blissful ignorance o
n a diet of bananas and rice. It teaches them how to wash with Ivory soap, how to quench the thirst and ease the heart with the taste of Coke. It showers down upon the bombed-out barracks perfumes, rainbow-colored cookies and candy drops, lace-fringed lingerie, expensive wristwatches, and rings graced with precious stones. Cheese appears on the smelly meal tables of Asia, and condoms slip out from between Asian girls’ thighs and dance on children’s tiny fingertips.

  Anyone who has ever been intoxicated, even once, by that taste and smell and touch, will carry the memory to his grave. The products ceaselessly create loyal consumers who are at the mercy of the producers. Those who lay hands upon the wealth of America will have the label US MILITARY burned into their brains. Children who grow up humming their songs and eating their candies and chocolates off the streets trust their benevolence and optimism. The vast purchasing power in the market, the booming business in the city, and the enthusiasm and ecstasy in the back alleys are all in proportion to the intensity of the war. The PX is a tempting wooden horse. And it is America’s most powerful new weapon.

  As I came to realize that the Americans were no more than mercenaries in Vietnam, I felt guilty living among the Vietnamese civilians in Danang. I used to glance at my reflection in the windows as I walked into the market with an American, with whom I’d come in an investigator division’s car disguised as a private company vehicle. My real mirror, in the end, was the Vietnamese people themselves.

  12

  Dictatorship

  1969–76

  My tour of duty in Vietnam lasted longer than the customary year; I was discharged from the marines after a year and a half. All I brought home were some cigarettes and toiletries in a small Boston bag. I also vowed never to cause direct harm to anyone ever again. But after settling back into civilian life, I realized my resolutions were little more than words. It did not take me long to understand that such idealistic notions were the product of a limited sense of self that was, in turn, the product of a land divided by ideology. In reality, the homeland I had returned to was a military dictatorship under the powerful influence of the United States.