Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles

by Simon Winchester

  My roommate was called Steve, he was a junior airman, he had a lot of pimples, and he drove a truck. He didn’t talk a great deal, and whenever I went into the room he was parked inches away from the television screen, gazing with rapt attention at a picture that, because of some eccentric adjustment, had all its colours magnificently wrong, like a Fauvist painting. Whenever I went to the washroom one of the other inmates, a black man whom I never saw clothed, would bring in his radio, if radio be the word. It was a device about as big as a Volkswagen, and which he could barely lift. He would sit it across four of the handbasins and turn the volume controls to maximum before he went under the shower. Then everything in the room—quite probably every unbolted thing within five hundred yards—shook like jelly. The first time he unleashed the monster I thought the general alarm had sounded and the base was under nuclear attack.

  Joe LaMarca turned up later, full of apologies, and bought me dinner. ‘You found a room, then?’ he said, genially. He told me he was aching to go home. ‘Got another ninety-four days and some hours to go and then it’s the Freedom Bird for me. Can’t say I like the place, can’t say I don’t. I don’t get off base very much. All I know is I’m going home to marry my Tracy, and stay stateside for ever.’

  He showed me Tracy, of whom he had a large number of colour photographs, all identical. She was a handsome, bright-eyed girl, a pharmacist in Plattsburgh, New York—‘that’s a SAC base, I’m sure you know. We got ourselves the FB One-elevens there, the ones we zapped that bastard Gaddafi with.’ He had an uncomplicated view of the world. ‘Way I see it, Simon—we Americans are the strongest and the best. No doubt about it. And President Reagan’s our commander in chief, and whatever he tells us to do—then, yes sir!—we’re going to do it and do it proud.’ He kept repeating this firm conviction, interleaved with expressions of deep fondness for his Tracy, for all of the three days I stayed as his guest. We drove one afternoon along the seawall—coils of barbed wire, mines, are lights, artillery (the guns in many cases manned by dummies, to fool would-be invaders into thinking security was better than it was), a full-time curfew. ‘North Koreans try and land here? Waste of time! We’d blow their asses clean back to China. No way they’d ever touch this mother. No indeedy!’

  Kunsan is arguably the most important American base in Korea—the base that all the foot soldiers will be looking to for help if the North Koreans ever force their way across the frontier. It is the home of the reputedly tough and scrupulously trained fighting machine that likes to be known as the Wolf Pack but is in fact officially designated the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing. The wing’s battle honours read like the invitation list for the cast party at the Pacific Theatre—New Guinea, Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and now Korea again. Statistics are hurled at the visitor: fliers from the 8th took part in nine campaigns in the Philippines, ten in Korea, flew forty sorties a day over North Vietnam, made 38.5 confirmed kills of MiG jets (though how one has 0.5 of a confirmed kill was a nicety left unexplained) during the Vietnam War. There are said to be few American units posted anywhere around the world with as much esprit de corps or as much confidence in their ability to deter again.

  The Wolf Pack’s task in the event of an invasion is simple enough: once the North Korean tanks have rolled across the border and smashed through Seoul (which is regarded by the battle planners and war-games tacticians as a more-or-less indefensible capital, likely to fall within hours of an attack), then the fighter-bombers from Kunsan hack their way through the Communist supply lines and attack Pyongyang, bringing the attack to a full stop. Once this is done, the big bombers from Japan and California will come in and reduce the impertinent braggarts to a fine (and, if necessary, radioactive) powder.

  David Kramer, the base commander, is quite obviously a man on the move, his appointment to Kunsan an indication of the importance of the place. I liked him as soon as I met him. (By contrast I thought that many others I met were most unimpressive: the fighter pilots I encountered were loud and unpleasant bullyboys, and many of the lesser functionaries were dull timeservers for whom air force life seemed to provide neither inspiration nor aspiration. But Kramer was different: he seemed low-key, highly intelligent, and sympathetically curious about the world he inhabited and that he had it in his gift to destroy.)

  He came from Connecticut, he married a girl from Connecticut, he went to university in Maine. The upbringing left its own peculiarly New England mark on him, and when he stopped talking about the mission of Kunsan or the Soviet threat in the Pacific, he would talk knowledgeably and affectionately of Thoreau, of nighttime shopping expeditions to the L. L. Bean store, and of the call of the loons on the lakes of New Hampshire.

  I felt—I suppose I have always felt—that I would have more faith in the judgement of the American man who had read his Thoreau, and knew of L. L. Bean, and what that institution meant in the great spectrum of American life, than in the regular Joe Sixpack from Toledo, who drove a Camaro, enjoyed the Happy Hour, and screamed blue murder at the ball game. Sadly—and perhaps fatally—the destiny of the globe seems increasingly to be left in the hands of soldiers and politicians of the latter group; the others—American men who have a sensitivity about them, if you like—are derided as effete, as bleeding hearts, as milquetoasts.

  Some Britons—even the British military—still try to retain respect for the more sensitive in society: there was one sailor in the Falklands War, Hugh Tinker, who wrote eloquently about the futility of it all before falling victim to the war himself. But the times are changing for Britain too, and Lieutenant Tinker was widely criticized, even in death, for having betrayed the nation’s fighting spirit. Others might suggest that it was to defend the right of spirits like his to exist that men fight proudly, rather than merely fight.

  All of which seems a long way from the thoughts I had as I sat in Colonel Kramer’s spartan office at Kunsan Air Base. My point, lest in digression it has been lost, is simply to remark—with relief—on how pleasant it was, and how unusual, to discover a man of real intelligence and sensitivity working at a senior post in the American, or indeed in any, air force, and to hope that others of Kramer’s calibre are toiling there too, adding their seasoning of sense and sensibility to an otherwise dully dangerous war-making machine.

  So he talked of his time in Nigeria (where he had been an attaché) and in England (where he had flown F-100s and presumably startled lots of country parsons off their bicycles), of his classes at the National War College, of work in Germany and his flying missions in Vietnam. (He was laughably overdecorated for various degrees of supposed heroism: a Distinguished Flying Cross with one oak-leaf cluster; a Meritorious Service Medal with one oak-leaf cluster; the Air Medal with nine oak-leaf clusters; a Joint Service Commendation Medal; an Air Force Commendation Medal; a Republic of Vietnam Cross of Gallantry, with palm.) He was fascinated by Korea (and had made sure his biographical notes were printed in Korean, in the event that any Koreans were fascinated by him), intellectually stimulated by his mission. ‘I suppose you could say I’m like the mayor of this town. I keep the town going so that the people in it can do the work they have to. I don’t direct the war: I just ensure it can be fought.’

  His most difficult task was the security of the base itself. It was a long way from town, on the coast, and it had a good strong perimeter fence, guarded by heavily armed soldiers of the Korean Army, by American airmen, by the best of American technology and weaponry, and by vicious dogs. ‘But there are rice-farming villages right outside the wire. Who knows anything about the people we see in the fields out there? Are any of them North Korean agents? Who knows? People say they can tell North Korean accents—even the use of words has changed in the thirty years since this country was divided. There are certain words they just don’t have in their vocabulary now. But the North Koreans aren’t fools. They could probably infiltrate this region easily—probably already have. So we have to take extra precautions.’

  T
he Pentagon provides its own advice. All aircrew members arriving at Kunsan are given a letter headed ‘Human Intelligence Threat Briefing’, which begins:

  Kunsan Air Base is considered vital to the survival of the Republic of Korea. Certain aspects of the intelligence collection effort by the North Koreans affect transient air crews.

  Friendly conversation about your job with merchants or bar girls may not be innocent. When questions proceed much beyond the point of ‘Do you work at the base?’ you go beyond innocent conversation. The appropriate response to these questions should be noncommittal or intended to direct the conversation in another direction. Many of these people understand far more English than they let on. Also, you cannot tell the difference between our ally, the South Korean, and our enemy up north.

  If you think you were the target of collection activity, you probably were. If so, immediately notify the Air Force Office of Security Intelligence. Enjoy your visit, but remember to leave your job on base.

  One of the homegrown precautions taken at Kunsan is a strictly enforced ban on any American serviceman living, sleeping, visiting, or even walking in a three-mile-wide cordon sanitaire around the three open sides of the base (the fourth side being the Yellow Sea, and jammed solid with mines and other high-explosive deterrents). Americans may drive—though only on ‘Route 26, the designated major curfew control area route’—and under certain circumstances ‘visit orphanages, churches or schools’. Otherwise, everything from the base wire to the three-mile line is off-limits, to avoid any American falling prey to subversive temptations.

  The archway-gate for Silver Town, which I had seen as I was walking in, turned out to be three miles exactly from the main gate. The town, which sat astride a small hill like an old Andalusian fortress-village, and had a population of maybe a thousand, had sprung up ten years before at this nearest legitimately on-limits point along Route 26. No one called it Silver Town—no one knew why it had been called that in the first place. Now everyone said simply A-Town. It was busy every night; but this was Friday night, and, moreover, it was the last night of the Team Spirit exercises. ‘Hookers’ prices have doubled since these bastards came in,’ grumbled one captain. ‘So there’s no alternative—got to do some serious drinking and go down and get ourselves some of the giggle-sisters.’

  So we climbed into a kimchi-cab (‘When these guys crash they make themselves into human kimchi, they go so fucking fast’). ‘Atashi,’ said Joe. It was the only Korean word he knew—an overfamiliar way of saying ‘uncle’—and the drivers, indeed everyone to whom he said it, winced when he yelled it, but took his money anyway. ‘Hey! Atashi! A-Town. Disco. Pronto!’ And we roared off in pursuit of the giggle-sisters. A sergeant, who was on his fifth tour in Korea, explained: ‘Call them that because even when you’re screwing them, they giggle. Tell you what I call this place—“The Land of Sliding Doors and Slit-Eyed Whores.”’ Everyone in the car guffawed, including the driver, except that his eyes betrayed him and deep down he wasn’t smiling at all.

  As we drew up at the A-Town taxi stand the sergeant yelled out: ‘Pick your wheels, boys! One with the valve closest to six pays.’ I chose the left-hand rear wheel, and the tyre valve sat precisely at six, had the wheel been a clock face. I paid up the four dollars, which might account for my dyspeptic frame of mind as we set off into the jungle of neon ahead.

  Silver Town was a throbbing square of discos, bars and cheap cafés, its narrow streets filled with a turgid river of American servicemen and the Koreans who chose, either cynically or by force of economic circumstance, to service their baser needs. Every bar was the same. There was a rickety stage on which, to the deafeningly unpleasant, cat-scratching din of a cheap sound system, sullen-looking women in dingily erotic costumes danced for five minutes at a time. The flashier bars—the Paradise, the Hollywood, the Korea à Go-Go—employed a cast of perhaps six women, so the clients would have to watch the same girl perform every half hour; the cheaper places had only three girls, or two, so the sweat was still glistening on girl number one when she clambered onto the stage to dance again as girl number three. In the cheaper places the girls were slatterns indeed, and the turnover in the audience was rapid. ‘Christ, let’s go down the road—these girls are dogs!’ Air Force women were in the crowd of onlookers too, many of the more attractive ones attached, limpetlike, to the Team Spirit pilots. Disgruntled nonfliers would always complain about this phenomenon—that better-looking girls would join the Air Force for the sole purpose of finding a pilot for a husband and behaved like star-struck groupies whenever a new squadron came to town. A flight of FB-111 bombers had come in from Japan for the exercise the week before, siphoning every pretty airwoman off the base. My companions that night—none of whom had ever been in a plane, let alone enjoyed the mystique of piloting one—grumbled endlessly about the unfairness of it all. They took out their angst on the Korean women up on the stage.

  ‘Fuck me!’ exclaimed a corporal, on seeing one particularly corpulent woman stagger through her routine. ‘She’s so ugly she’d blow the buzzards off a fish wagon.’ He specialized in one-liners that were some way removed from Noel Coward. He wore a T-shirt that proclaimed: ‘I’m so horny even the crack of dawn isn’t safe’, that might have been a better joke had I not seen the same shirt just six months before in Olongapo, the Philippine equivalent of Silver Town, where the U.S. Navy men play when they have time off from Subic Bay. ‘Hey, Mack,’ the corporal said, turning to me. ‘Know how you fuck a fat woman like her? Roll her in flour and hunt for the wet spot!’

  I smiled at the fat girl, and she came and sat next to me during her break. ‘You look bored,’ she said. I told her I was very bored indeed but that I felt obliged to stay with my hosts, who were all now drinking through straws from an enormous bowl of porridgelike punch (it was said to be a mixture of makkoli, vodka, whiskey, triple sec, brandy, beer and crushed ice, and was guaranteed to lay you flat on the floor in fifteen minutes). She said she was bored, too; she knew she wasn’t attractive enough for the pilots, ‘So I just get the maintenance men, and they can be very bad people, very cruel.’

  Her name was Miss Koh, she was twenty-three, she came from Seoul and had ambitions to be a dancer. ‘I feel ashamed of myself, really,’ she said. ‘You know how important it is for us to find a husband. Doing something like this ruins us. I don’t know why we all do it. At first it’s the money. But it gets boring soon, and because you’ve done it, there’s not else things you can do. My mother thinks I am waitress. I am sure she really knows what I do. It is very shameful.’ She gave me her telephone number in Seoul, ‘because you say you like Korea,’ and promised that if I called her she would show me the city. She wrote her name in hangul in my Alwych. ‘I hope to see you again,’ she wrote. ‘Good luck.’ As she finished writing she got up from the table and said quietly: ‘I don’t want you to see me here again. This makes me shamed. I want you help me proud my country. This is no good.’

  She pointed to her colleague who was even now drawing a chair leg between her thighs, to the raucous yells of a hundred airmen, including my hosts, who had by now drained the bowl of porridge and were demanding another. A security policeman had come into the bar on his rounds; he was an immense black man with strangely manic, staring eyes that gazed fiercely into the middle distance. ‘He’d crack your fucking skull like a walnut,’ said the sergeant and giggled.

  We left an hour or so later. The lieutenant nearly got himself arrested for pissing on the back wheel of a taxi. He then insisted on insulting the driver all the way back to the base and stopped and made everyone piss on a cherry sapling that he said had been planted a few days before. (Early each April, Koreans go on a massive tree-planting binge, to help replace the forests that were stripped bare by the Japanese colonists during World War II.) The driver remained quiet, impassively dignified through it all, like a parent watching his wayward child pass through a trying stage of its adolescence. I felt very saddened by it all and very much the prude.

&nb
sp; (A handbook given to all servicemen when they enter the country contains a preface that all are entreated to read: ‘As American guests of the Koreans we should strive to project the best national image possible. We are each judged as individual representatives of our country, and must act accordingly.’)

  The next morning I had my final breakfast on base with the liaison officer, a grease-smooth Korean called Mr Kwong, who wore a double-breasted waistcoat under his suit. I was fascinated by the performance by which he kept producing cigarettes, one every five minutes, from deep within the waistcoat. Some form of kinetic magic was at work: he simply pressed the top of a pocket and the white tube slid automatically into his hand, no wires or magnets anywhere in view.

  He had worked at Kunsan for twenty-five years. He was a schoolboy during the war and remembered vividly being in the city when the North Koreans overran it in August 1950. American infantrymen retook the city and occupied the base (their current title to it derives from its being one of the spoils of war) in late September. ‘The Communists had put all their political prisoners in the city jail. When they knew the Americans were going to recapture the place, they simply poured gasoline all around the prison buildings and set the whole place on fire. They were brutal people—strange to think they were Koreans.’

  (Or perhaps not so strange. Many people I met said that Koreans had an astonishing capacity for violence. Colonel Kramer had served in Vietnam with Korean paratroopers. ‘Know how they used to deal with any Vietcong they caught? They’d draw lots to choose on a poor fellow who they’d then skin alive. They’d stake him outside to die. A body without skin is a terrible thing to see. They’d show the other Vietcong prisoners what they’d done and then let some of them go. Their idea was they’d go back to their units with stories about how tough these Koreans were and scare them to death. They don’t monkey around, these guys. Anything mean and nasty, they have the capacity to do it.’ The Japanese, it was always said, would use Koreans as guards and torturers in their concentration camps—in the same way that the Russians would employ Buryats from Mongolia and Siberia to perform the least pleasant tasks of battle or occupation. The Mongols, like the Koreans to whom they are related, have a reputation for being easy to brutalize. If you were a British or an American prisoner of war and you saw a Korean coming for you, you knew you were in trouble.)