On the other side of the world, a flooded green rice paddy below, outside Munsan, heading north, though still five miles south of what used to be the 150-mile-long DMZ between North and South Korea, the loud rotor slap of the Seventh U.S. Army Cavalry choppers could be heard above eight escorting Cobras. The latter’s chin turrets, whose chain machine guns were slaved to the pilot’s helmet eyepiece, kept moving side to side, up and down, like a mosquito’s proboscis.
The usual thin head-on silhouettes of the Cobras were fattened this day by the thirty-eight rockets on each side of the stubby wings, giving the eight choppers a bug-eyed appearance, their tails higher than their bodies. Each of the 304 rockets was armed with a fragmentation head to provide covering scattering-shrapnel fire for the ten Hueys following and the sixty soldiers of the air cavalry aboard them. Their task was to steal the southern end of what was hoped would be a successful encircling movement against a company of North Korean regulars that had ambushed a U.S.-ROK convoy the previous night en route to Kaesong, north of the old DMZ.
All across the Korean peninsula, 120 miles wide at this point, hundreds of such missions continued to press home the U.S.-ROK counterattack against the NKA, a counterattack made possible by Gen. Douglas Freeman’s daring hit-and-run airborne attack against the North Korean capital. Like David Brentwood and many others who had fought and been decorated for the raid that stunned the world and bought valuable time for the fleeing U.S.-ROK forces, General Freeman was no longer in Korea. On leave after undergoing a violent allergic reaction to a tetanus shot, Freeman had, despite his protest, been taken off the active list for some weeks, and now there was concern that without him, the counteroffensive in Korea would bog down.
In the lead Huey, Major Tae, liaison ROK-U.S. officer for the Seventh Cavalry, a man whom Freeman had never met but who had been among the first to see action on the DMZ, was gripping the open door’s edge so tightly, his knuckles were white. The sound of 152 smoke-tailed rockets from the Cobras near him, streaking toward the scrubby side of the paddy, along with the howling rumble of the twin chin turret guns, each gun spraying out 550 rounds of 7.76-millimeter per minute into the scrub, was so loud that even though Tae was plugged in to the Huey’s intercom, he had difficulty hearing the pilot telling him and the six American cavalrymen in the chopper that they were about to put down on the south side of a long east-west irrigation ditch.
Some of the cavalrymen in the chopper, also veterans of the U.S.-ROK counterattack against the invading North Korean army, took no notice of Tae, his eyes watering with the wind, his viselike grip on the doorframe nothing more to them than confirmation that the South Korean major was as apprehensive as they were. The truth, however, was much different.
Before the war, Tae, an intelligence officer in the ROK, had conformed exactly to the ideals of West Point. A gentleman in every sense, he seemed to some more American than the Americans, despite his short, slim build. Indeed, Tae, though not nearly as widely known as Freeman and not known in America at all, had become something of a legendary figure throughout the U.S. Army in Korea. Interrogating the usual peacetime quota of would-be NKA infiltrators who had been captured while trying to slip into the South, Tae, who forbade torture of any kind, was struck not by anything the NKA prisoners said but by the fact that the chopsticks found in the NKA infiltrators’ kits were shorter — fourteen inches long rather than the standard seventeen. From this he had deduced that the North Korean army, in a country with an acute shortage of timber, was stockpiling wood. In a calculation that merely amused the U.S.-ROK headquarters in Seoul and made no sense to the U.S. officers born and bred in a throwaway consumer society, Tae had predicated that the North’s saving in wood, given the millions of chopsticks used, was probably going to the manufacture of chiges. These were the NKA militia’s famed A-frame backpacks, on which they carried all their ammunition and food, including the shoulder roll of ground pea, millet seed, and rice powder, which, mixed with water, would sustain them and which made the North Korean regular much more self-sufficient than the more elaborately supplied-from-the-rear U.S.-ROK forces.
Despite his prediction of an impending invasion of the South by the North in August, Tae’s warning was not heeded, in the main because an invasion during the monsoon was a no-no in any self-respecting army manual. Even the most junior U.S.-ROK officer knew that your heavy armor would simply bog down in the rains.
In the early hours of August 16, the morning following the South’s annual Independence Day celebrations, the NKA had struck, overwhelming the U.S.-ROK forces all along the line, the NKA’s light, Soviet-made fourteen-ton PT-76 tanks able to move much faster and with more maneuverability than the much heavier and mud-bound fifty-five-ton American M-1s.
Behind the armor, tens of thousands of NKA regulars came pouring out of the tunnels that had been painstakingly dug under the DMZ over several years during North Korean and U.S.-ROK maneuvers when normally sensitive ground noise sensors were rendered useless by the smothering noise of the maneuvers themselves. The United States had found three tunnels in the 1970s and cemented them up, with machine guns at each exit, but the NKA had dug others, which had gone undetected. Many of their troops streamed out in a massive feint that successfully engaged the bulk of the U.S.-ROK forces on the DMZ. This allowed the NKA’s famous Fourth Armored Division, whose forebears had spearheaded the NKA invasion of the South in 1950, to make an end run, breaking through down the Uijongbu Corridor, only eleven miles north of Seoul. Most of the long-standing U.S.-ROK booby traps on the eleven-mile stretch to Seoul had been neutralized by NKA commando teams, while other widespread and synchronized sabotage by “in place” NKA cells effectively gutted the crucial American chopper and fighter bases in the South.
In the face of the NKA’s byorak kongkyok— “lightning wars”—U.S.-ROK communications in a shambles from the sabotage, there had been panic in both the American and South Korean regiments. On the DMZ, Tae had fought bravely in his intelligence headquarters outside Panmunjom, but with the NKA having encircled him and threatening to annihilate everyone in the area unless he surrendered, Tae had been captured.
But if the NKA’s General Kim had succeeded in wreaking a humiliating defeat upon the Americans, his army was about to receive a rude shock. Douglas Freeman, his career looking as if it was about to be eclipsed by the younger men who had inherited the chronic instability of the post-Gorbachev world, devised and led a raid on Pyongyang. Confounding all military logic with a nighttime air cavalry attack on the North Korean capital launched from F-14-escorted choppers off carriers in the Sea of Japan, Freeman’s raid cut the NKA’s overextended supply line to the South. In doing so, Freeman bought precious time for reinforcements from Japan to reach the embattled U.S. and ROK forces, who, their backs to the sea, were fighting a bitter retreat along a fan-shaped perimeter running east-west for eighty-three miles from Pusan to Yosu on Korea’s south coast. Once reinforced and regrouped with an infusion of the fresh troops from bases on Japan’s west coast, the American army and the ROK were soon able to launch a counterattack over the next seven weeks during which they had retaken Seoul and crossed the DMZ, now entering the area around Kaesong where the U.S.-ROK overnight convoy had been attacked.
But while Freeman’s daring attack had electrified the world, as had Doolittle’s on Japan in 1941, and made it possible for the U.S.-ROK forces to retake the DMZ, the American troops that liberated the Uijongbu POW camps and set the then emaciated Tae free had come too late for Tae’s family. His wife and eight-year-old son had been strafed and killed, his nineteen-year-old daughter, Mi-ja, captured, betrayed by a boyfriend, Jung-hyun, who, an active member of the SFR— Students for Reunification — had talked her into the huge student demonstrations against the Americans that had preceded the NKA invasion. Jung-hyun, like so many from the SFR, was now believed by the U.S.-ROK intelligence to be an NKA officer somewhere in the North.
Now, amid the roar of battle, looking down on the wind-flattened green of the rice paddy, Tae was braced to jump but knew he must wait — watching long, dense trails of white smoke rising from where the Cobra escorts had dropped smoke canisters to curtain off the paddy from the thick scrub on the northern side of the east-west ditch. The scrub was erupting with dust from the fragmentation rockets and tracer from the 7.76-millimeter, so powerful, it was cutting saplings clean through, branches trembling, then flung to the ground, creating more dust, on fire and adding to the smoke.
Tae lifted his squad automatic weapon and waved the six other men to follow him out. Heads lowered, rivulets of water spreading away from them through the violently shivering grass, the men spread out, the splashing sound of their canvas-topped boots lost amid the whistle of bullets and machine-gun fire coming from beyond the scrub through the smoke screen, the shuffling noise of the big 120-millimeter mortar adding to the scream of the Hueys’ engines as the choppers hovered a foot or so from the ground while they unloaded, bullets thwacking into the fuselage. But Tae was unafraid, already well ahead of the squad, traversing the ditch and, to the other squad members’ astonishment, going straight over its protective wall into the thick smoke cover.
“Jesus!” shouted one of the air cavalrymen. “He’s crazy!”
The soldier was right. Something had happened to Tae the night that the North Korean major had brought in what he called a soltuk— “inducement”—for Tae to reveal the names of the top three KCIA counterinsurgency chiefs in the Pusan-Yosu region.
Tae had withstood the initial beatings, steeled himself enough to get through the unrelieved panic of the NKA soldiers holding him down, one of them stuffing a filthy rag, stinking of gasoline, into his mouth, pushing him underwater, then tying him to a chair, blindfolding him, suddenly tipping the chair back, catching it, setting it upright, tipping it back again to increase the panic. And men, as four men held him, another taking the pliers to his testicles. But his last torture had its own answer — a half second after they began, he blacked out. They’d left him for two days — back in his cell — giving him plenty of time to think about the pain next time, his strength fading, his only food a scum-rimmed rice cup of watery soup, a small piece of rancid meat flung into it. It was white and they told him it was fish, but he knew it wasn’t, having seen dozens of rats scampering through the cells and feeling them scuttling over his face and stomach during the night. When they brought him into the tent the third day, the major had asked him if he had enjoyed the meal. Tae, his arms pulled back and pinned by the guard, looked at the NKA major and, with his voice hissing through the broken teeth and raspy from dehydration, replied, “Very much. Thank you.”
“I’m glad you did,” said the NKA major, walking over and smiling down at him. “It was one of your allies.”
Tae did not believe him until he was dragged back into the cells again for refusing to identify any of the KCIA section chiefs. He knew that the NKA guards, as UN troops had discovered in another Korean War long ago, were regarded as the cruelest possible captors, surpassing even the brutality of the Japanese. Still, he was not prepared for what he saw. A white man, limbs tied to an upright mattress frame that was propped against the shell-pocked remains of the Uijongbu Catholic church, was being used for bayonet practice — the man still alive. It turned out that the man was not one of the Swedish UN observers from the DMZ but a young American from a signals corps captured near Uijongbu. What Tae remembered most about the man was how long it had taken him to die. A squad of NKA militia, having cut a crude U.S. of A. flag on his stomach, had bayoneted him again and again, literally disemboweling him, then, once he’d been cut down from the frame, hacked him to death, in the same way as in the 1979 “incident” when NKA troops had stormed across the DMZ and murdered two Americans who had been trimming a tree for a better view across the line.
The next evening, Tae had been taken back to the dimly lit interrogation tent. He would never forget the cloying smell of the flickering paraffin lamp, the enormous shadows of the interrogator and the guard, or the fragrance — of something so sweet, so familiar, that even in the semidarkness, heavy with terror, he knew it was his daughter.
The North Korean officer had asked Tae once more for the names of the KCIA agents. Tae said nothing and tried to smile at his daughter, but when she saw what they’d done to him, she began to cry. The NKA major gave an order and the guard jerked Tae’s head back against the chair, gagged him, and taped his eyelids back so that he was forced to watch his daughter.
Tae gave him the names and the NKA major raped her. After, as the NKA major stumbled breathless, satiated, back from her discarded form, Tae, in an agony the likes of which he had never known, heard his daughter whimpering like a dog in the far darkness of the tent, huddled in the corner, clutching her muddied clothes.
The NKA major gave her to the troops to do as they would.
It was the last Tae had seen of her. The NKA major was one of those reported killed during Freeman’s raid on Pyongyang, the name of the young American soldier who had shot him, Brentwood, one that Tae would never forget-But it was not satisfaction enough. With the madness that turns sorrow to rage, all Tae wanted to do now was to find Mi-ja and to kill every NKA he could find. Most of all he wanted to kill Jung-hyun, who had betrayed his daughter. And though he had already had more search-and-destroy missions in the last week than anyone else in I Corps, he had particularly wanted to go on this mission. Intelligence had received information that the company of NKA the air cavalry was now engaging was led by officers formed from the South Korean chapters of the Students for Reunification.
Ahead, through wafts of acrid white smoke beyond the slight rise of an irrigation ditch, Tae could see the wooden stock of a RPK 7.62 machine gun, surrounded by concertina wire, sweeping through a wide field of fire. Their bursts were too long — the barrel would overheat But it you rushed the wire alone and tried to go through it, it would wrap itself around you faster than any concertina. And too far for a grenade. The choppers had all gone. If the air cavalrymen didn’t move now, they would lose the advantage of the smoke screen.
Tae checked to make sure that the barrel of his SAW wasn’t clogged with paddy mud. He waved for two air cavalrymen to come up to his position. One man, steadying his helmet with his left hand, mouth parched with fear, drew level with him behind the ditch.
“Thought we were gonna get some F-14s up here,” the American said, eyes squinting skyward. “Off the carriers.”
“They’re busy,” said Tae. “Carriers have all been called up North.”
“Fuck!” said the cavalryman. “We’re up north!” Despite the heat of the battle, it struck Tae that the American private would never speak to an American officer like this. But he didn’t mind — all he cared about was the NKA.
“Russians are moving against the Aleutians,” Tae explained.
“Fuck the Aleutians. Send the Tomcats here.”
“They don’t see it that way,” said Tae. “I want you to cover me.”
“Where are you goin’?”
Tae indicated the machine gun still stuttering away.’ “They’ll have to change a drum soon.”
“Yeah—” said the cavalryman. “That’ll take ‘em about two seconds flat.”
“You ready? “asked Tae.
“Down!” yelled the cavalryman. The air filled with a shooshing noise, then an explosion that shook the earth, a hole blown in the wall of the irrigation ditch, a spume of dirty-colored water rising high in the air. Tae pulled the two smoke grenades from his pack and threw them upwind — the smoke cover the Cobras had laid almost gone.
“Ready?” asked Tae again. “We’ll have to do it without the Tomcats.”
The cavalryman nodded, his mouth too dry for him to speak.