At Fort Dyer, Sergeant Franks checked the thermal imager again. No movement, but the usual noise of North Korean loudspeakers from which Pyongyang Polly’s seductively soft, warm voice wafted through the rainy darkness, as usual exhorting the Americans to desert. The reward for turning over a radio, Franks noted, had held steady at two thousand won, while the amount paid for defecting with a helicopter had increased slightly to sixty thousand. There wasn’t going to be any war, she told them, unless the “gangsters in Seoul” and their “guerae migook”— “American puppets”—invaded the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, in which case the loyal workers and peasants of “our great respected leader and teacher” would repel the aggressors.
“Are you lonely, Private Long?” asked the sexy voice. “Who wouldn’t be? You are forced to stand guard for the corrupt lackeys in Seoul and Washington. While you are standing in the rain, your capitalist bosses are sitting in their warm mansions, enjoying their women and their wine. They send young men like you away from your families. You think they would come in your place?”
Private Long, a newcomer from Yongsan base, had been warned about this “personal approach bullshit.” He grinned at his buddy, but he was shaken. It was an unnerving experience, no matter how often you’d been told to ignore it — particularly when she started in with personal details that you thought were unknown to anyone else, least of all the North Koreans. To make matters worse, the volume of the speakers was now so loud, to compensate for the thunderstorm, that Long knew she could be heard all over. She mentioned his fiancée, Joan. Would she remain faithful to her soldier? “So far, far away, Private Long. Of course, your friends will look after Joan — make sure she won’t be lonely. Why don’t you come over? There are nice girls in Pyongyang. Sweet dreams.”
For Private Long, everything about the Korean night was alien. The monsoon was different, the stench of human feces, used as fertilizer, rising from the rice paddies, revolting. Even the sounds of the insects were different. He ached to be back home.
Sergeant Franks called the platoon corporal to take over the TI scope so he could go and talk to young Long. Halfway down one of the sandbagged trenches radiating from the bunker’s hub, Franks heard an explosion.
“Minefield!” someone yelled.
Franks cocked his M-60, swung it onto the sandbagged parapet. “Lights! — Two o’clock!” Three searchlights swept and crisscrossed the DMZ. He saw tracer arcing leisurely toward their position. “Mark and fire!”
Shooting erupted from both sides. A searchlight tinkled and died. The firing kept up.
“Flare!” ordered Franks. This was followed by a loud pop, and night became flickering day. It was an errant musk deer, one of its hind legs missing, the other caught in the fence, frantically thrashing against the barbed wire — the animal’s huge, soulful eyes bright beneath the dying flare, its doglike bark growing louder.
“Get a light on it,” said Franks, and taking careful aim, shot it dead.
Soon everything was quiet again except for the reassuring hiss of the monsoon’s rain. Following normal procedure, Fort Dyer reported the “false alarm” to “Big Blue,” the situation board deep in the underground headquarters in Seoul twenty-five miles away.
In Seoul the meteorologists forecast more rain.