Authors: Simon Winchester
I wished I had listened. The road, straight, narrow, streaming with murderous traffic, went onward and ever onward. Plenty of American cars and dollar-only taxis went by; I was passed by the bus that came down every day from the big air base at Osan; a caravan of sleek silver buses bearing the insignia ‘8 TFW—Wolfpack’ zoomed past—the base football team and their fans, coming home from a game. And each time I thought that the base must be just over that rise, or behind those trees. But it never was. I walked across the top of a pair of dams that held back an enormous lake; fishermen were stringing up their nets for the evening. I passed a village with an entrance arch that said ‘Welcome to Silver Town’, and into which a few of the American cars were turning. But still the road kept on unrolling, and darkness was starting to fall, and my feet were getting sore.
Finally, a glimmer of lights in the distance, and a water tower—the surest sign, given the American penchant for the purest of waters, of an American installation. The tower had a revolving searchlight mounted on top, and the beam swept across the road before me. It was quite dark when I finally reached the gate—a copy of a temple gateway, with a greeting in both English and Korean, and in place of the guardian kings, four American sentries, two carrying automatic rifles, the other two with pistols.
I followed the sign marked Visitors, and found myself in a dingy hut, with one Korean and two American guards. I set down my pack and asked for the base information officer. The guard—a corporal—thought there wasn’t one. Besides, it was too late, he’d have gone home. He was probably expecting me, I said; could he try him at home? The corporal, who clearly preferred the simple life, and waved other pass-holders through
with no more than a perfunctory glance, sighed deeply and promptly announced his intention to go off duty. ‘Here, Mike, you look after this guy,’ he said to his colleague, and a much more cheerful airman, an Irishman named O’Keefe, took over the task.
He had his trials too. No one could be found. Offices were shut, desks unmanned. Finally, after about half an hour, the phone on his desk rang, and there was a muffled conversation. He handed the phone to me. ‘Good evening, sir,’ said a voice at the other end. ‘I’m sorry to have to say this, but we don’t have any room for you here. You’ll have to go back to Kunsan City. The base is absolutely full.’
After an entire career that seemed at times to have been spent squeezing and cajoling and greasing and bribing my way into and onto things—planes, theatres, ferryboats—that claimed to be full, overbooked, closed, finished for the season or sunk, I was not to be put off that easily. Besides, it must be at least eight miles back to Kunsan, it was dark, I was completely shagged out, and there might not be a hotel to be found there either. So I asked the disembodied voice—Lieutenant Joe LaMarca, public affairs—if he had any idea I was coming. ‘We certainly did, sir. But we thought it would be next week. And anyway, I’m in the middle of softball practice. I really can’t help. Why not call us tomorrow morning?’
He was just about to hang up and go back to his mound or his diamond or wherever, when I decided to play my only ace. I decided to lie. ‘But look, Lieutenant, I really don’t want to disturb your game, and I’m in no hurry, really, so I can wait around here as long as you like, you take your time, but you know I wouldn’t have come here—walking all the way, that is—if I hadn’t been assured
personally
that there would be an accommodation waiting for me here.’
‘You were told there
would
be room for you?’ said the lieutenant. ‘Who told you?’ I spluttered something about U.S. Forces Headquarters in Yongsan—the camp in central Seoul where the commanding general has his office. He paused, then—in one of
those magical moments, as when the reservations clerk finds your name on the computer or the final passenger fails to show up on time—he took the bait. ‘Well, you just better come in and wait. Go to Billeting. I can’t promise anything. But get yourself over there. Hand me back to the sentry. I’ll tell him to let you in.’
There was still some more argument and what the Indian newspapers call ‘red-tapism’, before I finally showed my passport to the sentry and was ushered aboard a shuttle bus. We passed down miles of identical streets—East Ninth Street, West Fifth Street, A Avenue, C Avenue—until the driver let me off outside Building 309, a bile-green shack that looked like a unit in a country motel in Mississippi but was, in fact, Billeting.
‘C’mon in,’ drawled a female voice when I knocked, and when I opened the door it looked even more like a country motel in Mississippi. A tall black woman stood behind a check-in desk. She had a pencil in her mouth and a worried look on her face. Behind her, next to the charts showing which rooms were occupied and which were free, was a cooler filled with bottles of Michelob and Miller Lite; in front of the counter was an arrangement of plastic armchairs, a display case filled with tins of Spam and bottles of Coke, and an enormous Zenith television set that was showing very fuzzy pictures of a basketball match. The woman was called Staff Sergeant Nancy Morgan; she came from Covington, Virginia; she thought Korea was a ‘real neat place’ and she promised she would find me a room for the night. ‘Don’t you worry about a thang,’ she drawled. ‘I kin fit you in someplace.’ And she was as good as her word and eventually found somewhere—Bingo! she said—and made me register and asked me to pay for the night in advance. ‘Four dollars a night—pretty reasonable, huh? Of course, it means you’ll have to share.’
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 Connecti
cut, 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.’
The 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.