The driver hadn’t even saluted him when he’d climbed aboard back at Kimpo Airport, and Kevin wasn’t sure if he should report the man for insolence or just ignore it. Maybe they kept discipline pretty casual here in Korea — he just didn’t know.
He looked out the window to hide his discomfort. They’d driven right along the Han River through Seoul before turning north. And Seoul, at least, seemed pretty interesting. Tall, modern skyscrapers and huge freeways all built right next to delicate, tile-roofed palaces and narrow, winding streets. The place was huge, too — a lot bigger than Spokane or even Seattle. It must have been nearly an hour before they left the city’s sprawling suburbs behind.
The countryside wasn’t like anything Kevin had ever seen back in the States either — flat, green, water-logged rice paddies reaching out all the way toward rocky, knife-edged ridges running along both sides of the highway. The tiny villages they passed looked like something out of National Geographic with brown-painted cottages topped with curving orange, green, blue, and turquoise roofs. Narrow country roads bordered by tall poplars and gently swaying willow trees bordered the highway. Kevin began to feel a bit better. Then the odor hit him. Charcoal smoke and unleaded gasoline and thick humidity rolled up into a foreign smell that seemed to magnify the strangeness of the place.
The corporal chuckled a bit when he saw Kevin wrinkling his nose. “You won’t notice the smell by tomorrow morning, sir.
“If you think that’s strange, they got that homemade napalm relish they call kimchee. They don’t eat nothin’ without it. Take a bunch of red peppers, cabbage, cucumbers, radishes, and stuff, mash it all up, and let it ferment for months. You can smell kimchee all the way to Honolulu if the wind’s right.
“Course, it ain’t so bad right now. You oughta smell it in July and August when the heat really comes on.” That was just about the last complete sentence Kevin could get out of him all the rest of the way to Camp Howze.
Camp Howze looked like an Army camp. The rows of whitewashed barracks, supply warehouses, and office buildings were all laid out with straight-edged, military precision. There was a big difference, though, from the stateside bases Kevin had seen. The camp was surrounded by barbed wired and cleared fields of fire, and he could see camouflaged bunkers guarding the main gate.
A large sign declared that Camp Howze was “HQ 1st Battalion, 39th Infantry Regiment — 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division.”
The driver let him off right in front of the main entrance and watched while Kevin hauled his bags out of the back of the truck. Then, without a word, the corporal wheeled his truck around and drove off back west toward the highway.
A sergeant walked down from the gate to meet him. “Reporting in, sir?”
Kevin nodded, fumbling in his jacket pocket for his travel orders. “My plane was late. I was supposed to be here last night.”
The sergeant glanced through his orders. “Yes, sir. Battalion left word that you’re to report to Major Donaldson, the XO, as soon as you arrive.”
Kevin looked down at the pile of baggage at his feet and was acutely aware that he desperately needed a shower and shave to look, feel, and smell human.
The sergeant smiled. “I think you could interpret that order a little loosely, Lieutenant. I don’t think we’ll be able to log you in here at the gate for another half-hour. In the meantime, we’ll get you up to the BOQ.”
The sergeant broke off to yell up at the two privates watching from the gate. “Malloy, Brunner! Move your lazy asses down here and help the lieutenant with his bags.” He turned back to Kevin. “Welcome to Camp Howze, sir.”
A quick shower at the BOQ — the bachelor officers’ quarters — left him feeling a lot better, but Kevin still had knots in his stomach when he knocked on Major Donaldson’s door.
“Come.”
He opened the door, stepped inside, marched toward Donaldson’s desk, and came to attention. “Reporting in as ordered, sir.” Damn, why did his voice have to break every time he tried to sound properly military?
Major Colin Donaldson, a short, square-jawed man, looked Kevin over carefully for a brief moment, with all the studied disinterest of a man eyeing a horse he might want to buy someday. The major’s gaze made Kevin feel as though he were being X-rayed. He wondered what Donaldson saw.
He knew he wasn’t tall — barely average in fact. And though ROTC exercises and training marches had kept him in good shape, with a trim, flat stomach and muscular arms and legs, Kevin also knew he’d inherited his father’s stocky build along with the older man’s straw-colored hair and pale blue eyes. His father only kept his weight down by working from sunup to sundown on the family’s Eastern Washington ranch. The Littles didn’t have much choice, Kevin thought. It was either sweat or grow fat.
Feeling self-conscious under Donaldson’s gaze, Kevin held his shoulders back and head rigid, resisting the temptation to scope out the maps and personal mementos scattered throughout the major’s office. He had the feeling this wasn’t the right time to give his innate curiosity full rein. Not by a long shot. In fact, if he’d learned anything in the ROTC, it was that there was always a time to just play dumb. A succession of increasingly irritable instructors had made that painfully clear to him over three summers of basic and advanced training. It had been a difficult lesson to learn.
Curiosity, brains, and the itch for adventure were a large part of why Kevin wasn’t back home herding beef cattle from one sun-baked hill to the other. If he’d been the average kid in Ellensburg, Washington, he’d never have wanted to go to college. And if he hadn’t wanted to go to college, he’d never have signed up with the ROTC to pay for it. And now his service obligations to the U.S. Army had landed him smack dab in the middle of this camp just south of the DMZ.
Part of him was still pissed off. South Korea hadn’t been what he’d bargained for, and his orders to report there had come as both a shock and a disappointment. But another part of him was excited. This posting was sure to be a lot more interesting than the godforsaken spots in Texas, Tennessee, and Georgia that most of his classmates had been shipped off to.
After what seemed like an eternity, Donaldson pushed his chair back and came around the desk with his hand held out. “At ease, Lieutenant. I ain’t going to bite your head off.”
He shook Kevin’s hand, waved him into a chair, and then perched himself on the corner of his desk.
Kevin thought he should explain why he was late. “Sir, I’m sorry I didn’t get here on schedule, but you see, my plane was — ”
Donaldson interrupted. “Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant. We don’t expect our officers to control the weather, or even the airlines. Eighth Army phoned this morning to let us know what happened to you.” He paused for a moment. “But don’t get the idea you can be late from now on. I’m going to expect your platoon to be ready to move when I say ‘move’ and to jump when I give the word. Clear?”
Kevin nodded.
“Good. That’s settled then.” Donaldson pulled a file off his desk and started leafing through it. There didn’t seem to be much in it.
“Now, I see from your service record that you’ve had some language training. That was in Korean, I hope.”
Kevin couldn’t quite keep the bitterness out of his voice. “No, sir. I took four years of German in college — I never expected to …” He decided it might not be a good idea to finish the sentence.