The thing that most struck American commentators at the time as well as the South Korean reporters was the fact that despite its obligatory use of Communist rhetoric, Pyongyang radio had for once shown some political sophistication and even, perhaps, goodwill, in publicly counseling the students during the Liberation Day meet at Panmunjom not to provoke a confrontation, clearly intimating that the North did not wish to do anything that might undo forthcoming negotiations concerning the possibility of peaceful reunification between the two Koreas.
At midnight, as usual, “Pyongyang Polly” came on the radio announcing the evening’s reading: verse by “the venerable and much honored grandfather of our great and respected leader, Kim Jong Il,” the poem “Pine Trees on Namsan,” ending with, “I will be unyielding while restoring the country, though I am torn to pieces.”
“Major Tae!”
There was a long silence, Tae busy with paperwork as the last hundred or so students were being processed. “Yes,” he asked, pulling yet another file toward him. He was tired but relieved that, after all his apprehension, another Liberation Day had come and gone without any military incursion from the North to shatter the fragile peace.
When he looked up he saw a guard, drenched by the rain, reluctant to enter, water still dripping from helmet and boots. But as Tae rose, a smell, or perhaps it was the way the soldier moved, told him something was wrong.
“Well — what is it?” demanded Tae. The guard turned, motioning to someone outside.
A figure appeared. Mi-ja. She pushed back a wet strand of hair. It was a small gesture, but Tae could not tell, her eyes in deep shadow, whether she was looking directly at him or not. But in his fury, his humiliation, he interpreted the gesture as one of defiance. He made as if to speak, stopped, then turned away. “Search her.” He paused. “She’s no different from the rest of them.”
“Yes, sir.”
When the guard had taken her away, Tae sat staring straight ahead at the small map of old Chosun—Korea, “land of the morning calm”—but he could not see through tears.
CHAPTER NINE
As Liberation Day had ended, a spectacular sunset of huge, towering, cream-white cumulonimbus edged with gold, the men of the American Second Infantry Division Platoon manning OP (Observation Post) Fort Dyer were at “stand to,” normal procedure at sundown all along the DMZ and a drill that was as old as the Roman legions, as soldiers stood armed, silent, straining to hear or spot any movement in the rich green valley of rice paddies below that was turning soft black in the dying light.
Sgt. Elmer Franks, standing on the trench’s wooden duck-boards, was looking through the periscope binoculars. He could see nothing beyond the wire. Soon he would move over to the big infrared scope; no color in the picture, but contrasting black and white shapes were enough. The problem with the infrared scope, however, was that it was not passive, so that rather than simply picking up infrared emitted by a target, it needed to project an infrared beam, which in turn could be picked up by the other side — if they had the right equipment. To cover their bets, the Americans at Fort Dyer also had a “TI,” or thermal imager, which was passive and through which radiant heat from beyond the wire would show up in opaque sections, like white blobs on an X-ray film.
Overhead storm clouds began crashing into each other, lightning spitting in the distance. Franks looked through the TI.
CHAPTER TEN
Two hundred seventy miles south, night mist shrouding her, the fast guided-missile frigate USS Blaine, part of the Seventh Fleet’s carrier screen, sliced an oily calm between Korea’s southernmost point and Japan’s Tsushima Island off her starboard bow. As the ship left the warmer waters of the East China Sea, heading north into the Sea of Japan, the sweet smell of land wafted by, momentarily subduing the rubbery smell of the bridge. It was a routine patrol, and Ray Brentwood, the tall, thirty-seven-year-old Annapolis-trained captain of the Blaine, was on the bridge halfway through the eight-to-midnight watch.
For a moment Brentwood found himself thinking of his wife, Beth, their two young children, and of Lana, his sister in New York, whose last letter to him was full of unhappiness about her marriage. His eye caught sight of the sign — REMEMBER THE STARK! — taped to the bulkhead, and he immediately put all thoughts of family out of mind. He’d drawn the sign up himself and had copies posted throughout the ship. The Stark, a U.S. guided-missile frigate of the Perry class, like the Blaine, had been attacked in the Straits of Hormuz in ‘87 by an Iraqi jet firing two Exocets. Only one of the missiles had gone off. One was enough. Thirty-seven U.S. sailors killed, ass-kicking all down the line, the captain court-martialed, and behind all the official inquiries, families and friends devastated by the loss.
The sign on the Blaine was the young captain’s exhortation to his crew to keep sharp, not to let the boredom or fatigue of a Far Eastern patrol dull efficiency, to remember that for all the wondrous “gizmology” aboard the USS Blaine, and wondrous it was, the first warning that a missile was going to hit the Stark had not come from the ship’s state-of-the-art SLQ-32 radar but from a man—the Stark’s forward lookout — who saw the Exocet’s blue exhaust ten seconds before it hit. Above all, the sign was a reaffirmation of man over machine in the most mechanistic age in history.
At the end of his watch, before going down to the ward room for a snack, Brentwood made his way to his cabin, drew the green drape shut, tossed his cap onto the bulkhead peg, and sat down at the bare, gray metal desk to perform his weekly duty of writing home. He smiled at the snap of the four of them, taken a few months before during the spring, when they had visited Beth’s folks in Seattle, across from their navy home in Bremerton. They were all in gaudy-colored shorts, young John, four, bribed to grin with the promise of a Big Mac, Jeannie’s seven-year-old smile trying to be sophisticated, despite the missing teeth. Beth, petite, brunette, didn’t like the photo. “Unfair,” she’d proclaimed good-naturedly. “Ray’s eyes are so nice and blue. Healthy-looking. Can’t see mine for the bags. Aghh— look at my hair!” Said she looked worn out, “too pale… a hundred and four,” instead of thirty-four, which her mother said was par for the course, seeing as how the navy had moved them four times in five years, and with two young ones. “Divorce,” her mother had added ominously, was highest in the navy-forced separations its major cause.
Nevermind forced separations, he’d told Beth jokingly; it was tough enough when you did get together. With the kids at this age, trying to make love was like planning D-Day. Impossible before ten o’clock at night, by which time Beth could only flop exhausted in the living room, needing an hour of Ann Landers and anything that moved on TV to unwind. They’d tried getting Ray’s mom to come to Bremerton from New York to “see the kids”—run interference — but she said she “couldn’t stand the rain.” What she meant was she couldn’t stand the strain — didn’t like baby-sitting and having to read the same bedtime story fifteen times, with interminable cries of “toilet” and “thirsty.” Ray didn’t blame her, didn’t blame the kids, missed them terribly — said so in his letter each week. But next leave, damn it, he and Beth were going to take off. A couple of days up on the Olympic Peninsula, a little place like La Push, cottage by thundering green-white surf, the smell of dead intertidal life giving off that fresh “ozoney” tang, and craggy, pine-covered mountains sweeping down to the sea. He and Beth in bed — all day. Then chilled cans of “Oly”—none of the diet stuff. Make love till they couldn’t do it anymore.