TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Maps and Photographs

The Story
Chapter One: When the Americans Came to Unmu-do...4
Chapter Two: The Sleeping Bag......15
Chapter Three: The Volunteer.....16
Chapter Four: The Captain and Little Kim......18
Chapter Five: The Raid on Hill 213....23
Chapter Six: The White Stallion.........34
Chapter Seven: Three Storms...............37
Chapter Eight: Two Letters from Sunwi-do..48
Chapter Nine: Bringing Out King Kong....50
Chapter Ten: Chin Nampo...61
Chapter Eleven: Going Home...72
Chapter Twelve: Epilogue.....87
Postscript..........91

Afterword: The Lieutenant Looks Backand Ahead

The Lieutenant Speaks.....93
Photographs...104

About the Author

117

MAPS AND PHOTOGRAPHS

Maps
1. Map of the Yellow Sea
2. Map of Sunwi-do and WP8 territory

Photographs
1. The Lieutenant and Kim Jong Don on their last day together, Seoul, July
1953
2. Obituary of SGM John Walter Conrad (The Sergeant)
3. The Captain, George Lamms plaque at the Mt. Soledad War Memorial in
San Diego
4. Little Kim: Wearing the Captains shirt with 82nd Airborne shoulder patch
5. U.S. Marine Corps Base on Yongpyong-do (HQ of Wolfpack West), where
Little Kim was burned to death
6. Lee Duk Yung
7. Group Photo: Kim, Lee Duk Yung, the Lieutenant, the WP8 S-4, Nam,
Houseboy Oh
8. Kim Jong Don in front of the Lieutenants tent on Sunwi-do
9. King Kong, the leader of Wolfpack 8
10. Mr. Bong, Kongs Deputy
11. A Wolfpack 8 runnerthe carbine was real and fully loaded
12. Another Wolfpack 8 runner
13. A dwelling built by the partisans in their village on Sunwi-do for the
Lieutenants use

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THE STORY
A True Story of the Korean War

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ONE: WHEN THE AMERICANS CAME TO UNMU-DO

The sun came up like a pale fat orange over the mountains on the mainland
to the east. It was a warm, clear, windless day in late April, 1953. The boat
was lying at anchor three miles off the west coast of North Korea.
The hatch to the after cabin opened and three young men climbed stiffly
onto the fantail. The lieutenant was twenty-three, just over six feet tall. He
was emaciated, one of several unwelcome side-effects of his unorthodox life
style. The sergeant was twenty-six, six feet three, with the powerful body of
an Oregon lumberjack, which, in fact, he had been. He wore a thick
mustache in the style of Wyatt Earp. Kim was nineteen, also well-built, and,
at five feet nine, tall for a Korean.
All three wore U.S. Army fatigues, including billed fatigue caps, which the
two Americans had blocked with stiff cardboard, paratrooper-style. They
wore no insignia except the Americans had cloth U.S. parachutists wings
sewn over their breast pockets and Korean parachutists badges on their
caps.
They moved to the gunwale and performed their morning ritual, relieving
themselves into the sea. Then the lieutenant said: O.K., Kim, is everybody
ready? Kim glanced inquiringly at Cho, the leader of the combat crew, who
nodded.
Everybody ready, Sor, Kim replied.
You ready, Sergeant?
Ready as Ill git. Lets do er.
Er was a combat probe of Unmu-do, a small island situated just off the
west coast of North Korea, about seventy miles south of the Manchurian
border. Intelligence sources had reported that Unmu-do had recently been
occupied by a force of some 80 Chinese troops; the patrols assignment was
to validate the report. Specifically, they were to approach the island by sea
and attempt to draw fire. If they succeeded, they were to engage the
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Chinese from the boat, and, during the engagement, estimate their numbers
and chart as many of the Chinese positions as possible. If they failed to
draw fire, even after approaching to close range, the presumption would be
that the island was not, in fact, occupied. They would then send in a party
to screen the island and verify.
The catch was, of course, that the Chinese, if they were there, would not be
anxious to have their positions charted, and would therefore not fire on a
single, essentially harmless craft unless and until it approached within
effective range of their heaviest fire power. Then they would open fire in
earnest, to destroy it. So there was an element of cat and mouse to the
approach.
The boat crew pulled in the anchor, hand over hand, coiling the wet rope
onto the deck. The engine man meshed the gears and the captain/pilot
swung the junk around toward the north, the engine beating a steady
rhythm: pong-pong-pong-pong.
The boat itself had no name, nor any markings. It was a wooden fishing
junk, thirty-two feet in length, built in the 1930s and powered by a
Japanese one-cylinder hot-head diesel engine a hot-head engine being
one whose cylinder had to be pre-heated close to its operating temperature
before the engine would fire. Before the Americans came, the junk crew had
performed this task with a blowtorch; but the sergeant had soon improvised
a way to speed up the process by pouring magnesium from illumination
flares into the cylinder and igniting it. (The supply officer in Inchon had
remarked that the sergeant had requisitioned enough flares to light up
Pyongyang for an hour each night for a month.) Even with the magnesium,
the heating process still took 15-20 noisy minutes, an eternity if one had
cooled down in hostile waters. Once it was running, the junk made about
eight knots at full speed on a smooth sea, less in weather.
The unit was called Seadragon. It had been formed earlier that year when a
group of self-styled Korean pirates with two motor junks had approached
American intelligence and offered themselves and their boats for
intelligence and rescue missions in the northern Yellow Sea in return for
food, fuel, weapons, and ammunition. There was precedent for this: groups
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of Koreans, many of them anti-Communist refugees from the North, were

already occupying several of the offshore islands along the western North
Korean coast, under similar arrangements with the Americans, harassing
the Communists with raids on mainland targets near the coast. Seadragon
would be a mobile variation of that activity.
The lieutenant and the sergeant had been brought in to lead the operation.
The lieutenant had come from five months with a partisan group on one of
the northern islands, where Kim had been his aide. They had got on well
together, and Kim had made the move to Seadragon with him. The sergeant
had been running a motor pool at intelligence headquarters in Seoul when
they had posted a need for a volunteer for a hazardous special ops
assignment, with experience in small boats essential. The sergeant, restive
among the jeeps and trucks, had simply lied about the small boats.
When it became apparent that the Americans actually intended to take the
junks into hostile North Korean waters, most of the original Seadragon
people who had had no such thoughts had drifted off. The lieutenant had
replaced them with young hoodlums recruited off the streets of Inchon. At
the end of several weeks, and after two shakedown patrols up the North
Korean coast, Seadragon consisted of one junk, its operating crew of three,
the two Americans, the interpreter Kim, and a combat crew of twelve,
mostly wild young Koreans willing to go anywhere the Americans wanted to
take them.
The junks operating crew was another matter. The owner/captain/pilot, a
man of about forty-five, had regretted his bargain with the Americans
almost from the outset certainly from the moment he realized they were
seriously contemplating going into harms way. He took the boat north only
under duress, and was eagerly awaiting the first opportunity to repossess
the junk and disappear. This meant that one of the Americans or some
trustworthy member of the combat crew had to remain constantly on board
and alert, any time the combat crew was off the boat, for there was not the
slightest doubt that the junks crew would abandon them, anytime,
anywhere, including on the North Korean mainland, given only the slightest
opportunity. The other side of this coin was that either of the Americans,
Kim, or any number of the more loyal Korean combat crew would have
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killed any of the junks crew outright at the first serious sign of hostile
intent, so there was a sort of tense equilibrium among them.
The engine man was small and consumptive. He spent most of his time with
the engine itself, sleeping curled up beside it each night. He was covered
with a layer of oily grime that grew progressively thicker with time. The
deck boy was probably thirteen, barely five feet tall and scrawny. He did all
of the manual work associated with operating the junk, and cooked for both
crews on an open wood-burning hibachi in a sheltered area on the fantail.
He was, if that was possible, even grimier than the engine man.
The two Americans had converted the junk into a sea-going arsenal. Six .50
caliber machine guns on pedestal mounts were installed on the forward
deck, the fantail, and amidships, on either side of the cabin. The guns were

arranged so that at least three of them could be brought to bear

simultaneously on any target on their periphery. On the roof of the pilot
house was another pedestal mount, carrying a .57 mm recoilless rifle. The
combat crew were armed individually with carbines or .45 caliber Thompson
sub-machine guns, and there was a .30 caliber Browning light machine gun
available as a spare.
When all the deck guns were firing, it was a chaotic scene: the noise was
deafening, and brass cartridge cases were flying in every direction. Except
for Kim, who had had combat experience in the northern islands and was an
excellent, natural rifle shot and machine gunner, the Koreans were
inexperienced with weapons, and were considered by the Americans to be at
least as dangerous to their own party as to the enemy. During the training
sessions and gun drills, the combat crew had behaved like little children
engaging in a water fight, with much whooping and laughing and, until the
lieutenant had begun punishing offenders, they would point the loaded .50s
at one another and pretend to fire.
They had not, at that time, yet had an encounter with any of the Chinese
gunboats that patrolled the coast each night, after the American fighters
had stood down, and it was anybodys guess how they would perform in a
firefight with an enemy gunboat. The sergeant said, only half in jest, that if
they ever did engage a Chinese gunboat, his personal plan was to go over
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the side and start dog paddling south, while the combat crew kill each
other.
There were three forward holds in the junk, previously used to store fish.
The smallest, most forward of these was loaded with rice, ammunition,
grenades, and the sergeants magnesium flares. The two larger ones had
been hosed out and converted into sleeping quarters for the combat crew,
who slept on straw mats in summer GI sleeping bags, and who always
carried with them the faint, ripe aroma of the earlier, scaly tenants. Lashed
onto the forward deck were several drums of diesel fuel.
They had spent the night about 10 miles south of Unmu-do, a little more
than an hours run from the island at their cruising speed. Surprise was not
a factor, since their explicit purpose was to be seen, and to draw maximum
reaction from the Chinese garrison. Hence, the approach would be made in
broad daylight, at mid-morning. In contrast to the pre-dawn raids that he
and Kim had participated in in their previous assignment (soldiering), the
lieutenant referred to this mid-morning activity as gentlemans work.
Their adrenalin was beginning to pump now, in anticipation of the
approaching action. This was superimposed on the ever-present subliminal
tension that, quite literally, came with the territory. Working in the enemys
rear involves a very different set of hazards than serving on the front lines.
It is, in one respect, more akin to working in a deep mine, in a submarine, or
in outer space, in that the immediate risk can be quite remote, while the
ultimate danger if some small thing goes wrong can be virtually
absolute.
At the front, one is almost constantly at risk of being hit by a sniper or an
artillery or mortar round; or being wounded on a patrol or in an assault by
either side. But, when that happens, one is usually in friendly hands. The
System takes over, and one is propelled with what, allowing for the
circumstances, is surprising speed and efficiency, back to ones own world,
where chances of survival are as high as they reasonably can be.
In the enemys rear, the circumstances are almost precisely reversed. For
the most part, one encounters only militia or an occasional regular patrol,
or, at sea, a Chinese gunboat. On any given day, at any given moment, the
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chances of a serious encounter are slight. But here, far behind the lines, the
slightest routine incident engine failure (for any of a thousand reasons);
running aground; hitting a mine; being damaged in a hostile encounter;
being abandoned by the junk crew, etc., meant being stranded far from ones
own support system, at the mercy of overwhelmingly superior hostile forces.
Their lives, the lieutenant had once thought, had much in common with the
lives of hemophiliacs.
The tension never left; one never slept comfortably anywhere in the North.
By contrast, on one occasion the lieutenant and the sergeant, on a brief
busmans holiday in South Korea, had visited friends in an infantry
battalion at the front, and, secure in their perceived safety of the American
System, had slept like babies, even though Chinese mortar rounds had
burst on their positions at intervals throughout the night, and the unit on
their right was probed by an enemy patrol. Their front line hosts had
regarded them as aliens from another planet.
They sighted the island from about four miles off. It was a tiny dot, some
300 yards long, and perhaps 80 yards wide, lying more or less north-tosouth. The western (seaward) side was a rocky cliff, about thirty feet in
height, from which the ground sloped off flatly, merging into the sea on the
side facing the Korean mainland, four miles away. Unmu-do was barren
except for the thick, grassy ground cover that was prevalent throughout the
Korean peninsula, now turning a dark green with the coming of spring.
There were a few clumps of scraggly bushes, none higher than a mans
chest, and several outcroppings of rock. From seaward that morning, Unmudo was a small, detached piece of earth, floating on the smooth green sea.
Beyond, the North Korean foothills loomed dark and smoky blue.
A few hundred meters off the island, a rock formation broke the surface of
the sea. As they approached, a roiling of the waters around the rocks
suddenly caught their attention. (At this point, any unexpected
development, however slight, would send a tremor through the party). The
movement turned out to be that of a herd of perhaps fifteen seals, swimming
out to meet them, incredibly, as if the junk were a touring ocean liner and
the seals were friendly natives.
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Leading the pack was an enormous bull, his massive head cutting grandly
through the water like the prow of a sailing ship. The whole scene had a
primitive, almost magical quality that the lieutenant would never forget. He
thought, realizing even as he did how irrational the thought was: Someday,
if I live through this and have children, I will bring them here and show
them this place.
The seals had approached within thirty meters of the boat when the
moment was shattered by the crack of the sergeants carbine, followed by
the soft thunk of a .30 caliber round destroying the skull of the bull. The
bull reared upright, then disappeared like a stone; the remaining, now
leaderless, seals fled back to the haven of the rocks. There was only the
slightest, momentary crimson stain remaining on the surface of the water.
The lieutenant whirled on the sergeant in angry disbelief. What in the
name of God was that for? The sergeant, looking slightly surprised, said,
Jesus, I dont know. It was just reflex, I guess. Hell, lieutenant, dont get
your wind up. Its just an animal. But he saw at once that the lieutenant
had a very different view of the matter, and he turned away, his face deeply
flushed.
The Koreans, inured from childhood to senseless cruelty to both animals
and humans, watched impassively; some were laughing. The lieutenant said
coldly, John, that was the stupidest Goddam thing I have ever seen you do.
Youre damned lucky theres no law here, or youd go to jail for this, and Id
be for it. In other circumstances he might have said more, but they could
not afford to be distracted at this point; they were approaching small arms
range of the island.
Kim, he called out, tell the captain to make a pass around the island, at
about this distance. They circled once, about six hundred meters out.
Through the binoculars they could see that a deep slit trench had been
freshly dug around the islands perimeter, with sandbag-reinforced
emplacements located at about twenty-meter intervals. The island had been
occupied, for sure. But no covered bunkers were sighted, and no personnel
were seen.
Well, it looks like theyre here, the sergeant observed.
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Or have been, the lieutenant corrected. If theyre still here, theyre

hunkered down in those built-up positions, hoping well go away. Anyway,

theres no way theres 80 troops on that little island. They mightve brought

in 80 people to dig the positions, and then left a small outpost or pulled out

altogether. If theyre in there, Id guess no more than a couple of squads, 18

or 20 men, maybe even fewer. Probably some automatic weapons, maybe

one or two elephant guns. Elephant guns were the North Korean Armys

17.6 mm direct fire guns, fired from a bipod and originally designed as light
anti-tank weapons. The round was about the size of a mans thumb. They

were virtually useless against modern tanks, but were very effective against
lighter targets, such as jeeps and trucks, and personnel. The lieutenant had

a sobering moment imagining the damage an elephant gun could do to the

hull of his wooden junk, particularly if a round penetrated the ammunition

hold or hit the diesel drums on the deck.

They circled once more, now at about 200 meters; there was still no sign of

life from the island. OK, said the lieutenant, I dont think theyre in there,
but we have to be sure. Kim, get the wiggle boat ready. You and I and the
two Yus will go in. Carbines with full clips, and just wear skivvies and

komu shin; we may have to swim back. Everybody wear an ammo belt and

take a couple of grenades, just in case.

You sure you dont want me to take this one? asked the sergeant,
Youve done a few of these.
Yes, I have, replied the lieutenant, and thats one reason I should

probably do it. But the main thing is I want you on one of these .50s, John,

covering our young asses. Just you, Godammit. I dont want any of these

cowboys shooting our own guys in their enthusiasm. If we draw fire, you

engage them with the .50 and well run to the water and try to swim back.

Once were clear of the island, you can let them open up with the other guns,
but for Gods sake be careful, John. Keep firing, but move the junk back
another couple of hundred meters and keep it moving around. I really
wouldnt want to lose it up here.

Me neither, grinned the sergeant, not while theres beer left in it.
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The island, it turned out, was not occupied, at least by live Chinese soldiers.
Halfway through their sweep, the Yus, covering the seaward side,
discovered three bodies in the rocks below the cliff. When they had secured
the island and brought the junk in, the lieutenant climbed down and
inspected the bodies, which for some time had been exposed alternately to
sun and salt spray to the point of being semi-mummified. They wore no
clothing or dogtags, but near them was an aluminum paddle from a U. S.
Air Force life raft.
They may be Americans, John, the lieutenant said. Have the guys wrap
them in tarps, or ponchos or something, and well take them down to Graves
Registration at Inchon. Have them try to keep them intact if they can.
They stayed on the island until mid-afternoon, stretching their legs and
relaxing in the warm April sun. Then they headed south toward Inchon,
skirting the coast by a few miles, the hot-head engine beating its rhythmic
pong-pong-pong, intermittently emitting a fine spray of soot in its wake. The
lieutenant and the sergeant lay sprawled on the cabin roof, decompressing
from the days activities, oblivious to the soot.
John, did I hear you say there was some beer left? Disappearing into the
after cabin, the sergeant emerged with two cans. Tossing one of the warm
cylinders to the lieutenant, he said, Last ones, ice cold. Watch out for the
frost.
As they pulled on the tepid beer, the lieutenant asked, Say, John, where
did they stow those bodies?

I dont know, he said, let me check, and moved toward the forward deck
where the combat crew squatted and sprawled. Some minutes later, he
returned with a bulky, poncho-wrapped bundle under his arm. Git yourself
ready for some news, he said. They say the bodies was real messy and
coming all apart in those rocks. Long story short, they decided to just bring
back the heads. I know this has some drawbacks, but that was the way
they seen it.
The lieutenant absorbed this news for a long moment before he responded.
Okay, John, I can understand their thinking, but this complicates my job
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somewhat, just turning in a bunch of heads. This is not just a local thing
here. Picture this, John, staff car pulls up to a little house on Elm Street,
chaplain gets out, knocks on the door. Mrs. Jones, he says, your son died
bravely defending our country, and we will all miss him; here are his
remains. And then he hands her a goddam hatbox or something. Can you
see my problem?
The lieutenant did, in fact, find himself in an awkward situation several

days later, explaining the heads to a bald, bespectacled, cadaverous, and

most unsympathetic Graves Registration major in Inchon. Two of the skulls

had been identified as USAF officers through their dental records. The

major said sternly, Lieutenant, this is entirely unacceptable. I want you to

go back up there and recover the remaining remains (sic) of these officers.

(Long pause.) I can definitely see your point, Major, the lieutenant replied,
But Im not just a free floater here. I travel at the pleasure of the

Commanding General of the Eighth Army (true), and I can only go where

Im sent. I get these special assignments, mostly pretty far up in the North,
like this one was, and I do them as best I can. But I have to tell you, sir,

that even if it were up to me, I wouldnt do this one. Next time we went in,

the place might be occupied again, crawling with Chinese soldiers. I might

lose other good, live people, trying to save some pardon me, sir - some

rotten, headless corpses that may be probably are washed away by now.
I believe, sir, that all of us, including you, me, and their families, are

Goddam fortunate just to have recovered those heads. I have shown you, sir,
exactly where the, uh, remaining remains were located. If you would like to
take a recovery operation in there with your people, you would have my

sincere best wishes. But it would not be a suitable mission for my unit.

The major, who was not persuaded, and no more anxious than the
lieutenant had been to present severed American heads to his superiors,
shouted, You were the one who screwed this thing up, lieutenant, and you
are the one to make it right. Youll be hearing from me through channels.
The lieutenant, mentally agreeing with the major that, in an ideal world, he
should have brought the bodies back intact, saluted smartly and left,
knowing the major had no chance in hell of ever finding him again through
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the highly classified maze of safe houses, cover organizations, and specious
unit designations that surrounded him. He walked away circumspectly,
whistling softly, and disappeared again into the occult civilian docks of
Inchon.
They anchored for the night a few miles outside Inchon harbor. There was
still tension between the lieutenant and the sergeant, left over from the
killing of the bull seal. But the lieutenant did not want to open the fresh
scar again so soon. It would, in fact, never be opened, for the sergeant was
sent stateside two days later on a family emergency, and the war ended
before he could be returned. They would never see each other again.
That last night, lying on the deck in the after cabin, the lieutenant did not

sleep right away. He lay still, feigning sleep, as he had learned to do before

in combat operations on the island. Dear Diary, he composed, Today we

visited beautiful Unmu-do, a lovely tourist spot in the Yellow Sea. We took a
scenic walk along the cliffs and spent a leisurely afternoon relaxing on the

beach. Then he added, We were welcomed warmly by friendly natives, and

then we senselessly slaughtered the finest goddam thing they had there.
Well, Diary, tomorrow is another day.

He lay awake for a good while longer before drifting off. In the dark cabin,

Kim was sleeping silently; the lieutenant could hear the sergeant breathing,
but he couldnt tell if he was sleeping or faking it, like he was himself.

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TWO: THE SLEEPING BAG

One evening when the lieutenant was in his 50s, he had a phone call from
his ex-wife, telling him that she was selling the house and moving to the
West Coast. They were on fairly good terms again after a period of bad
feeling during the divorce. She had found some old things of his, she said, in
the attic as she was packing to move, and would drop them off the following
day if he wanted them. He thanked her and, when he found the carton on
his front doorstep the next afternoon, put it away in his basement storage
room and forgot about it.
Several years later he was in the storage room putting away a suitcase after
a business trip, when he came across the carton. In a moment of mild
curiosity he pulled it off the shelf and opened it, spreading the contents on
the floor. A couple of small framed Japanese prints, some old family
photographs, a folded newspaper from the day of the JFK assassination,
some other things. In the bottom of the carton, compressed along one side,
was a dark, soft mass, emanating a faint musky odor. He poked at it
inquiringly, then, as premonition dawned into shocked recognition, he
extracted the object from the carton, holding it in both hands. It was a
tightly rolled GI sleeping bag, tied with its olive drab web straps.
The lieutenant stood staring at the sleeping bag for a full minute while a
wave of memories washed over him. A moon rock, a goblet from Narnia;
something from another, far-off world, simultaneously real and unreal. It
brought it all back in a rush Kim, the islands, the Captain, King Kong, the
Yalu, the partisans, the sergeant, Unmu-do, the harbor at Chin Nampo, the
junk people. He put the sleeping bag under his arm and carried it upstairs,
tears welling up in his eyes.

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THREE: THE VOLUNTEER

They were at Ft. Lawton, Washington, a contingent of young airborne
officers staging through to Korea in the fall of 1952. One evening several of
them were in the officers club when a paratrooper captain, returning from
the war, downed a truly impressive number of Scotches and then began
slurring out wild combat stories that no one believed. Stories about a secret
war in the Yellow Sea, with pirates and Chinese junks, and raids into the
North Korean mainland. After a while he passed out, and some of his
friends carried him back to his quarters. Someone asked one of the captains
friends What is this guy, crazy? The friend, who was not drunk, looked
steadily at the inquirer and replied, No comment.
The lieutenant had not been at the club, but heard the story later, including
the name the captain had given to his fanciful unit. He couldnt be making
all this up, he thought, and filed it away in his mind. When they got to
Camp Drake in Japan, he waited two days, found a telephone and a U.S.
Armed Forces directory, looked up the listing and called the unit. A warrant
officer answered, and the lieutenant, after identifying himself, inquired
politely how one might be assigned to the unit. A major then came on and
advised the lieutenant that there were no open billets in the unit, and that,
in any event, the unit was engaged solely in a courier service between Tokyo
and Seoul. He implied rather strongly that the lieutenant was trying to
avoid combat duty.
Still politely, the lieutenant repeated for the major the gist of the captains
wild stories, and said, So, if these reports arent true, sir, I assume there
would be no harm in spreading them around Camp Drake. There was then
a long silence, during which the lieutenant could not tell whether the major
was scowling or smiling. Finally, the major asked stiffly Lieutenant, where
are you at this moment?
At the officers club at Camp Drake, sir.
How long will it take you to get your shit together?
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I can be ready in twenty minutes, sir.

Youve got an hour. Sergeant Reilly will pick you up at the club at 1100
hours.
The lieutenant spent that night in downtown Tokyo in a secure officers
hotel. He ate alone in the dining room, and no one spoke to him. He was not
allowed to go out into Tokyo. The next morning he was flown into Kimpo Air
Base, driven to a safe house in Seoul, and given a classified briefing on the
unit, which turned out to be pretty much as the drunken captain at Ft.
Lawton had described it. The following day, he made a practice parachute
jump with a group of Korean trainees onto a makeshift drop zone on the
sandy banks of the Han River, and was given a Korean partisan parachute
badge by the lieutenant colonel commanding the unit (Now, you are a
rokka-san.) Before dawn the next day, less than 72 hours after he had
made the telephone call at Camp Drake, he was leaving Inchon on a
dilapidated motor junk for a partisan base off the west coast of North Korea.

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FOUR: THE CAPTAIN AND LITTLE KIM

When the lieutenant arrived at the Wolfpack headquarters on Yongpyongdo, the captain commanding the Wolfpacks had a cute little Korean
houseboy named Kim. To an American, he looked to be about nine or ten,
but in fact was almost thirteen, and, as the lieutenant would learn, was in
certain ways much older. It was soon apparent to the lieutenant that this
was not a typical houseboy arrangement. Kim accompanied the captain on
troop inspections and other duties during the day, and the captain
laboriously taught Kim English in the evenings, by a Coleman lantern in his
tent. The captain brought meals and snacks to the boy from the American
mess, and, most striking, little Kim was the only houseboy the lieutenant
had seen who went about his duties armed. Sometimes he wore a huge (for
him) .45 automatic pistol strapped to his thigh in a leather GI holster, but
more often carried an automatic carbine slung over his shoulder. The
weapons were always fully loaded, and half-cocked, with the safeties off, in
the manner of the partisan leaders.
Kim was a cocky little fellow, bristling with pride, hot-tempered, and
arrogant. With the captain, he was pleasant and, although playful at times,
essentially respectful and polite. With everyone else, however, including
other Americans of all ranks, little Kim had a nasty side. He was
particularly abusive toward other Koreans, both young and old.
Over time, the lieutenant got the full story. Little Kims parents had been
killed on the mainland when the Chinese army swept down from the Yalu in
the winter of 1950-51. Kim and an older brother had fled south, almost
starving, until they had fallen in with one of the groups of partisans forming
up along the western coast of North Korea. They went through extremely
hard times until, in the fall of 1951, the Americans began to supply the
partisans who by then had migrated to the offshore islands - with rice,
weapons, and ammunition. In return for these necessities, the Americans
wanted some control, so they sent in their own people to plan and direct
18 | P a g e

operations against the Communist forces. These advisors were the

successors to the OSS and the forerunners of the Green Berets.
Among them was the captain. The captain had been a platoon leader in the

82nd Airborne Division during the war in Europe, had made the jumps over
Normandy and Holland, and fought through Germany to the wars end,

winning both the Silver Star and the Distinguished Service Cross. He was a
bandy-legged Irishman, no more than 56 tall in his jump boots, with a

certain fondness for drink and good times, and a deep, instinctive love of

dogface soldiers of all kinds. After a few beers, you could make him cry
every time by singing Danny Boy, however badly. He was brave,

intelligent, funny, a paragon of combat troop command, and the best tactical

infantry leader the lieutenant would ever encounter.

Assigned to command the western Wolfpacks, the captain had organized a

series of daring raids against Communist positions along the western coast
of North Korea. Little Kim and his brother, along with many other
underage, orphaned and homeless partisans, had participated in these
operations. The brother was killed on one of these raids, and Little Kim had
stayed on, having nowhere else to go.

How and when the captain had encountered Little Kim was not clear. At
some point, though, it appeared that the captain had noticed him in the
ranks, and made him his runner. It was not surprising that the captain had
been attracted to the boy. Little Kim had an incongruously cute, charismatic
quality that drew people to him, and a sad vulnerability that made him
seem particularly poignant to some Americans who came to know him. He
also had - or had developed - a vicious side that ultimately would determine
his fate.
For a time, the captain had used Little Kim as a runner during the raids he
led against the communist mainland. One day, however, withdrawing from

a raid on a mainland Communist position, they had encountered a minefield

and, after the common practice, had brought up two Communist soldiers
captured on the raid, and ordered them to lead the way through the mines
19 | P a g e

the idea being that both military expediency and equity would best be
served by having the greater risk borne by the side that had created the risk
in the first place. The Communist soldiers had demurred, and before anyone
else had reacted, Little Kim had unslung his carbine and killed them both.
After that, the captain had not taken him on raids, but had kept him at the
base camp as a sort of mlange of houseboy, aide-de-camp, and, God help us,
a son. Everyone, including, in his heart, the captain, could see that a
juvenile Jekyll/Hyde personality had invaded this little body, but the
captain stubbornly would not acknowledge it. He sent photographs of the
boy to his own mother back in Massachusetts, and nurtured an exchange of
letters between the two. There was wistful talk of adoption and of Little
Kims going to live in Massachusetts with the captains mother.
Superficially, Little Kim was just like all the other houseboys, small, bright,
eager to please. But, on closer examination, he was exceptionally intelligent,
mature far beyond his years, a charismatic leader, emotionally wounded,
and, perhaps unsurprisingly, essentially without moral values. The two
opposing sides of this small boys persona were extremely painful to watch
for the lieutenant and others close enough to perceive them.
In due course, the captain was rotated back to Ft. Bragg. Before his
departure, he called the lieutenant aside and gave him almost as a rite of
passage his personal sleeping bag. It was a rare thing, the latest design
and nylon-lined; there was no finer sleeping bag anywhere in the U.S. Army
at that time. The lieutenant, who until then had been shivering under GI
blankets, was close to tears in his gratitude, and would keep that sleeping
bag, literally, until his death. But the captain left, and life on Yongpyong-do
went on. Little Kim had no new surrogate parent - was, indeed, by then well
beyond the emotional stage where he could develop such a relationship with
a new father surrogate, even if one had been available. But he was clearly
dominant among the young Korean houseboys on the base, and soon became
the de facto, then appointed, honcho (boss) of the houseboy group.
He was an extremely efficient but very cruel master, even toward some of
the houseboys 3-5 years older than himself. All the Americans tents were
20 | P a g e

immaculate, cots neatly made, boots spit-polished, brass sparkling, and

fatigues washed and folded by village women, organized by Little Kim and
paid in cigarettes and C rations collected by him from the soldiers and
marines they were serving.
Most of the Americans were pleased and impressed by Little Kims
leadership. A few, however, had seen him mistreat other houseboys and
even a couple of elderly washerwomen. He had beaten them with his fists
and with a crude swagger stick he had fashioned from a large dried root.
This kind of mistreatment of subordinates was not uncommon among the
partisans; however, it was rare indeed to see it meted out by one so young,
to other children and elderly women. The trains were running on time, but
the little trainmaster was feared and despised by the crew.
Little Kim continued to carry the carbine around, until one day he was
reprimanded, fairly or not, for some minor infraction by the Marine gunnery
sergeant the senior NCO on the base, who had never liked the way the boy
had been pampered by the now-departed captain. In the middle of a fairly
extended, loud, and not very gentlemanly chewing out, Little Kim suddenly
jammed the carbine, round in the chamber, safety off, finger on the trigger,
into the gunnys stomach. You, shaddup, you! the boy shouted in his shrill
voice. There was a long, tense moment when it seemed he was going to kill
the gunny, but then he stepped back, slung the carbine on his shoulder, and
strode off angrily toward the houseboys tent, where he sat alone on his cot,
waiting for the next shoe to drop.
They took away his weapons and replaced him as the houseboy honcho.
They kept him on as an ordinary houseboy, keeping him as far away from
the gunny as possible. His offense was actually far more serious than the
available punishment, but, in those unusual circumstances, there was no
legal framework they could apply to him, so they just went on in that mode.
He was a surly, moody houseboy, but did his job well enough to stay out of
serious trouble. He continued to write increasingly competent English
language notes to the captain and his mother, and to receive notes and
packages from them. Back in the US, they were actively looking into the
possibility of adoption.
21 | P a g e

A few weeks later, the lieutenant was back on Yongpyong-do for a

debriefing. They were all asleep in the middle of the night when they were
awakened by shouts of Fire! Stumbling outside in the icy, pitch black

night, they saw it was the houseboys tent. The tent was blazing like a blast
furnace, smoke and flames shooting fifty feet or so into a cold starless sky.

No one was trying to do much about the fire, just letting it burn itself out on

the steep, rocky slope. The American soldiers and marines were trotting up

from their tents, rubbing sleep from their eyes; the houseboys were standing
in a group, staring silently and impassively at their fiery abode.

Remarkably, the lieutenant thought, most of them had been able to bring

their personal gear out with them, despite the speed with which the fire had
swept through the tent.

They had their gear? All at once it dawned on the lieutenant, what was

actually going on there. Wheres Little Kim? he asked a sergeant standing

beside him, wearing a field jacket, boxer shorts, and unlaced jump boots.
Hes inside there, replied the sergeant, the one who had been helping
Little Kim with his correspondence to the captain, Get it?

Aww, shit! the lieutenant groaned. Theyve killed him, havent they?
Way I see it. nodded the sergeant. Looks to me like they brought all their

own stuff outside, and then one of them just kicked over the stove, spilled
the kerosene tank. Whole thing went up in a few seconds. He probably

burned up before he was even awake.

Whos going to tell the captain? This is going to kill him.

The major, probly. Itll kill him, all right.
They buried Little Kims charred remains in the village cemetery, and the
Marine Corps major commanding the base wrote a note to the captain,
telling him what had happened. No one heard from captain, though.

22 | P a g e

FIVE: THE RAID ON HILL 213

The most prominent terrain feature on the North Korean mainland opposite

the lieutenants island, Sunwi-do, was a hill mass marked 213 on the maps,

indicating that the peak was 213 feet above sea level. On the crest of the hill

the North Korean Army had constructed a sizeable bunker, which they used

as an observation post overlooking the island and the contiguous coastal

waters of the Yellow Sea. The bunker was the only military installation in

the lieutenants operational area, a sparsely populated farming and fishing

sector of the Ongjin Peninsula. There were no paved roads, only cart trails
and footpaths; no bridges, tunnels, etc., where partisan forces normally
might work their mischief.

Two other factors shaped the situation. First, while many of the partisans

were refugees from other parts of North Korea, a good number were native
to Ongjin, had grown up there, and had friends and relatives living in their
area of operation. This meant not only that they were operating in a
relatively friendly environment, but also that they had a strong disincentive
to create damage in those environs. Second, and of far greater strategic
importance, UN air and naval forces totally dominated the skies over North
Korea and the oceans off both coasts. That dominance was probably unique
in the annals of guerilla warfare, and gave the partisans a built-in
advantage going into any engagement. They could lay on close air or naval
gunfire support for operations planned in advance, or call in air strikes for
ad hoc emergencies during daylight raids. That advantage was offset by
other factors, however: the partisans were essentially untrained, illequipped, poorly disciplined, and operating with little or no direction from
above.
Reflecting this mix of disparate elements, the engagement between the
partisans and the 23d Brigade of the North Korean Army, which defended
the Ongjin Peninsula, had evolved into a fairly consistent pattern by the
time the lieutenant had arrived. The partisans would send small recon
patrols in almost nightly, partly to maintain a presence in the area, partly
23 | P a g e

to monitor what the NKA was up to there, and partly to maintain contact
with friends and family. The 23d Brigade did not have the personnel to shut
down the partisans entirely, but couldnt afford to let them operate freely
there, either. They sent out their own interdiction patrols, and contact
between the two was not infrequent, with casualties taken by both sides. At
night, the territory was a kind of no-mans-land.
The lieutenants first personal involvement with this nighttime activity
came several days after his arrival on the island. He was called out before
dawn one morning to meet a patrol returning from the mainland. They had
recovered the body of a twelve year old boy who had persuaded them to take
him on a recon mission several nights before and had been killed in an
encounter with an NKA patrol. His body had been hidden by relatives on
the mainland until it could be retrieved by another patrol and returned to
his mother on the island. The lieutenant, unexpectedly elevated to the role
of visiting dignitary, apparently was expected to play a part in that process.
As he arrived on the scene, they were just beaching the junk on the sand.
One of the partisans lifted the small body from the deck and passed it to the
lieutenant, who, playing the scene by ear, cradled it in his arms and carried
it over to the sobbing mother. The boy weighed less than sixty pounds, wore
only GI fatigues, was barefoot, and had died of a bullet wound to the chest.
The lieutenant gently transferred him to his mother.
In the silence that followed, he came to realize that he was expected to
speak to the group of some fifteen or twenty people, probably neighbors of
the mother, assembled there in the dark, which he did very badly, mouthing
pompous clichs about common goals and UN dedication to freedom, and
nothing whatever about the grieving mother or her son. It was a painful
learning moment. Over several decades to come, the lieutenant would have
many other occasions to speak of and over the dead, and would never again
do it without remembering that mother and her dead boy, and without
speaking with humility, in personal terms, of both the dead and their
survivors.
Over time, the Americans had developed a tactic that became the bread and
butter of several Wolfpacks. They would send in a party to land shortly
24 | P a g e

before dawn, when the NKA would be withdrawing to their fixed daytime
positions. The partisans would go into a village and conduct a raid,
designed to be noisy but not very harmful to the friendly natives. Word of
the raid would soon reach the NKA, who would come out of their positions to
attack the intruders, who would withdraw to high ground near the coast,
dig in, and prepare to defend their ground. When the NKA force developed
sufficient mass to be a target, the partisans would call in an air strike (or,
less frequently, naval gunfire support) to break up the attack, inflict
casualties on the NKA, and cover the withdrawal of the patrol back to the
island. It was basically less a partisan offensive tactic than a technique for
creating easy, fat targets for the Air Force at low risk to the partisans, and
they used it frequently. Napalm was a popular weapon in these strikes.
But Hill 213 was a different matter. It was not a friendly village on neutral
ground but a dug-in, fully defended position, almost certainly subject to
rapid, strong reinforcement if attacked. Further, unlike bridges and gun
batteries, an observation bunker could be restored to its previous condition
by a few soldiers (or forced laborers) within a few hours. Thus, the potential
cost in casualties was high, as guerilla operations go, while the potential
damage to the enemy position was very low.
At one point, the Naval Gunfire Observer from Wolfpack Headquarters was
on the island while the USS Missouri was on station offshore. He radioed
the ship:
Big Boy, this is Eagle 4. I have a target for you.
Roger that, Eagle 4. What is your target?
Big Boy, our target is a large enemy bunker in Sector Peter Fox.
(Brief silence, then sounds of laughter from the ship) A bunker, Eagle 4? A
bunker? Eagle 4, do you know how much it costs to fire this monster? Sorry
Eagle 4, Big Boy doesnt do bunkers. If that one is bothering you, youd
best go in there and take it out yourselves. Good luck and out.

25 | P a g e

Well, the bunker was bothering the lieutenant, if no one else. Not that it

posed a threat to anyone or was a significant military target, but simply,

as Mallory said of Everest, because it was there, visible every clear day
through binoculars. He was also troubled by the captains having

successfully led a long-odds operation against a highly fortified coastal gun

emplacement opposite Mudo, temporarily opening a critical sector of the

coast off Haeju to the UN flotilla. He began to worry that he was too timid,

that he was losing the respect and confidence of the partisans. So, what the

hell, he decided to lead a raid on Hill 213.

That decision was less foolhardy than it might have appeared. His idea was
not to destroy the bunker, which could easily be restored, but rather to take
temporary control of it and the hill itself. If the partisans could seize and
hold the most important piece of ground in their territory, if only briefly, it
would challenge and embarrass the NKA and boost the confidence of the
Wolfpack unit significantly. They would also cause some NKA casualties
and with luck might take prisoners. As an observation post well inland, the
position would probably be lightly defended. If they went in and out quickly
enough and with sufficient force, their own casualties should not be too
great.
His plan was to go in on the high tide, as close to dawn as possible. That
would leave a six hour window to assault the bunker, hold it briefly, and
return to the island on the outgoing tide. They would take 120 partisans,
mostly riflemen, supported by light machine guns and 60 mm mortars, and
organized into three groups of forty, one to assault the bunker and two held
in reserve against a possible counterattack and to cover the withdrawal,
leapfrogging back to the beachhead. The three groups would be led by their
regular partisan commanders, and the lieutenant would coordinate the
assault and the withdrawal, joining the lead group for the assault and later
giving the order to withdraw. Close air support would be on call.
They made the landing on plan, just as the sun was coming up. After the
sail junk carrying the lieutenants party (himself, radio operator,
interpreter, runners) cast off from the motor junk that had powered them
across the channel, they were swept unexpectedly by the wind and current
26 | P a g e

around a point of land and disembarked to find themselves separated from

their main party and staring up at two NKA bunkers, links in a chain of
defensive positions the enemy had installed along the coast but occupied
only intermittently. Gambling that the positions were either unoccupied or
manned by late risers, the lieutenant gave a Shush signal to his group and
motioned them to move quietly between the bunkers to the higher ground
beyond, from where they joined the main party some four hundred yards
away.
The beachhead was almost two miles from the objective, up a winding trail
that steepened sharply at the base of Hill 213. The approach route had little
plant growth, but the hilly terrain gave them fairly good protection from
observation from the bunker. Further up, the base of the hill was covered in
thick bushes shoulder-high to the lieutenant with a scattering of large
rocks; that thicket was to be the final assembly area for the assault.
Screened by two scouts, the lieutenant and his party led the approach, along
with the leader of the assault group, whose troops followed next in line. It
took about half an hour to reach the thicket below the bunker, apparently
undetected by its occupants.
The lieutenant trotted ahead, found a spot behind a large rock at the upper
edge of the thicket where he had a clear view of the bunker, and waited

there for the assault group to close up. OK, let me know when theyre in

place, he instructed Lee Duk Yung, his interpreter for the assault, and Ill

give the signal. The signal was to be a single rifle shot fired at the aperture
of the bunker, upon which the partisans would attack the bunker and the

lieutenant would join the assault. But Lee responded, in his Elizabethan

English, Sir, the assault party is not here. They have turned back down the
hill.

Well, shit. The lieutenant had been waiting for that shoe to drop, while
slowly growing more hopeful it would not. He had been aware from the
beginning that the partisans, comfortable in their night patrols and daylight
raids on friendly villages, might not be willing to attack head-on a fortified
position manned by regular NKA troops. Like Big Boy, but for very different
reasons, these partisans didnt do bunkers. But rather than refuse outright,
27 | P a g e

they had gone along with the lieutenants ideas through the planning and
the landing, and then simply melted away during the final approach. They
had probably reassembled and formed a defensive perimeter on another hill
mass closer to the coast, and were waiting for him to join them for the
return to the island.
The lieutenant was frustrated and angry, but realized this had probably
been the partisans way of avoiding a confrontation in which neither they
nor he could win, and that there was little to be gained by pursuing the
matter further. A more immediate issue for him was what, if anything, to do
about that goddam bunker. The only intelligent thing would be to turn
around and walk down the hill. But he knew that he would never again be
as close to that bunker as he was at that moment, and that if he walked
away without even tweaking it, it would continue to prey on his mind.
He sent the radio operator and the two runners back down to join the main
body; he gave the same order to Lee Duk Yung, who refused to leave him
alone. He then stood, peeking over a chest-high rock, unslung his M1 rifle,
fired a single round into the aperture of the bunker, some forty yards up the
hill, and waited to see what would happen. After a minute or so, someone
ran a dingy white flag up a crude pole out of the roof of the bunker,
presumably a signal for Under Attack. He kept waiting, expecting that at
some point NKA troops would come out to see who had fired on them. His

idea was to wait for those troops to appear, then throw a hand grenade in
their direction and run like hell down the hill. The military purpose of all
this was unclear at best, but it would give him a degree of personal
satisfaction.

The bunker had clearly been unprepared for an attack, suggesting that if
the operation had gone as planned, it might well have succeeded. After
several more minutes, four or five NKA riflemen appeared, and moved
cautiously down toward the thicket. The lieutenant turned to Lee Duk
Yung.
Lee, Im going to throw this grenade up there, and then run like hell down
the hill. You go now and Ill join you in a minute.
28 | P a g e

No, sir, responded Lee, I will stay here, with you. I am your interpreter.
The NKA troops had entered the thicket and were less than twenty yards
away.
Goddammit, Lee, theres no one here to talk to. Now go!
Unperturbed, Lee said primly, Then I will talk to you, sir, and stayed
where he was. From his demeanor, they might have been having tea
somewhere.

The lieutenant pulled the pin and threw the grenade as far up the hill as he

could, in the direction of the NKA soldiers. He counted off five seconds, the
rated burn time of the fuse, and waited for the grenade to fire..four
thousand, five thousand. Nothing happened. Six thousand? Seven

thousand? Shit, it was a dud. Not surprising, since most of the ordnance

issued to the partisans had been designated salvage, meaning it was too
old or damaged, and condemned for use by US troops.

He could hear the North Korean patrol, now more confident and aggressive,
coming closer and calling out to one another. OK, Lee, he inquired with
exaggerated politeness, Can we go now? And they ran/slid down the steep
hill through the thicket as fast as they could go without falling. The NKA
patrol began firing their rifles, and soon two automatic weapons were firing
short, alternating bursts from the vicinity of the bunker. The rounds were
cutting all around them through the thicket, making little slapping sounds
that reminded the lieutenant of buckshot going through a Tennessee
cornfield in a similar, non-military, chase nine or ten years before.
Below the thicket there was only low ground cover, mostly high grass. They
zig-zagged down the hill, still under small arms fire, but more sporadic now.
As they crossed a cart trail, a burst of machine gun fire kicked up two puffs
of dust a few yards from their position, and, for the only time in his life,
before or after, the lieutenant experienced what is known in the trade as
hot blood. He had had a long day during which things had not always gone
his way. He had dressed too warmly for the pre-dawn channel crossing, and
was now perspiring freely and breathing heavily while running for his life
29 | P a g e

away from a failed operation. Those last two rounds somehow brought
everything to a head, and his temper took control.
Fearless, he stopped running and stood upright in the cart trail, facing Hill
213. He put the M1 to his shoulder and squeezed off the seven rounds
remaining in the clip from the earlier shot fired into the bunker. The firing
from Hill 213 stopped. The lieutenant slung the rifle over his shoulder,
turned, and walked away toward the beachhead with Lee Duk Yung by his
side. If the enemy machine gun had cut them down at that point, he would
have looked very stupid. But, for whatever reason, they were not fired on
again.
They soon came upon the main body of partisans, deployed on a short ridge
a half mile from the landing site. Further inland, the lieutenant could
already see enemy troops moving around a lower hill mass a few hundred
yards away. Back on the ridge, he was startled to see Mr. Bong, second-incommand of the Wolfpack on the island, standing in the center of the
command group. Bong had had no role in the planned raid on the bunker,
but apparently had been sent in somewhere in the landing party to play a
role in the raid after it had been diverted from the bunker. He now appeared
to be running things there on that ridge. The lieutenant did not know Bong
well, or anything about his background. He was a man of around forty, with
a smooth, round face and a soft, fleshy look about him.
The lieutenants first concern at that point was getting the partisans back to
their island with minimal losses, which was still not assured. But Bongs
unexpected presence and demeanor were also problematic. He did not greet
the lieutenant, or even acknowledge his arrival, until the lieutenant,
through Kim, now serving as his interpreter, said, Mr. Bong! I am very
surprised to see you here. Whats the situation?
Unspoken was the ultimate question: Who is in command here?
We are preparing to return to our base, but enemy is building up down
there (pointing).

30 | P a g e

I see them. Why dont we let them build up for a little longer, and then call
in an air strike?
I have radio contact with my commander back at base. I am taking my
orders from him.
Mr. Bong, there is no way in hell that anyone can direct this operation from
that far away. We have to make these decisions right here, in real time.
At that point, two mortar rounds dropped onto the ridge several seconds
apart, down the slope from where they stood. Everyone hit the ground, and
those who had dug holes dove into them. Bong began speaking excitedly into
the radio. Kneeling, the lieutenant said to Kim We have our own mortars.
Lets return fire. Lets also have a couple of the machine guns open fire
across the front of that hill. Let the bastards have it.
Kim translated, but Bong shook his head, and spoke briefly. Kim said Sor,
Mr. Bong say if we fire on enemy, enemy will be pissed off.
PISSED OFF? Tell Mr. Bong for me that the goddam enemy is already

trying to kill us here. What is he afraid they might do if they also get pissed
off? Then you personally go and find the gun crews and tell them if they

want to get off this goddam hill in one piece, theyd better start firing their
weapons. Now, GO! Within several minutes mortar rounds were falling
around the NKA position, and bursts of machine gun fire were being

directed there. After an initial flurry, the exchange of fire diminished to

occasional bursts, while the lieutenant assumed that the NKA /troop
buildup continued on behind the hill.

This went on for another half hour. Then the lieutenant looked up to see all
the partisans standing up and walking away from their positions, rifles
slung over their shoulders as if they had just been dismissed from a parade
formation. He leaped up, shouting the partisans back into their positions.
Some returned; others hesitated, kneeling down in place; still others kept
moving back toward the beach. If the NKA should attack them, out of
position in that state of confusion, there was real potential for disaster.
31 | P a g e

The lieutenant quickly found Bong standing in the crowd. What the hell is

going on here? he yelled. Bong (through Kim) replied calmly My

commander (i.e., King Kong) has ordered us to return to the boats.

Well, by God, your commander is about to get a bunch of us killed. I am

telling you to get these people back in their Goddam holes and keep firing.
Then well call in an air strike, and then well go back to the boats.
You are only an advisor. He is my commander.
OK said the lieutenant, I am advising you as strongly as I can to put
these troops back in their Goddam holes.
Kim translated first that, and then Bongs response. Mr. Bong say he do
not know whether to obey his advisor or his commander.
The lieutenant, still in the grip of hot blood, said Let me help him decide,
and shoved the muzzle of his rifle into Bongs stomach. He had not loaded a
new clip after firing at the bunker from the cart trail, but Bong did not
know that, only that an M-1 rifle fired point blank into ones stomach could
cause a serious problem. Smiling sweetly, the lieutenant asked: Does this
help?
Yes. I will obey your order. Bong shouted something in Korean and the
partisans began moving back to their positions.
The Air Force sent two jet fighters up from Kimpo less than fifteen minutes
after the lieutenant called for air support. It was the first time he had seen
at close range napalm-filled tanks tumbling through the air and splashing
fiery death on troops below. It was not a scene one easily forgot.
Under the air cover the partisans withdrew to the beachhead and boarded

the junks to return to their island. The NKA did not pursue them. Mr. Bong
and the lieutenant were on different junks, so did not discuss the

disagreements they had had during the operation. As things turned out,

they never would. The crossing back to the island was uneventful, and the
32 | P a g e

lieutenant, Kim, and Lee Duk Yung didnt talk much on the four-mile hike
back to the tent they shared with Nam and the houseboy Oh.

Over their C-ration meal that evening, they spoke of the operation. Kim and
Lee told the lieutenant they had not known beforehand that the partisans

did not intend to attack Hill 213, and he believed them. Correctly, they did

not discuss Mr. Bongs conduct or the lieutenants decisions. The lieutenant

would no longer be troubled by the bunker on Hill 213, but the events of
that day had given him a good deal to think about, going forward.

33 | P a g e

SIX: THE WHITE STALLION

Occasionally on Sunwi-do the lieutenant would find some high ground
overlooking the mainland and spend an hour or so peering through
binoculars at the Wolfpack 8 territory. This was primarily to get a feel for
the major terrain features and possible routes to and between critical
landmarks, but occasionally he would catch sight of live NKA activity
troops digging a trench, moving around a bunker, or moving on foot from
one point to another. It was one small way of knowing ones enemy. One day
he saw in the distance what appeared to be a North Korean officer mounted
on a large white horse. He was visible for less than a minute before
disappearing around a turn.
Mildly fascinated, the lieutenant returned the next day and scanned the
same area for NKA cavalry, but without success; the horseman had ridden
on. But a few days later, he spotted him again, and occasionally thereafter.
It seemed that one of the lieutenants counterparts on the mainland was
riding around in style while he was trudging across the hills on foot. He
described the white horse to his tent mates, Nam, Lee Duk Yung, and Kim,
remarking facetiously that the communists seemed to be taking better care
of their officers than the Wolfpacks. Nam, et al, seemed to take this in good
humor, and life went on.
One morning a couple of weeks later, a young runner came into the tent
wearing a big grin, and spoke briefly with the lieutenants tent mates. Lee
Duk Yung, smiling broadly, then told the lieutenant that he was wanted in
the village right away. Puzzled, the lieutenant put on his cap and field
jacket and walked the hundred yards down into the center of the village. He
was accompanied by his beaming tent mates and drew a small entourage of
children as he moved down the path. A small crowd of about thirty people
had assembled in the center of the village, and several of them stepped
aside, opening a pathway for the lieutenant to see for himself whatever it
was that had brought them all together.
34 | P a g e

He moved tentatively into the circle and: Ta Daa! What he saw there was
one of the most miserable creatures he had ever looked upon. It was a bony
little Manchurian pony, dirty white in color, badly undernourished, and
swaying unsteadily on its short, slender legs. It was, he was proudly told, a
gift from the Wolfpack 8 partisans to enable him to ride around Sunwi-do in
a manner befitting his position and rank.
The partisans and villagers were watching him expectantly. Get on! Get on!
So he took the rope reins in his hand and swung his right leg over the ponys
back, with most of his weight still on his left leg on the ground. Not knowing
whether the pony was broken for riding, the lieutenant hesitated, collecting
his thoughts. Kim and Lee Duk Yung, apparently expecting him to hop on
and take the poor beast for a canter, were urging: Go on! Ride him! It was
an exciting moment in the little village.
Slowly, he shifted his full weight over onto the animals back and waited,

not knowing what to expect. To everyones disappointment, the pony

collapsed under the lieutenants weight and lay there on the ground. They

pulled him up and tried again, but with the same result. The third time they

tried they couldnt get the pony to stand up again; the lieutenant had
observed at first hand the ultimate meaning of the term last legs.

He never got the full story of the Manchurian pony. He learned that it did in
fact come from the mainland (there were no working animals on Sunwi-do)
and had been rustled by the partisans from some unit of the 23d Brigade of
the NKA a daring act in itself. It was never clear whether it was the same
white horse he had seen through the binoculars, although with allowances
for distance, body size of NKA officers, and tricks of his own imagination, it
might well have been. The Wolfpack partisans, new to both rustling and
animal husbandry, did not bring the pony back to Sunwi-do aboard the
motor junk, but towed it through (and frequently under) the rough, icy
waters by a rope around its neck, which he assumed had contributed
importantly to its demise.
The following afternoon, someone delivered to the lieutenants tent a
wooden tray covered with a white cotton cloth. On the tray were several
35 | P a g e

pieces of red, raw meat, cut into 1 by 6 strips, and a bowl of marinade

comprised of soy sauce, sugar, and Korean spices. Nam cooked the meat on
a hibachi that evening and they all had a nice dinner, while the villagers

had a banquet of their own. The meat was too tough and stringy to cut with
the utensils they had, so they would hold the grilled strips in their fingers

and tear off bites with their teeth. Then, after chewing the bites down to an
irreducible, inedible mass of gristle, they would discard that and tear off

another bite. Compared to their usual C-rations, it was pretty tasty and was
memorable for other reasons, as well.

The lieutenant never caught sight of a white horse on the mainland again.

36 | P a g e

SEVEN: THREE STORMS

The First Storm
During his time in Korea, the lieutenant experienced three memorable

storms. The first of these came in November, 1952 as he was returning by

motor junk from the Wolfpack headquarters to Sunwi-do, some thirty miles
to the northwest. The Wolfpack Naval Gunfire Observer (NGO) a Marine

First Lieutenant, was going up with him to see if he could find any targets
for a shoot in the lieutenants operational area on the mainland. The USS

Missouri, the most powerful battleship in the world, was on station off the
west Korean coast, and the NGO was hoping to find a target important

enough to call in Mighty Mo for the shoot of his career.

On that overcast December day, they pushed off into the Yellow Sea in a

steady, cold drizzle on a choppy surface. The trip normally took three hours,
but on this day the going was slower. After an hour or so, the rain grew
heavy, a strong headwind developed, and the waves began to toss the junk
around with considerable force. The two Americans took shelter in the tiny
cabin with the pilot and the junk captain, bracing themselves against the
erratic pitching of the boat.
They had continued in that mode for another hour when they came upon a
25 foot fishing junk, foundering a few miles off the North Korean coast. It
was dead in the water and largely submerged, with an inch or two of water
washing over the deck. The holds were already full of seawater and there
was no apparent way it could hope to survive the storm. Wading on the
tossing deck in the cold wind and heavy rain were the boats master, a greyhaired man in his mid-forties, his wife, and a teenage girl whom the
lieutenant presumed to be their daughter. All three were dressed in white
peasants clothing. There being nothing they could do to navigate the junk,
they were simply huddling miserably together around its single mast.
The captain brought the motor junk alongside the sail junk and tossed a line
to the fisherman, who made it fast to the bow of the smaller boat. Everyone
37 | P a g e

was thinking: Well, OK, now what? Ideally, the motor junk might have
towed the smaller boat to safety somewhere, but it was clearly beyond
saving by then. With no buoyancy left, it was little more than a huge sea
anchor, heavily resistant to being towed at all. Even trying to move it would
have required a much stronger tow line and a more powerful engine than
were available. The situation was further complicated by the absence of an
interpreter; the Americans, technically in command, could not communicate
with either the stranded fishermen or their own junk crew.
The lieutenant leaned over the heaving fantail of the motor junk and
beckoned the sail junk family toward him. Come! he shouted. Come! Well
help you! It wasnt going to be easy, though, getting them onto the motor
junk with both of the junks pitching and heaving in the storm. The family
obviously understood what he wanted them to do. The daughter brightened
visibly and started to make her way toward him. But her mother merely
stiffened and the father extended his arm, stopping the girl. The father then
began communicating in a universal language, waving his arms and
shaking his head NO!
All of this had happened very quickly, and the basic issue for the huddling
family only then dawned on the lieutenant. He had been offering them
respite from a storm, but in practical terms the price of salvation would be
their home, their livelihood, and all their possessions. The cost of temporary
relief would, in practical terms, be their entire past existence and a bleak
future as three soaked, shivering bodies cast out with nothing into a wartorn world. Whether they ended up in North or South Korea, their chances
of survival even as individuals were miniscule, as a family none at all. The
father - and probably the mother had thought that through, and had
apparently decided that there were far worse possibilities for them and their
daughter than going down together with their little boat in that storm. And
it seemed quite clear they didnt intend to go anywhere else.
It took the Americans several moments to absorb all that. Then the Marine
lieutenant said OK, lets get out of here. If that boat goes down and were
still tied to it, it could swamp us, too in this weather. He took a knife from
his back pack and cut the line to the smaller junk. So, decisions had been
38 | P a g e

made, all around. The whole encounter had lasted less than twenty
minutes.
It took another three hours to reach Sunwi-do, where they dried out and

warmed up in the large tent the lieutenant shared with his partisan staff.

The Marine NGO was talking again about finding a target for Mighty Mo.

They never learned what happened to the family on the little sail junk, but
that was not unusual. Incidents like that were common in Korea at that
time.

The Second Storm

The second storm came in June of 1953, as the lieutenant was taking
Seadragon north to occupy an outpost in the Yalu River estuary. The
sergeant had been rotated back to Ft. Bragg, and the lieutenant was alone
with the partisans. They had no way of knowing that the war would end the
following month, and that this was to be Seadragons final operation.
It was a long trip to the Manchurian border, so the lieutenant stopped
enroute at Yongpyong-do where Wolfpack West was headquartered.
Everyone he had known there was gone by then, but he would pay his
respects to their replacements, stretch his legs, and possibly have a final hot
meal in the American mess before heading north again.
They arrived at the island at low tide, so they couldnt tie up along the inner
breakwater but had to anchor further out in the harbor and come in by
wiggle boat. The last 50 meters the lieutenant removed his boots and waded
to shore through the ankle-deep water and, approaching the beach, the
mud. At one point, he cut his foot slightly on a broken seashell, but
thinking little of it, rinsed off the blood in the harbor water, replaced his
socks and boots, and moved along to the Wolfpack compound. They stayed
on the island until early afternoon, re-boarded the junk, and headed on
toward the North again. The sky was overcast, but at that point the sea and
the wind were fairly normal.
39 | P a g e

As night approached, though, a serious storm came on them rather

suddenly out of the south. Heavy waves and powerful winds took control of
the boat, sometimes lifting the bow off the crest of one wave and slamming
it down against the next. Rain was coming down in torrents, and it was
impossible to maintain a steady course. They reluctantly cut loose the
wiggle boat to enhance maneuverability, and the captain steered the junk in
survival mode, simply trying to avoid being capsized in the storm.
It was impossible to maintain footing on deck, so the twelve-man combat
crew stayed below in the two pitch-dark and stifling forward holds, while
the junk crew took shelter in the pilot house, standing upright but pitching
constantly and bracing themselves against the bulkheads. The lieutenant
and Kim were in the after hold, where they lived and slept at sea, trying to
hold their gear down inside the tossing junk. The hold was illuminated by a
small Coleman lantern, which they took turns holding to keep it from
tipping over. To communicate, even within the narrow space of the hold,
they had to shout to be heard above the sound of the wind, rain, and the
ocean. The junk, although more than twenty years old, was sturdy and well
powered, and they were not seriously fearful for their lives. It was, however,
a situation where nothing could be ruled out, and the storm showed no sign
of easing off.
They went on that way for three or four hours, during which the lieutenant
gradually became aware of a painful throbbing in his left leg and groin,
above the foot he had cut wading in to the island that morning. It took only
a moment to realize that the harbor water had been highly polluted by
sewage and other waste from the village there, and that he had been very
foolish not to have tended to it at once. He pulled off his boot and sock and
examined his foot in the light of the Coleman lantern.
The foot was badly infected, and obviously getting worse fast. The cut itself
was festered and suppurating, and his foot was swollen and had turned an
ominous purplish color. Red streaks were running up his leg, and the lymph
nodes in his groin were swollen and tender. Distraction with the storm had
sublimated the pain while the infection was developing, but now that it had
his attention it was impossible to ignore.
40 | P a g e

Kim, who until the lieutenant exposed his foot, had had no inkling of the
cut, was visibly shaken by the sight. Eyes wide, he shouted: Very bad, Sor.
We must find ship with doctor, very soon. He meant a U.S. warship, which,
in those circumstances, was a fantasy the lieutenant could not afford.
Thinking with the clarity of a condemned man, he knew that he would have
to treat the cut himself or possibly die there of the infection.
He had no medical supplies, not even a first aid kit. He rummaged through
his duffel bag and retrieved the only thing resembling a surgical tool that he
owned, an old hunting knife. He sterilized the blade in the flame of a candle,
and set to work on the bottom of his foot. The knife wasnt sharp enough to
cut cleanly, so he began painfully scraping off the discolored, dead flesh
around the edge of the cut. Between scrapings, he would rinse the wound off
in a large wooden bucket of ocean water that Kim had brought in from the
heaving, storm-swept deck, at some risk to his own safety. He went through
several cycles of this scraping and rinsing for well over an hour, until all the
discolored excess was gone and what was left was a circle of pink, healthy
flesh, oozing bright red blood. It was an onerous process, but he was
inspired to see it through by mental visions of the alternative and the
throbbing pain in his groin.
He asked Kim to go on deck again and bring down a fresh bucket of
seawater. When it arrived, he plunged his foot into it, fell exhausted back
onto his rolled-up sleeping bag, and slept for several hours. He awakened to
the sounds of the unabated storm, and to the concerned ministrations of
Kim, who had not slept but nervously stood watch over him during his long
nap. To his great relief, the throbbing had eased considerably, the foot was
less swollen, and the red streaks were almost gone. It seemed his brief
venture into surgery had been successful.
The storm abated around mid-day. In the early afternoon the skies cleared,
and they resumed their journey north. The lieutenant favored the foot for a
week or so, staying off it altogether for a few days. After a couple of weeks,
the foot returned to normal; it did not leave a permanent scar.

41 | P a g e

The Third Storm

The third storm was the worst, a real typhoon. It came during the first week
of July, while they were occupying the island outpost in the Yalu estuary.

The island was a tiny dot in the sea, no more than three acres at high tide,
and rose sharply out of the ocean; there were no tidal flats. From above, it

was shaped like a mitten for the right hand, palm up, with a narrow inlet
dividing the thumb from the fingers. The fingers and the palm rose some

twenty feet above the ocean at high tide, to a gently sloping surface covered
with grass and low shrubs. The heel of the hand rose to a rocky peak some

twenty feet higher, and the terrain fell off sharply from there down a steep,
rocky slope where the wrist would have been. The rocks were inhabited by
several hundred screeching seagulls, which, to the lieutenants

disappointment, turned out to be inedible, along with their eggs.

They pitched the squad tent on the flat area (palm), and mounted the

recoilless rifle nearby. They built a bunker on the peak (heel) for the
machine gun and the radio, and as a defensive position for four or five
members of the combat crew, in case the island was attacked by the
Chinese. Just after dark each night the junk, with most of the combat crew
aboard, would move out a few hundred meters, away from the mainland, in
a different spot every night, drop a drift anchor, and post sentries, with the
engine idling. The lieutenant, Kim, and a few combat crewmen would stay
on the island, wide awake, and they would all wait until dawn for the
Chinese to come. They were a tiny unit, heavily armed but alone in deepest
enemy territory, so no one was tempted to doze on watch.
If the Chinese did come, and actually tried to land on the island, the
lieutenant and Kim would first engage them with the recoilless rifle from as
far out as they could see (which would vary considerably, depending on the
moon and the weather). As they came closer, the combat crewmen in the
bunker would engage them with the .30 caliber light machine gun, radio the
Navy that they were under attack, and hoist a lantern up a 12 foot mast to
signal the junk that the Chinese had arrived. The junk would then come in
like the cavalry, its six .50 caliber machine guns blazing, and the Chinese
boats would be either sunk or driven away. That was the lieutenants plan,
42 | P a g e

anyway; but, like all combat plans, it would be good only until the first
exchange of gunfire.
The reality was more chancy. Everything would depend on the size and
composition of the force the Chinese sent to take them out. If it was small,
comparable to Seadragon, then the lieutenants plan had a decent chance of
turning them away. But if they sent more than one gunboat and more than,
say, thirty or forty soldiers, there was little chance at all. There would be
heavy casualties on both sides, but in the end everyone on the little island
would be taken out for sure, and even the junk might not escape. The
critical issue was how large a force the Chinese would be willing to put at
risk in order to take them out.
As it turned out, that proved to be very little. Possibly speculating (as the
lieutenant himself had done) that Seadragon might be the bait in an
American trap to draw the Chinese into committing serious assets to be
destroyed by superior U.S. Naval forces, the Chinese would move against
them only with caution. As long as Seadragon undertook no offensive
operations, the incentive to move on them would be low. Twice, early in
their stay, Chinese gunboats probed the island at night, firing several short
bursts of automatic weapons fire randomly into the dark. Seadragon
sensibly hunkered down and did not respond, and the gunboats went away.
Each morning at dawn, the junk would return to the island and shut down,
and everyone would have breakfast and sleep until early afternoon. Then
the lieutenant would lead them in calisthenics and gun drills for an hour or
so, and they would all rest until dusk, when the lieutenants nighttime plan
would take over again. Most days, in the late afternoon, the lieutenant
would take his air mattress down to the inlet, along with his only reading
material, a paperback remnant of Stendahls The Red and the Black that
he would read while floating around on the air mattress. An hour before
dark, he would roll off the air mattress, dive to the bottom, and bring up two
or three of the large sea snails that populated the inlet. He would then climb
back up to the tent and make a stew of the sea snails, bouillon cubes, and Cration vegetables for his dinner before setting up again to wait through the
night for the Chinese to come.
43 | P a g e

The little island was at the southwestern end of MIG Alley, the area along
the Korea-Manchurian border where the American jet fighters came up
from Kimpo every day to engage the Communist MIGs, often flown by
Soviet pilots, off the Antung Peninsula. The lieutenant assumed that if an
American pilot was shot down in their vicinity, Seadragon would be sent in
to recover him, as they had been at Chin Nampo. However, no such order
ever came.
One day, soon after their arrival, someone noticed an auxiliary fuel tank
from an American aircraft, floating down from the Yalu on the tide. Every
American jet fighter had two wing-mounted auxiliary fuel tanks, which they
drew on to get them up to MIG Alley, then jettisoned for greater airspeed
and maneuverability prior to engaging the MIGs. These aluminum tanks
were shaped like fat, pointed cigars, 12-15 feet long and 30 inches in
diameter at the mid-point. Each held 600 gallons of jet fuel, and was
equipped with an electric servo-motor by which the pilot could release it
from the aircraft. Hundreds of these tanks were dropped over the
approaches to MIG Alley during the final months of the war. Most of them
fell onto the mainland, but a few fell into the Yalu and its estuary, and a few
of those floated out past the Seadragon outpost. Recovering one of these
tanks was a small bonanza, because of the value of the aluminum and the
electric motor in resource-poor North Korea. They could trade them with the
North Korean fishing boats for fresh fish, vegetables, rubber sandals, and
other scarce items.
Over the next week, they recovered a second fuel tank, which they lashed
with the first onto the cabin of the junk. The partisans were more and more
eager to cash in on their bonanza, to the point where the lieutenant
reluctantly decided to let them go, even though it would mean dividing his
small force and leaving himself and a small party stranded on the island for
at least one long night. They would send six members of the combat crew
south to do the trading, leaving six on the island with the lieutenant and
Kim. The boat would leave early one morning, spend that day and the
following morning trading with the North Korean fishing fleet, and return
to the island no later than late afternoon of the following day.
44 | P a g e

The risks were, first, that the six partisans on the junk would join with the
junk crew, who were always anxious to desert, and head back to Inchon,
where the fuel tanks would be worth a small fortune on the black market.
Second, that the junk would encounter one or more Chinese gunboats
during the night and be damaged or sunk. And, third, that the island itself
would be attacked during the night and, with no cavalry in reserve, might
be taken. But Kim and the six partisans who would stay behind argued
forcefully that their colleagues on the junk would never abandon them, and
that during the night the junk could anchor well offshore to avoid the
Chinese gunboats. The only real concern would be that the Chinese would
decide to attack the island on that particular night, an acceptable calculated
risk. No one raised the possibility of a storm.
The junk left the following morning, under clear skies. The group on the
island spent the day strengthening the positions around their bunker and
planning how they might defend the island against various approaches by
the Chinese. In the late afternoon the lieutenant went down for his usual
swim, but was interrupted by rain, initially light, but soon quite heavy. He
scurried back up to the tent without any sea snails, lighted the Coleman
lantern and had a dinner of cold C-rations. Soon it became very dark and
the rain was coming down in heavy sheets. The typhoon had begun.
As it became clear they were having a serious storm, the lieutenants
immediate concern was for the junk; losing it would be a serious matter,
since the junk was integral to Seadragons mission and, indeed, its very
existence. At that point, he was not concerned with his own safety, or the
safety of the others on the island, but that was soon to change.
The lieutenant and Kim took shelter inside the large squad tent, sparsely
furnished with two cots, a low wooden table, and a folding canvas stool. The
Coleman lantern burned brightly on the table, and a few cases of C-rations
were stacked in one corner. As the storm developed, the canvas roof of the
tent became waterlogged and leaky; several large streams of water were
coming in on them, and the canvas floor of the tent was awash. The
lieutenant shut down the lantern to avoid adding fire to their problems, but
in doing so put them in total darkness.
45 | P a g e

The wind grew stronger. Over the next few hours it first destabilized the
tent, then battered it, and finally destroyed it. It began with series of
powerful gusts down the length of the tent, collapsing a large part of the
roof and pulling up several of the stakes that anchored it to the ground. The
tent lost structure and integrity, becoming a shapeless mass of heavy wet
canvas, supported only by one of the two main tent poles. When the
remaining tent pole gave way, the weight of the soaked tent roof slammed
the lieutenant down onto the floor, stunning him momentarily. When he
recovered, he yelled into the black void Wed better get out of here! and he
and Kim groped their way to the door of the tent, through the dark, puddled
crawl space formed between the table top, the cots and the watery floor of
the collapsed tent.
They emerged into the full brunt of the storm. Outside they had better
visibility but were drenched in sheets of rain and unable to stand upright in
the wind. On their hands and knees, they moved clear of the thrashing tent
to a natural depression where they hoped to find some shelter from the
heaviest winds. Even worse than the wind, their greatest concern was the
rising sea, which was already several feet higher than was normal at high
tide. If it kept rising, it could cover the island and wash them away. Many
small islands in the Yellow Sea were partly or entirely inundated at high
tide, even in normal weather.
The lieutenant briefly considered trying to move up the narrow trail to the

bunker, which was on higher ground, but he had no confidence they could
make it there, crawling through the storm. So he and Kim lay huddled

together in the rain for the next few hours, feeling the ocean rising toward

them. By morning, large waves were breaking noisily on the lower edge of
the mittens palm, only fifty feet or so from where they were lying. But

the rain had slowed to a drizzle and the wind to an irregular series of strong
gusts. By mid-morning, the sky was clear and blue, and the new day was
warm and calm.

They set about cleaning up after the storm, and the lieutenant again had
the luxury of worrying full-time about the motor junk. The tent site was a
shambles. The wind had ripped the tent open along one side, and shredded
46 | P a g e

parts of the roof. One of the main poles was broken in two, the other missing
altogether. From what the storm had left, they were able to make a crude
lean-to, large enough to accommodate the cots and their personal gear,
which had been smashed together inside one end of the canvas remnant of
the tent, soaked through but otherwise fine. Some of the canned C-rations
had spilled out of their wet cartons, but were still as edible as C-rations ever
got. They laid everything out on the ground to dry, a Manchurian yard sale
without customers.
The recoilless rifle was wet and muddy but, once they cleaned and oiled it,
fully operable again. The machine gun and other weapons had gotten wet,
but needed only routine maintenance. The radio, also, was OK. All they
needed now was the junk to come home and Seadragon would be back in
business.
And the junk did come home, right on schedule. In the mid-afternoon it
chugged in, tied up at its usual spot, and shut down amid a ragged round of
cheers from the tired small group onshore. The boat had ridden out the
storm offshore with no serious damage, and had had successful trading
sessions before and after. So, they all prepared to stand watch that night in
high spirits. They had survived the typhoon and would eat well at least for
the next two weeks. Seadragon had nothing to worry about except the
Chinese Army and possibly other storms.

47 | P a g e

EIGHT: TWO LETTERS FROM SUNWI-DO

Shortly after the raid on Hill 213 and shortly before the lieutenant and Kim
left the Wolfpacks for Seadragon, Lee Duk Yung and Kim asked the

lieutenants permission to write to his mother back in Tennessee. He

agreed, and enclosed the folded notes in his next letter home. He never read

them until he came upon them in his mothers effects after her death more
than forty years later. The letters (verbatim below) revealed a great deal

about the characters and feelings of these two young men, whose lives and

futures had been demolished by the war.

Dear Mrs.

18 Feb. 1952

I am glad to allow me to send letter to you by my commander. Here, my commander and

his body-guard Kim and I and everybody in this tent are very well, madam, and may I
introduce myself to you. My name is Lee Duk Yung and 20 years old and I am a
interpreter to my commander, madam. How are you and your family, madam. I was
schoolboy before war but after that I am refugee and all my family stay in communist
region, madam. So I am very solitary and alone, but I am very happy because I spend my
life with my commander since last Nov and I know about my commander well, madam.
He is very brave man and smart for everything and he loves me in instructors situation
and take care of me charity.
He has very hard problems to do for justice and our unit, but I know the man who is very
honest and justice is disliked by people who is not honest and coward. So he has very bad
situation but he is very smart and brave for hard work. So I never saw you before but I
like to send letter to report about your son but I am afraid that I cannot say much English
but I decide my mind that whenever I live here I like to write letter to you. Then I can
report you more about Korea and everything I got, madam.
Then see you again by letter next time and I am proud of my commander and the woman
who has like this commander. May God bless your family forever.

Yours truly, Lee Duk Yung

48 | P a g e

He did not write again. Lee Duk Yung, age 20, was killed a few weeks later
in a Chinese attack on the island.

Dear Mrs.

19th Feb.

I am very glad to send this letter to you and blessing it is God, madam. I never saw you
before but in picture and I heard about you very many times by Commander and pardon
me that I didnt write you before long but excuse me. May I introduce myself to you. My
name is Kim Jung Don and 19 years and I am body-guard of your son and my Commander
and I am very well madam and I hope your family are very well and my Commander stay
in Korea for the world peace and our country but our country is not suitable for American
and everything are unlucky and everyone covered with sadness and sorrow so that my
Commander have very many problems work to(o) hard for our country but I believe him
very brave and merry and smart so I am very happy to work for him and my Commander
never seems to(o) tired out to work for us because he likes to work for justice and peace
and we have spare times to talk each other at nightimes and then we were fall into the
happiness but sometime I thought about very merrily and happily in states because I was
school boy in Korea but I spend my life under my Commanders charity and instructions.
So I lind (bind? lend?) myself to you. I will work for him with my efforts. After that I shall
be succeed and I hope you understand letter about this because the custom is different
between the Korean and American. Then may god bless you your family are very well for
ever. Then I will take my pen off the paper. I wait for your answer.
From Kim

49 | P a g e

NINE: BRINGING OUT KING KONG

The lieutenant had been on the island almost five months. One morning as

he was having his powdered egg breakfast, the Wolfpack S-2 burst into the

tent and entered into a quiet but quite intense conversation in Korean with
Nam, Kim, and Lee Duk Yung. The 2nd Wolfpack Battalion, he said, had

sent a routine night patrol onto the mainland the previous week. Friendly
villagers there had disclosed that a North Korean agent was in the area,
carrying sizeable quantities of gold and narcotics, with the mission of

building a safe route for Communist spies to move clandestinely between

North and South Korea. His purpose was to recruit a network of local

villagers to shelter these spies and facilitate their movements, in the classic
manner of underground railroads. Sunwi-do, lying only 70 miles northwest

of Inchon and less than a mile off the mainland, would be a prime link in
any Communist safe route between the North and South Koreas.

The patrol had found the agent in a nearby village, and had brought him
back to the island, together with his cache of heroin and gold. The 2nd

Battalion commander had proudly reported this coup to the Wolfpack 8

leader, Kong, who, a pragmatic man above all else, had decided to keep the

agent for himself. He had ordered that the American should not be told

about the agent, that the gold and the heroin should be secreted by the 2nd

Battalion commander, and that the prisoner should be incarcerated in a

monkey cage an open, fenced-in pen where both enemy prisoners and

Wolfpack miscreants were held, pending their subsequent disposition. Kong

had also ordered that, while the agent could be interrogated, he could not,

for the time being, be tortured, since he might later become a long-term ally
and benefactor.

The S-2 was less pragmatic, more old-fashioned than his leader. He held to

the quaint belief that the war in their country actually had serious meaning,
and that it was not acceptable to help Communist spies commute between
Pyongyang and Seoul, even in return for sizeable quantities of precious
50 | P a g e

substances. Kim, Nam, and Lee were of the same mind, and painstakingly
explained the situation to the lieutenant in their limited English, making
absolutely sure that he understood the delicate position the S-2 was placing
himself in by giving the agent up.
Kong, it turned out, was back in Seoul for several days, consulting with
the senior officers of the lieutenants unit, of whom he was a great favorite.
A former officer in the Japanese army, Kong was tall and handsome, had
excellent English, and moved with impressive ease in the circle of senior
American officers in Seoul. It was rumored that they had even sneaked him
into Japan for a few days R&R with them in Tokyo. Kong, then, consorting
with colonels and majors, was a formidable player in the lieutenants senior
command structure. Most Americans referred to him as King Kong.
The lieutenant decided to go in the following morning, into the village on
the northern end of the island, where the 2nd Battalion was quartered, and
where the commander lived with his family. The agent was being held in a
nearby monkey cage, and the gold and heroin were concealed in a bag of rice
in a certain spot (described by the S-2) in the commanders house. The
lieutenant would take only Kim, reasoning that a larger group would both
attract undue attention and convey a lack of confidence, possibly inviting a
level of resistance that would easily overwhelm the maximum level of force
they could muster. He was also tacitly relying on the unproven assumption
that the Wolfpack leaders - including, most notably, Kong himself would
not jeopardize their livelihoods by killing an American officer on their own
ground. They would carry only the weapons they routinely carried, a .45
caliber pistol for the lieutenant and a semi-automatic carbine for Kim.
External normality would be the order of the day.
They slept (fitfully, fully dressed except for boots, as one did before any
operation) from midnight until around 3:00 am. There were no alarm clocks,
so at least two other members of their group in this case, Nam and Lee
Duk Yung had to stay awake, monitoring their wristwatches, and rouse
their colleagues at the appropriate time. They left the tent at 4:00 am; the
2nd Battalion village was some four miles away, over narrow mountain
51 | P a g e

trails, and they wanted to arrive at the commanders house just before sunup.
The thing went well. They were in and out of the village in less than 30
minutes, with the gold, the heroin, and the prisoner. The sleepy battalion
commander had been sullen but, in the end, compliant. The gold, cast into
small, delicate rings, and the heroin, in a shoe-box-sized metal container,
were found in the rice bag as expected, and the North Korean agent was
sleeping miserably on a straw mat on the dirt floor of the monkey cage. The
lieutenant and Kim never had to draw their weapons.
Back in their own village, the lieutenant had the agent incarcerated in the
local monkey cage, and spent the day deciding what to do. Theoretically, it
was a no-brainer: he had an enemy agent, with conclusive physical evidence,
and the obvious thing was to radio Seoul and take him in. But King Kong
was possibly indeed, almost certainly involved, almost certainly
complicit. And Kong was a popular favorite of the senior American people in
Seoul. If the lieutenant overreacted if, that is, he gave the impression that
he was naively discovering Oriental intrigue where none could be proved he could bring the wrath of the higher echelons down on his own shoulders
while Kong and the agent went their merry ways. In the end, that was more
or less how it turned out.
The lieutenant got on the radio and reported to Seoul that he had an enemy

agent of possible strategic intelligence value, and that partisan leaders

appeared to be involved. The response was immediate: were sending a

chopper at first light tomorrow. Negative, said the lieutenant, sensibly; the

chopper pilot wont want to set down this close to the mainland (although, if

you lived here, you knew it was pretty safe. The pilot, who lived in Seoul,

would think he was deep inside enemy lines), so they should make the

pickup in Donkey territory, on the extreme seaward end of the island and as

far from the mainland as possible. Itll take us a couple of hours to get over
there, and I dont want to travel those mountain trails in Donkey territory
in the dark. So have him come in at 1000 hours, and he gave the map
coordinates of a suitable location.
52 | P a g e

The 3-4 mile trek across the mountains into the Donkey area was slow
going. The trail was narrow, steep, and primitive, and their prisoner,
somewhat the worse for wear after several days of interrogation in

monkey cages, had his hands bound tightly behind his back with EE8
telephone wire, and staggered slowly along the trail, falling down at

intervals and requiring assistance in moving along. Along the steeper

stretches, they virtually had to carry him, together with their own gear.

They arrived at the rendezvous point almost an hour late, finding the
chopper pilot in a nervous state. The range of emotions among the parties
was extreme. The helicopter pilot and the North Korean agent were fearing
for their lives, for quite different and both ill-conceived reasons. The
lieutenant and Kim, to their certain knowledge miles further away from
danger than they had been for weeks, smiled amiably at the pilot and dozed
comfortably during the brief flight down to Kimpo.
In Seoul, they were met by agents of the CIC (Counterintelligence Corps), a
major and a captain, who took charge of the prisoner, the gold, and the
heroin. (The lieutenant persuaded them to let him keep one of the gold
rings, as a souvenir). During the late afternoon the lieutenant was debriefed
by the CIC officers. He told them what he knew, together with his strong
suspicion that the guerilla leader Kong was somehow involved. Assuming
that his own part in the scenario was over, the lieutenant checked into the
safe house BOQ for the night, had a long, hot shower, and went to the units
secure Officers Mess for cocktails and dinner.
There the scenario changed rather abruptly. Kong, it appeared, had been in
Seoul for the past few days, but had left that morning to return to his base
on the island. He would be arriving during that night, and would soon be
apprised that the agent had been discovered, and that the lieutenant was in
Seoul, carrying a set of facts and implications that might be quite adverse to
Kongs interests. The first order of business, then, was to determine what
Kongs role and intentions had actually been, and that, obviously, could best
be done by interrogating Kong himself.
53 | P a g e

But by this time Kong was ensconced back in his own base, 70 miles deep

into North Korea, and would be in no mood to journey back to Seoul for such
questioning. It was also a factor that the most senior American officers of
the lieutenants unit, who regarded Kong as one of theirs, were not yet

aware of the situation regarding the agent. Once they knew, it was feared,

they would at very least slow the process down to a crawl, making any

complicity by Kong much more difficult to establish.

The CIC officers came over to the lieutenant during the cocktail hour in

the Officers Mess. We were wondering, the major said, almost casually,
whether you might be willing to go back up there and try to bring King

Kong down here for questioning. This prisoner isnt talking, and we really
need to get to the bottom of this mess. What do you think?

The lieutenant, no hero, considered this very carefully before he replied,

Sure, Major, Id be happy to bring him back. I think it will be pretty simple
if we do it right away.
What do you mean right away? asked the major, and how many men will
you need?
Right away means ASAP, sir, before they have time to think about it up
there. Id leave right now, except Id want to get there during the early
evening, and its too late for that tonight. If Im going to do it, Id like to go
in tomorrow night. Get there around 2000-2100 hours.
Okay, said the major, we have a nice boat you can use. Twin Grey Marine
engines, makes about 18 knots. Assuming its big enough. How many men
do you need?
Oh, I dont need any men, sir. I have this one Korean guy, goes around with
me. He and I can do it, no problem. Thats how we brought out the prisoner
to begin with. If we take a larger group, we attract attention, and were
outnumbered in any case. Kong has close to a thousand partisans up there.
Show of force, we lose. Walk in quietly, throw down on him, walk out quietly
is the way, I think.
54 | P a g e

Standing in their group, taking all this in, was a young Air Force second

lieutenant, assigned as liaison to the partisan headquarters in Seoul. Ill

go! he almost shouted. What do you mean, youll go? said the
lieutenant. I want to go with you, he said, I can help.

One, said the lieutenant, we dont need help. Youd just clutter up the

place. Two, maybe Ive made this sound too easy. Theres a fair degree of

risk involved; we lose somebody every few days up there, just minding our

business. This is a little bit closer to the edge. You could get hurt, or get us
hurt, for no useful purpose.

Id really like to go, the young man said, a little too emotionally. Ill do

anything you say. The lieutenant was not thinking wisely; hes about my

age, and must be frustrated down here, he thought; he could be company on

the way up and back, and he may not get another chance to do anything this

interesting in this war - or, for that matter, for the rest of his life.

Okay, the lieutenant said, how about if you rode up and back with us in

the majors fancy Grey Marine engine junk, and just hung around on the

beach to secure the boat while my friend and I go in after Kong? Thats a

critical job, and youd still have been deeper into North Korea than most
people ever get.

If thats your best offer, the Air Force officer said, grinning broadly Ill
take it.
In the end, they took him with them all the way. The majors boat was
luxurious by Wolfpack standards, with an eight-mat tatami-floored cabin, a
kerosene heater and a Coleman lantern. The trip up took about four hours,
and they landed without incident on the western side of Kongs island, at a
point only a mile or so from Kongs headquarters.
They landed the junk, posted security, and the three of them walked

unchallenged over the steep narrow trail across the coastal hills, and down
into Kongs compound. (Security is lousy here, he thought. Its no wonder I
havent been sleeping well lately.) Entering the compound, they could see

that the center of activity was the lieutenants own tent, which he had left
55 | P a g e

only two days before as he took the prisoner south. He had carried most of
his personal gear with him (not that he had had all that much), realizing in
leaving that it might be awkward coming back.
There was a tense moment when they entered the tent, brushing their way
through the canvas flaps covering the entrance. This time, they came in
with their weapons drawn, but at their sides. As usual, the lieutenant was
carrying a .45 caliber pistol and Kim had a .30 caliber automatic carbine.
The Air Force lieutenant had pulled out a chrome-plated .38 caliber pistol
the showpiece weapon carried in hip holsters by all the rear echelon officers
back in Seoul. Whether he had any idea how to fire it, or whether it was too
rusty to fire at all, was anybodys guess.
Inside, Kong and several senior partisan leaders were milling around
casually like guests at a frontier saloon drinking party. Some of them were
staggering drunk. The tent had been trashed, and in the center the S-2, who
three days before had compromised the agent and exposed Kongs
involvement, was tied in a wooden chair, naked to the waist. His face had
been damaged, and there were bleeding welts and bruises over his arms and
upper body.
Everything stopped when they came in. All of the partisans wore side arms
in holsters, but they didnt attempt to use them, seemingly stunned by the
lieutenants unexpected reincarnation. The lieutenant, who had counted
heavily on precisely that reaction, said, Kim, ask everyone to please stay
calm. Last thing we need is some shooting here. We just want a few words
with Mr. Kong. Very calm and very careful is the way. Then he said to the
visiting Air Force lieutenant, Put away your pistol, and untie that guy in
the chair, will you? We need to take him back with us or these folks may kill
him when we leave.
He walked over to Kong and said respectfully, Mr. Kong, wed like to invite
you to come back down to Seoul with us, to clarify some things. We dont
want to cause any problem here, least of all to get you or me shot, so we
should all just walk out nicely together. So please tell your men here that
everything is OK.
56 | P a g e

Kong, an extremely cool customer even in the worst of times, was not drunk.
Realizing that he was at a tactical disadvantage and probably thinking that
he would have friends in high places in Seoul, he exuded confidence and
calm. He spoke briefly to the group in Korean and, pulling on a GI field
jacket, started walking toward the flaps leading out of the tent. The
lieutenant had to hustle to keep up.
The lieutenant said, Kim, tell the S-2 to come with us; hell be OK in
Seoul. But the S-2 declined. No, he said (in Korean, through Kim) if they
wanted to kill me, Id be dead by now. My wife and children are here, and
my parents are in a village just across the channel on the mainland. I cant
leave them. This thing will pass very soon. Please go. So, not without
misgivings, the lieutenant left him there.
Going back in the CICs fancy junk was a little tense. Kong, aloof,
alternately hostile and bored, was silent throughout the trip. The Air Force
lieutenant, adrenalin still pumping, wanted to keep talking about the
operation, while the lieutenant and Kim just wanted to sleep.
Back in Seoul that afternoon, they turned Kong over to the CIC people and
the lieutenant heard nothing for three days. Finally, he was called in, not by
the CIC but by the operations officer in his own unit. Do you realize what
the hell youve done? the major yelled at him. Youve been playing Boy
Scout with one of the most valuable partisan leaders weve got, and you
almost turned him against us with some bullshit tale about double agents.
Not double agents, sir. Just one Communist agent, and a fairly important
one, I thought.
If you mean that prisoner you brought in, as far as we could tell, he was
just an ordinary NKA soldier they caught on the mainland one night, no

agent or anything like that. We turned him over to the ROKs and he was
interned as a POW. End of story. End of your bullshit story.

How do we explain the gold and the heroin, Major?

57 | P a g e

The major gave him a long, cold look. There is no gold or heroin, or any
record of gold or heroin. That is another part of your phony bullshit story.
Sir, the CIC officers saw the gold and heroin. They took them into custody.
They must have them somewhere.
Those CIC officers have no recollection of any gold or heroin. I questioned
them myself, and I have their sworn statements. They have been sent on
TDY to Tokyo for a few weeks, so that part of your bullshit story is over,
too.
Standing very stiffly at attention, the lieutenant said simply, I see, sir.
And, of course, with one of the majors non-existent, bullshit gold rings in
his pocket as he spoke, he did see, everything, pretty clearly.
The question now, the major said, is what to do with you. Obviously you
cant go back to Kongs area. Personally, Id like to bring charges against
you, but we dont want to draw attention to ourselves any more than we
have to. Somebody suggested that we transfer you to an infantry unit on
the MLR, but youve got too much sensitive information in your head to just
turn you loose up there.
So we have this garbage outfit down in Inchon. Twenty, thirty people
claiming theyre pirates, with a couple of old motor junks. Want to patrol up
and down the West Coast, saving shot-down pilots, harassing Communist
coastal activity, stuff like that. So were going to send you down there to
take over that little group. Try to make something useful out of it. And
remember, well have an eye on you. Screw up again and well nail your
Goddam adolescent West Point honor system ass to the wall.
Such had been the inauspicious beginning of Operation Seadragon.

A few weeks later, the lieutenant was back in Seoul to report on his
progress with the pirates. During the cocktail hour at the officers club, the
lieutenant encountered the American commander of the Donkey unit that
had operated from the southern half of Kongs island. He was an elderly
58 | P a g e

captain, a WWII reservist who had been recalled at the beginning of the
Korean War and, through some fluke, had been assigned to the partisans,
strangely out of place among all the young paratroopers commanding other
guerilla units on the northern islands. He was in his 50s, grey, and
considerably overweight. Wisely, he had not personally led raids onto the
North Korean mainland, but had been fairly aggressive in sending patrols
and raids into his assigned territory there. They had met once, briefly, on
the island.
Good to see you again, said the captain, Lets step outside for a few

minutes, get some air. They took their drinks out onto a balcony, shivering

in their thin fatigues in the March cold as the sun was disappearing behind
the war-battered Seoul skyline. Do you remember that Communist agent

you brought in a while back? he asked softly. Yes, sir, I do. the lieutenant
said, thinking Oh shit, here we go again.

Well, it seems these bastards down here turned him loose. About a month
ago, one of my patrols caught him again, operating in my area this time,
with a new supply of gold and heroin. My Donkeys brought him to me, and I
had a choice to make.
What choice was that, Captain? the lieutenant asked, as neutrally as he
could. He still didnt know where all this was going.
Well, one option, I could turn him in, like you did, the captain said, but
they would just have let him go again, and I would have been on their shit
list, like you are. So, I figured, another option, I could eliminate the
middlemen and turn him loose myself. Why fight city hall, you know?
Is that what you did, Captain, let him go?
The captain took a long pull at his bourbon on the rocks. He wasnt looking
at the lieutenant, but squinting out toward the Seoul skyline, the sun now

gone behind the ruined buildings. He peered out into the dusk. No, he

said, I shot the son of a bitch. Personally. Myself. I didnt like those other
options all that much. We dropped his body off on the mainland the next

night.
59 | P a g e

The lieutenant, who had had other stressful experiences but had never
personally executed anyone, absorbed that news for perhaps thirty seconds.
Well, I have to say, Captain, I admire your style. And I thank you for
telling me. I assume this is not common knowledge.
No, said the captain. Just me and a couple of Donkeys that I trust. But I
thought youd like to know.
I appreciate this very much, sir, the lieutenant responded.
They shook hands, and went separately back into the warmth of the club.

60 | P a g e

TEN: CHIN NAMPO

They were tied up alongside the long stone breakwater at Cho-do, at low
tide, which, given the 32 tide differential on the Korean west coast, meant
that they were high aground in the mud, with long poles propping the junk
upright against the breakwater. In a few hours, the tide would come
rushing in again, and they would be floating freely. Until then, though, they
were grounded. Cho-do, controlled by UN forces, was a relatively large
island, lying in deep water several miles off the West Korean coast and
another several miles south of the harbor at Chin Nampo, the major North
Korean port city.
A jeep drove up to the head of the breakwater and the swarthy little captain
who was the S-3 (operations officer) of the Leopard Group, got out and
walked briskly out onto the breakwater until he was abreast of the junk.
The lieutenant, the sergeant, and Kim waited for him on deck, at the point
where the curved hull of the junk abutted the breakwater.
The captain, as always, was brief. We have a pilot down somewhere in

Chin Nampo harbor, dont know where, they havent spotted him yet. They

have an air cap on right now, UN fighters covering the whole area, shoot

anything that moves to take him. If our guys can spot him, theyll call in the
choppers, take him home. But thats only good until dark. After that,

Chinese gunboats come out to pull him in and take him to their home.

Which we would not welcome, you see. So, what they want you to do is go in
there tonight and try to find this guy before they do, and bring him home.
Questions?

The lieutenant and the sergeant were trying, somewhat unsuccessfully, not
to laugh. Yes, sir, I do have one question, just to be clear on this. The

captain said, Shoot!, and the lieutenant, still trying not to laugh, said,

Okay, if I understand this correctly, they want us to go into that harbor,

maybe 100, 150 square miles, and try to find this one lone guy, who may not

61 | P a g e

even be there, floating around in a Mae West, with all these

Chinese gunboats after him too, in the dark?
Thats right, responded the captain, Are you questioning Higher
Authority?
Me, Captain? Question Higher Authority? Not on your life, sir. You know
us, Captain, go where were sent, do what were told, and try to get back as
best we can. But youve got to admit, sir, this ones a bit of a stretch.
Fucking insane, the sergeant said, not quite under his breath, and then, in
his usual drawl, and now aloud and quite serious. Captain, why dont they
send us in during the day, when we can see the pore SOB, and when the air

cap can keep the Chink gunboats away? If we fly our flag, or somehow mark
ourselves so they know not to shoot us, then we might, just might, be able
to bring him out. This way, theres no chance in hell we can find him in the
Goddam dark, before they do, and a real good chance theyll kill us in the
meantime.

First, said the swarthy captain, you cant get there before dark. Youre
aground here for at least two more hours, with another two to get inside
there. You cant get there in the daylight we have left today.
The lieutenant: Then how about tomorrow morning, Captain? Why not go
in then, first light?
Second, the captain went on as if the lieutenant had not spoken, If we
wait for daylight, chances are very good that the damn Chinks will find him
during the night. His only chance and everybody agrees its a slim one is
you. Youre our only shot tonight, so you have to give it a try.
He went on, As regards going back in there tomorrow, Higher Authority
(i.e., God, in the captains way of thinking) must know something we dont,
or they wouldnt make up ground rules that may strike us as a little funny.
We are ignorant dogface soldiers here, Lieutenant, and we dont question
Higher Authority. Good luck to you. He strode back to his jeep and drove
away.
62 | P a g e

They were still shaking their heads, but the captain had been right about
two things. First, they had to get into that harbor just as fast as they could dark, slim chance, gunboats, whatever. They couldnt just abandon this guy
to the Chinese for the night. Second, the captain was right about the
timing. They couldnt float the junk for another two or three hours, during
which they tried, unsuccessfully, to come up with a rational plan for finding
and recovering the pilot before the Chinese found him or worse, discovered
them and sank their junk. They would, in typical dogface fashion, go in
dumb and blind and just drive around inside there, hoping for the best.
They finally pushed off from the breakwater about two hours before dark,
and arrived at the mouth of Chin Nampo harbor in deep dusk, some fog,
and what was beginning to look like a fairly serious rain storm. They pulled
up to a small, rocky islet which, the lieutenant had been told, was an
observation post for a Leopard unit operating in the Chin Nampo area. The
lieutenant and Kim jumped off the heaving junk onto the rocks and made
their way to a level spot where a local Leopard chief was waiting to liaise
with them. The lieutenant asked (through Kim, interpreting), What can
you tell us about the harbor, Chief? Shore batteries in daytime, replied
the Chief, We can never go in in daylight. Chinese gunboats at nighttime.
Very difficult go in even at nighttime.
Well, we are going in tonight, right away. What is your advice? My
advice? No go in! Chinese very active tonight. Go in tonight crazy.

How many gunboats? asked the lieutenant. Most nights, two or three.
But tonight very busy. Maybe four or five. Go in tonight very crazy.

Thanking the chief (for nothing, he thought), the lieutenant and Kim reboarded the junk, and the lieutenant called a meeting of himself, the

sergeant, Kim, and the junk captain, to decide how best to search the harbor
for the pilot in darkness, rain, and fog. The captain had some knowledge of

the harbor from visits before the war, but had little interest in going back in

under then prevailing conditions, especially into the company of several

Chinese gunboats. Kim interpreted: Captain say, Sor, this crazy. He will not
take junk into harbor tonight. Too danger. Captain say he will not go in.

63 | P a g e

Okay, the lieutenant said, ignoring the captains refusal Lets push off.

Tell the captain to take us all the way into the inner harbor first, then work

our way out. That way well get the hairiest part of it out of the way, and be
further from the shore batteries when daylight comes. Tell him to follow the
back-and-forth pattern we talked about this afternoon, and stay well clear of

the shallow areas. Tide will start to run out in a couple of hours, and we
sure as hell dont want to get stuck in here.

And listen, he said, if we run across any Chinese gunboats, which is

almost certain, we will not fire on them unless we absolutely have to. Kim,

tell the guys that I and the sergeant will personally shoot anyone who fires
without my order. If we get in a firefight in there theyll all come at us and

well be outgunned and outnumbered four or five to one. Theyll take us out,

for sure. So, we bump into them, we turn away sharply and try to lose them.

If they chase us, we run for it, firing the stern guns and maybe Ill get on the

.57 recoilless. Shouldnt be too hard in this fog even at our speed, and
theyre probably not expecting us in here, anyway.
Yes, Kim grinned, they dont know we crazy.

They steered directly into the inner harbor and began the back-and-forth
course, hoping against the long odds to stumble across the floating pilot.
The rain was hard and steady now, and the fog was thick. Visibility was

never more than 50 yards at best, mostly much less. To everyones surprise,
the water was phosphorescing, creating a pale, eerie glow as the bow cut

through and trailing off in the wake of the junk. It was visible, however, and

the engine was pretty noisy, pong-pong-pong, so it wasnt likely they could
sneak around, glowing and noisy as they were.

They stayed inside the harbor for almost seven hours, from around 2100

hours until 0400 the following morning, by which time the weather had

cleared and the sun began to appear as a faint pink glow over the city of

Chin Nampo. They had had their first sighting of a Chinese gunboat within

the first hour, when it crossed their bow at a range of perhaps 30 yards, a

dark shadow with a phosphorescent wake, half again as long as the

Seadragon junk and almost twice as fast. The Seadragon junk captain was

64 | P a g e

steering his own course, hopefully on the agreed pattern, but no one really
knew except him.
I am technically in command here, the lieutenant thought, legally and
morally responsible for whatever happens, good or bad, but I am by no
means in control. This junk captain can take us wherever he wants, and I
will not have any true sense of where we are. I am, at the end of it, merely
his passenger. He probably will not want to take us too far from our agreed
course, though, because he is acutely aware that I and the sergeant, if not,
indeed, the partisan combat crew, would treat him very harshly if we
discovered he had tried to abort or divert our mission. It is also possible,
however remotely, that he has developed some sympathy for the downed
pilot and hopes as we do that we can find him. So, we muddle on.
During the night, which seemed to everyone to last several nights, they had
frequent, adrenalin-rushing near-misses with the Chinese gunboats. The
rain was driving down and the fog kept visibility to a minimum. A few times
they passed close enough to hear the Chinese crew members calling out to
one another, and to see their phosphorescent trails in the water. Once, they
passed alongside a Chinese boat going in the opposite direction, at a
distance of no more than ten yards, swish, like passing cars on a narrow
two-lane road. The Chinese did not turn off course to pursue them, but the
lieutenant imagined the Chinese crewmen thinking Huh? What was that?
Thank God, he thought, they dont know we crazy.
Finally, as dawn approached, they chugged out of the harbor and anchored
a few miles offshore. No one wanted to talk, or eat, or make rice or coffee, or
anything else except collapse and sleep. They lay sprawled on the deck for 2
or 3 hours, until the bright sun awakened them, adrenalin still pumping a
little from the bump-a-car scene with the Chinese gunboats. Then the
Americans and Kim made coffee, ate cans of C-ration fruit, and just moped
on the deck of the anchored junk while the deck boy cooked big pots of rice
and fish for the combat crew and the junk people. The lieutenant was
thinking that they would throw it in at this point, go back to the pier at
Cho-do and await their next mission. Bummer, though.
65 | P a g e

The lumberjack sergeant was sitting on the forward port gunwale, long

thick legs outstretched on the deck and holding his canteen cup of C-ration
coffee. Out of nowhere, in a casual, by-the-way tone, he said, If you was

floating around in there, gesturing with his head and his canteen cup

toward the inner harbor, and you had somehow got through the night,

freezing your balls off in that cold water, and you knew we was out here and
could come in and save your pore ass, (pause) and then you knew we wasnt

even going to try how would you feel?

The lieutenant took this in, because he had been struggling with the same
thought himself. They had been strictly ordered to stay out of the harbor
during daylight hours, because the air cap was going to blast anything that
moved into smithereens. But that order was stupid, since it did nothing
whatever to recover the downed pilot, and the longer they waited, the
greater the certainty he would be lost. The sergeants logic was compelling.
How would we feel if we knew salvation was so near, and yet not even
trying to help us?
But, Goddammit, they had been told to stay out of that harbor or be fair
game for the UN aircraft. One assumed, also, that, while the Chinese
gunboats would not be out in daylight, the NKA shore batteries would be
active, so they would be going into a real hornets nest Chinese shore
batteries and UN air cap - if they ventured back into the inner harbor
without clearance. The thought occurred to him that he could radio for
clearance to go back in, but Higher Authority, in its wisdom, would almost
certainly say no. That wouldnt solve the sergeants problem, or what was
beginning to be his own, and would surely lead to a court martial for the
lieutenant if they went directly back in in the face of an explicit, real time
order. So they probably had to go back in, just on their own. Never ask the
rabbi if its kosher.
What are you saying, John? You want us to go back in there?"
All Im saying, the sergeant went doggedly on, is if you was in there,
and
John, the lieutenant demanded, do you want to go back in there, or not?
66 | P a g e

All Im saying, the sergeant began again; but the lieutenant had already
cut the cord.
Aw, shit, John, he said. Kim! Tell them to fire up the goddam engine.

The sergeant here is anxious to get us all killed. Kim, who had been taking
their conversation in, grinned, shook his head in mock disbelief, and passed
on the order. Most of the combat crew were smiling, nodding yes! Forty

minutes later they were chugging back into Chin Nampo harbor in broad

daylight. Well, the lieutenant thought, lets face it: we crazy.

This was a very different scene from the one they had left just a few hours
before. The sun was well up in a totally blue sky by now. It was one of those
wonderful cloudless storybook days that always seem to follow a storm at
sea, and visibility was limited only by their eyesight and the strength of
their binoculars. There was very little wind and the ocean surface was flat,
with only a few light swells. They couldnt have asked for better conditions,
although, to be fair about it, neither could the shore batteries or the air cap.
Going back in, compared to the tension and apprehension of the dark, soggy
night before, the mood was upbeat and confident, even cocky, about finding
the pilot. Maybe he drifted near the shore, they said, and holed up there
while we and the gunboats churned around further out. If thats it, we can
just follow the shoreline around until we spot him, and then take him home.
Inside, they turned northeast and began following the shoreline clockwise

around the harbor, about 300 meters from the shore. The lieutenant and

the sergeant took turns with the binoculars, while the combat crew manned
their stations, all systematically scanning the shoreline and the harbor,

looking for any small sign of their man. It wasnt long, however, before they

realized how big the harbor was, and how slim were their chances. If he was
along the shore, and visible, the North Korean civilians would have turned
him in by now. If he was holed up somewhere, Seadragon wouldnt be able
to see him, and he wouldnt know who they were, to signal them. Even

assuming, that is, that he had actually come down in the harbor, and hadnt
been picked off by the gunboats during the night. But they had to go

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through the process, and they did, with excessive care if he was still in
there, they must not let him slip away.
There was very little activity visible on the shore. They saw a few civilians
in the familiar white farmers attire, moving in the fields outside the city,
but virtually no movement in the harbor, and no pilot in a Mae West. When
they reached the northern end of the harbor, they turned and headed south,
skirting the eastern shore, about 1000 meters out, looking, looking.
At one point they sighted a small sail junk tied up alongside a rickety
wooden pier, and decided to go in and cut it out. The lieutenant had very
mixed feelings about taking anything of value from ordinary North Korean
people, who were already living totally miserable lives and for whom he had
developed a great deal of sympathy while living among them on the island
for a time. But these Koreans were, after all, part of an enemy complex, and
they would do harm to the Seadragon crew, given the chance. So they went
in and cut away the junk, a single-masted fishing vessel, possibly 20 feet
long, and in pretty fair condition, and tied it to the stern. It was soon
apparent that the new boat was a significant drag, cutting their speed by a
third or more; but, under no hostile fire and having taken their prize, they
chugged cheerfully on in the beautiful technicolor morning.
Then, everything seemed to happen at once. First, they went aground.
Suddenly, as if a giant invisible foot had pressed on the brake, the boat slid
to an abrupt stop on a large submerged mud flat, causing everyone to lurch
forward on the deck. Oohh, shiiit! This was the nightmare they had all
dreaded most, stuck in broad daylight, within easy range of the Communist
shore guns, and with the tide rushing out at one inch every minute. If they
didnt move clear in five minutes, they would be hopelessly mired in place;
twenty minutes more, and they would be immobilized on an exposed mud
flat, completely at the mercy of the enemy shore batteries for several hours.
Worse yet, this was an excellent first step toward the nightmare of getting
captured.
The junk captain, no stranger to mud flats and receding tides, slammed the
engine into reverse and began maneuvering the junk off the mud flat, the
68 | P a g e

way one rocks a stuck automobile out of snow. But it wasnt working; they
were stuck fast and the rapidly receding tide was sticking them faster, one
inch deeper every minute. Then, before anyone knew what was happening,
the two Yus, first cousins from a village near Haeju, had leaped into the
water and, wading shoulder-deep, laid hands on the keel and had begun
rocking the boat up and down while pushing it astern. Within moments,
they were joined by other members of the combat crew and those on deck
felt the junk slide a few inches in the right direction. Now the men in the
water were working in unison, chanting the Korean version of heave-ho:
Oggi-oh-CHO! Oggi-oh-CHO! Then the screw got a few seconds traction and
the junk backed free off the mud.
It had been an amazing display of grace under stress by the Yus, but no one
had time to be amazed just then, because meanwhile the Communist shore
guns had begun firing. So long as the junk had been coming nearer, the
guns had no reason to fire; the target was only getting fatter. But when they
saw that the junk was aground, the target became too fat to pass up.
There were three, possibly four guns, probably Russian 76 mm direct fire
guns, and they seemed to be firing a coordinated pattern. The first round

swished over them and landed some fifty meters off their starboard bow. It

made a loud BLAM and sent a large geyser of seawater into the air, but did

no harm to Seadragon. A second round passed forward of the junk, this time

missing by forty meters, BLAMsplash, while the Yus were laboring to

free it. There was every reason to expect the firing would intensify.

Sergeant! shouted the lieutenant, the unaccustomed formality reflecting

the stress he was feeling. Sir! responded the sergeant, in kind. Sergeant,
cut that boat loose from the fantail and lets get the hell out of here. He was
trying hard to be calm, but was feeling considerable strain. (He later
thought he might have used the f-word instead of hell). The sergeant trotted
back to the fantail and released the captive sail junk. The captain, needing
no order, turned the junk sharply away from the guns and headed out of the
harbor as fast as he could chug.

69 | P a g e

Turning away helped somewhat. Moving parallel to the shore, the target
they had presented was the full length of the boat, and the range was
constant. Moving away, the target was reduced to the beam of the boat and
the range was steadily increasing in their favor. Even so, they should have
been an easy target for direct fire guns at less than 2000 meters; their
chances of getting away were close to zero.
The guns were firing about twice a minute, sometimes a single round,

BLAMsplash, sometimes two or three rounds, BLAMBLAMBLAM

splaaaash. All of the volleys came within 50 meters of the boat; several

came much closer, rocking the junk and splashing water over everyone on

deck. Fortunately, the Communists were using contact fuses, meaning that
they had to make a direct hit on the junk to do serious harm. If they had

been using proximity fuses, the rounds would have detonated in the air

above the junk, causing concussion shocks on the deck and raking it with

deadly chunks of shrapnel. As it was, the rounds were detonating in the cold
ocean water, showering the area with salt spray and small fragments of

shrapnel. BLAMsplash. BLAMBLAMsplaaaash.

They tried to take evasive action, with Kim lying along the port gunwale,

feet astern, looking back at the guns. Whenever he saw a muzzle flash on
shore, Kim would instantly signal the lieutenant, who was standing on
deck, near the bow, facing aft. The lieutenant, hoping to out-guess the
gunners, would then spin his hand right or left, signaling the sergeant, who
had taken the helm from the captain. The sergeant would give the boat hard
rudder in the direction of the lieutenants signal. When the rounds came in,
BLAMBLAMsplash, and they werent hit, they would swing back onto the
outbound course and wait for the next muzzle flash. Whether all this frantic
zig-zagging accomplished anything useful was questionable; however, the
lieutenant thought later, it gave them something to do instead of just sitting
there waiting to be hit.
But, incredibly, they were not hit; through some near-miracle of luck and
bad Communist gunnery, they just kept moving, pong-pong-pong. They had
been under fire for 10-12 minutes when one of the combat crew began
gesturing excitedly toward the sky, at two fighter planes circling at low
70 | P a g e

altitude. Uh-oh, the air cap was back. The aircraft, which turned out to be
British and propeller-driven, had apparently been circling on station at a
higher altitude; they must have observed the junk taking gunfire and were
coming down for a closer look. They made one pass over the junk, during
which the lieutenant had all the Koreans lie face down on the deck while the
two Americans removed their caps and stood waving and pointing to their
faces: Look, goddammit, were Americans!
They never knew whether the pilots could actually see their faces, but they
must have realized by context that the junk was some sort of U.N.-friendly
operation (else why would the Communist shore batteries be firing on
them?). The fighters then made a couple of low passes over the area where
the guns were located, which apparently was enough for the NKA gun
crews. They ceased fire and Seadragon finally exited the scene.
Forty minutes later, well clear of the coast, they dropped anchor and shut
down. They were all pretty much out of adrenalin, and very tired. The
sergeant came out of the pilot house, settled onto the forward deck, and
immediately fell asleep. Kim, who had been with the lieutenant on other
tense operations, came up smiling wearily, and they gripped hands and
embraced for a moment. The lieutenant made his way to his favorite spot on
deck, the point of the bow, where he sat down on the deck facing aft and
leaned back against the gunwale like a chaise longue.
He was just drifting off when his eyes focused momentarily on the sergeant,
snoring open-mouthed on the bare deck, looking vulnerable and a little
stupid, and the lieutenant was caught up in a small epiphany. You, he
thought. You are the crazy one. You are the one who is fucking insane.
Okay, we didnt find him, but you made us try, by God, go back into that
hairy shit when no one else, including me, was going to do it. If we had
found him, you should have been highly decorated for this, and I would have
put you in for it. You are smarter than Higher Authority and a better
soldier than I will ever be.
He then went to sleep with a big smile on his face. Crazy sonofabitch, he
thought, one of these days he will get us killed.
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ELEVEN: GOING HOME

One sweltering morning in July, one of the lookouts ran shouting up to the
lieutenants lean-to, having sighted a motor junk approaching from the
south. As it drew nearer, they saw it was flying an American flag off the
fantail, and, through the binoculars, the lieutenant recognized the swarthy
little martinet of a captain who was the Leopard operations officer from
Cho-do. He was standing at the bow with one foot up on the gunwale,
striking a theatrical, crossing-the-Delaware pose, probably for the benefit of
some imagined audience.
The lieutenant climbed down the rocky point to meet the junk, wearing only

fatigue trousers and komu shin, the Korean rubber sandals worn by the

partisans. It occurred to him that he must look something like Robinson

Crusoe, shaggy hair, sunburnt, half-naked and ragged, except that he had

made a point of shaving every day. Knowing that the captain would expect a
salute, the lieutenant gave him a perfunctory one, just short of

insubordination. Welcome to the frozen North, he said, suspecting that the

captain had not previously ventured that far away from the comfort and
safety of the Leopard headquarters. To what do we owe this pleasure?

The captain didnt smile, or offer a greeting, but, departing from form, made
no comment on the lieutenants appearance. Theyre signing an armistice
in Panmunjon tomorrow, effective midnight the day after. Air Force and
Navy will be pulling back for good, meaning that youd better shag ass for

the barn, ASAP. Heres a map, where theyre assembling to break up the
units. Its just outside Inchon harbor. Take everything away with you. You
wont be coming back. The junk pulled away and made back for Cho-do.
Actually, there wasnt much left to take away. The typhoon had destroyed
the tent and blown away much of their personal gear. Since then, the
lieutenant had been sleeping under the crude lean-to he had put together
from the remnants of the tent, and wearing the fatigue trousers and rubber
sandals, rinsing the trousers out occasionally in the ocean water of the inlet.
72 | P a g e

He rolled up the sleeping bag and stowed it in the canvas duffel bag with his
remaining underwear, shaving gear, toothbrush, and (in that situation,
totally alien and superfluous relics) spit-shined paratrooper boots. He
paused for a moment holding the dog-eared 40-page Stendhal remnant
which he had read so many times he knew it by heart, and then let it slip
out of his fingers onto the dusty ground. He smiled wryly at the small,
stone-lined fire pit where he had concocted his sea-snail and bouillon cube
stews each evening, and at his only cooking vessel, a fire-blackened .50
caliber ammunition can stenciled sternly: POISON! POISON! NOT TO BE
USED AS FOOD CONTAINER!
They had been there five weeks. The tiny Seadragon unit had been assigned
to occupy a small island in the mouth of the Yalu River, primarily as a
passive observation post, but secondarily in case they were needed to go in
and rescue a downed pilot as they had tried unsuccessfully to do at Chin
Nampo. They had no offensive mission, though they werent explicitly
precluded from mainland raids. The lieutenant had initially considered
going in and creating mischief along the Manchurian border, but on
reflection had concluded that the viability of his primary mission would be
at risk if he began tweaking the noses of vastly superior Chinese forces only
a few miles away. So they had hunkered down, and except for a couple of
tentative nighttime probes by patrolling Chinese gunboats, had had no
contact.
He took a final, slow look around, deliberately fixing the scene in his mind.
The island was a tiny, rocky dot, just outside the mouth of the Yalu. To the
north and west loomed Manchuria and the Antung Peninsula, where the
MIGs were based; to the south and east, the North Korean mainland. He
remembered the daily ritual wherein they would watch the contrails of the
U.N. fighters coming up from the south, and the MIGs climbing from
Antung to meet them. A few times the fighters had engaged close enough to
the island that the lieutenant and his crew could follow their intricate,
deadly maneuvers without binoculars, front row spectators at possibly the
most spectacular competition in the world.

73 | P a g e

Finally, carrying the duffel bag containing the sleeping bag, jump boots, and
his other gear, he walked down to the junk. The combat crew had removed
the machine gun and the recoilless rifle from their dug-in positions on the
island and re-installed them on the pedestal mounts on the deck of the junk.
They left the island around noon, and tested the weapons during the first
hour out. There was no thought of relaxing; they were still very deep in the
north and the armistice was almost two days off.
Except for a primitive compass, the junk crew had no navigational

instruments or skills, so they skirted the coast south on the clear, hot day,

on the smooth sea with the diesel engine throbbing its pong, pong, pong and
spewing grainy soot on the cabin roof and the fantail. They passed through

the North Korean fishing fleets, often within a few yards, close enough to
see clearly the faces of the fishermen and their families. There was a

complex tension in these encounters, since the Seadragon junk was heavily

armed and clearly not North Korean or Chinese. But it was also apparent

that the junk had no hostile intent at that time. Sometimes the lieutenant

would smile and wiggle his fingers at the fishermen, and sometimes they
would smile and wave back: "Hiya, folks, how ya doin?" He was the only
Caucasian most of them would ever see.

The trip south was a Rubicon for everyone. The war, which had given hard
structure and definition to all of their lives, virtually erasing everything
else, was effectively over. In some respects, it was like coming out of a
general anesthetic. For the Korean combat crew, this trip was a chasm
between a deadly, hazardous but known world and a physically safer black
void. There would be no market for uneducated North Korean machine
gunners in postwar South Korea - no homes, no jobs, no sponsors, no status
or even identities. Some of them might be inducted into the South Korean
Army; otherwise, their best hope would be to catch on as houseboys and
laborers for American GIs, but among them only Kim spoke any English
and almost none of them could hope to snag so tiny and remote a brass ring.
They were just going to be set adrift in a strange, inchoate world. The
lieutenant, who had come to love them as one does love other men in those
extreme situations, silently agonized along with them over that prospect.
74 | P a g e

In an ironic reversal of roles and status, the squalid three-man junk crew
suddenly were the only ones with prospects. The junk was both their home
and their livelihood; in peacetime it would catapult them into the merchant
class in the new era that was dawning in South Korea. The lieutenant
would release them upon arrival in the south, and they would pong-pong
happily off toward Inchon and their futures. There was no mutual regard
between them - none; there would be no fond, nostalgic good-byes.
The lieutenant had his own chasms to cross. The first was absorbing the
simple, massive fact of his own survival: the war was over, and he was alive.
That favorable outcome had not always seemed likely, and he had struggled,
early on in his tour, to absorb and, most importantly, learn to function
around - the knowledge that he might be captured, maimed, tortured, or
killed. That was, of course, a basic rite of passage for every combat soldier,
and he had managed it; but, now that he was going home, reversing the
process and coping with the reality of survival was not nearly as simple as
one might have thought. The fears and tensions didnt, as he might have
expected, just disappear with the threats. It was a blurred roller coaster of
emotions, from relief to exultation to survivors guilt. He would never again
have the same view of his own mortality, or, for that matter, of anything at
all.
Living and dying apart, the abrupt change in his basic lifestyle would not be
without its own stresses. No contrast in human experience is greater than
that between infantry combat and civilian life in peacetime. In a very few
days time, he would be transported from the real, harsh, and deadly
environment of the war to the unreal one of civilized society populated by
soft southern women and well-fed, totally unafraid children; where one
would have serious dinner conversations about trivial things; and where
small sounds in the night did not occasion cold rushes of adrenalin. He was
to be married within a month of his return, and he was not confident at that
point that he would be able to make all the necessary adjustments.

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Finally, there was Kim. When the lieutenant had arrived, several months
earlier, at the island partisan base lying just off the North Korean coast, he
had inherited from his predecessors a support cluster of four young men.
Nam, about 25, was the interpreter; Lee, 20, the translator of written
documents; and Oh, about 14, was the houseboy. Kim, 19, did not appear at
first to have a well-defined role.
The four of them and the lieutenant shared a winterized squad-tent on the

outskirts of a small partisan-controlled village. Over the months they were

together, they became a sort of family, with the lieutenant, age 23,
incongruously playing the father role. At night, when they werent

patrolling the islands perimeter or preparing for raids on the mainland,

they ate their C-rations together, and spent the evenings talking. The

lieutenant, because he was American, and an officer, was the supreme

authority on everything except Korea. He helped them with their English,

and they taught him primitive, essential Korean: airplane, enemy, get

down, run. Personalities emerged. Nam, older, quieter, studious, had an

interest in American popular music. The lieutenant taught him Too

Young, then high on the American Hit Parade, and he taught the

lieutenant Shina no Yoru the Japanese soldiers equivalent of Lili

Marlene, in Japanese. The lieutenant would remember parts of that song,

Japanese words and all, for the rest of his life.

Lee Duk Yung was shy, studious, emotional, and idealistic. He was, indeed,
archetypal of everything that made the Korean people who and what they
were. He had learned English primarily by reading Shakespeare and other
classics, and punctuated his conversations with expressions like Zounds,
Egad, and Forsooth. He would prove extremely cool and brave in combat,
and would be killed within a few months in a Chinese attack on the island.
Oh, it was soon apparent, was a mole planted by the partisan leaders to tell
them what the lieutenant was up to. But he was too young, had almost no
English, and was totally lacking in the skills and instincts of a mole. He was
discovered almost immediately by Nam and the others and isolated. He was
a nice kid, just not cut out for his job.

76 | P a g e

Kim, it turned out, was supposed to be the lieutenants personal bodyguard,

a concept which struck the lieutenant as bizarre, given that his job was to
execute combat raids against superior Communist forces on the North
Korean mainland, seventy miles behind the lines (Bam. Blooie. Rat-tat-tat.
But dont worry, Mom, I have a 19-year old bodyguard!) But he couldnt send
him away without causing him a massive loss of face, so he went along with
the scenario, and what Kim had become was more than a bodyguard, and
even more than a friend. As weeks turned into months, he and the
lieutenant had bonded into a single, almost seamless persona, which, in
effect, directed the unit, both on the island and on raids on the mainland.
They developed a level of rapport that allowed Kim to communicate the
lieutenants thoughts to the partisans, under stress, and sometimes based
on no more than a nod, grunt, or nudge between them. And he was equally
effective at conveying to the lieutenant what the partisans both the
leaders and the troops were thinking and, more valuable yet, were likely
to do next.
In November, on his first visit back to Seoul, the lieutenant had taken Kim
along. He had met Kims father, a tall, heavyset Korean man of perhaps 45
years, who had been a respected high school principal in Haeju until the
war. When the Communists had begun to assert themselves in the late
1940s, he had been a leader in the underground opposition movement, and
when the Americans had swept north after the Inchon landing, he had
taken his family on foot to Seoul, and later had joined the U.N. partisan
forces as a senior staff planner. Kim, then 17, was his only son. Rather than
see him conscripted into the South Korean army, the elder Kim had offered
his young son to the Americans on the northern islands, where his chances
of survival might be better, and the father could get news of him
occasionally.
In Seoul, the lieutenant had allowed Kim to visit his mother and young
sister overnight in a refugee village, and Kim had not returned at the
agreed time. The second day, certain that Kim wouldnt desert (where, after
all, could he go that wouldnt be worse?), and therefore must be in some sort
of trouble, the lieutenant set out to find him. Others in the unit, including
Kims distraught but fatalistic father, were certain that Kim had been swept
77 | P a g e

up by one of the ROK Army military police squads that patrolled the streets,
looking for deserters, draft evaders, and military-age refugees. They were
also certain he was beyond retrieval. Hes gone. they said, Just pray that
he survives the war. Even Kims father was resigned to his loss.
No. said the lieutenant, Lets think this through. He has to be somewhere
(Isaac Newton speaks), and if hes somewhere, we can find him. Where do
they take these guys after they round them up? He was told that there
were numerous collection facilities in the city of Seoul, where they were
screened, and the healthy ones were conscripted into the Korean army. The
others were assigned to labor pools supporting the ROK military along the
front lines and in the rear, where they frequently died, of cold, fatigue, or
malnutrition, in the service of their country. Hundreds of young refugees
from the north disappeared into that bleak void every week.
The lieutenant found 1st Lt. Koh, a ROK Army liaison officer assigned to
the unit, and asked him to go with him to find Kim. Koh declined,
explaining patiently that such an effort would be hopeless. There were
maybe two dozen different monkey cages where they took these people,
scattered all over the city. We wouldnt know where to start, he said. Right,
said the lieutenant. They dont even take names in those places, said Koh;
wed have to go right into the cages and check each mans face, individually,
and there are dozens of them in many locations. Right. They dont keep
them long here in Seoul; chances are hes already in the Army or up on the
MLR in a labor pool. Right. And, even if we did find him, they probably
wouldnt release him to us. Right. said the lieutenant, Now jump in the
goddam jeep and lets get started.
The monkey cages werent terribly attractive, and Lt. Koh had not
exaggerated the magnitude of their challenge. The first cage was simply an
open barbed-wire enclosure, perhaps thirty meters on a side, on a bare dirt
lot, with a windswept shed along one end and a putrid, open latrine in an
opposite corner. Crowded inside were several dozen young Korean men in
various degrees of malnutrition, filth, and misery, most of them sprawled
desultorily on the icy ground. There was no conversation among them. By
78 | P a g e

the gate was a makeshift guardhouse manned by a ROK sergeant; three

other ROK soldiers with carbines manned posts on the corners.
Lt. Koh spoke briefly to the sergeant, who saluted and opened the gate for
them. They walked into the enclosure and began looking over the inmates,
one by one. It was slow going; all were weak, many were asleep, and none
were cooperative. Lt. Koh did not know Kim, so was of little use in the
search, except to translate for the lieutenant and help to keep track of those
who had been examined and those who had not.
They took about an hour to get through the cage, and they found nothing.
They drove to another enclosure, somewhat larger, and spent another two
hours going through the inmates there. By now it was mid-afternoon, and
Lt. Koh was railing constantly about the futility of it all. Right, agreed the
lieutenant, and kept on going.
The third cage was in the unfinished basement of a bombed-out office
building essentially a dungeon. There were perhaps 200 inmates in a dark
space no more than five feet high at the highest point; standing upright was
impossible. It was warmer here than in the open cages, but the stench was
much worse and it was far more crowded, with bodies stretching wall-towall on the wet, dirt floor. The darkness made their task more difficult,
working slowly through the tangled forms with a dim flashlight the
lieutenant had rented from one of the guards for $25 in American military
scrip. They found Kim, sitting half asleep in the middle of the room, just as
darkness was falling on the streets outside.
Just as Lt. Koh had predicted, the officer in charge of the compound was
unwilling to release Kim to them. Explain to him, the lieutenant said

pompously to Lt. Koh, that I am here under orders from the Commanding
General of the U.S. Eighth Army, and this man (gesturing toward Kim) is
the personal houseboy of the general. He was picked up and brought here

while on an official errand for the general, and if I dont get him back, this

officer will have some explaining to do. Ill be happy to sign a release. Koh
took this in, and had a long discussion in Korean with the officer. The
lieutenant did not know what he was saying, and never asked, but he

79 | P a g e

suspected that it had nothing whatever to do with the Commanding General

of the U.S. Eighth Army. After a while, the officer nodded, and Koh said,

OK, lets go. In the jeep on the way back to the unit, Lt. Koh muttered

something about stupid luck, and the lieutenant responded cheerily Fine.
Ill take it. To Kim he said, You can stay with me at headquarters tonight.
Tomorrow, well get you some clean clothes, and go back to North Korea,
adding, where its safe.

After that, they had been constantly together. Kim had landed with him at
Unmu-do, been on the raid on 213 and the incursions into Chin Nampo
Harbor; and the two of them, essentially alone, had successfully gone in and
snatched the partisan leader Kong from his stronghold in the North. When
the typhoon had devastated their little camp on the Yalu outpost, and had
threatened to inundate their tiny island, Kim and the lieutenant, not
knowing whether they would be washed away, had huddled together in a
shallow depression until the storm finally subsided at daybreak. They had
become as close as any brothers could be, but now the unreal, temporary
world in which they had known one another was coming to an end, and, in
the real world that would follow, they would have little in common except
those memories.
They anchored well off the North Korean coast for a few hours of sleep, and
chugged into the rendezvous point outside Inchon late the following
morning. The little island was crawling with activity and wild celebration.
There were perhaps a dozen American officers and NCOs who, like the
lieutenant, were coming out of North Korea, relieved but conflicted about
being alive, concerned about the partisans they had left behind, and very
mixed about going home. There were two hundred or so Koreans who had
not had permanent homes in the North. The whole scene reminded the
lieutenant of stories he had read of the rendezvous of the mountain men on
the American frontier, two hundred years before - a congregation of men
coming out of isolation and danger into safety, with profligate drinking,
gambling, and whoring with native women. Friendly fistfights were not
uncommon, and the overall mood was one of camaraderie, relief, joy, and
sadness. There were emotional reunions and goodbyes with friends
80 | P a g e

learning who had lived, and who had not and sincerely meant promises to
keep in touch.
The lieutenant and Kim inflated two GI air mattresses, and took them down
to the beach. They pushed them off into the clear ocean water, paddled out
beyond the light surf, and just floated for an hour or so. There was a great
deal going on in their minds, but there was little conversation. The letdown
from the tension they had become accustomed to in the North was so great
that it was difficult to stay awake. Like everyone else, the lieutenant took a
long, hot shower before crawling onto the sleeping bag for the night
The next morning, in a makeshift personnel office set up in a tent, they

processed him out, issuing travel orders home, and giving him a chit for his

back pay, which he could convert to greenbacks in Seoul. The captain who
processed him said, Theres a 2 1/2 ton truck over on the dock in Inchon

thatll take you in to Seoul. You can take your man with you as far as Seoul,
if you want, but after that, hes on his own. Theres also a couple of Korean
cooks helpers that got burned this morning that youll need to drop off at

the 223rd MASH unit on your way. Driver knows the route, and expects you
around noon. This guy here (pointing to a skinny little Korean boy in

grease-stained fatigues) will take you to the truck. Theres a motor junk
goes back and forth every hour or so. Good luck.

The two-lane asphalt road that wound between Inchon and Seoul was
crowded with GI vehicles, moving at a crawl in both directions. The sky was
cloudless and the sun was beating down like a blowtorch. The lieutenant
rode in front with the driver, while Kim rode in back with several other
Koreans and the two burned men. There was no tarpaulin over the truck
bed, and the two injured men whose upper bodies were horribly blistered
and burned, and who were suffering without medication were lying on
stretchers exposed to the elements. No one expected they would live to reach
the hospital.
At intervals, Kim shouted status reports on the mens condition up to the
lieutenant in the cab. The lieutenant, who had begun to feel a strong, totally
unwanted and undeserved burden of responsibility for the two mens lives,
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was urging the driver to drive faster, passing other vehicles far too

aggressively on the narrow, crowded road. Their communication was limited

to gestures and grunts, since the driver spoke no English, and the

lieutenants eclectic Korean vocabulary (airplane, enemy, get down, run) did

not lend itself to that particular situation.

About halfway to Seoul, Kim called up that one of the burned men had died,

and the other was no longer conscious. They were still an hour or more away
from the MASH unit. When they finally arrived, the lieutenant and Kim
took opposite ends of the stretcher and trotted with it into the hospital

receiving area. They brushed past a protesting T-5 and pushed down the

corridors until they found a young doctor who seemed to be more concerned
with the injured man than with the rules. We dont have any paperwork,

and I dont even know his name, the lieutenant said, But I swear to God he
is a worthy man. I beg you to save him if you can.

Ill do my best, replied the doc, sounding as if he meant it. The lieutenant

wished the injured man well, but they had done all they could and needed to
keep moving. He never learned what happened to the burned cooks helper.
In Seoul, the lieutenant drew his back pay in greenbacks, picked up his
clean uniforms and other gear, and ate prime ribs and drank beer at the
officers club in the secure compound. Kim spent the night in the refugee
area with his mother and sister. The next day, before the lieutenant flew out
in the afternoon, they got up early and spent the morning together walking
around Seoul, saying a long goodbye. They had a photograph taken of the
two of them in a small shop, and each kept a small, wallet-sized print. Kim
also gave the lieutenant an earlier photograph of himself in the uniform of a
North Korean high school student. On the back, he had inscribed in neat
English letters (probably learned from the late Lee Duk Yung) Never Be a
Coward.
Around noon, the lieutenant needed to head back to the secure compound
and pack his gear for the flight to Japan and home. Kim opened a clothwrapped package he had been carrying, and produced a small, ornate stone
vase, which he gave to the lieutenant as a remembrance. This is small
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thing, he said, and, to you, not so much. But to my family, this is very
important thing, for many, many years, and, my family say OK, I give it to
you as my body. They embraced, and went their separate ways.
Back in Japan at Camp Drake, the lieutenant had a full evening. Sitting in
the transient barracks (the place was so crowded with troops going in and
out of Korea that they billeted enlisted men and junior officers in a common
barracks), he had felt an itching sensation on one of his arms. Removing his
shirt, he found a small, scarlet rash developing on the soft underside of his
right forearm, and a similar spot on the left. He was engulfed by a
shuddering, cold fear. He had seen such a rash many times among the junk
people with whom he had lived on the civilian docks at Inchon. He didnt
know whether it was a virus or a fungus, but, once it was contracted, he had
never seen a case where it failed to spread quickly over the victims body
until they were essentially consumed by it. As far as he knew, no one who
contracted this malady ever recovered; it was a lifetime thing.
As it spread, the rash would grow angry and weepy, forming a dull grey
crust over the victims skin. The itching, apparently, was excruciating. In
some cases, the face and limbs were spared, but the body was taken, and
vice-versa. But, sometimes, it was even worse. He remembered vividly a
young woman in a waterfront shop in Inchon, whose face, neck, fingers,
wrists, ankles, and feet were swollen and encrusted. Seeing her move, one
realized that she was afflicted over her entire body. She was going about her
work like a zombie, trying to ignore her abject misery, but failing totally.
The lieutenant, seeing her through the detached eyes of a (presumably
immune) visiting alien, had felt something closer to fascination than
sympathy. Now he was rapidly developing a different view.
He raced to the infirmary, and was lucky enough to encounter a senior

medical officer who happened to have been a dermatologist in civilian life.

Ive heard of this, he said, but youre the first real case Ive ever seen, and
frankly, we wouldnt know how to treat it here. I can break you into our
hospital, and we can try, but I think youd be better off going back to

Letterman or Walter Reed. Meanwhile, Ill give you some potassium

permanganate. Its a strong drying agent, and may slow it down some;
83 | P a g e

might even dry it up altogether. Soak your arms in it for a half hour or so,
couple of times a day until you can get seen stateside.
The lieutenant had not been so terrified at any point during the war. The
rash seemed to be spreading, even in the hour since he had discovered it,
from dime, to nickel, to quarter-sized blotches. Back in quarters, he
prepared an extra-strong potassium permanganate solution and spent
several hours soaking and drying, soaking and drying his arms, until he was
having trouble staying awake. He then lay down on the bare mattress on a
bunk in a small room in the barracks, and fell asleep.
He had been there less than an hour when the lights suddenly came on in
the room and someone said to him, OK, buddy, wake up and get dressed;

youre going to Korea. Bleary-eyed, the lieutenant sat up on the edge of the

bunk and looked at the two men, a wiry young sergeant and a fat, pale

corporal. No, he said, I just came from there this afternoon.

Dont matter, drawled the fat corporal, smiling amiably. Theyre just

trying to get the head count in Korea up to the maximum possible before
the armistice, cause thats the limit well have to live with afterwards,

under the Treaty. Everybodys going back, dont matter.

Well, said the lieutenant, fully awake now, it matters to me, by God, and

Im not going back there. You can try and take me, if you want to, but... At
that point, he noticed an unused metal GI file cabinet in the corner of the

room, with a length of pipe serving as a bar-lock. He stood up, naked except
for boxer shorts and dogtags, pulled the pipe off the cabinet, and, holding it

loosely in both hands, backed into a corner.

The sergeant and the corporal, who by this time had noticed the silver bars
on the lieutenants khaki shirt, hanging on the chair, glanced uncertainly at
one another, and tacitly decided that they should move on to easier pickings.
The lieutenant, adrenalin now pumping, did not go back to sleep, but spent
the remainder of the night soaking and drying, soaking and drying his
arms.

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On the flight back to San Francisco, he spent most of the time soaking and
drying his arms, using compresses he had improvised from paper towels and
a solution made from the potassium permanganate and tap water from the
head. His forearms and hands by this time were stained a dark, purplish
brown, but the rash had stopped spreading, contained in two-inch circles on
his forearms.
Flying into San Francisco, in the clear early morning, with the sun coming
up over the Bay, was another emotional bath. Crossing the Belmont hills,
seeing the San Francisco skyline in the distance, for the first time it seemed
real that he had, in fact, survived the war and was coming home. He also
felt, out of nowhere, a spontaneous surge of what could only be described as
pure love of home and country that brought tears to his eyes. In later years,
the lieutenant would make the San Francisco landing from the Pacific many
times, and would never fail to recapture that moment with total, vivid
recall. He never lost, even for a moment, that basic love of home and
country.
Back at home, the re-entry process was as awkward as he had feared. In
less than five days, the lieutenant had been plucked out of a tense situation
in deepest North Korea and deposited into the arms of his loving mother
and fiance in a small, safe southern town where the war was as remote and
unreal as Oz. He himself was fine with all this, but his body, reflexes, and
instincts were struggling to catch up. He was gaunt, tense, and ate
ravenously, with primitive table manners. He spent a lot of time in the
bathroom, soaking and drying his arms, and his hands and arms were still
covered with the dark purple stain.
He would fall asleep, unaccountably, throughout the day, and would wake
up, unable to sleep, during the night. Jet lag had not been invented yet, so
his family and fiance attributed this, along with his other abnormal
behavior, to combat fatigue, and worried that he might never recover.
He reinforced their impression without trying. On his second day at home,
he was sleeping on the living room sofa, when his fiance came in to call him
85 | P a g e

to dinner. She sat lovingly beside him on the sofa, and began gently shaking
him awake. In his first moment of awareness, they were both on the floor.

She was on her back, struggling and screaming, and he was on top of her,
with one knee on her chest and his hands gripping her throat. They were

both all right the moment he was fully awake, and she wasnt really hurt.

But she was shaken, now, and as apprehensive as he was about their
impending marriage. Welcome home, GI, he thought.

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TWELVE: EPILOGUE
But the next day was better, and the next, and the next, and so on. The
tension and the abnormalities gradually disappeared and his sleep cycle
normalized. They took long walks together, and did a huge jigsaw puzzle,
joking and laughing as they had done before, and rediscovered why they had
become engaged in the first place. A month later, they were married, and
the union lasted more than 25 good years and produced five fine children.
The rash on his arms slowly receded and finally disappeared, never to
return. The lieutenant soaked his arms for three weeks after the last visible
vestige of the disease had gone, just to be sure. He spent a year as an
airborne battalion staff officer at Ft. Bragg before resigning from the Army.
The captain, now promoted to major, was in the same regiment, and they
became close friends. The lieutenant named the captain godfather of his
firstborn, a son, although the term godfather applied to the captain was
something of an oxymoron, and he never performed any godfatherly duties.
Not one.
The following June, the lieutenant left the Army and lost touch with the

captain for more than 30 years. In the 1980s, the Army declassified all of
the secret records of the partisan operations, and some of the Americans

involved were discovered by the military historians and the fiction writers,
who sought them out and interviewed them exhaustively, later writing
about them in their books. In the process, they developed a network of

names and telephone numbers, which enabled the lieutenant to contact old
colleagues, including the captain.

As it happened, the captain, by then in his 70s, was living in Hull, a small
coastal town just south of Boston, where the lieutenant had settled. He

phoned first, then drove down one afternoon and found the captain living in
a modest two-room apartment on the second floor of a small frame house on
the beach. The apartment was a surprisingly neat museum of memorabilia
from the captains two wars, with photographs and news clips from the
87 | P a g e

Normandy jump, photos of Korean partisans in sail junks, and the captains
decorations. On a table was a small, framed photograph of Little Kim.
God, how I loved that kid, the captain said.

The captain was a hero here, as well. A few years before, Hull had been hit
by a severe winter storm, which inundated the low-lying peninsular town

and destroyed many homes a major disaster. The captain, apparently, had
come out of nowhere, organized the townspeople, commandeered shelters,

and coordinated meals and medical services for several hundred homeless

citizens until the Red Cross and the other emergency services took over.

Now, everyone in Hull knew him, and people would greet him respectfully
as he and the lieutenant walked down the streets, calling him Major,

which had been his official rank at retirement. In several bars in the town,

he couldnt buy a drink.

The lieutenant saw the captain fairly often for a year or so, driving down to
Hull or bringing the captain up to Boston for dinners. They drank a lot of
cognac, though not nearly as much as in the days at Ft. Bragg, and
reminisced. The captain was still the lieutenants mentor and hero.
Then the captain developed lung cancer and within a few months had
withered away and died, strictly obeying all the doctors orders and, toward
the end, the hospital rules, even declining the cognac that the lieutenant
smuggled into the hospital for him. He bore the suffering stoically and, for
the most part, with humor. The lieutenant was reminded of the captains
favorite passage from Kipling:
When your officers dead and your sergeants bled white,
Remember its ruin to run from a fight
So take double order, hitch up, and hold tight,
And wait for support like a soldier

That was how the captain died, waiting for support like the good soldier he
was. He was buried in a national cemetery on Cape Cod, and the
lieutenant would drive down, alone in the early mornings, to tend his
grave once or twice every year. He does so still.
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One day in the 1970s, the lieutenant got an unexpected telephone call from
Nam, the quiet translator from the island, who had taught him Shina no

Yoru. Nam had immigrated illegally to the U.S., and was operating a small
repair shop in Los Angeles. There was a new law, he told the lieutenant,

that gave permanent U.S. residence and ultimate citizenship to Korean

nationals who could prove that they had served in combat with the

American-led partisans in the North. Would the lieutenant send in an

affidavit? Of course, and he did, in the strongest possible terms.

But a few weeks later, another call. Unaccountably, Nams case had been
denied, and he had been served with a deportation order. He would lose
everything he had built up in LA, and be sent back to start all over in
Korea. He knew of several others, less deserving, who had been granted
permanent residence under the same law. What could he do?
The lieutenant phoned a friend in a senior position in the State Department.
I shouldnt be telling you this, the friend said, but tell him to just stay
put. The government doesnt have the people or the budget to actually

deport any but the most flagrant cases. If your friend just sits there, nothing
will happen, and youll have time to help him re-apply. He sounds eligible,
and well help you walk it through.

But when the lieutenant called back that evening, Nams phone had been
disconnected. He had either given up and returned to Korea or gone to
ground in LA. The lieutenant never heard from him again.
He saw Kim once more. In the 1960s the lieutenant, several years out of the
Army, was a diplomat assigned to the American Embassy in Tokyo.
Through friends in the Army, he got orders permitting him to take military
transport to Korea and visit Kim, who, he had learned, was managing a
U.S. Army PX near the DMZ. They put him up overnight in a BOQ outside
of Seoul, where, by remote chance, the Korean manager, a former Wolfpack
partisan, recognized the lieutenant and refused to accept payment for the
billet. The next morning, they flew him up to the DMZ in a light aircraft,
and he had an hour with Kim.
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It was an awkward, unsatisfactory meeting; there was still a strong feeling

between them, a mutual, sincere regard. They embraced with great emotion,
but it was soon clear that they had gone their separate ways by then, into
very different worlds, and now they struggled unsuccessfully to recapture
the rapport they had had during the war. Kim was heavier now and had a
harder edge; he chain-smoked through the meeting. He was no longer
managing the PX, as the lieutenant had been told, but had been demoted
over a misunderstanding, and had a lesser job. There had been no
misconduct; the whole thing had been political. The lieutenant sympathized,
but had no way of helping. They were still brothers, just no longer as close.
Kim had some ideas about what he wanted to do next, and the lieutenant
was more than willing to help. But, practically, his ability to do so was quite
limited, and neither of them followed up. As the months passed, he thought
about it less and less, until reality gradually faded into memory. He never
heard from Kim again. Over time, the sour aftertaste of their final meeting
receded, and what finally survived was a vivid, bittersweet memory of two
young brothers on a great adventure.
For the rest of his life, the lieutenant would carry in his wallet the photo of
himself and Kim taken on the last day in Seoul, the one of Kim in schoolboy
uniform (Never be a Coward), and one of the slain Lee Duk Yung, arms
folded across his chest, wearing a proud, shy smile.
When his children had grown old enough to go camping, the lieutenant had
used the sleeping bag on weekend camp-outs, and for several years it was a
familiar fixture in their summer lives. But when they grew older and went
away to college, they didnt go camping together any more. The lieutenant
rolled the sleeping bag up into a tight cylinder, with all of its memories
wrapped inside, and put it up in the attic. He didnt think of it again until
he chanced upon it one evening in his storage room, many years later.

90 | P a g e

POSTSCRIPT
The lieutenant entered a second marriage at age fifty seven and had a sixth
child, a daughter, born during his sixty-second year. She used the sleeping
bag for sleepovers as a young child, and one year during grade school, to
prove something or other, slept in it outside on the upstairs deck throughout
an entire, sub-freezing Massachusetts winter.
She graduated from college when he was eighty four, and he wanted to
commemorate the occasion with a special gift. He went into his chest of
drawers, found an old jewelry box, and from it took a non-existent, bullshit
gold ring (nebsgr) that he had brought out of North Korea sixty one years
before. He took it to Barmakians in Boston and had it made into a signet
ring for her. The nebsgr tested out at 24 karats, too pure and malleable to
be practical as wearable jewelry, but Barmakians re-cast it in an 18K alloy.
It could stay in the lieutenants family for at least another hundred years.

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AFTERWORD
The Lieutenant Looks Backand Aheadfrom 2014

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THE LIEUTENANT SPEAKS

I graduated from West Point on June 5, 1951, my 22d birthday. Following
basic infantry training and parachute school at Ft. Benning and a ninemonth tour with the 11th Airborne Division, in October, 1952 I was ordered
to Korea where I was assigned to a highly classified special operations
group, the 8240th Army Unit, and spent nine months serving mostly behind
enemy lines in North Korea. This is the story of that brief period in my life
and the extraordinary individuals, American and North Korean, with whom
it was my privilege to serve.
My assignment with the 8240th was divided into two parts. From my
arrival in October 1952 until the following March, I served as
commander/advisor to one of eight partisan units (Wolfpacks) operating
from offshore islands along the west coast of North Korea between Inchon
and Ongjin, some 80 miles to the northwest. I was assigned to Wolfpack 8,
with 800-1000 partisans, the largest of the Wolfpacks, on the island of
Sunwi-do.
From April, 1953 until the armistice was declared that July, I commanded
Seadragon (aka Task Force Able), a heavily armed seaborne unit with a
combat crew of 12 partisans, controlled by 8th Army Headquarters on a
series of special missions between Inchon and the Manchurian border. This
account covers both the Wolfpack and the Seadragon periods.
Countless times while writing this I have realized how easy it must be to
write Rambo stories to entertain sedentary readers, as if what real soldiers
do isnt interesting enough for them. The characters in this work are real
people (see photographs), doing real, difficult, dangerous things at the risk
(sometimes cost) of their lives. I am unwilling to cheapen their efforts by
inflating this story with false heroics, as others have too often done in
writing of the 8240th (examples below).
There are several stories interwoven here. At one level, it is a microcosm of
the 8240th AU, the US Armys attempt to organize and deploy a partisan
93 | P a g e

force against the Chinese and North Korean armies. It was a major,
complicated task and in retrospect not very effectively done. How
effectively, even approximately, may never be known because the history of
the unit has survived as a small nucleus of fact awash in a large tide of pulp
fiction, too often self-serving.
The partisans, almost all North Korean refugees, were highly disparate in
their suitability for guerilla warfare - age, experience, health, and
motivation. In terms of military skills, a few were combat veterans of the
Japanese army and some had been bandits or Yellow Sea pirates, but others
had no relevant experience. Many were teen-agers and even younger. Some
of the partisans had families elderly parents, wives, and children. Many
were staunchly anti-Communist, but others were politically ambivalent,
adrift in a war-torn environment and wanting only survival for themselves
and their families. To some extent, all this is probably true of all guerilla
movements.
The American side, also, was a mixed bag. The 8240th was commanded by a
lieutenant colonel who had been with the guerrillas in the Philippines
during WWII, but was new to Korea and had never organized or managed
anything as large and complex as this. Within the command, virtually no
one else had experience or training in guerrilla warfare. How the personnel
for the unit were selected was never clear.
My own case was exceptional, in that I had learned of the unit by accident
and more or less blackmailed my way into the assignment. Most others were
plucked out from the broad mainstream of replacements flowing into the
Eighth Army, through a process that, at best, was not very consistent. Many
of those were airborne infantry, a few with WWII combat experience;
however, many others were from other branches, and had never had even
basic infantry training. One young corporals only military experience before
being sent to lead partisans in combat on a forward island had been as a
chaplains assistant. He sustained a scalp wound from an enemy mortar
round within a few days of his arrival, and was evacuated to a MASH unit
outside of Seoul. An officer who visited him there quoted him as saying, It
only hurts when I laugh.
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Even the infantry soldiers were unfamiliar with the tactics of guerrilla
warfare, which typically consists of small unit harassment and sabotage
activities, and deployed the Koreans, often with inadequate training, in
larger-scale assaults on prepared enemy positions.
An even greater problem was the lack of professionalism and discipline.
Unconventional warfare special ops, rangers, commandos, etc. - by its
nature tends to attract cowboys, and to bring out the cowboy in otherwise
straight soldiers. This is not all bad; however, it requires firm, by-the-book
leadership at the top, or the organization can rather quickly morph into a
rodeo. In this case the rodeo started at the top. On one occasion, the
commanding officer and some colleagues were drinking in the 8240th
Officers Club in Seoul and stayed well past closing time. When the Club
Officer reminded the group that he needed to turn off the lights according to
the colonels own rules, the colonel reportedly drew his chrome-plated .38
caliber pistol and shot out the lights. I heard the story soon after the
incident, and believed it, as did most others. Even if it wasnt true (and I
still believe it was), the fact that it circulated with credence is a measure of
the state of discipline in the unit.
That sort of behavior in Seoul set the standard for the 8240th as a whole.
There was very little supervision or guidance from above at any level, and
virtually no regular reporting. Most Americans in the North operated pretty
much as they pleased. It was my good fortune to be assigned to Wolfpack
West, a group of five partisan units commanded by Captain George Lamm,
a highly decorated WWII veteran of the 82d Airborne Division (the captain
in my memoir). Absent direction, Lamm simply followed his instincts and
experience, and personally led his Wolfpacks in an aggressive pattern of
conventional infantry attacks on mainland enemy positions. Although we
later developed a close and lasting personal relationship, he was transferred
back to Ft. Bragg shortly after my arrival, so I never participated in any of
his mainland operations. However, I was strongly influenced by his
example, and, despite having no combat experience, was as active as I knew
how to be. Lamms replacement was not as aggressive and preferred to
lead mainland operations from allied warships offshore. I dont know that
95 | P a g e

he ever set foot on the North Korean mainland, although he was a prolific
source of colorful anecdotes after the war.
My own first landing on the North Korean mainland was a daylight

reconnaissance in force with about 50 Wolfpack partisans, during which our

only enemy contact was a brush with a group of 30 50 North Korean

farmers army, or militia, exchanging a few rounds of small arms fire at a

distance of several hundred yards. Returning to Sunwi-do, I found the

partisans had prepared (apparently in advance of the operation) a

handwritten after-action report in which we had attacked a large NKA

force, inflicting heavy casualties while sustaining none ourselves, and I had

behaved so gallantly as to deserve a medal. This was embarrassing reading,

and nothing I wanted to be seen by other American soldiers. I tore up the
report and told the partisans that I would personally prepare all future

after-action reports. In fact I never filed any, and was never asked about
them by anyone higher up the chain.

I later discovered, however, that other partisan groups routinely filed

similarly exaggerated accounts, and that their reports were passed up
through the American chain and consolidated into highly inflated totals for
the unit overall. The 8240th apparently recommended Americans for medals
based on these partisan-generated reports, which characteristically
represented enemy casualty numbers far out of proportion to the scale of the
engagements described, versus partisan casualties far too low. One sure
giveaway was the ratio of enemy KIA vs. WIA (dead vs. wounded) typically
reported as eight or ten to one, when any combat infantry veteran knows
that in the natural order of things both we and the enemy lose fewer dead
than wounded. Further, the partisans always reported enemy casualties in
more precise numbers than they possibly could have verified, including from
air strikes occurring well outside their range of vision. A 1956 evaluation by
independent analysts concluded that the partisans reports of enemy
casualties should be discounted by a factor of 3 to 10. I believe the true
exaggeration factor was possibly as high as 50 to 100.

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In one of several books written by American former members of the 8240th,

the following anecdote appears:
Wolfpack 8, with about 800 partisans under the command of Lt. William L. Givens, a
no-nonsense paratrooper, controlled Sunwi-do. Givens and his partisans were a
constant irritant to the Chinese commander opposite him. In an effort to rid himself of
Givens, the Chinese commander put a $25,000 bounty on the American. Givens
retaliated with a slap in the face: He put a $25 price tag on the head of the Chinese
commander. But Givens did not let it stand at that. After each successful raid by one of
his Wolfpack units, Givens lowered the bounty by $1. When it reached $16 the Chinese
commander reportedly was relieved and sent elsewhere.

George Lamms replacement is cited as the source of this fantasy.

There is actually a small kernel of truth to it. The Chinese did post a
$35,000 reward on me via a Radio Peking broadcast in late 1952, but it is
most unlikely the Chinese themselves ever took it very seriously.
Apparently they had somehow gotten hold of a document linking my name
to the 8240th, and used it as a propaganda gimmick in the manner of Axis
Sally and Tokyo Rose several years before. It is unlikely that the reward
ever existed except as a brief, one-time mention in a radio script. (I suppose,
however, that if I had later been taken prisoner in North Korea, there might
have been a different story).
Shortly afterward, during a raid on a friendly village on the mainland, I
mentioned the Chinese broadcast to a small group of villagers, and said
jokingly that I should offer a reward for the commander of the 23d NKA
brigade (the unit defending our territory), adding that it should be small
because if he was worth a shit, we couldnt keep coming in here. The
villagers laughed politely and, I would stake my life on it, never thought of
or mentioned the reward again. No one on the communist side in Korea
had any notion of any reward on me, themselves, or anyone else. No one.
Ever.
An earlier version of the same story was written in 1964 in Saga, an
adventure magazine, also by Lamms replacement under the pseudonym
Johnny Archer. In that account I was named Bert Carlson, and the
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reward was only $5000, while the price on Johnny Archers head was a
flattering $10,000. As time has passed, other Wolfpack veterans have
remembered rewards on themselves in widely varying amounts. In all
these recollections, the rewards were said to have been posted by local
communist commanders, when in fact no regular troop commanders of any
nationality ever have funds available to post rewards for individual enemy
soldiers; their job is to kill or capture them.
Also in the book quoted above there is a passage describing in detail a 1952
communist attempt to take control of Sunwi-do, where I was serving with
Wolfpack 8. The island, less than a mile from the mainland, had changed
hands twice since the MLR had stabilized in early 1951.
In late 1952 the CCF and NKPA decided to run Wolfpack 8 off Sunwi-do and launched a
low-tide night raid in freezing weather with about three thousand men. The defenders
on Sunwi-do were well entrenched and had excellent fields of fire on the exposed
mudflats and land bridge . . . . When the attackers got within range they were raked
with mortars and machine guns . . . (and) napalm canisters were ignited. Air force
planes . . . flew up and down the mudflats, bombing and strafing the attackers . . .
(who) found themselves not only being pounded. . . (by the USAF), but being swept
away by a rising tide of water so cold it contained ice chunks.

The air force planes continued their attack until there appeared to be no survivors,
then withdrew. The next morning at high tide naval vessels cruised through the channel
looking for survivors but found none. By all estimates, the entire three-thousand-man
attacking force was wiped out. Sunwi-do was never hit again.

The source of this exciting story is none other than the aforementioned
lieutenant colonel who commanded the 8240th in 1952, in a 1983 personal
interview at the U.S. Army Military History Institute. I cant imagine how it
might have found its way into the official record, because this attack is pure
fiction; it never happened at all. I was on the island from October 1952 until
early 1953, and nothing resembling that description could possibly have
taken place. For starters, as Google Earth clearly shows, Sunwi-do is
separated from the mainland by a mile-wide deep-water channel; there is no
land bridge and no mudflat. Raiding parties from either side could cross the
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channel only by boat, using clusters of sail junks towed behind motor junks.
That is how both we and the Chinese did it.
But a cross-channel landing of three thousand troops would have been a
minor Normandy, requiring an armada of at least a hundred sail junks and
possibly twenty motor junks. The Chinese might (repeat, just might) have
been capable of mounting an operation on that scale, but I believe if they
had actually done so we would have noticed, especially if they had left three
thousand bodies on our beaches.
This is not to say there wasnt real enemy activity during that period.
Around the end of 1952, January or February, there was a sizable troop
buildup on the mainland across the channel. I reported that activity to
Wolfpack headquarters and requested an airdrop of additional mortar and
small arms ammunition, which we received by C-47 late the same
afternoon. As night approached, the tension mounted. The island was eight
miles long, too big to deploy a static perimeter, so we outposted the coastline
and positioned two of our three battalions (about 300 men each) as mobile
reserves. I was particularly tense, since I was new to this sort of thing and
had no idea how the partisans would react to an enemy incursion. It seemed
quite possible they would just melt away as they had on other occasions,
leaving me to melt with them or face the Chinese alone.
However, one of the partisan leaders had an idea: there was one motor junk
left on the island; why not send it out with one or two 2.36 rocket launchers
(bazookas) and fire into the slow-moving Chinese invasion fleet? It would at
least break their stride, and might turn them back altogether.
I agreed with this plan, but did not go out with the junk, rationalizing that I
should be with the main body in the event that the landing succeeded. (Was
this good judgment or cowardice? I still dont know). Fortunately, the
bazookas did the trick. I never learned exactly how they did it, but it is not
difficult to imagine that anti-tank rockets coming out of nowhere into the
hulls of junks and open decks crowded with unprotected troops would be a
serious deterrent. Add to that the vulnerability of the entire Chinese junk
fleet to hits on a few easily spotted motor junks, and it is not surprising that
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the fleet returned to the mainland and the assault force dispersed before
daylight came on.
I left the Wolfpacks shortly after that incident, and the communists made
no further moves on Sunwi-do during the remainder of my stay there.
However, soon afterward April or May? - we heard from friends in
Wolfpack that my replacement there, a recent graduate of the Special
Forces school at Ft. Bragg, had been killed, along with my friend,
interpreter Lee Duk Yung, in hand-to-hand beachhead fighting during a
Chinese assault on the island. He was Lt. Joseph Castro, the first American
Special Forces soldier of any rank ever to be killed in action.
So much for the 8240th AU. This is also the personal story of a 23-year old
West Point graduate, coming of age as both a soldier and a human being
under unusual circumstances. In a regular infantry unit I would have had a
well-defined position (probably platoon leader in a rifle company) in which
my responsibilities and authority would have been both limited and clear.
Like other junior officers, I would have been mentored from above and
below by older, more experienced officers and NCOs. With the Wolfpacks I
had none of that. With Wolfpack 8, I was assigned to command a group of
800 to 1000 partisans about the size of an infantry battalion in our Army
but was competing head to head for de facto control with their indigenous
leader, a former officer in the Japanese army roughly twice my age whose
interests and agenda were not aligned with mine and who ultimately
prevailed with the support of the senior American officers who should have
been my mentors.
With Seadragon, my command of the unit itself was uncomplicated, but
guidance from above was minimal. We were assigned challenging missions
(e.g., Unmu-do, Chin Nampo) directly by 8th Army Headquarters, but the
orders were passed down to us through the 8240th and delivered ad hoc
through whichever partisan unit we were nearest at the time. We had
virtually no guidance from our superiors and would go for weeks without
hearing from anyone in our command chain. We werent always sure that
they even remembered we were there. Fortunately, when the armistice
came, someone did remember. Otherwise we would almost certainly have
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been swallowed up within a day or so and never heard from again, a

sobering thought.
The other big difference was cultural. In the U.S. Army, I would have been
in an American environment, albeit transplanted onto foreign soil. On
Sunwi-do I lived in a totally North Korean world, save only that I was living
in a GI squad tent in a North Korean village. My tent mates and all our
neighbors were North Korean. All the Wolfpack partisans and their families
lived in similar villages on the island. The Seadragon partisans were also
North Korean, meaning that most of my nine months in Korea were spent
living daily among the North Korean people. I did not share fully in their
privations, but I observed them at close range and came to know them well.
My tour with the 8240th AU was, in effect, my first, entry-level job out of
college. It was stressful and sometimes hazardous, but having survived it I
cannot now imagine a better start for any young persons career in either
diplomacy or international business. Through a combination of luck and
instinct I ended up in a poorly run, under-staffed combat organization in
which I was catapulted far above my pay grade into a hostile foreign
environment and left to sink or swim on my own. I learned to swim
somehow, and in that process developed skills and insights that later proved
useful in a long series of interesting and responsible jobs.
Among the basics that I learned there were the following:
With the Wolfpacks, having no alternative, I learned at a young age to make

difficult decisions independently and under stress. In later years I have

come to realize that sound decision-making that is, making rational

choices that will hold up over time is not a natural gift but the product of a
conscious, disciplined learning process that must be carefully developed over
the course of ones career and ones lifetime. Rational decision-making is

probably the single most important skill set one ever develops, because the

essence of ones life, at the end, is simply the product of all the choices,

personal and professional, great and small, right and wrong, that one has
made over the course of it.

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With the Wolfpacks I learned that in any negotiation, win or lose, facts and
honesty are more powerful than tricks and tactics, and that one need not be
intimidated by the seniority of either ones counterparts or ones superiors.
Later, as a political officer in the Tokyo Embassy and Washington, I
negotiated on friendly terms with the Japanese government and
adversarially with the U.S. Army (Okinawa) and Navy (nuclear weapons
and submarines). Later yet, as assistant to Rickover (who was adversarial
with everyone, including me, his own assistant) I negotiated successfully
with senior officials, both foreign and domestic, including my former elders
in the State Department. Finally, in thirty years as a management
consultant I was able to navigate through complex relationships between
and among large multinational corporations and government entities.
But the most valuable lesson I learned with the Wolfpacks concerned
hardship, and ones capacity to cope with it. With the Wolfpacks I learned
that there were still places in the world where physical hardship and
mental anguish reached extremes known to very few Americans in any walk
of life. I had grown up in East Tennessee in the 1930s and 40s as the only
child of a single working mother during a severe depression, and always
believed I had had a difficult childhood. With the Wolfpacks I came to
appreciate that on the scale of all mankind both I and my mother had led
comfortable, privileged lives. She died at ninety five, warm, physically
secure, and well-nourished. I expect to have a similar passing in due course.
Such was not a reasonable expectation for anyone I ever met in North
Korea.
Since coming out of North Korea sixty-one years ago, I cant remember
having a truly bad day; I have always felt fortunate just to be alive,
physically comfortable and secure, and in reasonably good health for my
age. Things that bother most other people snowstorms, auto accidents,
injuries, illnesses, financial problems, etc. dont bother me very much. In
recent years I have regarded a hip replacement and major heart surgery not
as ordeals but as enhancements to the quality of my life. This perspective I
learned first with the Wolfpacks.

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Finally, with the Wolfpacks I developed a deep affection and admiration for
the North Korean people that has not diminished over time. I believe the
North and South Korean people are cut from the same bolt of cloth.
Ethnically, temperamentally, and every other way that matters, they are
one and the same. I believe, had they been given the same opportunities, the
North Korean people would now be as productive and affluent as their
compatriots to the South, exporting ships, automobiles and advanced
electronics and serving as a stabilizing political and economic force in the
region. Contrary to the current popular wisdom, I have a similar view of
North Korean leadership. The sooner the Korean peninsula and its people
can be reunited, the better off they, their Asian neighbors, and the rest of
the world will be.

Here I will take my pen off the paper.

November 13, 2014

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p h o t o g r a p h s

The lieutenant and Kim Jung Don on

their last day together in Seoul, July
1953. Two days before this photograph
was taken they had been with
Seadragon on the Manchurian border.
Two days later, the lieutenant was back
in his mother's home in Tennessee.

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Obituary of Sergeant Major

(Ret.) John Conrad ("the
Sergeant)" circa 1988. Smarter
than Higher Authority, and a
better soldier than I would ever be.

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Lee Duk Yung on Sunwi-do.

"Shy, studious, emotional,
and idealistic...archetypal of
everything that made the
Korean people
who and what
they were."
Killed in action
in May, 1953,
age 20.

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On Sunwi-do. Standing, from left: Kim Jung Don,

Lee Duk Yung, the lieutenant, Wolfpack 8 Supply
Officer, Translator Nam. Kneeling: Houseboy Oh.

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"The Captain," George Lamm's

plaque at the Mt. Soledad
Veterans Memorial in San Diego.

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"Little Kim" on
Yongpyong-do,
wearing
George Lamm's
82nd Airborne
Division shirt
and holding a
Korean-English
dictionary.
Photograph
Courtesy of
George Lamm.

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Wolfpack West Base Camp on Yongpyong-do,

where Little Kim was burned to death.
The Korean village where he is buried can
be seen at lower left. Yongpyong-do is now
the northernmost South Korean outpost in
the Yellow Sea, and has been subject to
North Korean shelling in recent years.

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A legendary figure: "King" Kong,

former Japanese Army officer and
leader of Wolfpack 8

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Mr. Bong, Deputy Commander of Wolfpack 8

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Kim Jung Don in front of the tent on Sunwi-do,

from which the lieutenant and Kim returned
"King" Kong to Seoul for questioning. An
identical tent was destroyed by the "Third
Storm" in the Yalu estuary in July 1953.

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A Wolfpack 8 runner. The carbine was real

and fully loaded. These young boys frequently
participated in combat operations on the
North Korean mainland and suffered
casualities along with the older fighters.

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Another Wolfpack 8 Runner.

He was freuently sent to fetch
me to the radio
tent, a hundred
yards from my
own tent. At
night, as we
went down the
trail, he would
reach up and
slip his hand
into mine. I
assumed it was
to give me
courage in the
dark. If alive,
he would be in
his 70s today.
I would be
honored to
shake his hand.

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A dwelling built by the

partisans in their village on
Sunwi-do for the lieutenant's
use. The lieutenant and Kim
Jung Don slept there for only
two to three nights before
they left Wolfpack 8
unexpectedly for Seadragon.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William L. Givens was graduated from the U.S. Military Academy, West
Point, N.Y. He served in the 11th and 82nd Airborne Divisions and in
combat (Special Operations) in the Korean War.

Mr. Givens spent nine years in the U.S. Foreign Service specializing in
Japanese political affairs. He served for five years as a `Special Assistant to
Admiral H.G. Rickover, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (now Nuclear
Regulatory Commission) responsible for negotiating U.S. nuclear powered
warship entry into foreign ports.
He spent three years as a consultant with The Boston Consulting Group,
advising American and European corporations with interests in Japan and
Japanese corporations interested in the U.S. He subsequently formed his
own consultancy, Twain Associates, Inc. performing corporate strategy
analyses and negotiations for major corporations in the U.S., Europe, and
Japan. He continues in that practice.
In 1978 Mr. Givens joined the Board of The Japan Fund (est. 1962), the first
U.S. mutual fund investing exclusively in Japanese equities. He served as
Chairman 2000-10 and CEO 2007-10. Mr. Givens was honored by
Institutional Investor as Small Board Trustee of the Year in 2002 and 2008,
the only individual to have twice received that award.
His articles on various subjects have appeared in Foreign Affairs, Fortune,
The Washington Post (Outlook), Business Week, The Boston Globe, and
other publications.
He lives in Boston with his wife, Elana Givens, Special Advisor to the Dean,
International Business School, Brandeis University. Their daughter Celia, a
2014 Honors graduate of NYU, is currently a paralegal at the Legal Aid
Society DNA Unit in Manhattan.

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