On Desperate Ground Page 3

  The Professor beamed with pride, too, but he kept it inside. “The reason it looked simple,” Smith later boasted, “was that professionals were doing it.”

  2

  TRAITOR’S HOUSE

  Seoul

  Twenty miles to the northeast, the citizens of Seoul waited anxiously, bracing themselves for the coming Americans. Seoul was a city of nearly two million war-weary people, the fifth largest in Asia, a crazy quilt of old neighborhoods whose tile-roofed houses climbed over the sawtooth ridges and lush green knobs. Looped like a sash across the city’s belly was the broad Han River, its war-damaged bridges shrouded in haze. In the September sultriness, the city lay inert. Trolley cars stood unbudging for want of electricity, empty warehouses sweltered, the footsteps of the few marketgoers reverberated off bare concrete. The streets were desolate but for a handful of trundling rickshaws—merchants hurrying homeward. For the most part, people kept to their houses, clung to their families. They knew what was happening; they’d been through this before. First would come the trembling artillery, then the clink of tank treads on pavement, then the bombs and blades and blood. Hard choices would have to be made in an instant, decisions of allegiance, decisions of life and death. That the citizens of Seoul were used to heartbreak did not make heartbreak any easier.

  On the edge of the city, in a hilly neighborhood called Buk Ahyeon Dong, in a district known as the West Gate, a two-story Japanese-style house stood curtained and hushed. Its denizens hardly stirred within. A small child could occasionally be seen in a window, nose pressed against glass. The North Korean authorities had labeled this a “traitor’s house.” No one was supposed to live here anymore, at least not officially. But, in fact, six children called this place home—six sibling orphans of war, including twin boys who were less than a year old.

  Looking after them was their cousin, Lee Bae-suk, a medical student. He was a boyish young man of twenty, with a delicate voice and a frank face lightly scruffed with beard stubble. In those anxious days, as the Americans approached, Lee played parent as best he could, padding through the darkened rooms, shushing his little cousins, fixing meager meals of noodles or rice. It was a fine house, or had been once—a cheerful place lined with books and classical records. Musical instruments were lying about, and a well-tuned piano was set against a wall.

  Lee never ventured outside, for he knew that if he did, there was a good chance he would be seen, maybe captured, maybe killed. One never could be sure who might be watching and where their fickle sympathies might lie. Neighbors spied on neighbors. Friends became accusers. Families turned against themselves.

  His cousins knew the procedure: When a noise stirred beyond the fence, when a visitor knocked, Lee would slip upstairs and bury himself in the jumbled contents of a bedroom closet. The older children would shut the door and scoot a large armoire against it. Inside, he would wait in nervous silence until the trouble passed.

  * * *

  Lee’s fear of the North Koreans was paradoxical, in a way, for he himself hailed from North Korea. He was born in an industrial city far to the northeast and had been raised there, the oldest of nine children—only to escape the nascent Communist country in 1946, at the age of seventeen. Eluding border guards, he had made a weeklong trek over mountain trails that led toward the South. Penniless and half-starved, Lee had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, then hitched a ride on a coal truck bound for the South Korean capital.

  He knew he had relatives who lived somewhere in Seoul, and after a long search he showed up, begrimed with coal dust, at the house in Buk Ahyeon Dong. His aunt and uncle immediately took him in. They were extraordinary people, warm and generous and kind. At the time, they had four young children. They were educated and enjoyed a different life from the circumscribed existence his own family had lived in the North, where his parents were uneducated merchants, descended from peasants.

  Lee’s uncle, Ahn-seongkyo, was a concert violinist of some note, and a distinguished professor of classical music at the national college. He had been a child prodigy, had studied music in Tokyo, and, as part of a popular quartet, had regularly performed on radio programs broadcast live across South Korea. But it was Lee’s aunt, Ok-seon, who was the firebrand of the household. Ok-seon was a teacher and a civic activist, a bold woman unafraid to speak her mind. Ok-seon published a women’s newspaper and became a leading organizer of South Korea’s newly formed Olympic Committee, which sent the fledgling nation’s first contingent of athletes to the 1948 Games in London.

  Lee’s aunt and uncle became his new parents, and they prodded him to pursue a career in medicine. Soon he was enrolled in premedical school. To make extra money, he worked as a paperboy, delivering his aunt’s newspaper on foot through the suburbs of western Seoul. Then he took a night job at a dormitory complex serving the American embassy, where he quickly picked up English.

  Lee often thought of his family back in the North. He missed his mother and father, his eight sisters and brothers. He wondered whether his youngest sister, Sun-ja, who was only three at the time he left home, would remember him. He despaired for his family’s fate under the new Communist regime and feared that he might never see them again. The border was becoming increasingly militarized, and passing across it was growing ever more perilous.

  Some days, a terrible homesickness gnawed at him. Lee was happy in his new life in Seoul, but happy in a way that sometimes made him feel guilty for his good fortune. For four years, he lived here with his aunt and uncle and their growing family—in early 1950, Ok-seon gave birth to twins. Lee thrived in his studies, too. He was well on his way to becoming a doctor, and hopeful for the future.

  * * *

  At the end of World War II, the Allied powers had been faced with the question of what to do with the spoils of the Japanese Empire. Korea had been a Japanese colony, and at the suggestion of the young American diplomat Dean Rusk, who reportedly used nothing more than a National Geographic map as a guide, the peninsula was summarily divided at the thirty-eighth parallel. This line was an arbitrary one—the two “nations” shared the same culture, the same history, the same language. Now the peninsula had been carved up into more or less equal halves, with the understanding that the Soviets would temporarily control the North and the Americans would temporarily control the South, until the country’s thirty million citizens could become reunited under one independent government. But that reunification never happened. The two separate realms were quickly remade, each in the image of its custodial nation.

  In the South, the United States installed a staunch anti-Communist, pro-capitalist, American-educated leader named Syngman Rhee, who held the country together but proved to be a ruthless authoritarian. When he came to power, in 1947, Rhee’s government tortured and assassinated opposition leaders and led a military campaign against left-wing insurgents that culminated in the deaths of more than 75,000 people. This “awkward bedfellow of ‘democracy,’ ” as he’d been called, had proven an embarrassment to the United Nations. The United States, growing ever more focused on the global containment of Communism, tended to look the other way, but Rhee’s police-state tactics concerned the Truman administration enough that it refused to provide the republic with much in the way of heavy arms—thus leaving South Korea vulnerable to attack.

  In the North, meanwhile, the Soviets had handpicked Kim Il Sung to lead the fledgling Communist nation. Kim had been a ferocious and wily guerrilla resistance fighter against the Japanese in World War II and had become indoctrinated as a Communist ideologue. He proved a master at broadcasting his own legend, exaggerating his exploits as a fighter; among North Korean peasants, stories circulated about how Kim could render himself invisible during battles—it was even said he could walk on water. Consciously imitating Stalin’s model, he developed a cult of personality, erecting gargantuan statues and billboards in his honor and calling himself “Great Leader.” Later, his public relations minions would go furthe
r, declaring him “the sun of mankind and the greatest man who has ever appeared in the world.” Tightening his grip on the reins of power, he systematically imprisoned, exiled, or murdered his political rivals. Kim vowed to unite Korea under one government—his government—creating what he called a “happy society” that would eradicate all vestiges of “American imperialists and their stooges.”

  For several years, the South had fended off border incursions from the North, and vice versa. Vengeance killings, guerrilla attacks, and border skirmishes were routine. By late 1949, a simmering peninsula-wide civil war, rooted largely in settling old scores and punishing those who had collaborated with the Japanese, was coming to a rolling boil.

  On June 25, 1950, Kim Il Sung’s Soviet-equipped army came rumbling across the border, catching much of Seoul off guard. Lee Bae-suk, working at the American embassy complex, looked out the window one day and saw a tank in the street. Its turret swiveled and its gun seemed to be aiming right at Lee’s window. At first he thought it was a South Korean tank, but then he realized: It was Russian-made. The North Koreans were already here.

  As Kim’s troops tightened their grip on the city, foreign dignitaries fled the country, and the government went into exile. South Korea’s anemic army retreated south to take up defensive positions at the tip of the Korean Peninsula. With the Korean People’s Army (KPA) seizing power, Seoul was thrown into upheaval. Party officials rounded up suspects to face hastily organized people’s courts. Indoctrination meetings were held in which citizens were expected to publicly “criticize” themselves and pledge allegiance to the new state. The party staged military parades that featured billboards of Stalin and Kim. Radio stations, carrying signals beamed from Pyongyang, played party anthems and stirring odes to the Kremlin. Meanwhile, the new occupiers settled ancestral scores and committed atrocities, executing “enemies of the people”—however loosely defined—and dumping their bodies into mass graves. More than three thousand people were killed.

  In this nightmarish chaos, Lee did not know what to do. He had no job—the abandoned American embassy had been taken over by the North Koreans. He would have to give up his medical studies, too, because he realized that he couldn’t risk being seen on the streets. A young man like Lee, of military age, would immediately arouse suspicion among the police. Any soldier from the North would likely catch Lee’s accent and know where he was from. There was no hiding it; his dialect would give him away.

  And what was a young North Korean man of sound body and mind doing here, living in Seoul? He should have been fighting. He should have been with his comrades, digging in for the American onslaught. The answer was obvious: He had to be a traitor. An enemy of the people.

  So, at his aunt and uncle’s insistence, he sequestered himself inside. For nearly three months he hid here, in the house in Buk Ahyeon Dong, in the West Gate.

  * * *

  But Lee wasn’t the only one in the household who faced danger. Ok-seon had good reason to be fearful, too. Her career as an outspoken community organizer, newspaper editor, and South Korean patriot put her in particular peril. Over the years, she had angered plenty of influential people; many around Seoul considered her newspaper far too insistent and shrill. Upon seizing the city, party officials quickly shut down her press, as they did all others in Seoul—only official party organs were allowed to exist. One day in July, the military police came knocking on the door, looking for Ok-seon. They escorted her to a nearby station and interrogated her for quite some time. They released her but demanded that she return every morning and “report” to the authorities.

  This Ok-seon did, diligently, morning after morning. Then, one day, she went to the station and never came back. That was it. No one saw her again. No information was available. Ok-seon had simply vanished.

  Ahn-seongkyo tried to cope as best he could. He did not protest his wife’s disappearance, for that, he thought, would put his own life in immediate jeopardy. He had six children to raise, seven if you counted Lee. He had to put up a good front. He held out hope that Ok-seon was alive—languishing in some prison, perhaps, but alive. Ahn-seongkyo understood that his having studied music in Tokyo could be a fatal stroke against him. Among other targets, party operatives were said to be on the hunt for Japanese “collaborators” from the war days.

  Ahn-seongkyo continued teaching at the university, and occasionally he gave private music lessons in the house. But one morning he went off to school and didn’t come back. He, too, had vanished. Lee would never see his aunt or uncle again.

  Lee was on his own, the man of the house, responsible for six children. He could only assume that his aunt and uncle were dead. Fortunately, Ok-seon had an older sister named Shin-kyeon, who lived elsewhere in the city. At considerable personal risk, Shin-kyeon would bring food and come to the house to help Lee tend to the children. One afternoon, while Shin-kyeon was there, a visitor rapped on the gate. Shin-kyeon, sick with dread, clicked the latch. Outside the door stood a North Korean soldier, holding a rifle.

  The soldier demanded entry and, once inside, began to search the house, upturning furniture, rummaging through drawers and cupboards. What he was looking for wasn’t clear. In the vestibule by the front door, he knelt to study the long row of shoes neatly arranged on the floor—children’s shoes, mostly. He snatched up a pair that obviously belonged to a grown man. They were Lee’s. “Whose rubber shoes are these?” the soldier barked. “Who is the owner?”

  Shin-kyeon maintained a facade of calm. “Those old things? They’re my husband’s. He’s at the market today.”

  The soldier, with a sniff of suspicion, set the shoes back down and left. Lee, trembling upstairs in the closet, had heard the whole exchange.

  * * *

  Now that the Americans were coming, Lee feared that Seoul would erupt in new paroxysms of violence. The North Koreans, in their desperation to hold the city, might resort to anything: looting, rape, reprisal killings. When the Americans came, there would likely be door-to-door fighting. The occupiers, cornered and probably doomed, would lash out against the civilians, Lee thought, like a tiger caught in a trap.

  In those muggy days of September, every sound on the street caused him to jump. He worried about his cousins. He worried about his country. Now and then he could feel distant shudders, could hear planes throbbing overhead. Lee peered through a tiny gap in the curtains and waited.

  3

  ACROSS THE HAN

  Inchon

  The American soldiers of X Corps kept wading into port—twenty thousand men, thirty thousand, sixty. With each high tide, more landing ships nosed into the channel. From their maws came tanks and tractors and rolling artillery pieces, bulldozers and jeeps and endless crates of ammo. The invasion was unstoppable now. The bridgehead flared like a fast-growing spore. Ziggurats of war stuff swelled upon the docks—food and fuel, medicines and generators, radio equipment, rifles and grenades and shells—the steady streams of supplies coming in, said one British journalist, “as fast as the brilliant large-scale organizational genius of the Americans could bring them.”

  General Oliver Smith had been impatient to get off the Mount McKinley ever since the invasion began. The Professor finally caught a ride to the seawall on the evening of September 16 and set up his division headquarters in a well-placed nook of the smoldering port as the men of his First Marine Division snuffed out the last pockets of resistance. In just two days, Inchon had been quelled. The city, said one correspondent, was “a burned-out husk of a place that would, it seemed, never live again.” Already, Smith was turning his sights on Seoul, twenty-four miles to the northeast.

  General MacArthur, still espousing his numerological theories, remained adamant that Seoul must be captured on September 25. The symbolism of the date was of paramount importance to him—never mind that a battle for the city must first be fought, one that was likely to involve door-to-door combat and tricky matters of tactics
that would present their own demands and suggest their own timetable. The Professor, from his experiences in the Pacific, had learned to be skeptical of preordained deadlines in the face of battle. But he would do his best.

  MacArthur, marching ashore for a sightseeing tour of the ruined port with a retinue of aides and correspondents, met with Smith in his command center. MacArthur urged him to press forward to Seoul with all dispatch. This Smith was already doing: He had sent his Fifth regiment toward the northwest to seize Kimpo Field, the largest airstrip close to Seoul. He’d sent his First Regiment to capture the main road that led to the Seoul suburb of Yeongdeungpo. His Marines were already closing in on the approaches to the capital. The skies swarmed with friendly aircraft, and American artillery was pummeling the city’s outskirts. The campaign was going like clockwork.

  However, a few obstacles stood in Smith’s way. The enemy still held a few villages, and some stretches of road had been mined. And there could be snipers just about anywhere. Then there was the Han. The tidal river, broad and swift, was one of the great waterways of the peninsula, with tributaries extending far back into the watersheds of both North and South Korea. The river tumbled from the western slopes of the Taebaek Mountains, flattened into rich alluvial plains, then swirled through a maze of coastal islands before spilling into the Yellow Sea. At Seoul, the Han was a quarter mile across and was rich with the mingled smells of ocean and sod, its turbid channel full of needlefish and sticklebacks, mullets and eels.

  Smith would have to cross it somehow. All of the Han’s bridges had been blown, and they were not immediately repairable, so the engineers would have to devise something on the fly. The amphibian challenges of the Inchon landing were thus almost immediately replaced by this new challenge: how to get thirteen thousand Marines expeditiously across a river whose currents were treacherous, whose best ferrying points were fortified, and whose margins were nothing but mud bogs.