Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

^ELEVEN THE MORBID TYRANNY OUT OF ANTIQUITY ^{WITH U.S. FORCES, KOREA} Summer 2006

Since 2002, I had been covering deployments on several continents that had two overarching themes: fighting the Global War on Terrorism and positioning the U.S. military for the rise of China. It really was a global war—something that American troops in countries like Mali, Algeria, and the Philippines never tired of mentioning. Yet this new array of military commitments was layered atop old ones. The United States was in its fourth year of a war in Iraq. But it had been on a war footing in Korea for fifty-six years now. More than ten times as many Americans had been killed on the Korean Peninsula as in Mesopotamia. Whereas Americans hoped more or less to withdraw from Iraq within a few years, they still had 32,000 troops in South Korea over half a century after the armistice. Korea gave one a sense of historical perspective, as well as of America’s imperial-like legacy. Furthermore, it provided a lesson in what could be accomplished with patience and dogged persistence.

Thus, I came to Korea.

I was struck by the somber, seaweed hue of the peninsula’s lush and rugged landscape, and the hyperactive modernity of this economic powerhouse, which had become one of the most technologically precocious countries on earth. It wasn’t always so. The drive from the airport at Inch’on to downtown Seoul went through the heart of a former urban war zone. South Korea’s capital was taken and retaken four times in some of the most intense fighting of the Korean War.

It was a conflict that many people preferred to forget, even while it was being waged. However alluring the country might be with its dramatic mountainscapes and distinctive food, which, more than any other place on the Pacific Rim, bore an imprint of Inner Asia, the first thing that came to mind when recalling Korea from the American soldiers’ viewpoint was the awful climate. One would suppose that as a peninsula, the climate would be moderated by the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan. But rather than warm weather issuing from those waters, in winter the winds came charging down from Siberia, and in summer the monsoon blew in from the Pacific Ocean; so winters were unbearably frigid, and summers hot and humid. The perennial dust blowing in from the Gobi Desert did not help matters. Ground troops sweated and froze accordingly, floundering in often horrific, nameless battles. Many hundreds of thousands of Korean lives were lost in combat between June 1950 and July 1953, in addition to 142,000 American casualties, of which over 33,000 were killed in action. Yet it was a military clash of “subtle and infuriating limitations, and ambiguous results,” according to historian James L. Stokesbury.[112]

When communist North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea, merely five years after the United States had defeated Japan and ended World War II, the American people were just as bewildered as when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait less than a year after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

What few fully grasped at the time was that by occupying Japan, America inherited strategic responsibility for the nearby Korean Peninsula; just as by ending Soviet domination of eastern Europe, America consequently enhanced its role in the adjacent Middle East, even as the Cold War status quo in the Arab world collapsed.

Following North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in the early summer of 1950, it had taken only a few months for an American-dominated United Nations force to drive Communist troops back to the 38th parallel. Like the first Gulf War in 1991, which had ejected Iraqi forces from Kuwait, that initial phase of the Korean conflict restored the status quo ante. But subsequently, the Americans decided to push deep into North Korea, to solve the fundamental problem of the North Korean regime itself. The result was Communist China’s entry into the war, which then dragged on for nearly three grinding, bloody years, until a cessation of hostilities back at the 38th parallel where it had begun.

As in Iraq, the Reserves had to be called up in significant numbers. A need arose to train an indigenous army, and to adapt to the tactics of guerrilla insurgents, even as the Pentagon brass grumbled that such a large indefinite commitment of troops to one place would undermine America’s military posture everywhere else.

In Korea, the American public experienced a war that, at least from afar, appeared to be less about good and evil than about the abstractions of strategic positioning. And it did not much like or understand it. President Harry Truman left office an unpopular president. If people preferred to forget Iraq as though it were a bad dream, even before the bulk of American troops departed, it would not be the first time this happened in American history.

But there was another way to look at Korea. In 1953 many doubted that Asians were capable of mastering democracy and a free-market system. It would not be until 1992 that South Koreans elected a truly stable and democratic government. Given South Korea’s economic transformation in the intervening decades, particularly under the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee in the 1960s and 1970s, the lesson might be that democracy should come last and not first in the transition from poverty and totalitarianism. Yes, that point could be argued. But a point that cannot be argued is this: a large reason South Korea eventually succeeded was patience—the patience of American policy makers and the American military, and their ability to persevere, decade after decade, in the Korean Peninsula. What old Korean men and women would always be grateful for was our “stick-to-itiveness,” without which, in any case, we would have little hope of remaining a great power.¹

In the heart of Seoul lay the Green Zone—that is, Yongsan Garrison (“Dragon Mountain”), a leafy, fortified Little America, guarded and surrounded by high walls. Inside these 630 acres, which most closely resembled the Panama Canal Zone before the Americans gave up control, were eight thousand American military and diplomatic personnel in manicured suburban homes, with their neatly clipped hedges and backyard barbecues. I drove by a high school, baseball and football fields, a driving range, a hospital, a massive commissary, a bowling alley, and restaurants.[113] South Post was the residential part of Yongsan; Main Post where U.S. Forces, Korea (USFK), and its attendant bureaucracies were located, in red-brick buildings that the Americans had inherited in 1945 from the former Japanese occupiers. USFK had another similarity with Iraq: Korea was so substantial a military commitment that it merited its own semi-autonomous subcommand of PACOM, just as Iraq, unofficially, merited its own four-star subcommand of CENTCOM.[114]

Alas, I arrived in Korea just as the Americans were to begin a troop drawdown. Having moved into Yongsan Garrison when Korea’s future seemed highly uncertain, they now planned to give up this prime downtown real estate and relocate to Camp Humphreys in Pyongtaek, thirty miles south. The number of ground troops would drop to twenty thousand or less, and would essentially comprise a skeleton of logistical support shops able to add muscles and tendons in the form of a large invasion force, in the event that war ever did break out on the peninsula, though it wasn’t clear how necessary a large invasion force would be.

Integrated with the American military to an unprecedented extent, with the most Americanized officer corps in the world, the South Korean Army had literally a half century longer than the Iraqi Army to perfect itself. It was a first-tier Asian military at the same level of sophistication, technologically and operationally, as Singapore’s. Thus, it would be able to shoulder many burdens in wartime. South Korea’s special forces units were becoming so interoperable with the U.S. Air Force that their forward air controllers on the ground were trained to call in close air support from American A-10s and to laser-guide B-2 pilots from Whiteman to high-value targets.

The ability of the United States to draw down land forces did not in any way indicate a lessening of responsibility for the American military here. Indeed, North Korea presented the U.S. and Pacific Rim countries with unique security challenges that made it, perhaps, every bit as pivotal in terms of how the twenty-first century would unfold as the rise of China and the actions of al-Qaeda. While the Communist regime in Pyongyang was a legacy of the Cold War, at the same time its collapse could become the catalytic event that set the outlines for a new Asian military century.

Perhaps no regime in the early twenty-first century bore as close a resemblance to the morbid, crushing tyrannies of antiquity, as described in the Old Testament and in Herodotus, as that of North Korea. The worldview of Kim Il Sung, the founder of the Communist state, was something like a mix of Lenin’s “fight-talk, fight-talk” dictum and the view expressed in Hitler’s Mein Kampf that an organism that does not always fight dies.[115] Juche, the regime’s ruling philosophy of self-reliance, described as “Dear Leader Absolutism,” warped the Confucian ethos into a means for controlling an entire population.[116] For decades after the emergence of the North Korean state in the mid-twentieth century, the regime operated like a combination of a crime family and a religious cult, undergirded by layers of myth and fabrication. In this storybook universe, it was Kim and his guerrilla forces alone who had expelled the Japanese in 1945. It was said that Kim Jong Il, the son and successor of Kim Il Sung, was born on Paektu-san, the highest mountain in Korea, on the Chinese border, where a deity descended from heaven. The American military acronym for North Korea said it all: KFR, the Kim Family Regime.

It was a regime that Americans misunderstood because of their own myths. Kim Il Sung was not simply a dreary Stalinist tyrant. As North Korean defectors will tell you, he was also a charismatic anti-Japanese guerrilla leader with stores of popular legitimacy, very much in the mold of Enver Hoxha, the Stalinist tyrant of Albania who earlier had led his countrymen in a successful insurgency against the Nazis, with relatively little help from the Allies. Nor was Kim Jong Il the childish psychopath of the film Team America: World Police. Expertly tutored by his father, he had consolidated power largely on his own and manipulated the Chinese, Americans, and South Koreans in the 1990s into subsidizing the Communist regime. One thing Kim Jong Il was not was impulsive. North Korea had the equivalent of think tanks that concentrated on military responses to attacks from the U.S. and South Korea, attacks that themselves would be reactions to crises initiated by Pyongyang.

“The regime constitutes an extremely rational bunch of killers,” said Andrei Lankov, professor of history at Seoul’s Kookmin University. Lankov, who grew up in the Soviet Union and spoke fluent Korean, told me that the Kim Family Regime was unusual in this critical sense: even in Stalinist systems such as the former East Germany and Leonid Brezhnev’s U.S.S.R., the children of top party officials rarely followed in their parents’ footsteps. In fact, quite a few became writers and avant-garde artists, helped along in their careers by their parents’ privileges and social connections. But the top officials of the KFR begot top officials of the KFR. The regime was biologically self-perpetuating. Nor was there a particular interest in liberalization or contacts with South Korea. The KFR saw how West German Ost-Politik had helped destroy the former East Germany.

And so, seventeen years after the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the end of subsidies from the East Bloc, North Korea plodded on, resilient and relentless. Kim Jong Il had been a playboy, but he had evolved into a remarkable operator in his own right. In Lankov’s view, under different circumstances Kim Jong Il might have become the successful Hollywood film producer that his propaganda machine claimed he was. Helping his succession had been his father’s ability to link the regime in the mind of its subjects to the Joseon dynasty, which had ruled the Korean Peninsula for five hundred years, thus justifying the KFR’s system of primogeniture.

And yet Kim Jong Il’s talents were slipping. It wasn’t so much the post-9/11 reality that he might not have properly taken into account, in which the United States saw provocations like missile tests in a wholly different light, but the post-Iraq reality, in which an administration in Washington, humbled by events, was particularly unlikely to be impulsive and thus careful not to play into the KFR’s hands.

Eras don’t end neatly and all at once. And as North Korea demonstrated, that also went for the Cold War. On the border dividing the two Koreas, amidst the cry of egrets and Manchurian cranes, I saw South Korean soldiers standing frozen in tae kwon do–ready positions, their fists and forearms clenched, staring into the faces of their North Korean counterparts. Each side picked its tallest, most intimidating soldiers for the task. The South had raised a 328-foot flagpole; the North responded with a 525-foot pole, then hoisted a flag atop it whose dry weight was 595 pounds. The North built a two-story building in the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom, so the South built a three-story one. The North then added another story to its building. “The land of one-upmanship,” is how one U.S. Army sergeant described the demilitarized zone (DMZ). The two sides once held a meeting in Panmunjom that went on for eleven hours. Because there was no formal agreement when to take a restroom break, neither side budged. It became known as the “Battle of the Bladders.”

Childish and yet illuminating, for beneath our civilized pretensions, the behavior on the DMZ demonstrated how deep down human beings were still chest-thumping silverbacks (or testosterone-charged adolescents) playing King of the Hill. Although the formalized hatred on display in the DMZ would be consigned to history on some foreseeable morrow, as for war itself there could be no end.

When you looked at other divided-country scenarios in the twentieth century—Vietnam, Germany, Yemen—it seemed apparent that however long the division persisted, the forces of unity ultimately triumphed. But the historical record also indicated that unification did not happen through a calibrated political process in which the interests of all sides were respected. Rather, it tended to happen through a fast-moving cataclysm of events that, despite decades of war gaming, caught experts by surprise. And the weaker the North Korean regime became, the more dangerous the overall situation: totalitarian regimes close to demise were apt to be panicky and, therefore, irresponsible.

Given that the North’s 1.2 million-man army—the fifth largest in the world—was increasingly being deployed forward, to the border with South Korea, the Korean Peninsula loomed for the U.S. military, at least theoretically, as the next horrendous land nightmare out there following Iraq.[117] As the saying went among American soldiers, “There is no peacetime in the ROK [Republic of Korea, pronounced ‘rock’].” One merely had to notice the Patriot missile batteries, the reinforced-concrete hangars, and the blast barriers at Osan and Kunsan air bases south of Seoul, as fortified as any bases in Iraq, to know that. I remember one marine in Okinawa telling me that North Korea’s was not some third-rate, Middle Eastern conventional army that would disintegrate like Iraq’s. Those “brainwashed Asians,” as he put it crudely, “would stand and fight.” Ominously, uniformed Americans here referred to the 1950–53 fighting as “the first Korean War,” as if there might be a second.

North Korea boasted 100,000 well-trained special operations forces. With one of the world’s largest biological and chemical arsenals, the North Korean People’s Army was trained to operate in a chemical environment, and to deploy chemical weapons in order to create opportunities for field maneuver. Furthermore, the experience of de-Baathification in Iraq suggested that the collapse of a governing infrastructure in Pyongyang, combined with the unconventional guerrilla mentality of the Kim Family Regime’s armed forces—the legacy of Kim Il Sung’s own guerrilla experience—could result in widespread lawlessness, as well as mass migration within and out of North Korea. The myths and Juche philosophy of the regime would increase the potential for an insurgency. This was to say nothing of the need to gain immediate control over nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD) facilities.

Kim Jong Il’s compulsion to demonstrate his missile prowess was a sign of his weakness. Contrary to popular perception in the United States, Kim didn’t stay up at night worrying about what the Americans might do to him; it wasn’t North Korea’s weakness relative to the United States that preoccupied him. Rather, if he did stay up late worrying, it was about China. He knew the Chinese had always had a greater interest in North Korea’s geography—with its additional outlets to the sea close to Russia—than they had in the long-term survival of his regime. (Like us, even as they wanted the regime to survive, the Chinese had plans for the northern half of the Korean Peninsula that did not include the “Dear Leader.”) One of Kim’s main goals in so aggressively displaying North Korea’s missile capacity was to compel the United States to deal directly with him, thereby making his otherwise weakening state seem stronger. And the stronger Pyongyang appeared to be, the better off it was in its crucial dealings with Beijing, which were what really mattered to Kim.

Even as the pros and cons of various diplomatic strategies toward the Korean Peninsula were discussed, middle-and upper-middle-level American officers based in South Korea and Japan were beyond that. They were planning for an unconventional meltdown of the North that, within days or hours even, might present the “world”—that is, substantially the U.S. military—with its greatest stabilization operation since the end of World War II. “It could be the mother of all humanitarian relief operations,” Army Special Forces Col. David Maxwell of Springfield, Massachusetts, told me. On one day, a semi-starving population of twenty-three million people would be Kim Jong Il’s responsibility; on the next it could be that of U.S. Forces, Korea, and PACOM.

More likely, it would be a drawn-out process. Robert Collins, a retired Army master sergeant, now the chief civilian area expert for the American military here, outlined for me seven phases of collapse in the North. Phase One: resource depletions. Phase Two: the failure to maintain infrastructure around the country because of resource depletions. Phase Three: the rise of independent fiefdoms and widespread corruption to circumvent a failing central government. Phase Four: such tendencies reached a point whereby the KFR had to attempt to suppress them. Phase Five: resistance against the central government. Phase Six: the regime fractured. Phase Seven: the formation of new national leadership. The regime had probably reached Phase Four in the mid-1990s, but was saved by subsidies from China and South Korea, as well as by famine aid from the United States. It had now gone back to Phase Three.

The Kim Family Regime had learned a powerful lesson about survival from the fall of the Ceausescu Family Regime in Romania: take utter and complete control of the military. And so it had. The KFR now ruled through the army. Only individual North Korean soldiers had defected to the South, not units—not even squads. That would have indicated soldiers were talking to one another and were no longer afraid of exposure by comrades. One defector from the North’s special operations forces told me that everybody in the ranks was afraid to discuss politics with one another.

Nevertheless, the North Korean People’s Army was simply too big to be kept well fed, so the regime concentrated on bribing its elite units. This defector, a scout swimmer, also told me that while his men lived well, the extreme poverty of the conventional troops would make their loyalty in a difficult war problematic. Would they fight for the KFR if there was an unforeseen rebellion? Again, the Romanian lesson was that it depended on the contextual peculiarities of the event. When workers revolted in 1987 in Brasov, the Romanian military crushed them, but when ethnic Hungarians did two years later in Timisoara, the military deserted the regime.

Col. Maxwell, the chief of staff of Special Operations Forces in South Korea, had thought hard over the years about the tactical and operational aspects of an unraveling North Korean state. “The regime in Pyongyang could collapse without necessarily its army corps and brigades collapsing,” he told me. “So we might have to mount a relief operation at the same that we’d be conducting combat ops. If there is anybody in the U.N. who thinks it will just be a matter of feeding people, they’re smoking dope.”

Maxwell spoke from experience. He had been the commander of the 1st Battalion of the 1st Special Forces Group when it had landed on Basilan in the southern Philippines in early 2002, a mission that combined unconventional warfare—humanitarian assistance, in this case—with counterinsurgency against Jemaah Islamiyah and the Abu Sayyaf Group. “The situation in the North could become so messy and ambiguous,” he went on, “that the collapse of the chain of command of the KFR could be more dangerous than the preservation of it, particularly when one considers control over WMD.”

He indicated that such a relief operation would necessitate contacts with ex-regime generals and various factions of the former North Korean military, who would be vying for control in different regions and who could form the basis of an insurgency if not brought under the coalition’s operational command structure. The Chinese would certainly be in the best position to do this, but the role of U.S. Army Special Forces in this effort could be substantial. Green Berets and OGAs (other governmental agencies, especially the CIA) would be among the first in, very much like in Afghanistan in 2001, in order to prevent a debacle of the sort that occurred in Iraq, with even deadlier consequences.

But the U.S. could not insert troops into a dissolved North Korea unilaterally. It would likely be a four-power intervention force, officially sanctioned by the United Nations: the U.S., South Korea, China, and Russia. Japan would be kept out, though all parties would gladly accept Japanese money for the endeavor.

Let’s take these other powers one at a time. Because of their proximity to the Korean Peninsula and anti-Japanese feeling here resulting from a brutal occupation from 1910 to 1945, the Japanese, of all the parties, had the most to fear from a reunified Korea, even as Korean hatred of the Japanese made participation of Japanese troops in an intervention force unlikely. Japan had occupied not only Korea but China too, and had defeated Russia on land and at sea in the early twentieth century. Thus, Japan bore the brunt of widespread hostility in a volatile strategic environment. While this could make it all the more necessary, from the Japanese standpoint, to put boots on the ground in a collapsed North Korea, China and South Korea would fight tooth and nail to prevent that from happening. Because the Japanese had so far failed over the decades to confront their own brutal behavior during World War II, nobody in the region yet trusted them, and thus they would likely be dependent on U.S. diplomatic and military support.

Whereas Japan’s strategic position would be weakened dramatically by a collapsed North Korean state, China might eventually benefit. China was already positioning itself for a reunified Korean Peninsula, to some extent under the control of South Korea. China was South Korea’s biggest trading partner. Driving along the Yellow Sea all I saw at South Korean ports were Chinese ships. China harbored thousands of North Korean defectors that it wanted to send back, in order to build a favorable political base for China’s gradual economic takeover of the Tumen River region—where China, Russia, and North Korea came together, with good port facilities on the Pacific. De facto control of a future Tumen Prosperity Sphere would bolster China’s economic strength, helping it to do fiscal battle with the U.S. and Japan. Expect China to sanction the coalition, provided its own troops could, at the least, carve out a buffer zone in the part of North Korea near the border with Manchuria, where China was already developing massive infrastructure projects like roads and ports. In other words, China was already on third base in regard to a Greater Korea.

Russia’s weakness in the Far East, as demonstrated by its failure to prevent the creeping demographic conquest of its eastern territories by ethnic Chinese, meant that it would be that much more truculent in guarding its interests on the Korean Peninsula. The fact that North Korea was a Soviet creation was but one example of how Russia did, in fact, have a historical legacy here. It might be less trouble for the other powers to allow some Russian troops into Korea rather than to keep them out.

South Korea would bear the brunt of the economic and social disruption in returning the peninsula to normalcy following the collapse of the North. Its interests were paramount. Though no one would say it out loud, there was little interest in the region in a reunified Korea, unless it happened gradually over years and decades. What was really preferred was a sort of South Korean protectorate in parts of the North, officially under an international trusteeship, that would keep the two Koreas functionally separate for a significant period. This would allow everyone to reposition himself for a truly unified Korean state, without the attendant chaos.

The early implementation of a stable polity in the North, following the Communist regime’s collapse, could likely fall to PACOM and U.S. Forces, Korea. But while the U.S. military would probably have operational responsibility, it might not have the desired control. It would, in effect, have to lead a coalition (of, in some cases, mutually suspicious states) that deployed fast and furiously to stabilize the North, as well as deliver humanitarian assistance. A successful relief operation in North Korea in the weeks following the regime’s collapse might determine the difference between anarchy and prosperity on the peninsula for years to come.

But what if the opposite occurred? What if rather than simply unraveling, North Korea actually launched a surprise attack on South Korea? Maxwell and others were busy filling in the details of that tactical battlefield as well.

Merely driving through Seoul, one of the world’s great and congested mega-cities, made it clear that a conventional infantry attack on South Korea’s capital was something that not even Hitler would have contemplated. With that reality in mind, think of North Korea’s People’s Army as a mass of artillery supported by a scheme of maneuver. Its 13,000 artillery pieces and multiple rocket launchers could fire over 300,000 shells per hour on the South Korean capital, in a low-grade demonstration of “shock and awe,” which, because of its very indiscriminateness, would cause widespread havoc in Greater Seoul, where close to half of South Korea’s 48.5 million people lived. The havoc would be amplified by infiltrating North Korean special operations forces, who might sabotage water plants and train and bus terminals. As for its maneuvering infantry, all roads led to Uijongbu, north of Seoul, from where the North Korean People’s Army would cross over the Han River and bypass Seoul from the east. One objective would be fuel stations to keep their vehicles moving before the South Koreans and the Americans could mobilize properly.

But this strategy could never succeed. For one thing, while A-10s, F-16s, and other aerial platforms would take out enemy missile batteries and kill many North Korean troops inside South Korea, submarine-launched missiles and B-2 Spirit bombers from Guam and Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri would destroy strategic targets inside North Korea, both above and below ground. For another thing, the South Korean Army would quickly occupy the transport hubs, while unleashing their own divisions and special operations forces. Such an invasion would have to be the act of a regime in the middle and later phases of disintegration. Its lone hope would be that given the hourly carnage, in the time between the first artillery barrage on Seoul and the beginning of a robust military response by South Korea and the United States, some political factions inside South Korea, abetted by the United Nations and elements of the global media, would cry out for diplomacy as an alternative to violence.

The violence would be horrific. Iraq and Afghanistan would be clean by comparison. A South Korea filled with North Korean troops would constitute a target-rich environment in urbanized areas where the good guys and bad guys would always be close to each other. “Gnarly chaos” is how one F-16 Viper pilot described it: “the ultimate fog of war.” The battlefield would be made more confusing by the serious language barrier that still existed after fifty years between American pilots and South Korean joint tactical air controllers, who would have to guide the Americans to many of their targets. Both A-10 and F-16 pilots complained to me that this weak link in the bilateral military relationship would drive up the incidences of friendly fire and collateral civilian deaths—on which the media would then concentrate. As part of a deal to halt the bloodbath, members of the KFR might be able to negotiate their own post-regime survival.

It wasn’t just that a land invasion of Greater Seoul was impossible, and that even the scenario just described was far-fetched; it was that the real worry was less of infantry units storming across the border than of refugees doing so. North Korea’s collapse terrified South Korea much more than its missile program.

Yet there was a conventional military option for North Korea that American officers and senior NCOs, as well as some civilians with whom I spoke, truly worried about. Start with the fact that it really wasn’t a matter of A-10s, F-16s, or B-2s, but of a combined American–South Korean military machine that would not only respond speedily to a North Korean artillery barrage, but would then in short order march much of the way to the Yalu River on the North Korean border with China, thus finally putting an end to the Korean War. Following an artillery barrage on the South, China would not necessarily oppose this plan; we could give Beijing the guarantees it needed regarding postwar access to the peninsula, especially control over a Yalu River buffer zone.

Obviously, the KFR knew all of this. Remember, it was deliberate and calculating, not impulsive, provided, of course, that it was not in one of Collins’s final phases of collapse.

Therefore, middle and upper-middle levels of the American military were worried less about an indiscriminate artillery attack on the South than a very discriminate one. For example, take the missile launches that occurred during my visit. My sources feared that the Bush administration actually might have been foolish enough to respond militarily. As they explained it, don’t think that before Kim Jong Il even fueled those missiles he hadn’t already calibrated a response strategy were they to be destroyed by the United States, since to have them destroyed, without a military response of its own, would have unraveled the regime’s mythology of omnipotence and control.

The KFR’s response to such a provocation would have to be linked to one of its primary strategic goals: splitting the alliance between South Korea and the United States. How would it do that? After the U.S. had destroyed the missiles, or had responded militarily in a very targeted fashion to some other specific challenge—resulting in the embarrassment of the Kim Family Regime—the North would launch, say, an intensive five-or ten-minute artillery barrage on the heart of Seoul, killing Americans and South Koreans in the vicinity of Yongsan. Then it simply would stop. And after the shellfire halted, the proverbial question among American officers in a quandary would arise: What now, lieutenant?

Politically speaking, we would be trumped. South Koreans, encouraged by their leftist movement—the upshot of both an intrusively large American troop presence and decades of manipulation by the North—would instantly blame the U.S. for the targeted strike against North Korea that led to the carnage in their capital. The United Nations and the global media would subtly blame Washington for the crisis and highlight the argument for talks. With that, the KFR could have an injection of new life, with more aid forthcoming.

That’s why, short of a march toward the Yalu, some officers and NCOs with whom I spoke favored economic warfare against the North. Do not help the regime through food aid. Its population had been semi-starving for decades. Its forests were denuded. People were eating tree barks. Stop prolonging the agony. Help the KFR collapse.

One problem with this strategy was that in the latter stages of collapse, the likelihood of the more far-fetched military options improved—conventional and unconventional. Another problem was that it wasn’t we but the Chinese who were really keeping the regime alive, though they did not necessarily exert foreign policy control over Pyongyang: the KFR, bent on its own survival, made a very bad puppet. In fact, China was in the process of gaining operational control over anything in the North of strategic economic and military value: mines, railways, and so on.

In other words, the Korean Peninsula was arguably the most dangerous place on earth; hard landings were easier to describe than soft ones. And a soft landing would more likely be orchestrated by Beijing than by Washington, even as the Chinese might not mind saddling the Americans with the short-term military responsibility of stabilizing a collapsed North.

But a landing there would be.

As I’ve indicated, a reunified Korea would have an instant, undisputed enemy: Japan. Any Korean politician would be able to stand up in parliament and get political mileage out of an anti-Japanese tirade. The Japanese knew this, and it was fueling their remilitarization, particularly in regard to their navy, with the latest, quiet diesel submarines and Aegis destroyers. While I was in Korea, in addition to the missile launches, there was a saber-rattling contest with Japan over disputed islets that South Koreans called Dokdo and the Japanese Takeshima, in what the Koreans referred to as the East Sea and the Japanese the Sea of Japan. Both sides sent survey ships to the area. Another option for Kim Jong Il, therefore, would be to leave South Korea alone and attack Japan instead, thereby playing on pan-Korean anti-Japanese nationalism.

Here it is useful to review Korean history. While in the medieval era the Koreans fought wars against Chinese dynasties like the Sui and Tang, later on, following the coming to power of Korea’s own Joseon dynasty in 1392, Japan gradually matched China as Korea’s principal adversary. There were repeated Japanese violations of the peninsula, culminating in an orgy of rape and murder at the end of the sixteenth century, and a savage occupation at the beginning of the twentieth, which ended only with the Soviet and American conquests, though it wasn’t altogether black and white. South Koreans had trouble admitting that Japanese colonialism in the early twentieth century nearly doubled the life expectancy of the average Korean.

Japan’s main consolation, according to Syung Je Park of the Asia Strategy Institute in Seoul, was that a Greater Korea might serve as a balance against an even more significant threat to Japan: a rising China. But the situation looked to be far more subtle than that. This anti-Japanese Greater Korea could also be a linchpin in China’s twenty-first-century Asian economic prosperity sphere, a more benign version of Imperial Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere of the 1930s and 1940s. Korean businessmen would certainly resist Chinese economic domination; but this would be tempered by anti-Japanese feeling and some lingering anti-Americanism in Korea, as the generation that remembered the sacrifices of American soldiers during the Korean War faded entirely. As in Germany, America will have made Korea a free society through a large troop presence, one that a younger, ahistorical generation might remember only negatively. But what would not fade from local memory was how the United States had its occupation of the Philippines supported by Japan, in return for American acceptance of the brutal Japanese occupation of Korea following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05. Such were the wages of imperialism, even when, as in the case of America and South Korea, it led to good results.

Greater Korea’s relationship with China might ultimately be determined by how America itself decided to act: specifically, the degree to which the United States could get Japan to recognize its war guilt. If the U.S. had a military alliance with Japan without Japan publicly coming to terms with its past, psychologically it would push Greater Korea’s population toward China. Henceforth, China and its implicit ally, Greater Korea, would have a tense relationship with Japan and its allies the U.S. and India, though, because of its own manifold business interests in China, America could only balance against China delicately.

Perhaps the wisest thing the U.S. could do was to keep ten thousand troops or so on the Korean Peninsula even after the KFR collapsed and the northern half of the peninsula was stabilized. At least this was the opinion of South Korean Army Col. Chung Kyung Yung of Seoul’s National Defense University. Such a contingent, he told me, would serve as a political statement that the U.S. was not abandoning Korea to a militarily resurgent Japan. The best way to secure peace and prosperity in Asia, Col. Chung emphasized, was not to have an initially fragile Greater Korea without U.S. troops become a bone of contention between China and Japan. Moreover, because the United States was the farthest away of all these powers, it should be perceived as the least dangerous—the one power without territorial ambitions.²

The problem with that idea was that it might run counter to what was doable in South Korean politics. It is true that South Korean anti-Americanism was exaggerated, mainly the product of a sixties-style student movement that had come to fruition a decade after the ones in America and Europe, partly because the end of war and middle-class prosperity had also come later here. This was still a country where the few statues of foreigners included American Generals Douglas MacArthur and James Van Fleet, the latter the father of the South Korean armed forces. Protestantism was practically the dominant religion, the result of late-nineteenth-century American missionary activity. (When and if North Korea collapsed, expect Christian evangelicism to replace the Communist regime’s Juche ethos of self-reliance. Pyongyang was once the “Jerusalem of Asia” because of its missionary associations a century ago.) Yet, despite such comforting legacies, South Koreans had, by and large, convinced themselves to be nearly as worried about the Americans as they were about the Chinese, just as they had convinced themselves to be as afraid of the Japanese as of the North Koreans. In truth, many South Koreans had an interest in the perpetuation of the Kim Family Regime, for its collapse would usher in a period of economic sacrifice here that nobody was prepared for. A long-standing commitment by the American military had allowed South Korea to evolve into a status quo, materialistic society. Thus, few here wanted to rock the boat.

While Washington was keen on a free and democratic Korean Peninsula, Beijing, with its infrastructure investments, was laying the groundwork for a Tibet-like buffer state in much of the North, to be ruled indirectly through its ethnic Korean cronies, once the Kim Family Regime unraveled. This buffer would be less oppressive than the morbid, crushing tyranny that it would replace, even as Beijing would bear the cost of it. Therefore, from the point of view of the average South Korean, the Chinese might offer a better deal. The more Washington thought narrowly in terms of a democratic Korean Peninsula, the more Beijing had the potential to lock us out of it. Ultimately, victory here would go to the side with the most indirect and nuanced strategy.

The logic of our policy on the Korean Peninsula was dependent upon the willingness of South Koreans to make some measure of sacrifice for the sake of freedom in the North. But sacrifice is not a word that voters in free and prosperous societies anywhere tend to like. Indeed, if voters in Western-style democracies were good at anything, it was rationalizing their own selfishness. It seemed that the authoritarian Chinese might have understood the voters of this free and democratic society better than we did.

Our whole military strategy worldwide was bent on nurturing such free societies. But once these societies were on their feet, rather than be on our side, they would more likely become states that we would, well, just have to put up with. We were right in our mission, so long as we recognized its tragic contradictions.

Before leaving Korea, I heard an American general exhort his troops to be proud of the sacrifices that they and their predecessors in uniform had made for the Korean people, whether or not young South Koreans appreciated it. Some days later, on July 4, 2006, there was a toast at the Special Forces Association picnic at Yongsan Garrison for the members who were “absent”—those who had been killed, or might still be missing in action (MIA) in North Korea and Vietnam. And some days after that, I went on a long road trip to the mountainous southern end of the peninsula with an old friend from the Philippines, Master Sgt. Mark Lopez of Yuba City, California.[118] To pass the time, I asked him, if he had the choice, when would he have most liked to be born? His answer was swift: “Right before the Great Depression, so that I could enlist as a combat pilot and fight in World War II and Korea, and still be young enough to fight in Vietnam.” Mark and so many others I knew saw these three wars as equally sanctified—not as one good war, one stalemate, and one bad war.

On all of these occasions, it struck me how the military had historical memories that the public did not. To wit, my own generation saw Korea as a blur and Vietnam as a cause. But for those like Mark, those two Asian conflicts were, well, wars, like World War II—with heroic mythologies no less tragic and glorious.

Korea brought to mind Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s amphibious landing at Inch’on, the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division’s and South Korean 1st Infantry Division’s initial capture of Pyongyang, the 1st Marine Division’s brave retreat in the snow from the Chosin Reservoir following heavy fighting with seven Chinese divisions (one of the proudest moments in Marine history), the U.S. Navy’s unrelenting artillery support of ROK infantry landings on the southern Korean coast, and the B-29 pilots who bombed behind enemy lines: it was in Korea where the new U.S. Air Force made its bones.

As for Vietnam, because so many of their dads had fought there, the uniformed Americans I knew were also on intimate terms with that conflict. Thus, they saw it in all its gray shades: with its tactical successes and tactical failures, with its Marine combined action platoons and Green Beret infiltrations that worked, and its Big Army ones that didn’t; with its Big Army generals who succeeded like Creighton Abrams, and its Army generals who failed like William Westmoreland; with its moments of glory like Hue, and its moments of disgrace like My Lai; and above all, with its heroes, like the Son Tay Raiders, who had attempted to free American POWs in 1970, and the “Misty” forward air controllers and “Sandy” search-and-rescue pilots, who risked their lives for untold hours over North Vietnam, identifying targets and prowling for downed American pilots. It was because these soldiers knew their history that they did not get discouraged easily. Thus, they were armed with stores of patience for the bad times.

Master Sgt. Lopez was one of a half-dozen NCOs from the Army’s 1st Special Forces Group who were embedded with South Korean special forces detachments on one-man missions. In a quiet bar in Seoul one night, I discussed with these Americans the perennial subject of host-country NCOs, the quality of which they had been working all their professional lives to improve. As good as South Korean NCOs were compared to those of other foreign armies, everyone at the table agreed that Korean noncoms were not up to American standards. It was cultural, Mark insisted. Married to a local—like most of the guys at the table—he loved and respected the ingenuity of Koreans, who, he admitted, were in many ways superior to Americans. “But Koreans are also hierarchical,” he said, “and so their NCOs are too subservient to their officers.”

Americans were definitely not hierarchical, everyone chimed in. We were still a fluid, middle-class society born of a frontier ethos where respect was based on work done, not on social position or who your parents happened to be. I looked around the room and thought that these men were as good an example of that ideal as any you could find.

I had met many like them since 9/11. For despite their uniforms and short haircuts that were supposed to have robbed them of their individuality, the American troops whom I met I remember only as individuals. Of course, I might have had the same impression writing about coal miners with pickaxes and shovels instead of rifles, or about construction workers, or cod fishermen, all of whom dressed in veritable uniforms and had their characters invigorated by dangerous physical labor. While the troops looked alike to outsiders, after a few days with them their personalities achieved vivid proportions, without the need of affectation.

I wanted to continue traveling in their company, but the more experiences one accumulated of a certain kind, the more that memory began to edit them into oblivion. If I continued my restless life with the military, I knew that these individuals would start running together into composites. My travels had reached the point of diminishing returns.

Individuals these troops were. Yet the best of them shared a common trait that had nothing to do with following orders, or thinking literally about the task at hand, or some such thing. It was their metaphysical direction. The best of them groped toward an indefinable frontier. In his “Invocation” to The Year of Decision: 1846, Bernard DeVoto cites a passage from Henry David Thoreau: “Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free…I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.”³

This should not be confused with nativism, or anything connected to America’s current tensions with Europe, or even a hankering for Asia. Instead, Thoreau and DeVoto refer to a spirit of pioneering ambition that invigorated the best military units I knew, whatever the foreign policy or administration of the moment. It is a spirit that provided for a healthy enthusiasm among those taking part in deployments in Iraq or Afghanistan, Kosovo or Indonesia, and so many other places. It is a spirit that had nothing to do with conquest.