Land of the Morning Calm

I spent 13 months in Korea in 1962 and 1963 at Camp Hovey about 20 miles south of the DMZ.

The mornings were so calm you could almost touch them, like an envelope of the most finely spun glass. Even in the bustle of an army outpost, the calm remained, an atmosphere of its own.

In the winter, the old papa-sans in their high pointed cone-shaped hats would set out  in the hushed mornings for the endless frozen hills with empty A-frames on their backs to gather firewood, returning to the smoke-pungent villages in the evenings, bent almost double with their high bramble loads. From a distance, they looked like slowly moving, trunkless, leafless trees, single shadows of Birnam Wood.

In our Quonset hut – we called them “hooches” – were two Republic of Korea (ROK) sergeants, both named Kim. They were quiet and much better soldiers than we were, and I became friends with the smaller of them, Kim Jung Koon, who wrote letters to my sisters to practice his English.

Kim saved my life. I was drunk and passed out in a rice paddy in the middle of the winter and he picked me up, put me on his back, and carried me the mile back to the camp.

I saw the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in a department store in Seoul. She was breath-taking. I was, unfortunately, with the chaplain’s assistant from our rifle company, and he later stole the clandestine picture I took of her, but she is still clear and transcendent in my mind’s eye.

The most memorable Christmas Eve of my life was listening to a two-hundred-person chorale sing “The Messiah” in a vast, unheated hall in Seoul. We sat near the top in the hopes that the body heat below would rise to us.

I became friends with the sergeant major of our ROK detachment and we would spend evenings at his house in the village, drinking the Korean rice wine called makgeolli , which the GIs pronounced mock-o-lee, while he told stories in his broken English of the war. Some were horrific, like war itself.

I recount these deep, cherished memories of Korea as a prelude to voicing my hopes that two obvious madmen will not destroy that country and perhaps the world.

Korea has historically been a buffer and battleground, fought over and trampled over by Japan and China, among others, a pawn in the endless games of empire.

The Korean people have endured and South Korea has thrived, despite recent and ongoing revelations of both government and corporate corruption.

But now, with 12,000 pieces of North Korean artillery zeroed on Seoul itself and numerous American bases, and with an itchy-fingered maniac in Pyongyang  boasting of increasingly viable nuclear delivery systems, Donald Trump’s response has been to tweet return threats that are as crazed and hostile as Kim Jong-Un’s, unbridled goading by one unstable psychopath of another.

Trump has historically had a macabre curiosity about nuclear warfare, as well as a predilection to see himself as a tough guy, despite evidence of his physical cowardice and draft-dodging.

His continuation of this reckless course of challenging Kim Jong-Un can only lead to one of two evils unless prevented  by clear-headed and rational diplomacy: the first and lesser evil would be the instigation of conventional warfare on the Korean peninsula that would be a bloodbath of catastrophic proportions; the second and infinitely greater evil would be a nuclear confrontation that could be the beginning of the end.

The morning calm must be restored.