Incident at China Crossing: With the 7Th Operations Detachment Hapbongam-Ri, Korea

By James F. Kirkham

This is a memoire of an enlisted man’s service - my
service for thirteen months, October 1957 through November 1958, in a small Counterintelligence Corps unit, The 7th Operations Detachment, at the tiny village of Hapbongam-ri, in Korea right near the DMZ – us on one side, them on the other.

This memoir is written many decades after the fact, and without the benefit of notes or research - just well faded memory. Dates, places, the precise words of conversations - none of these is guaranteed. Furthermore, where memory failed or the remembered facts were ambiguous, I did not hesitate to fill gaps with what likely must, or at least, should have happened. Accordingly, I have changed all the names but my own, lest an ex compatriot complain of inaccuracy, and the Publisher, wisely and appropriately, labeled this a work of fiction, not a memoire, in fact. Fiction – yes, I agree: No doubt my account is inaccurate in a merely factual sense. It is, however, meticulously accurate in reflecting my memory - of strange sights, smells and customs, of fellow citizen-soldiers coping with lonely service in a distant dangerous land, and above all, toward the end of my tour in that fateful thirteenth month, of being scared to death that I would be shot and killed. The why of that latter is the heart of this tale.

My purpose in spending another thirteen months to write this inaccurate memoir was not to catalogue facts, but to convey now, a sense of what it was like then, doing service in the 1950's on a distant and uneasy frontier, as once the citizen Legionnaire served under the Imperial Eagles on the banks of the Rhine, far away from hearth and Rome.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796040821

Book preview

INCIDENT AT CHINA CROSSING

With the 7th Operations Detachment

Hapbongam-ri, Korea

title%20image.JPG

JAMES F. KIRKHAM

Copyright © 2019 by James F. Kirkham.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019907795

ISBN:       Hardcover       978-1-7960-4084-5

                 Softcover         978-1-7960-4083-8

                 eBook               978-1-7960-4082-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 11/19/2019

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CONTENTS

I INTRODUCTION

On The Nature Of A Counterintelligence Unit

II WHO REMEMBERS ABOUT KOREA NOW

The Unforgettable Repo-Depot at Uijambu

III THE KOREAN ALPHABET

I Learn to Read Korean Without Understanding It, Creating Thereby a Chronic Misunderstanding

IV MONEY IN KOREA 1957-1958

How to Dine out in Tongduchon Without Getting Arrested

V THE ADVENTURES OF ADVANCED ENGLISH CLASS

The Superannuated Analyst as River Pilot and King of the One Quarter Ton Four by Four

VI THE OFFICER CADRE - 7TH OPERATIONS

My Resolve to Conduct My Own Intelligence Survey; Peter Rabbit’s Famous Ride; Captain Carver’s Rise and Fall

VII MORE ON READING KOREAN

How the Ability to Read Gives Mysterious Insights

VIII SHOWERING IN KOREA

How out of the Muck Blooms the Lotus; Out of Hardship, Exquisite Pleasure. Never Tell Your Mother About an Injury.

IX INTELLIGENCE SURVEY: STEP NUMBER ONE

In Which Sandy and I, to Avoid Courtmartial, Successfully Cover Up an Encounter with a North Korean Agent.

X ECSTASY IN KOREA

I Look for Scorpio and Find a North Korean Patrol

XI LINGUISTIC POLITENESS CONVENTIONS

Turk Kim Sweats as He Learns to Speak Politely to the Bakery Girls

XII INTELLIGENCE SURVEY: NEXT IN ORDER

In Which My Soul Is Saved at a General Protestant Service and I Encounter a Curious Coal Mine

XIII CAPTAIN KIM OF THE KNP

I’m Captain Kim of the KNP

I run the thugs for Syngman Rhee

The whores all split their take with me

Though I’m a lowly captain

XIV TOP SECRETS

Secret Atomic Warheads at ⁷th Division, Under Surveillance from Top Secret North Korean Observation Post

XV SO NOW WHAT

How to Deal with a Would-Be Assassin on Route to Advanced English Class

XVI THE BIG PICTURE

Cries and Phonemes, a Witch Attends a Christening, and My Cover is Blown

XVII AT POISON KIM’S

I Drink with a Friend, and Sell a Rifle

XVIII AT KIM BAE DUK’S

A Geopolitical Discussion; A U-Turn on the Golden Gate Bridge

XIX THE END OF THE STORY

A Surprise Visit from Sleepy Yi

I

INTRODUCTION

On The Nature Of A Counterintelligence Unit

This is a memoire of an enlisted draftee’s service - my service - for thirteen months, October 1957 through November 1958, in a small Counterintelligence Corps unit, The 7th Operations Detachment, at the tiny village of Hapbongam-ri, in Korea right near the DMZ – us on one side, them on the other.

The name of the CIC (Counterintelligence Corps) unit which I served was the Seventh Operations Detachment. Hence the subtitle of this book. Operations Detachment was the code name for a CIC unit. It fooled no one.

To learn about the enemy is clearly useful: That is Intelligence. To keep the enemy from learning about you: That is Counterintelligence. But by its nature, counterintelligence produces nothing useful for unit commanders - friend or foe. The difference between a counterintelligence unit and most other kind of Army unit is that a counterintelligence unit tried not to produce anything useful. A counterintelligence unit wants to keep everybody from knowing anything. In the 1950ties, the Army filled counterintelligence units with overqualified, smart-ass, college-graduate, enlisted draftees, possibly on the theory that producing nothing useful would come naturally to them.

This memoir is written many decades after the fact, and without the benefit of notes or research - just well-faded memory. Dates, places, the precise words of conversations - none of these is guaranteed. Furthermore, where memory failed or the remembered facts were ambiguous, I did not hesitate to fill gaps with what likely must, or at least, should have happened. Accordingly, I have changed all the names but my own, lest an ex-compatriot complain of inaccuracy, and the Publisher, wisely and appropriately, labeled this a work of fiction, not a memoire, in fact. Fiction – yes, I agree: No doubt my account is inaccurate in a merely factual sense. It is, however, meticulously accurate in reflecting my memory - of strange sights, smells and customs, of fellow citizen-soldiers coping with lonely service in a distant dangerous land, and above all, toward the end of my tour in that fateful thirteenth month, of being scared to death that I would be shot and killed. The why of that latter is the heart of this tale.

My purpose in spending another thirteen months to write this inaccurate memoir was not to catalogue facts, but to convey now, a sense of what it was like then, doing service in the 1950’s on a distant and uneasy frontier, as once the citizen Legionnaire served under the Imperial Eagles on the banks of the Rhine, far away from hearth and Rome.

II

WHO REMEMBERS ABOUT KOREA NOW

The Unforgettable Repo-Depot at Uijambu

Many years ago, but likewise many years after my Korean tour of duty, I was comforted by a cartoon in the New Yorker. A man sitting at a bar addresses the bartender: What do you mean, you never heard of Uijambu? The comfort was that there were enough persons who knew and remembered to warrant a cartoon.

We who served in Korea right after the war - that war - knew Uijambu: north of Seoul on the MSR (Main Supply Route, the two-lane dirt road that ran from Seoul to our Army garrisons to the North). Uijambu lay about halfway between Seoul and the 7th Operations Detachment’s tin hootches and quonsets at Hapbongam-ri near the DMZ. No one would be expected to have heard of the village of Hapbongam-ri. The village consisted of ten to twelve houses strung along an irrigation ditch drawn from Sinchon Creek (the village’s grandest structure, the communal latrine). Sinchon Creek ran due north a short run to the Imjin River. The Imjin River ran east to west at that point, Sinchon Creek at the conflux forming a right angle with the flow of the Imjin. We were on the one side of the Imjin, the south, and the enemy was on the other, the north. At Hapbongam-ri, less than a mile south of the Imjin, we had the illusion of soldiering, but no illusions of being at a place that would be remembered.

Uijambu, on the other hand, was the home of I Corps (pronounced Eye Core, though, undoubtedly, the I was meant to be the Roman numeral one), with its repo (i.e., replacement) depot, a lode of parts and supplies whose mining by the Koreans provided the economic base for the surrounding country. It was an unusual economy, but susceptible of classic analysis. Cost of theft was the main component of price - heavier, bulky items costing more than light and compact, with little regard to original cost of materials or manufacture.

When I arrived in Korea I was missing my Army raincoat, and at my first opportunity, during a trip to Uijambu, I went to the quartermaster to buy a replacement. (That is where you are supposed to go for such replacements.) The sergeant in the strangely small and lonesome facility responded to my request to buy an Army-issue raincoat with an uneasy fidgeting.

While in the Army, I was always viewed with the suspicion that I was something different than I purported to be. This was still the era when every platoon had a Plato or two - enlisted, college-educated draftees. (I draw this name, possible anachronistically, from the Beetle Bailey cartoon.) I was a museum-quality specimen: a P.f.c. draftee, twenty-five, balding, and chain-smoking a pipe. This was at a time when pipe smoking was still viewed as academic and intellectual rather than stinking and unhealthy, and the pipe seemed to add a mysterious and intimidating panache to an overage private who used correct grammar even when excited. Also, at the time (alas) I displayed sufficient self-importance to suggest an ROTC officer, or undercover CIA. And, through no achievement of my own, I stood six feet four inches tall, and basic training had forced me to acquire a strong physique.

The sergeant, finally (I assume) decided that I was not an officer from the Inspector General’s staff in a clumsy disguise, and informed me that quartermasters did not carry a stock of Army-issue supplies, since all Army-issue items were available at below the Army price on the black market. In response to my request, he recommended Skoshie Joe’s as a particularly reputable dealer and gave me directions to that store, two and one-half blocks east of the main gate.

Indeed, Skoshie Joe’s was reputable. That establishment fitted me perfectly from its wide selection of Army-issue raincoats, quoted a price well below the Army price, and even declined to cheat me when I began to pay at the official hwan-to-dollar exchange rate, which was half the acceptable black market rate. Skoshie Joe’s was an establishment that valued its integrity.

The main supply depot at Uijambu, from which the raw materials for the market flowed, had at one point been commanded by a barrel-shaped colonel of extraordinary energy and competitive spirit. To foil the Korean pilferers (slikies or slikie boys as they were called), he first laid and welded together steel strips designed originally for the construction of airfields. These strips were thick gauge steel some thirty feet long and two feet wide, with two-inch diameter holes at regular intervals to make them lighter to handle. After welding the floor to prevent tunneling into the depot - the area was enormous, at least the size of a football field - he then welded the same strips vertically into a solid fence thirty feet high. He capped the fence with barbed wire and put a dog run just behind the fence all around. There was but one gate, manned by GIs, each with a carbine at the shoulder and a .45 caliber pistol at the waist.

To be said for Americans, they admired and respected the Koreans for being able to continue their pilferage at about the same rate post-fence as pre-. Something like Kipling’s view of the Fuzzie Wuzzies, who broke the British square. The barrel-shaped colonel, in a manner unintended, however, had created a romantic master work in Brobdingnagian, tinker-toy ugliness, much like the Eiffel Tower. And as the Eiffel Tower to Paris, so the Repo Depot to Uijambu. Once glimpsed, never forgotten.

Recently, over a glass of port during a dinner party at my house (the barrister, after a stormy day in court, comes safely home to port - Alexander Pope, more or less), the conversation turned to now dimly-remembered martial locations; the Relief of Mafeking, the disaster at Gallipoli, and so forth. I told of the cartoon of the man at the bar saying, What do you mean, you never heard of Uijambu? There was a long puzzled pause. No one there had heard of Uijambu, either.

It is time now to write about Korea then.

III

THE KOREAN ALPHABET

I Learn to Read Korean Without Understanding It, Creating Thereby a Chronic Misunderstanding

Nowadays, we have all seen Korean script, in signs and windows of any large American city. But suppose you were stationed in Korea where all the signs - certainly in the countryside - were in Korean script. What an advantage if you could read the script! Not understand it - just read it.

To illustrate:

Imagine you are a young counterspy fresh from Fort Holabird, (where young counterspies like me were trained in the 1950’s). You are newly stationed in a foreign country - say, in Germany - and do not speak the language. Not a word. If you have to go to Garmish, you can drive down the road indicated by a sign that says GARMISH with an arrow. You will know when you arrive by observing the sign at the entrance to town that reads GARMISH. If you want to meet in Garmish with Herr Doctor Wickenhauser, a medical-looking office with the legend Wickenhauser provides a strong indication of the correct location. Note how much valuable information the young counterspy has at his command by being able to read German - not understand it, mind you; I have assumed our counterspy understands not a single word of the language. But he can read it because it is written in the same Roman alphabet (more or less) as English. An alphabet, of course, consists of symbols that stand for sounds. Thus, if you know the sound of a name, a street, or a city, and if you know what sounds the symbols stand for, you can then read the sounds and know where you are - whether or not you can understand the language.

There are lots of alphabets. The Roman is just one. In Greece, phenomenon becomes φαινόμενον. Russians use the cyrillic alphabet. But in each, a symbol stands for a sound. The Chinese, instead of an alphabet, use ideographs. Their symbols stand for ideas, not sounds. Thus, a Chinese ideogram (for example) which stands for the notion of an entrance, is pronounced entrance in English, Entrada in Spanish, Eingang in German and Whatsis by the nomadic tribesmen of Mongolia or whatever their word for entrance is in Ugric or Altaic. The great advantage to ideographic writing is that it can be understood, more or less, by persons who cannot speak each other’s tongue.

This flexibility covers not only different peoples, but different times. The educated Chinese can read Confucius though he lived thousands of years ago. Like most everything: the good news is also the bad news. Ideographs convey meaning, but not sound. If Western writing were ideographic, an educated American could commune with Aristotle, but could not listen to Homer. A further disadvantage to ideographic writing is that it takes years of study to build up knowledge of the thousands of ideographs necessary for a useful reading and writing vocabulary. An alphabet need contain only some twenty to thirty symbols representing the sound groups used by a particular language and is easily mastered.

Each Chinese ideograph is, as a matter of style, made up of a number of relatively short pen strokes forming a more or less rectangular group of hatch marks. Such ideographs are easily identified as such by their style - or so it seems to the westerner. So it seemed to me when I first came to Korea.

Seoul, for a city with an enormous American garrison, contained virtually no signs written in the Roman alphabet. Street signs, shopkeepers’ marquees, legends on trucks and buses all bore the crisscrosses and squiggles associated with the Orient. By great good fortune, I took my first walk through Seoul with one of the few native American GI Korean interpreters in all Korea. He was a graduate of the Monterey Army Language School and was stationed at Counterintelligence Headquarters in Seoul. (It has always been a puzzle to me why counterintelligence relied so heavily - exclusively in our unit at Hapbongam-ri - upon Korean national interpreters. But on that turns at least part of this story.)

Upon arriving in Korea, I was bussed from the airport first to a casual company for all new entrants and then after two days to my assignment with the CIC, for which I had trained at Fort Holabird. I did not, however, have the status of a counterintelligence agent; for a straightforward reason: I was duped by the Army.

In those days, there was de facto universal military training. Everyone served for at least two years. It was a liberal idyll which was too grand to last. All men of whatever social status, race, education, etc., at the age of early maturity - typically, seventeen to eighteen - were drafted. In basic training, the Army proceeded to:

1) Take away all clothing,

beards and hair styles, so that

all external social signs of who

should hate whom and who should

look down on whom were eliminated;

2) Examine each recruit-

draftee medically and dentally and

cure those who were ill, and fill

and repair all bad teeth;

3) Inoculate all against

diseases to the extent medical

science allowed;

4) Teach all illiterates to

read;

5) Impose a rigorous program

of calisthenics combined with unlim-

ited amounts of nutritious food, such

that the fat lost weight, the skinny

gained: an eight-week metamorphosis

from swayback, hollow chest, lard

belly to stand tall and fit;

6) Teach pride, self-reliance,

self-discipline and teamwork through

the imposition of difficult but not

impossible tasks generally along the

line of what we would now call "sur-

vival programs," like Outward Bound;

7) And after two years of service,

provide funding for higher education

with no strings attached (except that

the funds be used for the self-improvement

of education).

Naturally, we hated the Army. I say naturally, since, no doubt, the hatred was Oedipal: the authority-discipline-Army officer father reimposing itself just as late teenagers we were struggling free of the biological father. Eventually, I suppose, that hatred translated itself into political action (or is everything bad to be traced to Viet Nam). In any event, the best, indeed, historically unique, all-embracing social engineering system for creating egalitarianism, imposing fairly upon all social strata, races and creeds the obligations of service, engendering physical and mental competence, plus leaving each with the stringless opportunity for higher education, lasted but a generation 1940 to 1960 at most and was then dismantled. Not that I liked it while doing it. I said, we all hated it. And after basic training came terminal ennui, Mickey Mouse cum feckless fussing in place, yielding boredom so intense that any risk to break the monotony seemed worth the hazard. (Therein lies more of this tale.)

The casual company through which I passed on arrival in Korea was corrupt, and I was fed my first two days in Korea the only complaint-worthy food of my Army duty. (C rations on maneuvers do not count, since there is reason for their bizarre form and content.) The Army - that incorporeal abstraction - provided, as always, great quantities of food, but the entirely corporeal casual company cadre sold the greater part of it to the Korean black market. Indeed, they even sold, in due course, the smaller portion that they fed to us. Our latrines at the casual company consisted of a row of holes above a cement trough where our excrement collected for sale to local farmers. The notion was ecologically sound, but the compound stank. When I returned thirteen months later, the whistle had been blown, the meals consisted of steaks and baked potatoes served with re-enlistment propaganda, and our far grander excrement whisked uselessly away through traditional commodes, presumably to pollute the adjacent river.

I was not a counterintelligence agent, because I refused to add an additional year to my service. The deal was fair enough. In those days, if you went to college, you still did not escape military service. You could allocate a significant portion of your time in college to ROTC, and then, with officer status, serve the minimum two years. If, as I did, you chose to allocate your college courses differently, you were drafted as an enlisted man, but typically (as a college grad) offered OCS (Officers Candidate School). But OCS required a commitment of an extra year’s service, or a total of three, the extra year being the trade-off for not taking the ROTC in college. If recruited as I was for one of the intelligence services, typically counterintelligence, you were sent for advanced training to Fort Holabird - the Bird, as it was called. There, they sprang the trap which we recruits should have anticipated (but typically, full of our own importance at being selected for elite training at the Bird, did not): an extra year, for a total of three again, to become an agent, wear civilian clothes, and spook around, sniffing out subversives: or finish your two-year term in lowly enlisted uniform as an intelligence analyst. Draftees of any moxie and leadership ability, and who were willing to spend an extra year, typically chose to become officers and were not tapped for the CIC. Those with the same qualities, but willing to spend in the military only that minimum period of time required, were undismayed at the prospect of being an enlisted soldier in uniform, and declined the bait. The result was that counterintelligence agents consisted, with salient exceptions, of self-indulgent, leadership-challenged klutzes - often charming, always well educated - but klutzes.

The Army in Korea kept its civilian status bargain with its counterintelligence agents, but, like ancient bargains with the gods (Sibyl’s, for immortality; Cassandra, for the gift of prophesy), the substance belied the form. Civilians qua civilians - minding their own business, doing their own thing - were not allowed in the war zone of Korea, which, at that time and in the part of Korea where we were, consisted of everywhere but Seoul. Some civilians, mostly engineers, did work for the Army outside of Seoul, but were required to wear Army uniforms, without rank. Instead of rank insignia these uniformed civilians wore a patch, like a Boy Scout merit badge, on the shirt with the legend DAC (Department of the Army Civilian). Thus, CIC civilian status agents wore the Army uniform in Korea, the only difference being the DAC patch. But the irony was more.

The commanding general of the Seventh Division and his staff hated the CIC as a collection of self-indulgent klutzes. (The premise was correct; the conclusion, a bit unfair.) Those officers could do nothing about the agents’ DAC status. That status had been decreed from on high, i.e. the Pentagon. But by God, otherwise, the CIC would soldier, and soldier especially well. Thus, agents were subject to particular harassment on the condition of their uniforms - shirt and pants had to be spotless and flawlessly creased; brass agleam; shoes dazzling. The real Department of the Army civilians wore the same clothes but with a militant sloppiness, contriving to be out of uniform, one way or another, at all times: It was an important badge of their status as a real DAC.

Thus, it was that all secret counterintelligence agents in Korea proclaimed their identity from a distance of at least thirty yards in moderate to bright sunlight by being flawlessly in uniform and wearing the DAC patch. Of course, DACs, including our not very secret agents, were accorded officer status, (though