• ing drafted and entering as a private or taking ROTC and entering as an
officer. The latter sounded better to me. Although I never intended to make
a career of the army, it turned out that I enjoyed military life.
Like most Americans, I had little interest in or appreciation for Asia as a
boy and only remember seeing the newspaper reports concerning the Ko-
rean War, which was the first time most of us had heard of such a place as
Korea. After the war ended in , Korea retreated to the far reaches of
my memory.
This rapidly changed in the early and middle s. I married Jody Elston,
my high school sweetheart, in , and after graduating from college and
leaving law school, I was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army.
When officers’ basic training was completed, I received orders to Korea for
my first duty assignment.
I reported at the end of , remaining until early in . This first as-
signment in Korea, which unknown to me at the time would be the first of
several, was a great learning experience. Korea was far more rural then than
it is today—and poor, very poor. Every U.S. unit supported a school or or-
phanage. The kids were usually in bad shape by our standards and did not
seem to get much government support. We provided things like clothes, a
small amount of financial support, some food and milk—whatever we could.
Some of my soldiers who had carpentry or other skills would also sometimes
help with building projects and repairs on weekends. For a young, middle-
class American, the whole country, except for parts of Seoul, was pretty
much the pits. The only paved roads I remember were but a few miles long—
from Seoul northwestward to Kimpo Airport and from Seoul southward to
Suwon. The air terminal at Kimpo was little more than a Quonset hut; the
military arrivals entered one side and civilians (of which there were few)
entered the other.
I was initially assigned to a unit in the Osan/Pyongtaek area, which was
just south of Seoul and not far from where, in July, , American troops
had first engaged (disastrously) the North Koreans in battle. Soon, however,
I was selected to take charge of another unit that was located well in the
rear, in North Cholla Province near the town of Kunsan. This unit had its
troops deployed at about a dozen different sites over a large area, and I be-
came quite familiar with the Cholla geography and people. In the southwest-
ern part of South Korea (officially the Republic of Korea, or ROK), the Cholla
Provinces were even more depressed than most of the rest of the country—
poor sanitation, subsistence farming on small plots, and little opportunity.
It was only later that I became fully aware of the regional animosity that