•
By the time my in-country training was complete, I knew the landscape
better than most Koreans and had friends and acquaintances in almost
every part of South Korea, even the smallest towns and villages. This expe-
rience made a big impression on the way I thought of the Korean people.
During my travels, I had been befriended in countless ways, taken into homes
for a meal, and offered shelter. Koreans had a reputation for being cool to
strangers, especially foreigners, but this was not true to my experience, then
or later. I had developed a deep affection for the people.
On a less positive note, I began to recognize the pervasive influence and
invasion of privacy that Koreans in those days were forced to accept as a
normal part of life. In October, , President Park imposed martial law
nationwide, and a month later he pushed through the authoritarian
“Yushin Constitution,” which among other things set the stage for his con-
tinued rule on an indefinite basis. A series of national and international
developments—a narrow reelection victory for the president in , the
withdrawal of a division of American troops from the ROK while the United
States rapidly scaled down its effort in Vietnam, U.S. overtures to the Com-
munist regime in China, and the opening of talks between North and South
Korea—created intense insecurity among the top leaders of the South Ko-
rean government. Park’s response was to tighten control over his surround-
ings, a development that affected Americans in South Korea as well as that
nation’s citizens.^1 Government security officials always seemed to know
where I was going and what I was doing. Since I was assigned to the U.S.
Embassy, I had been warned that the security apparatus would be watch-
ing my activities, and indeed there almost always seemed to be someone who
would appear each day to ask me where I was going, the purpose of my visit,
how long I was staying, and such. Some of this was perhaps natural curi-
osity, but too often a black jeep would appear out of nowhere to watch my
movements. For all the time the authorities spent watching me, they must
have been disappointed when my activities always amounted to nothing
more than attempts to improve my poor language capability and learn more
about the local area.
Near the end of my assignment during the summer of , I was asked
to write a report summarizing my year at the embassy so that those who
followed would not have to “relearn” the lessons I had already learned. The
report was fairly extensive and recommended that future officer trainees
attend the ROK Army Staff College at Chinhae as part of their training. It
also recommended that, due to the difficulty of the Korean language, fu-
ture trainees spend at least two years undergoing formal language train-