AUTHOR’S PREFACE
This story almost was never written. Following my retirement from the U.S.
Army in , I began a second career as an international business devel-
opment consultant and had intended to work equally hard at improving my
golf game. Business often took me back to Korea, however, and invariably
into frequent contact with old friends in the army and U.S. State Department,
and especially with my many Korean friends and associates from days gone
by. Inevitably the talk would turn to our previous experiences in Korea, our
affection for and interest in the country and the Korean people, and my own
somewhat unique career and perspective as the U.S. Army’s first fully trained
and experienced Korea specialist. Friends often urged me to write a short
review of my thirty years of experience in Korea, including the historic
events in which I personally participated. After some thought and consid-
erable procrastination, in I agreed to undertake this project for the
Korean magazine Wolgan Chosen.
I wrote primarily out of a sense of history. Much had been written and
published in Korea about such incidents as the assassination of Pres. Park
Chung Hee in October, , Chun Doo Hwan’s seizure of control of the
army the following December and the subsequent imposition of martial law,
and the tragic events at Kwangju of May, , but almost all of the pub-
lished record was from the Korean perspective. In fact, when this memoir
was published in Korea during , there was no accurate account by any
responsible American officer or individual who actually participated in these
events.
Since then, Ambassador William H. Gleysteen Jr. and Gen. John A.
Wickham have published in the United States their recollections of experi-
ences in Korea during the late s and early s.^1 Yet these men served
at the very top of the U.S. country team in Korea, and they did so over a short
period of time. Neither was a Korea specialist. The recounting for an Ameri-
can audience of my lengthy experiences at the lower and middle levels—in
Korea and in the United States—still seems useful for two reasons: first, my
perspective on the events of – are sometimes different than those
of Gleysteen and Wickham; second, the transitional nature of the current