At the Detention Barracks

16
At the Division Detention Barracks, 1965


The day was “not a bang but a whimper.” It had begun with a bang, of course, but ended up at a gaol. Immediately after the morning roll call, HQ Section Personnel Major Sergeant Bong announced with pride a company feast at the mountain valley of Hion Li, Kapyong County, one mile away from the company. "It will be a grand feast of porks and soju," the sergeant said. Under the command guidelines of Regiment Commander Colonel Kim, the medical company of the Seventh Regiment of the ROK Sixth Army Division raised pigs which would be consumed for a sort of nutritional supplementation. And it was the very day set for the whole company to enjoy a taste of the cooked pork and to allow its members the freedom of soju.

The air of the autumnal ethereal blue was crisp. The valley was long and deep whose creek bed was almost dry. Regiment Army Surgeon cum Company Commander Lt. Han got off the ambulance, with Administrating Officer Pang and his minions attending to the surgeon's leaving the passenger seat. The troops from the company kitchen helped erect a large cast iron pot to cook the pork and prepare the gourmet lunch. Major Sergeant Bong attended to the company commander and Sergeant So and So arranged the rest of the company troops to take their seats on the grass.

But hardly had the company troops made a first pick of the delicious meat dishes with their spoons and chopsticks with gusto when an army wireless phone beeped and paged the company commander, who relayed an urgent message that an emergency drill was issued by the division commander. On Sunday of all the days. Medic Corporal Dano and another medic Hoon Kwang, who had once been a ssirum wrestler, were ordered to go down to the 2nd Battalion HQ.

They did go wearing a medic armband and equipped with the first-aid kit but they did not join the roll call on the exercise gathering. They did it one better: The two soldiers during emergency exercise were actually knocked out in sound sleep on the barracks room of the HQ company. Finding the two medics detached to the battalion drill knocked out on the barracks room, Battalion Commander Lt. Col. Hong Minh was enraged. "Lock 'em up in the division detention house," he yelled at the medical company commander via army telephone.

The two medics were roughly awoken by a battalion cadre by whom a summons order from the medical company commander was relayed to them. They found out belatedly that they themselves had slept their way through the drill on the barracks room. Seeing them racing up toward the medical company, the administrative officer told them in not so loud but in subdued voice to appear in the company ground in full combat gear.

They did. They carried backpacks, but they did not carry rifles because the army medics had not been armed. The officer then delivered the order from the commander to the effect that the two negligent soldiers would be punished by the division commander on the grounds of the army service regulations.

They had to go through two stages of disciplines. The first stage of punishment would be carried out immediately and in their own camp ground, and the other in the division compound in the form of one week's detention for the culprits' behavior modification and correctional purposes. They had first of all to do punitively jogging ten rounds of the regiment camp ground far down the company, and in full combat gear, of course. "On what counts?" the officer replied, "On charges of the disobedience to a commanding order."

With the discipline of doing the double done, Sergeant Song, one of the five sergeant majors of the company, made sure that the two poor corporals would be ready to go to the 3rd Military Police Headquarters under the jurisdiction of the Army Sixth Division. He felt he had turned out a cattle farmer who would have to push his cattle to a slaughterhouse. So miserable. With the delivery procedure of the disciplined soldiers to the M.P. office done, Song got up from the seat. Turning around to Dano and Hoon, Sergeant Song said, "Sorry! I'll see ya soon." "Not at all, sir!" Dano and Hoon snapped to attention to salute.


The schedules of the detention house were nothing more than Dano and Hoon could stand. The seven arrivals before them were not harsh on the two new arrivals. They didn't act cold nor tough as rumored around the barracks. "Don't worry," one said, smiling. "Don't be afraid of anything," the other soothed them. They didn't try any initiation ceremony on them, which was unexpected and appreciative to a great degree. "You are supposed to keep things in memory, though" the one who looked to be the oldest and the highest-ranking said, pointing to the directives and notices posted on the wall. It was time for attention, for memory, and of reckoning.


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It was not the first time that Dano had experienced the police probe. Dano had been to the police station not long after from his high school graduation. Disappointed at the delay that his son should have been appointed as a teacher, Toung Doung had shown casual discomfiture despite himself. The delayed notification of Dano's appointment was owing to his own poor school performance, of course, by which he had barely graduated at the tail of his classmates. Not getting over the pressures, on one late spring afternoon, Dano had taken off, leaving his home on the sly, hitching a train ride at Euiseong Railroad Station to Busan.

The poor hitchrider was nabbed while hiding at a train lavatory at Soo Yeong, short of Busan, by a security officer on the train and taken to the Soo Yeong Police Station. "What a wrong time!" a middle-aged officer at the police station mildly reprimanded Dano for his ill-timed travel, taking a reproachful glance at him. The officer pointed to the slogans hanging on the walls of street buildings. "Down with the Gangsters!" a slogan said of the necessity of eliminating the street hoodlums. "Long Live the Revolution!" another slogan expressed its support for the May 16th Coup masterminded by Major General Park Jung Hee. "Free riders of the transit system could be mistaken for vagrants, who could be put into hard labor," he said, passing a decision on the reckless juvenile delinquent to "pay the default fees of the punitive charges to the Euiseong Police Station."

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Two "revolutions" had taken place during and after Dano's school years at the interval of no more than one year. The initial revolution, the April 19 Revolution, had erupted on April 19, 1960, with high school students taking to the streets in the two southern parts of South Korea, Masan and Daegu, protesting against the ruling party's illegal voting practices of stuffing the ballot boxes for Candidate Syngman Rhee and with the university students and their professors organizing the mass demonstrations in the capital. The May 16 Revolution, which had been so named by the military itself, had taken place on the heels of the Students' Revolution, to remedy the anarchic chaos caused by the free-wheeling and irresponsible politicos.

Hardly had the students in Seoul succeeded in driving out the corrupt and dictatorial government and taken control of the street order when the students in provincial districts were running amok on the streets and their school grounds. The belatedly irate crowd of Andong mobbed the mansion of then Congressman Kim so and so of Liberal Party and set it on fire, destroying it.

The students of Andong Normal School went further. On a late spring day the class monitors convoked the school ground assembly, by alarming each other "Let's gather on the school ground!" A solemn atmosphere took over. Student Body President Tiang Huon presided the entire session in which all the students of 600 played jurors. He took a stand below the pulpit and, alas, was questioning the poor principal. School Principal Oh Hio on the pulpit responded to the insulting questions in an awkward and clumsy manner. In that public students' interrogations proceeded in a question- and- answer session, Principal Oh was "indicted and convicted." Mr. Oh, after a guilty plea, said, "People, I'll leave the school!"

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Dano was notified of his late appointment on an autumn day of September, 1961, whereas his peer graduates with good marks had earlier been appointed in March that year. Dano's initial service at Nakdong Elementary School, Saangju County, at age 19, as a teacher was not impressive. He was greatly impressed by the locals, by their convivialities, hospitalities and by the students' gaiety,

The locals were extremely gentle. Many parents of the students dropped by the school whenever they went to the local bazaar and said hellos to the young teacher, most of them handing "a piece of their mind" out to Dano, in which a bottle of apple cider and a pack of rice cake was enveloped. Some locals, of whom the descendants of the Hanyang Cho clan were special, went to great lengths to invite the entire teaching staff, treating them to feasts. The senior teachers, of whom almost all the teachers were natives, were especially friendly, but Dano wasn't friendly in kind. The ending-pitched Saangju accent was good to hear and the landscape of Nakjong river ferry was dreamlike, too. but his classroom performances were not impressive, mostly clumsy and ineffective. He was a misfit, after all.

Despite his oft-repeated defaults on his boarding charges at Mr. Baik's and on the school text book fares for the following year which had resulted in the discomforts of the school children themselves, the encounter with Spear Handle was a great windfall during his young days. She was a sixth year student of the school who was medium height, slender, pretty and amiable.

Dano found her especially attractive, so attractive that he thought she would turn out to be a great woman companion befitting a great gentleman of an era. What had made her look so special was that she had not cried at the commencement ceremony that the rest of the girls had. She had rather been patting the backs of the peer students who had been crying, whispering soothing words to their ears. She had been the one and the only girl who had not acted according to the conventional idea that the female graduates had been supposed to cry, impressing and inspiring him enormously. But Spear Handle had remained another default on his own amorous journey.

It might have been a possessive thought that he had held. An obsession that he had to go to the army to get the bad habit of defaults done away with. He had not volunteered to serve the army, but he had been enlisted at the exact time of his military conscription. However, the self-inflicted motive was lofty, indeed, and the peer pressure was high that men should and could be reborn through the lives in the army barracks.

Contrary to his own anticipations, most of M1 rifle bullets on the firing range in the army boot camp of Nonsan had missed the target and he had almost always ended up at the tail of the file when his squadron had staged race competitions. Aside from the inferior performance at the Nonsan army boot camp, his performance ratings at Masan Army Medical School in the summer period of 1963 had been widely rumored, at the school, to be brilliant, but ended up outdone in the deployment assessment board.

Dano hadn't harbored any pent-up grudges toward the assessment board of the medical school, not envied peer medics their opportunities to serve in the army hospitals, either. Getting on board the truck heading the Third Reinforcement Battalion with the other co-graduates, he had been full of new expectations. In due course, he had been deployed, with the seven other co-enlisted men from Euiseong, at the medical company of the 7th regiment, the Sixth Army Division. of whom two had had placements at the company dispensary and pharmacy, whereas Dano had become a medical squadron member. The barracks life at the front had been so boring to the extent that some higher-ups at the barracks room had had the urges to inflame the idle buttocks of the lower-ranking soldiers engaged in reading books or chatting gaily. The outdoor details had comprised the rest of the barracks routines.