Before dawn, Independence Day, the pungent odor of breakfast kimchi and gasoline fumes filling their interiors, the riot buses, twenty of them, wound their way down through the early morning traffic and pollution to central Seoul, disgorging a squad here, a squad there, at various strategic positions throughout the city. Subway entrances in particular were favored by those retreating students hoping to grab a train out of the fray when the “riot ritual,” as the police call it, got too rough for them. And it would get that way soon enough in the exhausting and exhilarating business of baiting the police amid temperatures that AFKN, the U.S. Army radio network, predicted were going to climb well into the nineties with matching humidity, creating a fifty-fifty chance of late thunderstorms. But now it was still cool as the police quietly took up positions throughout an H-shaped grid running north-south through the city’s western sector down Sejong and Taepweong, and in the eastern sector running down Chang-Gyeong. Joining the two arms of the H were platoons stationed along Cheong Gye, the largest concentrations in the left half of the H around City Hall. Of the squads allocated to the protection of U.S. buildings, most were stationed outside the U.S. Chancery, as it, unlike the heavily fenced-in embassy, was immediately accessible from the street.
“Maybe it’ll be too hot for them,” joked a platoon leader in one of the rear buses.
“It’s too hot now,” replied one of those standing in the aisles. “This gear’s killing me.”
There was a chorus of mock sympathy and a punching of shields.
“You’ll have rest soon enough, Chun,” said the platoon leader. “Some student’ll put you on your ass.”
“I’ll break his head first,” said Chun, lifting his truncheon.
“You monster!” cried out another. “What if it’s a woman?”
“Then I’ll stick it somewhere else,” Chun retorted.
“Someone’ll have to show you where it is.”
“I know where it is.” Chun was twenty-four, son of a janitor, and a policeman who hated university students with a passion. It wasn’t only the fact that he had come from a poor family and had missed out on the opportunity to go further than high school that made him feel so hostile toward the students — rather it was what he saw as their blatant hypocrisy. The same hooligans who would be throwing rocks and insults at him today would, in four years time, be executive trainees for Hyundai, Samsung, or some other giant chaebol while Chun would still be a policeman fighting a new generation of students shouting their obligatory anti-U.S. slogans. The latest were “Drive away the American bastards!” and “Down with the government!” banners scrawled in their own blood. Oh, some of them, the leaders, were genuine Communists, and Chun hated them the most for inciting the more gullible in the giant “reunification rallies,” thousands of students deafeningly applauded the Democratic Reunification Party’s belly-crawling overtures to Pyongyang. But Chun believed most of them were simply out for excitement under the pretense of it being serious political protest. It was a lark, a time to vent all the teenagers’ pent-up rage against parents forever pressuring them to Kongbu haera! — “Study! Study!” A chance to lash out at police, teachers — against all the Confucian-bred respect for authority.
Chun filed out with the rest of his platoon near City Hall, but designated as a “flying wedge,” his platoon would not remain at any particular junction. Instead it would be on standby — ready to move quickly to reinforce weak spots in the H. Chun took great pride in knowing he was a member of the most experienced riot police in the world. Never mind all the “Cherry Berets”—the old “Olympic Police”—sliding headfirst down ropes like monkeys for the evening news crews, or the blue-denimed National Police; when the big battalions of protesters came out, when it went from bricks to Molotov cocktails, it was Chun and the other “Darth Vaders,” the black-helmeted riot police, who settled it. A squad of neatly turned out National Police passed by, their white helmets wonderful targets for any projectile. One of them waved. Chun nodded with stiff formality; the riot police remained aloof. Someone in Chun’s platoon said the Catholics and Protestants were coming out in support of the students.
“So?” a rookie asked.
“Protestants!” replied a corporal. “That’s how they got their name, right? Protest-tants. Means golchikkori—troublemakers!” As far as Chun was concerned, the Catholics were no better. And if it was true the Christians were going to get involved, it would be a long, hard day. Students might then win middle-class support. The worst possible combination.
He heard a crackle of radio static; another three platoons, a hundred men in all, were being requested by the officer in charge of policing the square around Myongdong Cathedral. Catholic nuns were forming a human chain, swaying and singing hymns. Then there was a call from police HQ diverting two platoons to Yonsei University in the west. Less than a minute later an urgent plea came in from Korea University campus in the city’s northeast. This was unusual, the students normally favoring inner-city streets for their protests, where they could best be concentrated to gain maximum TV coverage and where if you ran out of paving stones, there were always construction sites — plenty of loose brick. Besides, the Molotov cocktails, made mostly with empty OB and Crown beer bottles, were much more effective against closely packed police in city streets than on open campuses. What was behind the new tactic? Chun wondered.
A “most urgent” call came in for a “wedge” at the corner of Yulgog and Donhua about four blocks northeast of the U.S. Embassy.
The first shower of projectiles thudded against the bus’s thick window mesh as it passed Changdokkung Palace on the left. Chun could see the students, about two thousand, he guessed, overwhelming a hundred or so National Police, white helmets dotting the huge crowd as it swarmed about the entrance to the Secret Garden — a phalanx of placards demanding reunification. Soon the crowd of students, half already inside the gate, was expanding, contracting, and expanding again, at once controlled and uncontrollable, pushing and pulling, its waves surging through the gates, spilling into the gardens.
“Beautiful!” said Chun. “Those bastards are bottled up inside by the wall. Perch in a pond.” He pulled out his club. “Boom! Boom!”
“Chun!”
“Sir?”
“You’re on tear gas.”
“Yes, sir,” said Chun, cursing under his breath. He badly wanted to use the stick. He broke open the short, wide-barreled gun and plopped in a canister of “pepper” gas, the most acrid, then snapped the gun shut. Next he tightened his gas mask and flipped down the steel mesh face guard. The platoon, now in its “Darth Vaders,” was ready.
“Don’t be disappointed, Chun,” said a muffled voice. “Fire ‘em off quickly. Then you can go in with the butt.”
“Perepi”—”TV!” somebody shouted. “Migook”— “American!” Chun pulled the stock into his shoulder, aiming high as if readying for a lob shot, but the moment the cameras were gone or their view blocked by the wall, he intended to fire straight into the crowd. And if it zapped one of the protesters full force on the head—”Tough tit!” Accident.
“Wedge forward!” came the command, and Chun fired.
Four of the half-dozen leaders of the riot, all members of the DRP, Democratic Reunification Party, were at the Secret Garden at the time, but this wasn’t known until film of the incident was replayed several days after by police. By then it was too late. The two KCIA men at the garden entrance never stood a chance, swept along in the irresistible tide of students and riot police — much of the crowd lost from view in the gardens, where giant billows of tear gas enveloped the ginkgo trees and evergreens like morning mist, many of the students, eyes burning, stumbling blindly into the lily ponds, the riot police now in “free run,” clubbing as they went, leaving the dazed and fallen to be arrested or clubbed again and dragged away to the buses by the more lightly equipped National Police regrouping in the rear.
The younger of the two KCIA men, his voice drowned in the cacophony of screaming students fleeing from the gas, was knocked down, still holding his coat, his other hand reaching into his shirt pocket, extracting his KCIA card. The next instant he was trampled underfoot, warm blood streaming down his face, unable to see. He lost consciousness.
By the time he was picked up, his KCIA card lost in the stampede, and put in an ambulance, the only available emergency ward was at Severance International Hospital; all the others were already overflowing from the citywide riots that now included Songan University as well. Badly concussed, the agent also had six ribs broken, minor cuts and abrasions, as well as a split on his left forehead requiring ten stitches. In plain clothes, being mistaken for a protester, he was put in a room under police guard, after X rays were taken.
A UPI — United Press International — stringer, celebrating Independence Day with relatives from Kwangju in the southwest Cholla province, had taken his visitors up on the cable car to the top of Namsan, or Nam Hill, to escape the muggy, tear-gassed atmosphere of the city, relishing the cooler temperatures atop the observation tower that rose another four hundred feet above the nine-hundred-foot hill. With the vast bowl of the city stretching all around them, he pointed southward to the site of the old 1988 Olympics on the far side and to the nineteen bridges that spanned the Han River.
Looking northward through the coin telescope, they could just make out the tearoom and restaurant atop Pugak Skyway, and beyond it, blue, smoky ridges that obscured the DMZ. The wind shifted, clearing parts of the city previously hidden by tear gas, and off to the southwest, they could discern the suburban sprawl running either side of the Han spreading westward to the harbor and industrial clutter of Inchon twenty miles away. Beyond Inchon there was a metallic glint, the Yellow Sea, separating Korea from China, broken here and there by the gray slivers of American warships.
The stringer excused himself from his relatives and called the four emergency wards closer to the city center before phoning his contact at Severance International around 9:40 a.m. Yes, said the contact, a nurse’s aide, there was something she could tell him: A young man — name on the security card Lee Sok Jo— brought in about an hour ago had just died. Brian hemorrhage, they thought. After repeating the name to make sure he’d got the spelling right, the stringer, exiting the booth and adopting the fourth level, or tone, due the most elderly of his relatives, excused himself to make one more call — to UPI’s downtown office. He could feel his pulse racing. With a civilian dead, he knew it was no longer just another riot. It was now, as his American colleagues would say, “a whole new ball game.”
Within minutes the name “Lee Sok Jo” was on the wire services all around the world and being simultaneously broadcast on Seoul’s four major radio stations and the U.S. armed forces network in Korea.
By midafternoon, students at all eighty-seven colleges and universities throughout the ROK had declared “war” on the government for its “massive brutality.” Within two hours the riots were nationwide. By 3:15 p.m., despite official denials, Lee Sok Jo had become the latest martyr of the struggle against the “oppressive imperialistic regime of the South Korean government — puppets of Washington.” When fumbling bureaucrats finally discovered that Lee Sok Jo was not a student but had in fact been a KCIA agent, this information was deliberately withheld by the government, for fear it would be seized upon by the students as further evidence that security agents were being used as agents provocateurs and spies against them.
It was a gift to both the leftists and the Democratic Reunification Party. The police could not contain the riots, beaten back by hails of pavement stones and Molotov cocktails. Scores of police and students were injured, some seriously, the worst fighting occurring around Myongdong Cathedral, eight blocks southwest of the Secret Garden, the gardens themselves now all but deserted.
Agent Chin called the vendor in from Chamshil and replayed as much news and police video as he could get his hands on. Not surprisingly, no matter how many times Chin “froze” the film, zooming in for a close-up, the vendor couldn’t pick out the stranger he’d seen in the Myongdong from the crowd, particularly as many of them were wearing either blue or white gauze masks as protection against the pepper gas. Whether the North Korean agent had reached a phone in the gardens during the night and enlisted the leftists’ help in getting him out of the gardens, or whether he’d simply lucked out, Chin would never know.
By 4:00 p.m. the situation, especially around Myongdong Cathedral, was rapidly getting out of control. Exhausted riot squads, Chun among them, charged repeatedly through choking, riot-strewn streets, only to find themselves reeling under new onslaughts of stone and fire, many driven back so far, they ended up crashing into the long “congo” lines of arrested students who, heads bowed, holding one another’s waists as ordered, were snaking through the rubble, herded by National Police to waiting paddy wagons.
At 4:15, a momentary hush, not unlike those experienced in the midst of a village shaman’s incantations, suddenly descended upon the feuding students and police. Even the endless swirl of humanity about the pagoda-shaped Namdaemun, or Great South Gate, slowed to a crawl, as a Buddhist monk, in his early twenties, assumed the lotus position, poured kerosene over himself, and struck a match. For a second his saffron robes were as one with the flames, his charred torso curling into the fetal position like burnt paper.
Immolations by several other monks in Kwangju and in the always politically discontented “Cinderella” province of South Cholla injected more tension and violence into the increasingly chaotic scenes of Seoul. Finally at 9:00 p.m. that evening, South Korean President Rah felt he had no option but to call in the army. For the first time in ten years, rioters were confronted with live ammunition.
The troops were ordered to fire overhead and did so, but several, firing just as a new hail of projectiles rained down upon them, instinctively lowered their weapons, their volley tearing into the panicked crowd. Two students were killed, seven badly wounded. Several Democratic Unification Party leaders were arrested, along with most of the known leftist leaders, a few of whom the riot police had nabbed in their sweep through the Secret Garden. The government announced it would put them on trial for insurrection.
KBS, the Korean Broadcasting System, Yonap, and Kodo, the Japanese wire service, together with the three American networks and the BBC foreign service, had it all live.
In Washington, it was now 8:00 a.m. — too late for the visuals and sound bytes to run on “Good Morning America” and its ilk, but in plenty of time for the networks’ much more influential evening news broadcasts.
The arrests triggered further riots. Leftists and Reunification Party members under house arrest now called for general strikes, but Rah’s government was determined not to give in.
At 10:05 p.m. Radio Pyongyang reported that it was deeply distressed by the situation in the South, and described in glowing terms the earlier arrival at Panmunjom of the more than ten thousand “peace” marchers from the South. Pyongyang television then showed pictures of the North and South Korean students joyously greeting one another, and then as dusk had fallen, bidding each other farewell in a moving, nostalgic rendition of “Uriuisowon’un-tongil”—”Our Wish Is Reunification.”
Major Tae and his guards, having watched the rally from the southern side of the DMZ, were convinced that more students were now heading south than had arrived in the DMZ that morning. A perfect opportunity, Tae thought, for the NKA to slip infiltrators across. Accordingly he ordered the ROK’s DMZ unit at Panmunjom to halt everyone on Unification Highway after they had cleared the DMZ and to carry out a thorough identity check.
The students, objecting vehemently, as he knew they would, were incensed enough to fight, but the ROK troops stationed along the DMZ were heavily armed and less tolerant than riot police. Besides, now that it was dark, student leaders knew television coverage would be minimal and so advised their fellow protestors not to resist the U.S.-ROK search but rather to show dignified solidarity in the face of the “imperialist lackeys.” Despite the downpour of a thundershower, the single file stretched out for over two miles, inching forward, each student being searched for arms and false papers.
The thing that most struck American commentators at the time as well as the South Korean reporters was the fact that despite its obligatory use of Communist rhetoric, Pyongyang radio had for once shown some political sophistication and even, perhaps, goodwill, in publicly counseling the students during the Liberation Day meet at Panmunjom not to provoke a confrontation, clearly intimating that the North did not wish to do anything that might undo forthcoming negotiations concerning the possibility of peaceful reunification between the two Koreas.
At midnight, as usual, “Pyongyang Polly” came on the radio announcing the evening’s reading: verse by “the venerable and much honored grandfather of our great and respected leader, Kim Jong Il,” the poem “Pine Trees on Namsan,” ending with, “I will be unyielding while restoring the country, though I am torn to pieces.”
“Major Tae!”
There was a long silence, Tae busy with paperwork as the last hundred or so students were being processed. “Yes,” he asked, pulling yet another file toward him. He was tired but relieved that, after all his apprehension, another Liberation Day had come and gone without any military incursion from the North to shatter the fragile peace.
When he looked up he saw a guard, drenched by the rain, reluctant to enter, water still dripping from helmet and boots. But as Tae rose, a smell, or perhaps it was the way the soldier moved, told him something was wrong.
“Well — what is it?” demanded Tae. The guard turned, motioning to someone outside.
A figure appeared. Mi-ja. She pushed back a wet strand of hair. It was a small gesture, but Tae could not tell, her eyes in deep shadow, whether she was looking directly at him or not. But in his fury, his humiliation, he interpreted the gesture as one of defiance. He made as if to speak, stopped, then turned away. “Search her.” He paused. “She’s no different from the rest of them.”
“Yes, sir.”
When the guard had taken her away, Tae sat staring straight ahead at the small map of old Chosun—Korea, “land of the morning calm”—but he could not see through tears.