A picture – taken by me – of the main drag of Nam Yang Korea in 1964
A picture – from about the same place of Namyang, Korea now (lifted from Google Maps).
It turns out that a Korean who was stationed at the same place in 1979 ran into my post and was able to send me the Google map – uh? I guess that is really any map – coordinates which allowed me to find Namyang (I have been spelling it wrong, but I did have the name right). Then it was a matter of opening the picture gizmos and there was Namyang as it is today. To me, the change is staggering.
Near our old Compound, is a new hotel, The Hotel Rolling Hills which seems much more deluxe than my old digs.
Even the local Buddhist Temple has been updated, from this
to this
I am sure that there are places in the United States that have changed this much but none where I have lived.
Back in Korea, at The Compound, at the aforementioned Enlistedmen’s Club, we had a PX. One of the few benefits of being in the Army are the PX’s. The military didn’t pay much – it probably still doesn’t – and one of the ways they make up for that is by giving us a place to buy stuff cheap. In our case, in Korea at The Compound, the big items were cheap beer and booze (I never saw any wine, but in those days I wasn’t looking for it). On a nice afternoon – maybe Sunday before our traditional steak barbecue – a nice way to pass the day was with an alfresco gathering. The dress rules in The Compound were pretty casual: on duty, we had to wear “appropriate ” uniforms – always fatigues for us – when off base we had to wear Olive Drab wool uniforms or khaki uniforms. Officially, we were never allowed to wear civilian clothing in Korea but, in The Compound, sometimes guys did and nobody seemed to care.
My home – my bunk – in The Compound, was next to the back door of the Radar and Fire Control Quonset Hut and, outside “my door”, just beyond the perimeter fence, was a Magpie – Pica pica I found out about 15 minutes ago – nest and its chattering seemed to be mocking me. It seemed to be saying You think the world is inside your fence; the world is really outside, here. And it was. A world that was very different from any I had seen before. While we weren’t – exactly – forbidden to go out into Korea, we certainly were not encouraged and it took me awhile to get there.
My first views were from the inside of the Courier truck on a trip to the Eighth Army Headquarters in Seoul. As an aside, one of my favorite stories is shown in the picture, below. Where we were , in rural Korea, there was no refrigeration and very few trucks (no private ones). Almost every family raised a pig or two and getting the pigs to market was a problem. If the pig was killed before being taken to market, it would start to go bad, in the heat, on the long trip, if it was put on the back of a bicycle, it would squirm too much. So the family would have a tearful going away party for the pig – who was almost a pet and part of the family – and then the drunk farmer would load the passed out pig on the back of his bicycle on take him – or her – to market. Seeing a drunk farmer weaving down the road with a passed out pig strapped to the back of a bike was a fairly common sight. End aside.
Finally, I started walking into – for me – this new World. Often talking somebody else into joining me, but sometimes going alone.
Korea, where we were, was poor. It was the first time I had left California, except for a day trip to Tijuana, and I pretty much thought poor was taking the bus (although I had done alot of hitchhiking during Highschool). This was real poor, dirt roads poor, garbage in the streets and shitting by the side of the road poor. I don’t remember what I expected except it wasn’t downtown Nam Yang above. For a long time my shock hid the reality that everybody was working, that all the kids were in school, that this was a country on the make.
Over time, I began to see the beauty of Korea, and the hard work.
At some point – and I don’t remember the circumstances at all – Terry Upman and I volunteered to guest teach a couple of English classes at the local school. I don’t remember being very good at it – although I do remember making the kids laugh – but it opened another gate and I was invited to dinner in Suwon with a couple of teachers.
I was starting to become an Asiaophile, but I never expected the change that Korea made. From impoverished, war-torn, country to one of the Four Asian Tigers with an average UN Human Development Index – a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education, standards of living, and quality of life – that is higher than France or Italy. I didn’t expect this
or this
to turn into this (not my pictures).
I didn’t expect Seoul’s South Gate to go from this
to this (not my picture).
But, maybe, my picture of South Gate in 1964 foreshadows the South Gate of today. In my picture are two buses that look sort of like a VW Micro-bus except that they are four wheel drive for the – then – dirt, and often very muddy, roads and they acted like communal taxis. The buses would hang around at a large parking lot, each bus going to a different, specific, place, when the bus was full of people going to the same place, it would take off. Because the buses were marked in Korean, it was hard to find the bus to Nam Yang, and they were not as comfortable as the Courier truck, I only took them once or twice. But I do remember thinking that they would be great in the US. Imagine how handy it would be to catch a direct bus from San Francisco to – say – Telegraph and University in Berkeley, or Portola Valley, or downtown Fairfield.
Looking at the buses in Seoul, was the first time I saw that the weak sauce of American superiority – in everything – often covers an inability to learn from others. Korea didn’t have that alleged advantage. The next time I saw it was in Japan, when I walked from a train platform directly onto the train without climbing stairs. I see it in subways in Hong Kong and high speed trains in Shanghai; all transportation solutions that would help the Bay Area and California. And it is not just in the public sector, I saw it the last time I got into a General Motors car and noticed the goofy power seat controls so much less intuitive than the seat controls in a Mercedes Benz that almost every European and Asian car has adopted.
Reviewing my slides from Korea has been quietly cathartic (to quote Malcolm Pearson). I am surprised at how much one year has informed my life.
I was in Korea for about a year, serving in C Battery of the 38th Air Defense Artillery Brigade, first as a Fire Control Operator and then, when I became a Sergeant, as a Target Selector in a HAWK – Homing All the Way Killer – SAM ( Surface to Air Missile) system. We were in the business of providing an air defense umbrella for the Republic of Korea and the United States troops stationed there. Everything in C Battery revolved around the Tac Site which was the home of all the radars and missiles in our system and sat on the highest hill around. The Tac Site overlooked the Yellow Sea and had the best view of any place I have ever worked. By far.
To the northwest and west were islands and inlets off of the port of Inchon, which opened into the aforementioned Yellow Sea. To the north and east were rice paddies and the village of Nam Yang.
To the immediate north, in a small valley just below the Tac Site was a compound with a Buddhist temple (I went there several times but it always seemed deserted except for the laundry and I now have the feeling they were ghosting us).
To the southeast and south was an almost endless view of hills and valleys. For awhile, when the Air Force took the troublesome F-105 offline, we ran practice missions against the Marines who were flying A-4 Skyhawks and they used to sneak up these southern valleys at about 350 miles per hour. They were much harder to “kill” than the Air force planes.
In the winter, on top of that hill, it was sometimes bitter cold with the wind coming off the Yellow Sea. Most of the snow was blown off the hill by the wind, but the cold remained, and we were often stuck out in it.
The Quonset hut, in the middle right in the picture above, was called the Ready Room or something equally pretentious. Our basic work schedule, if that is the right term, was that our Battery would be On Status or Hot for about half the time (I don’t remember the time frame, maybe 24 hours out of 48, 48 out of 96, something like that). On the Tac Site, when we were not On Status, it was a regular work day and we would be working on the equipment or running drills. When we were On Status, in theory, we were ready to launch missiles at airplanes if we were attacked. Well, semi-ready, we had to be ready to launch in fifteen minutes and meant hanging out, waiting for an alarm from Battalion with somebody, in the Battery Control Central – BCC – wearing an headset listening to the Battalion comm-line all the time. Passing time when we were awake and sleeping in our clothes when it got late or we got bored (when pulling duty in the BCC, I discovered that the headset connection cable was long enough to allow me to sleep on the floor, a tactic based on my theory that Battalion talking to me over the comm-line would be loud enough to wake me). On one day, off one day, for a year, in theory. In practice we were on much more than we were off, the longest run being almost full time from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve. It got tiresome.
This was the early 60’s, and the HAWK system was based on vacuum tubes. The BCC had a wall of racks and racks of tubes that required a huge air-conditioning system to keep the inside temperature reasonable. It was so noisy inside that even though we were within touching distance, we couldn’t hear each other, relying on headsets and microphones. This was 60’s state of the art meaning thateverything was unreliable and required daily, hourly, minute by minute maintenance. The missiles, especially demanded constant tinkering and replacement which required taking them to the assembly building on little crawlers and constantly running operation checks while they were on their launchers.
Our most distinctive radars were continuous wave radars, called illuminators, which lit the target with a radio frequency beam that the missile then homed in on. The radar frequency was controlled by a gizmo called a klystron that was encased in its own glycerol cooling system which was very unreliable and had to be replaced way more than seemed reasonable. We had different crawlers to help move them around.
Keeping the HAWK system running required almost constant activity but it was activity to no end. It was practice and maintenance – and changing klystrons – over and over again ad nauseam . It was sitting in the dark, watching small dots – bogies or blips – move across a radar display. It was running system checks and then re-running them. It was lugging heavy machine guns into bunkers in a snow storm but not being issued any ammunition.
Except for August 2, 1964, when the destroyer USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin thought it was being attacked by the North Vietnamese and everybody went amok. We were off status but came up, as fast as we could, accompanied by klaxons blaring, and orders to change code books. Ammo was issued to us without anyone keeping track, the missiles were armed, and our battery commander went sort of bonkers issuing orders nobody could follow. It was an interesting couple of days, followed by another half year of pointless drill.
Recently, I started going through my old slides to have them digitized. The slides were shot on Kodachrome 25 and Ektachrome 100Plus and they are pretty soft and fuzzy compared to today’s digital images. So are the memories they evoke but, as I touch up the slides in Lightroom – a great software program – the memories start to get clearer also.
One group of slides memorializes a year I spent in Korea in a HAWK missile Battery overlooking the Yellow Sea ( humm? is that name racist or just a coincidence?). Actually, I didn’t spend all of the year at the actual missile Battery which we called The Tac Site and which was on top of a nearby hill (reached by the road at the far left in the picture above). Somewhere between one half to two-thirds of the nights that I was in Korea – at C Battery, 38th Brigade, Air Defense Command, or something like that – were spent at the place pictured above. This was lovingly called The Compound and life here was sweet (especially compared to life on The Tac Site). We had good food, were allowed to have women on base, had an Enlisted Men’s Club where we could see movies, and none of that was quite like it sounds.
The food in Korea was a pleasant surprise. While it wasn’t particularly interesting – before Alice Waters, most food wasn’t particularly interesting – we could get eggs cooked to order in the morning. Sometimes we had a delicacy called creamed beef on toast – informally known as SOS, Shit on a Shingle -that I found to be very tasty. It was very salty and fatty (think McDonald’s french fries). On Sundays, we often had barbecued steaks acquired by our mess sergeant by trading booze to some Air Force mess sergeant from Osan Air Base. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, we had turkey with all the trimmings and mashed potatoes (actually, we had mashed potatoes with almost everything). I don’t remember ever having a salad.
Close to The Compound, was a small village called Nam Yang ri and in it was a small bar and women we, euphemistically, called businesswomen. Their business was us. At night, after work, or on a day off, we could go down to The Vill for drinks at the bar and/or a date. There were – it is hard to remember exactly – about twenty women and we all knew their names and, delicately put, their behavior patterns. The only names I still remember were Mrs. Song who went steady with our Battery Medic and Annie who was very enthusiastic about her job. It was, maybe, a fifteen-minute walk to The Vill and a date was – I don’t really remember exactly – probably less than five bucks (in those days a Private was paid, I think, $91 a month plus clothing and room and board with an extra $10 a month for being in a war zone).
As I recall, alot of guys went steady which cost about thirty to forty bucks a month (it was a sliding scale). Guys who were going steady were able to bring their girlfriends onto The Compound for a movie at the Enlisted Men’s Club (and drinks, of course). One nice perk, if that is the right word, is that a truck was sent down to Nam Yang ri at ten o’clock to bring the happy warriors back home. It was sort of like a taxi picking you up at a bar at closing time if the taxi was an open truck and you rode in the back (less comfortable in winter).
Our Battery Courier made daily runs to civilization, in this case, 8th Army Headquarters and our Ordinance Depot in Seoul, and the 38th Battalion Headquarters near Osan Air Force Base. All were considered distant places of unimaginable luxury. One was about two and a half hours away by 3/4 ton truck on dirt roads, the other, maybe two hours away and it required a full day pass to go to Seoul (where we walked around, gawking like rubes).
A couple of times a week, the courier picked up a movie that was chosen for us by some unknown force. Most of the movies were very mainstream and very pro-American – I saw Dr. Strangelove two days before I shipped out to Korea and, as far as I know, it never got to an Army Base – and they were always highly anticipated. I probably saw Mary Poppins, Hud, The Train, Charade, The Birds, Lilies of the Field, From Russia with Love, The Great Escape, and The Pink Panther. I don’t think I saw Tom Jones, A Hard Days Night, or The Pawnbroker in Korea. The major problem we had was that movies were starting to change to the widescreen format and that required a special lens because they were compressed on the film and had to be expanded back out to be shown. We did get the special lens but the room was not big enough and the lens could not focus that close. We ended up showing the movies in an un-expanded form which made everybody look extra tall and extra skinny. I do remember Cleopatra being a problem and some basketball picture with Jane Fonda where everybody was extra, extra tall. Still, it was much better than no movie.
It was also better than spending the evening back at the barracks. My barracks was in the third building down from the top on the right side, in the picture at the top of the post. In the picture below of the inside of the barracks, my bunk was on the bottom left. Neatness counted, but, after we left for work, Korean Houseboys – they were really men, Jeez! the causal effrontery – came to work to clean up the area, shine our shoes, sort laundry, refuel the diesel space-heaters shown in the center of the picture, and, in general, make our life more pleasant.
