CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Major Tae jumped over the irrigation ditch, burst through the thinning smoke, his squad automatic weapon spewing flame, its tracer tattooing the NKA machine-gun position twenty yards from the ditch wall, the U.S. cavalryman giving him supporting fire, spraying the paddy to their right, the rice stalks trembling under the hail of the 7.62-millimeter bullets.
When Tae reached the machine-gun post, he saw it was abandoned, one NKA dead, the top of his skull blown off, the Soviet-made RPK 7.62 gone. Tae felt several spent casings. They were still hot, and he waved for the six- man squad from his Huey to advance.
“Where the hell have they gone?” asked the cavalryman, relieved but surprised. “Hot damn, those bastards can melt away onya!”
Tae saw one of the cavalrymen off to his left prod a dead NKA down by the irrigation channel.
“Don’t touch him,” cautioned Tae.
The cavalryman by Tae’s side was signaling the other sixty-odd troops behind him on the search-and-destroy mission. He turned to Tae. “They wouldn’t have had time to booby-trap their dead, Major.”
Tae was down on one knee, clipping a new magazine into his SAW, surveying the paddy field, wisps of cover smoke still obscuring his view.
“Where the hell have they gone?” repeated the cavalryman. “Underground?”
“Not unless they’ve got scuba suits,” said a sergeant, moving up to join Tae and the other cavalryman. “Nothing but flooded paddy out there.”
“They’re using reeds,” said Tae. “They wait till we pass.”
“Then we’ll go around it,” suggested the sergeant.
“They could’ve rigged sticks,” put in another, referring to the camouflaged pits of spikes so often set by the NKA.
“So what do we do, Major? Get our feet wet? Sitting ducks or do we risk ‘sticks’?”
The major ordered a fifty-fifty split, half the force — about thirty men — in a broken line to go across the paddy, the remaining thirty to sweep the flanks beyond the paddy, requesting an air strike ahead of them to clear.
Within ten minutes an F-4 Phantom came in low over the hills, strafing the bush area beyond the paddy a quarter mile away and dropping two napalm canisters, which turned the jade-green countryside to orange-black, leaving the once bushy area denuded. A swarm of insects had started to bother the men while they had been waiting, and several in the paddy pulled on head nets over their helmets before they moved forward, still tense but feeling better now that the air strike had pummeled the area before them.
The major was moving cautiously but was so far out front that one U.S. cavalryman dubbed the once shy major “Hound Dog.” Every one of them now knew the story of his daughter being raped before his eyes and sympathized with his obsession for vengeance on the NKA, but they weren’t keen to be part of it. Tae’s obsession was making him altogether too dangerous, in their eyes.
They slowed as they approached a second area, where they saw the remains of four NKA, one man’s limbs charcoal, two of the faces black jam already seething with insects. Tae was annoyed the napalm had burned off all unit patches or any other kind of identification that might have confirmed they were against one of the units led by Students for Reunification traitors like Jung-hyun.
The men on the flanks were resting on the slope up from the ditch when they heard the spitting of light machine-gun fire. Hitting the ground, no one knew where it was coming from until two cavalrymen dropped in the paddy fifty yards behind them, the high waterspouts dancing amid the stalks of rice. The Americans around Tae were unable to return the NKA fire for fear of hitting their own men in the paddy, and it wasn’t until two more Americans had been killed in the paddy and an NKA was seen floating that the firing ceased.
Seeing two of his men badly wounded, staggering from the rice field, the air cavalry lieutenant was on the PRC-25, calling in a Medevac chopper. Major Tae ordered the others into a tighter defensive perimeter. There was a scream off to his left, three men hit by a “Malay whip,” a long, six-inch-thick dead log rigged to a trip wire, slamming down like a swing trapeze. Two men were killed outright, the other, his back broken, screaming in agony — someone yelling at him to shut up, the lieutenant pulling a violet flare, its purple smoke designating the landing zone for the chopper and also alerting any NKA nearby to the Americans’ position.
It was then that Tae saw two badly burned NKA, fifty to sixty yards away, crawling into unburned brush, a whiff of burnt flesh and wood smoke in the air. One of them tried to turn and fire what looked like an AK-47, but either he was out of ammunition or the gun jammed. The other NKA, all but naked, save the singed rags of what had been a drab, olive-colored uniform, kept crawling toward the brush.
The cavalry sergeant caught up with him, and the man, though beaten, was staring up, eyes alive with hatred, his breathing labored and wheezy, eyebrows gone and a gellike pus where napalm had eaten into his left thigh. But there was no mistake, and Tae recognized him at once. Jung-hyun— his daughter’s onetime boyfriend and SFR activist who’d turned on his own country.
The cavalry lieutenant could tell at one glance that Tae had found his man. “About time, eh, Major?”
If Tae heard, he gave no indication, but while the lieutenant was preoccupied with organizing covering fire for the incoming Medevac, Tae handed his squad weapon to the sergeant, then, bending down, drew his knife from its leg sheath. The chopper was coining in, sporadic NKA fire erupting from the bush. “Where is Mi-ja?”
Jung-hyun refused to answer. Tae grabbed Jung’s tattered collar, bringing his head close to the blade. Once more he saw his daughter across the interrogation room — the smell of her perfume, and the rape as real to him as if it were happening now. And for her he could not kill Jung. As he stood up in the stinging dust of the Medevac chopper, whose rotors were beating the air into a maelstrom about him, Tae’s anger at his inability to do that for which he had stayed alive overwhelmed him and he kicked Jung in the side. Jung’s body rolled. There was an explosion — Tae’s body seemed to jump, sending him crashing into the sergeant, the grenade’s shrapnel killing the sergeant outright and mangling Tae’s feet, his boots, shredded with splintered bone, streaming blood.
In the American camp south at Uijongbu, the instructors used it as an example of how an officer, Tae, well trained and knowledgeable about booby traps, had, in a case of what the instructor called “emotional overload,” forgotten the very thing he’d just told a U.S. air cavalryman a few minutes before: “Never move close in to an NKA body, live or dead.” One of the oldest NKA tricks in the book was to pull a grenade’s pin and shove it under the weight of your body. As soon as you’re moved — down goes the striker. “Boom!”
Had it not been for the Medevac getting Tae to a field hospital within half an hour, said the instructor, the ROK major would have lost his life rather than having to be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
“Would have been better off,” said one of the pupils.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“
Now, with other prisoners being picked up along the way, the British and American column being force- marched to Gobfeld, eighteen miles north of Bielefeld and forty miles southwest of Hannover, had swelled to more than three hundred men. As much as the prisoners resented the bullying guards, most of them, like David, realized that ironically, in the Russian’s haste to move the POWs out of the way of their advancing echelons of armor-led troops and motorized regiments, the Stasi guards were in fact keeping some Allied prisoners alive who would have
