T.R. Fehrenbach - This Kind of War - The Classic Korean War History

Troop morale was lousy. All the men wanted to go home; some of them could get pretty nasty about it. In the meantime, they made out as best they could. Korean girls ran up and down the barracks at night, and everybody made black-market deals. There was no discipline among the troops.

When Landers spoke to any of the junior officers, they shrugged. "What can you do? The war's over."

A deadly thing had been done to the Army, which even the Army had not yet fully understood. The Doolittle Board had been convened in 1945 to iron out the inequities of the so-called "caste system" of the Army. The board interviewed a total of forty-two witnesses, and read approximately one thousand letters. Most of the letter writers were unhappy. In all fairness, many of them had a right to be. In making an Army of eight million men, the United States had commissioned many thousands of men who should never have risen above PFC. Some lousy things happened, particularly in the Service Forces. Officers and noncommissioned officers, in some cases, did abuse their powers.

Basically, there were two ways to reduce abuses of power in the service. One was to overhaul the officer procurement system, make damned certain that no merely average man could ever be commissioned, and have fewer officers, but better ones. The other way was to reduce the power to abuse anybody.

The Doolittle Board, probably thinking of a long period of pleasant peacetime coming up, in early 1946 chose to recommend the second.

It was a good idea, but it wouldn't work. The company commanders in Korea watched the girls run in and out of the barracks, had men talk back to them, and didn't know what to do about it. In fact, they weren't sure but what the American thing to do was to ignore it, and get a girl of their own.

Which many did.

What the hell, the war was over. Anybody who said a new one was brewing was definitely a goddam Fascist, or something.

Besides, contracting a venereal disease was no longer a court-martial offense. That kind of thinking had gone out with the horse, with saluting except on duty, with the idea that you should respect a sergeant.

Captain Landers made some contacts with the natives. After all, the American Army was in Korea for their benefit—or that was what he kept telling the troops. He met newspapermen from Seoul, and a Dr. Ahn of Inch'on. He learned to take off his shoes, even in winter, and sit politely in a Korean house. But the conversation with these intelligent Koreans sometimes threw him.

"What is democracy?" asked Dr. Ahn.

"Why is your democracy good for Korea?" the newsmen asked.

"Why do Americans refuse to have anything to do with the people of Chosun?" Dr. Ahn asked. "Why do you try to re-create your own way of life in our country?"

"Why do MP's throw Koreans out of the American compartments on the trains? Why do your allies the Russians keep Korea divided at the parallel? Why do you not go home and let us rule our own country?" Koreans were very inquisitive.

"But what really is democracy?" Dr. Ahn still asked, after Landers had spent half an hour telling him.

"Let me ask you one," Captain Landers said. "Yesterday, I saw a Korean girl fall alongside the road near the Education Center. I called the Special Korean Police. They wouldn't come. Only after I had called three times did they show up to take the girl away."

"Ah," said Dr. Ahn. "They did not want to accept responsibility."

"Don't your people have compassion?"

"Of course. But it is always wise to shun the unfortunate," Dr. Ahn said, wisely. "Now, tell me what democracy is, and why it is best—"

Captain Edward H. Landers, Infantry, walked back to his quarters, thinking. He passed a group of drunken colored soldiers coming back from town. They pretended they didn't see him, so they wouldn't have to salute.

At ASCOM City, plenty of girls were hanging around, waiting for the lights to go out. Captain Landers remembered the Korean word for young girl was seikse . Like the Chinese, the Koreans optimistically refer to their young women as virgins.

Many a young Korean woman of the better class, approached by an American soldier, said, "Oh, no—oh, no! I am seikse!"

This sometimes confused the issue beyond repair. The girls were often beyond repair, too, but that was life.

Captain Landers was old Army. He could not understand Korea or the Koreans, and he could no longer understand the Army itself.

He requested separation.

First Lieutenant Charles R. Fletcher came to Korea in July 1946. Things were better now; the first complete chaos of the early months had gone. But the squalor, the smells, and the hopelessness of a conquered, brutalized people produced the same sense of shock in him as it produced in most of his countrymen. Lieutenant Fletcher had been born and raised on a farm near Wichita, Kansas, but this was no preparation for Chosun.

A hundred years before, Americans might have gone to Korea and taken it in stride, but no longer. America had changed, both materially and subtly over the decades, and now in the Orient American soldiers could not live without insulating themselves from the life around them.

It was not that Americans came with arrogance or with a feeling of insurmountable superiority. They simply would not—could not—accept the way the people of Chosun lived.

No matter how cultured or ancient the civilization, no average American is going to condone the absence of flush toilets. Not now, not ever. The United States Government and international planners may as well face that simple fact.

Because Fletcher, a good-looking, quiet, pipe-smoking young man, planned to stay in the service, he made the best of what he considered a bad deal. His wife, who came over later, reminded him that some people were occupying Germany or Austria, but there was nothing he could do about that.

He was assigned to Major Herbert Van Zandt, who ran the huge New Korea Company. American occupation officers still had control of all important parts of the Korean economy; South Korea had not been able to develop the necessary capable executives since the Japanese surrender.

Neither Americans nor Koreans were enthusiastic about the arrangement.

The New Korea Company was actually the old Oriental Development Company, that Japanese octopus of industry that had dominated the Far East before the war. It had owned mines, mills, shipyards, factories, smelters, and farmland. Now, for the most part, only farmlands remained.

Van Zandt installed Fletcher, an infantry officer, as Director of Mining Industry and Engineering, an imposing title for a farm boy from Kansas. However, Fletcher soon found that most of the mines were in the North, where he might as well forget them, and that engineering was defunct.

By this time, most American Military Government officers realized that they might never be able to restore the Korean economy. Certain things had come to light since 1945: two-thirds of Korea's people lived and farmed south of the 38th parallel, but almost the entire industry and mineral wealth of the country lay in the north.

By themselves, the two halves might possibly build a viable economy by the year 2000, certainly not sooner.

And Fletcher soon found that the occupying Russians to the north intended that the country be joined on their terms, or not at all. Their terms included formation of a "democratic"—Communist—government for the entire peninsula. They allowed neither Koreans nor Americans to enter their zone.

Korea had always been a homogeneous nation. There was no difference between the North and South, no cultural line such as divides the United States along the Ohio Valley, no separate ethos, no distinct dialect. The split made absolutely no sense—except to two mutually hostile occupying powers, each with its own irons in the fire.