Toward the end of the Advance Course, all students had interviews with a branch career counselor to discuss future assignments, standard practice throughout the Army. And I hoped to have this conversation in the context of how to navigate through the next three assignments. My counselor was definitely of the old school and believed that women should not be in the Army.
I laid my cards on the table. “Sir, I want to think about the next several assignments in MI. I'm having a hard time understanding what the general outline should look like with the prohibition of women in so many assignments.”
As I spoke, he nodded complacently. “Your career path is very circumscribed, Captain,” he said. “You women will never get anywhere in the Army until the male chauvinist pigs like me are out.”
What kind of career counseling is this? I thought. “Yes, sir,” I said aloud. I decided he had so little support for women in the Army, it would be counterproductive to argue with him. (He outranked me and one does not argue with one's assignment officer.) I managed to extract a few usable details about possible assignments and we concluded that I would probably go to Korea next. I looked the officer in the eye and thanked him for his time. You can't run me out of the Army, I thought. I'll be here long after you are gone.
There were a lot of hard cases like that officer. But there were also more enlightened leaders. Lieutenant Colonel Mike Pheneger, one of our class faculty advisors, who became the G-2 of the 2nd Infantry Division in Korea while I was there, was impressed by the dedication and competence of the women officers in the course. “You listen to these women,” he told our men colleagues, “because one day you'll be working for them.”
I was both pleased and concerned by his comment. One thing the six women in the course did not need was any divisive prodding that would separate us from our supportive peers. But it was a tremendous vote of confidence that forced me to think about why I would want to retreat from such praise.
By spring 1976, I had committed to a one-year unaccompanied tour of duty in Korea. My husband planned to return to New England and find a job. And we planned to spend six weeks together before my departure to Korea. Neither of us was pleased with the prospect of separation. But I was not ready to leave the Army. After completing the Advance Course at Fort Huachuca, I took some brief training at Fort Devens in cryptology—popularly known as code-breaking, but which actually involves far greater technical complexity. Then I packed my bags, my husband and I said goodbye, and I caught my flight halfway around the world to South Korea.
Seoul was a gritty mixture of ramshackle squatter towns and gleaming new buildings. But the prosperous South Korean capital was precariously near the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), across which the North Korean People's Army had arrayed one of the world's larger military forces. The noncommunist Republic of Korea (ROK) Army occupied in-depth defensive positions south of the DMZ, which split the Korean peninsula along the curved track of the 1953 armistice line. The United Nations Command (UNC), whose principal ground American combat element was the U.S. Army's 2nd Infantry Division, supported the ROK with over half a million personnel, many in Transportation, Signal, and Intelligence units like mine.
I was assigned to Camp Red Cloud north of Seoul as the operations officer to a signal security detachment that had the mission of protecting U.S. and ROK forces from hostile intelligence services. Our responsibility was to make sure American and ROK forces maintained the highest degree of communications security possible, so that their fixed positions and mobile operations could not be tracked by hostile SIGINT.
This was more than a routine assignment in the summer of 1976. For months, tensions had been mounting along the DMZ. One of the first things I learned on arriving in Korea was that the North Koreans had forward-deployed scores of new divisions, together with their armor and artillery, in the previous two years. ROK forces had also discovered an elaborate system of tunnels, many wide enough to accommodate columns of troops and artillery pieces, dug beneath the mountains of the DMZ. North Korean defectors had confirmed that these were intended as invasion tunnels.
The impression this increased tension had on a newly minted Military Intelligence captain like me was profound and immediate. My unit was on a permanent state of alert. I wasn't even over jet lag when I found myself working sixteen-and eighteen-hour days, often jolting along rough gravel roads in a Jeep, shuttling through the dark hills from one camp to another. Everywhere I went with the officer I was replacing, we noted the serious demeanor of the American and South Korean troops. They knew the situation was precarious. When the soldiers in our section found signal security problems, which they often did, that simply meant we had to spend additional hours discussing the findings and recommending solutions with the leaders of the military organizations involved. When I looked up the steep green hills toward the rugged mountains of the DMZ, I could picture the tens of thousands of North Koreans dug into their reinforced concrete bunkers just a few miles to the north. We were doing soldiers' jobs in support of our fellow soldiers, American and South Korean.
But that didn't make the days any shorter. One night I got back to camp long after the mess hall had closed and went to the officers club to grab a bowl of chili before hitting my bunk. The room was dim, almost empty, but booming with rock music, as always, from a monster tape machine. As I sat over my chili bowl, mechanically spooning in the clotted mixture of beans and ham-burger, I felt the long table shaking. Why do I have to hold on to this bowl? I thought wearily. Then a bare leg jerked past on the table. I looked up. A bored, naked Korean go-go girl with a flat expression and dead eyes was listlessly bouncing along the top of the tables. The few people remaining in the room hardly glanced at her. This scene was depressing testimony to the poverty of the Korean people who had to take such degrading work and to the Americans who found no more imaginative use of their very limited off-duty time.
Some of the most aggravating North Korean provocations in the previous year had occurred in the Joint Security Area (JSA) that straddled the Military Demarcation Line that snaked through the middle of the four-kilometer-wide DMZ at its western end near the village of Panmunjom. This neutral zone consisted of conference rooms where the Military Armistice Commission met, a camp for neutral Swiss and Swedish military observers, as well as UNC and North Korean Army guard posts and observation towers, set up on their respective sides of the DMZ.
North Korean guards would often hurl insults at their South Korean and American counterparts, who, like the North Koreans, had full access rights to the JSA under the terms of the 1953 armistice. But by the summer of 1976, the North Koreans seemed intent on pushing verbal harassment toward physical confrontations: The American security guards resisted responding to these provocations, but did not relinquish access rights of the UNC to the Joint Security Area.
One of the problems with maintaining good security in the southern portion of the JSA was a lack of visibility caused by foliage growing between UNC observation posts and checkpoints. When American and South Korean security guards accompanied by South Korean workers arrived to cut down a tall poplar in early August, the North Koreans reacted aggressively, demanding that the UNC leave the tree standing. The United Nations unit complied in order to prevent another confrontation.
But this North Korean order was unacceptable. Unless the UNC observation posts and checkpoints could see each other, they were vulnerable to the increasingly hostile North Koreans. The local American Army commander, Lieutenant Colonel Victor S. Vierra, determined that he could achieve visibility between the posts by trimming branches from the poplar rather than felling the tree itself. His plan was approved by the UNC, and on August 18, a security force of ten U.S. soldiers accompanying five Korean workers left on two trucks to carry out the tree trimming. The unit's commander was Captain Arthur G. Bonifas, with First Lieutenant Mark T. Barrett as deputy. There were five American enlisted men and a ROK Army interpreter.
By about 10:30 that morning, the South Korean workers began cutting bra
nches. Soon, North Koreans, led by a notoriously aggressive officer, Senior Lieutenant Pak Chol, arrived and demanded to know what the workers were doing. When he was told they were only trimming branches, he proclaimed, “That is as it should be.”
But within a few minutes, Lieutenant Pak demanded that the work stop and the UNC contingent leave immediately. Then North Korean reinforcements surrounded the smaller UNC unit. Suddenly, Lieutenant Pak yelled, “Chookyo!” (Kill!). He delivered a martial art kick, toppling Captain Bonifas.
Photographs taken from the nearest UNC observation post revealed what happened in the next terrible minutes. The North Korean guards surrounding Captain Bonifas wielded pipes and pick handles. Others used axes they had seized from the work party. Captain Bonifas was beaten to death on the ground. Lieutenant Barrett was seen fleeing, with club-wielding North Korean soldiers in pursuit. The melee lasted four minutes before an alert American driver managed to swing his truck out of the area past the wall where most of the unarmed Americans and South Koreans had taken refuge. Lieutenant Barrett was not among the survivors who safely reached a UNC position, battered but not seriously injured. Later in the day, the UNC recovered the bodies of both American officers. They had suffered massive and repeated head injuries. Neither officer had had time to use his personal weapon.
The implications of the murders were clear and ominous. For months, the North Koreans had been provoking incidents along the DMZ. In the Joint Security Area, their guards had repeatedly threatened Americans with death over trivial perceived slights or loss of face. On the morning of August 18, they followed through with those threats. North Korean defectors had spoken of their dictator, Kim Il Sung's, plans to invade the South. Was this bloody incident and the anticipated American reaction to it the final provocation that Kim needed to unleash that invasion?
The UNC commander, U.S. Army General Richard D. Stil-well, could not afford to take any chances. He requested and received permission from Washington to raise the DEFCON (Defense Condition) for the Republic of Korea from the normal level of 4 to 3 on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the lowest (no perceived threat), and 1 the highest (attack imminent).
I learned of the emergency at about noon, when word was flashed that a “full-bore” operational situation was underway. All leaves were canceled. Security was visibly increased. With DEFCON 3 in effect on the second morning of the emergency, I was in steel helmet, flak jacket, and web gear on my way with another officer and a driver up to the 2nd Infantry Division's area of operations just below the DMZ. As we passed South Korean camps, I saw field artillery units hooking up their howitzers to trucks and loading ammunition. American and ROK Huey helicopters thumped by overhead. I passed armored personnel carriers (APCs) and M-60 tanks in staging areas on our way north. For a moment I recalled the terrible cacophony of the “Mad Minute” firepower demonstration years before at Fort Benning. If the situation deteriorated along the DMZ, firepower of unimaginable magnitude would be unleashed among the pine groves and fields of millet stubble I was passing. Thousands would die. I was just a minor cog in a huge machine, but my job was to provide the best signal security support possible and be prepared for additional ad hoc missions. In a crisis there is always uncertainty. It was the job of the leader, even a junior leader such as a captain, to reassure her soldiers by making sure they were well briefed on the biggest possible picture as often as feasible.
When the other officer and I met with our counterparts in the G-2 section of the 2nd Infantry Division, they were pleased with the signal security that the soldiers in my unit would be able to provide during this operation. No one wanted an inadvertent mistake over an open telephone line or radio circuit to be the source of a breach in op sec (operational security), should the standoff escalate to violence. This work was not particularly glamorous or demanding, but it was complex and important in the overall scheme of our military operations following the axe murder incident. I felt the deep satisfaction of devoting myself fully to my duty, knowing that in doing so I was making a vital contribution to the American military's effort.
And that effort—Operation Paul Bunyan—was impressive. General Stilwell and the United Nations Command staff had devised a detailed Operations Plan that balanced the full superpower might of the United States with suitable restraint. The goal of the plan was to demonstrate to the North Koreans our resolve, to intimidate them militarily, yet not to provoke any further bloodshed along the tripwire of the DMZ.
The action was to be centered on the Joint Security Area where the murders had occurred. As General Stilwell told his staff, “That damned tree must come down!” He intended to demonstrate to the North Koreans the UNC's authority in the zone in the form of lightly armed security forces, backed up by enough visible in-depth ground and aerial firepower, including infantry, helicopter gunships, tactical fighter-bombers, an aircraft carrier task force offshore, as well as nuclear-armed B-52 bombers, to give Kim Il Sung serious doubts about his aggressive actions.
H-Hour for Operation Paul Bunyan was 0700 on Saturday, August 21, 1976. While the waves of American warplanes off-shore lit up the North Korean radar screens, UNC ground units swung into action. In the Joint Security Area, a United States–ROK guard unit drove directly to the poplar tree, as UH-1 Huey helicopters and AH-1 Cobra gunships of their heavily armed infantry support landed just south of the zone. Part of the unit blocked the North Koreans' approach avenue, while the other element went to work on the tree with chainsaws. Then a UNC engineer team entered the zone and ripped out barriers the North Koreans had illegally placed over the years.
The North Koreans, caught by surprise, finally responded by assembling a guard company armed with AK-47 rifles. But faced by the large and well-supported UNC contingent, the North Koreans made no effort to enter the southern section of the zone. By 0830, the U.N. soldiers had sawed the poplar trunk into sections, thrown them onto trucks, and departed the Joint Security Area. The communist troops made no attempt to interfere, possibly because they faced the awesome presence of the Cobra gunships.
(Those interested in learning more detail of the murders in the Joint Security Area and the subsequent Operation Paul Bunyan can consult the “Extract of the Annual Historical Report, UNC/USFK/EUSA, 1976” and the related report, “A Daily Sequential Listing of Events Between 18 August and 22 September, 1976 Involving Armistice Affairs Division and the U.S. Army Support Group–JSA Which Were Precipitated by the 18 August, 1976 Incident in the JSA.” Copies of these documents are available through the U.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington, D.C.)
But the crisis atmosphere remained palpable over the coming months. Although I managed to get a little more sleep each night, I was still working six or seven days a week, just like the other American soldiers in Korea at that time. I began thinking about my duty as a professional soldier differently during this period. In order to do my job well, I saw that my commitment would have to be all consuming. Conventional concepts about business hours taken from the civilian world meant nothing in such an operational military situation. There was work to be done; once a soldier identifies that work, the amount of effort or time required to accomplish it is not a consideration.
By fall, the level of tension following Operation Paul Bunyan was reduced and the local DEFCON was returned to level 4. I went to my next assignment, executive officer to the commander of the U.S. Army Security Agency Field Station, Korea, in Pyongtaek, south of Seoul. Even though the worst of the crisis had abated, working for Colonel Charles S. Black, Jr., was every bit as demanding as my first six weeks in Korea.
In 1976, Military Intelligence had two operational headquarters, the U.S. Army Security Agency, a signals intelligence and signal security organization, and the U.S. Army Intelligence Agency, which incorporated counterintelligence and HUMINT work. Because I was a woman captain, I was considered a good candidate to become Colonel Black's executive officer (XO).
Colonel Black, aka “the Prince of Darkness” to us (albeit well behind hi
s back), was one of those officers for whom the term perfectionist was minted. When he did not receive absolute perfection from his subordinates, it was an unhappy time for all.
For example, the unit had several remote sites along the DMZ, which by standard operational procedure were to be evacuated in the event of North Korean invasion. Colonel Black insisted on visiting each site by helicopter to personally observe the soldiers rehearse their evacuation within the prescribed time limits. To prepare for these inspection trips, the operations officer had to lay out meticulously detailed maps showing the chopper's ingress and egress routes with exact timing, communications, and alternate routes should weather problems divert the aircraft. The colonel would hunch over his wide desk, studying these maps intently. If he perceived the slightest error, he would fling the sheets onto his carpet and stamp on them with both boots, howling in rage. “Get them out of my sight!” Once he became so livid that he knocked over an intricate, multitiered metallic ornament that a Korean Army officer had presented him, scattering gleaming brass leaves from the coffee table across the entire office.
On another occasion, when the unit sports officer had the temerity to admit that he didn't know when the next softball game was scheduled, Colonel Black had him and me report to his office, delivered a blistering reprimand, and told him, “You're fired.”
Black turned to me. “Captain, take care of this. I want this officer replaced immediately.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and hustled the lieutenant back to my office. I told him to sit down and try to be calm, and I reluctantly returned to Colonel Black.
Did he mean for the lieutenant to be removed from his job, from Korea, or from the U.S. Army? Such was the power of Colonel Charles S. Black, Jr., that we sometimes wondered. It turned out the lieutenant in question was simply relieved from his position as sports officer.
Generally Speaking Page 9