N. Korea Expands Special Forces
For two of the four years I spent in Korea, I lived, not in a tent or a Quonset hut, but in apartments in Seoul, directly adjacent to the Han River, with breathtaking views of the city lights reflecting on the river at night. It was, ironically, the most comfortable and luxurious existence of my life. Yes, there was the occasional annoyance of rising early to come to a PT formation and the other petty despotisms of Army life — Finance screwing my pay up, the hospital losing my medical records, NEO exercises, and command sponsorship. Somewhere in a pile at the bottom of one of the closets were a gas mask and a kevlar helmet (but no weapon, of course). My sentiments about our Army’s contingent in Seoul wasn’t unlike the sentiments expressed more famously here:
As a lawyer, and especially as a defense lawyer, my life was much softer than it had been as a civilian not long before, freezing and hungry in wood-heated hovel in South Dakota, in an area that could only be described as a trailer park with utmost generosity. As a soldier — or rather, as someone who wished he was one in some physical and spiritual way — this was a source of guilt and vulnerability, in the same way that my poverty of the past was a source of confidence and arrogance about all that I’d learned to survive and overcome. I’d become a good shot with a rifle in those earlier years, not in the Army, where I stood little chance of getting back to the arms room and having a weapon issued to me unless the North Koreans chose to attack during normal working hours, and with plenty of advance notice.
The readiness of our military in Korea is a joke. We knew it, and so do the North Koreans. Our vulnerability is at its greatest at places like Hannam Village in Seoul or Camp George in Taegu, where soldiers live in comfortable, vulnerable off-post exclaves of apartments with their wives, husbands, and children. If there is a war, many of those people are going to die on Day One.