by Ken Hruby
My memories of Vietnam and Korea are showing signs of age. They are older now than I was when I served there. Mostly they remain hidden just beneath the surface of consciousness, like mines laid in a rice paddy, ready to explode and echo across the decades when the right pressure is applied. Just what it is that trips them remains a mystery; sometimes a sound, occasionally a word, usually a smell. And, like the mines, these memories are not always where I laid them; they shift and migrate in the bramble of my hippocampus as if the laws of physics and probability have been suspended. It is subtle movement, for the ground and the ground-rules changed when I wasn’t looking. (1993)
It was a clean shot that took the ringed-neck pheasant’s head off and left the carcass of iridescent brown and bronze feathers slumped in the grass stubble north of the fence in a barrier minefield: very good marksmanship; very bad judgment. That single shot and the events that ensued violated a dozen articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), a half dozen the unit standing orders and all the principles of good common sense.
The report of the shot echoed across the western end of the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) in Korea and found me just beginning the first of my three daily inspections of the battalion’s sector of the “fence”, the heavily fortified southern edge of the two-and-a-half-mile wide DMZ, (also called the South Tape) that rips the Korean peninsula in two from the Sea of Japan in the East 160-miles to the Imjin River estuary on the West. The peninsula droops like a flaccid penis from the bloated belly of mainland Asia and for centuries has been the shunt between the insular island empire of Japan and dominating Han dynasties of China. The “Fence” was essentially a swath of defensive positions and bunkers, cyclone fences and barbed wire, minefields and ditches designed to prevent another invasion from the North as happened in 1950 to launch the 38 month “Korean Conflict” aka ”the Forgotten War.”
The ten-foot-high chain-link fence that ran diagonally across the jagged mountains of the country was topped with three spirals of razor wire that stretched like a trio of sharpened Slinkys from one support post to the next as far as the next ridge and well beyond. Interrupted at intervals with manned gates to allow patrols to enter and exit the “neutral” territory of the zone, the fence was a very visible barrier separating the two Han-Gook nations. It shared few features with the other, older, more famous barrier of the Orient, the Great Wall of Chins, six hundred miles to the West. Its intent was twofold; by the ROK government, to prevent another aggression from the North; by the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), to prevent their citizenry from fleeing to the more prosperous South.
Other features of the DMZ were not so apparent. Just north of the fence is a wide antipersonnel minefield augmented by smaller anti-tank minefields in likely tank approaches to the South – safe lanes ran through the minefields at intervals across the peninsula. Between the fence and the minefields was a sand-raked strip to highlight footprints of any infiltrators, a sort of evidentiary sand trap. Immediately north of the fence, between the sand strip was a safe path for maintenance and access, as needed, to the minefields.
Kim Jung Un had not been born yet and his grandfather, Kim Il-Sung, the founder of the DPRK, was fulminating a perpetual state of agitation along the truce line that served as a buffer between the divided Koreas. The PsyWar speakers blared day and night from the hills across the neutral zone with propaganda, boasts of impending incursions and death threats to some of the opposing military unit commanders – by name. On nights when the wind blew from the North out of Manchuria, the incessant blather and nasal musical interludes were especially irksome and unnerving. Little has changed in the ensuing four-plus decades.
In 1968 and the following year, this was a combat zone. While the heavy action was raging in Vietnam, the DMZ of Korea was declared a “hostile fire zone” – and the scene of over a dozen ambushes of US patrols within the neutral zone and as many engagements with infiltrators along the south tape. In 1968 and 1969, there were thirty-three hostile incursions by the North Korean forces into the South that resulted in 27 US ground forces killed in action and sixteen wounded. Those incidents did not include the seizure of the USS Pueblo crew, the Raid on the Blue House or the Gangwon-do landing attempts or any of the casualties in the Republic of Korea Army (ROK) sector to our east. Nor do they include any of the tunnels, as many as twenty, which were being dug by the DPRKA at the time and not discovered until 1974. While this level of “action” was clearly insignificant relative to what was going on in Vietnam, it was significant enough to those of us who were isolated on the fence, facing the totally inscrutable forces of Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of the equally unpredictable Kim Jong-un.
So, the single rifle shot was not alarming. Frequently the sentries in their foxholes would see some movement, real or imagined, in the ungroomed vegetation in front of their positions and engage whatever it was with a shot. Since there was no return fire from this shot and a firefight had not ensued, I shrugged it off and continued to walk the well-trodden trail between gun positions to make sure that the “day force” knew the daily challenge and password, and all the other checks that were demanded. The second report had a deeper, more resonant tone – a hand-grenade or a land mine, nothing like the staccato crack of a rifle that I had all but ignored ten minutes earlier. By the time I had gotten to the gate at the center sector to meet up with my driver, the events became clear.
To supplement the minefields along the fence, the restricted zone between the Imjin River and the south tape was dotted with anti-personnel minefields to channel would-be infiltrators from working their way South unencumbered. This zone was also off-limits to the native farmers and their families who, for centuries before the war, had tilled the fields and rice paddies. Since the armistice was signed at Panmunjom in 1953, the deep thinkers in higher headquarters (HHQ) had added “nuisance minefields” to this rather vast “demilitarized” sector and the restricted areas between the DMZ and the Imjin River. As a young infantry platoon leader on my first deployment to Korea, I was given the mission to lay one of these minefields in an abandoned rice paddy just to the northwest of Libby Bridge, one of two permanent bridges across the river in the US sector. While this was normally a job given to the Combat Engineers, it was not unusual to turn it over to the infantry, but some intense training would be needed to get the platoon ready to do it properly and safely. Long before Google and Wikipedia became the “go to” for esoteric information, the Army had a library of “field manuals” that covered every imaginable aspect of life outside of the garrison – in the field. They all had numbers, something like the Dewey Decimal system that had revolutionized the library systems across the world nearly a century and a half earlier; the one I needed was FM 22-32, Land Mine Warfare. And therein it was all spelled out in mind-numbing detail: organization, design, layout, installation, density, cluster design, safe lanes, lane entrance and exit, markings, recording, and reporting.
Without mishap, my infantry platoon, 3d Platoon, Charlie Company, 1st Battle Group, 7th Cavalry Regiment, did what we were tasked to do; after training for two weeks, we laid a minefield. As the Officer in Charge (OIC), I dutifully recorded the effort on the proper DD Form 1355 Minefield Record, complete with detailed drawings of the base stakes, starting pods, lanes, azimuths, mine type, cluster density, signature and SECRET stamp and sent it up the chain of command. At the time, it was just another mission that got layered as part of the base coat of experiences a neophyte lieutenant needed to be an effective combat leader.
Ironically, eight years later, after some adventures in Vietnam, some gunnery instruction duties in the training base stateside, and the vagaries of the Infantry Branch assignment system at the Pentagon, I found myself back on the DMZ, this time as the Executive Officer of the one Rifle Battalion permanently assigned duty on the fence. The other units “ping-ponged” in and out at three-month intervals, but we were on the fence for the duration, however long that might be. The brutal winter of 1969, with regular low temperatures at 40 degrees below, ultimately gave way to the spring thaws, the season of mud and some movement in the Civil Affairs office at HHQ to return some of the arable land north of the river to its ancestral families for cultivation. With the help of the Division Engineers, I was given the mission of clearing five of the nuisance minefields near the Libby Bridge. As I examined the minefield records, the DD 1355 that I had signed as a Lieutenant eight years before sat at the top of the pile.
A “piece of cake”, easy money, I thought. My former platoon had laid the mines. I had been there on the ground and knew and I remembered the details. It was my drawing on the Minefield Record form and my script filling all the boxes and my signature. It was exciting to have first-hand knowledge, like an old-timer, of this effort, although I had just turned thirty a few months before. A gush of memories flooded over me as the details saw new life in my mind.
As the sketch indicated, the base marker was just off the north side of the road by the first culvert after the exit from the bridge; the base cluster was supposed to be a specified distance at a specific azimuth, but as one of the sergeants so carefully probed in the ancient rice paddy, having now been fallow for sixteen years since the end of the war, there were no mines to be found where they were supposed to have been. And the doubt and danger of what was becoming obvious began to cloud the mission to the point that it was abandoned until some mechanical means could be arranged to detonate the mines in situ. Eight seasonal changes of deep freezes and thawing, monsoon rains, and the subtle, relentless tug of gravity and erosion had transformed an orderly, deliberate pattern of mines into a complete mine migration mystery in three dimensions. The Minefield Record was worthless to aid in disarming the field, as were all the others on the list and, while they were all well marked with the international minefield signs and symbols on the “friendly” side, they would remain a constant threat to the ignorant, the innocent and the careless who missed the warnings.
Two thousand miles to the south, on the high plateau in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, my former West Point roommate, John Purdy, had one of these abandoned minefields to deal with. He was advising a battalion of Vietnamese infantry in the Central Highlands on the edge of the Cambodian border, the same job that I had in nearly the same location five years earlier. “Advising” then, as now, put the protagonist in a position of having great responsibility with little, or no, authority. As he was heading out on an operation with his Vietnamese unit, a US Army helicopter approached and landed outside the advisor compound: two Warrant Officers, on their last sortie in the country, wanted to see and photograph the elephants frequently used as beasts of burden in that sector of the country.
To “see the elephant” had both a literal and a metaphorical meaning and a curious history that goes back to the early nineteenth century as the circuit circuses began to expand their exotica from the Eastern metropolitan areas to the heartland. For those who dealt with livestock of the standard ilk as cattle, horses, and hogs, the arrival of an elephant with the circus was mind-altering. One could have seen all the domestic mammals and perhaps, an elk or a moose, but the elephant, with its multifunctional trunk, flat feet and ivory tusks, was beyond their wildest imaginations. To say, “I’ve seen the elephant”, was to say, “you cannot surprise me; I have seen everything”. But the expression took on a more cynical meaning during and after the Civil War as the carnage and casualties mounted and the veterans of set-piece battles expressed their complex emotions to their families on the home front with the simple declaration: “I’ve seen the elephant”.
The Warrant Officer served a special function in the Army as one who had special technical skills that allowed them to focus and practice their specialties without the expectation of expanding beyond that role into the general leadership demands of commissioned officers. Logistics, personnel management, intelligence, to name a few, were the domains of the Warrant Officers before the Vietnam War. The introduction of airmobile operations brought hundreds of this new specialty ranking into the army as pilots.
The field in which they landed, unknowable from any altitude, was a minefield abandoned by the French soon after their defeat at Dien Bien Phu 1954 and the French withdrawal from Indochina not long thereafter. It was one of many lethal relics from the protracted French-Indochina War that were peppered about the region. Once they shut down the engine, both pilots stepped out of their chopper and within a few strides stepped onto mines. A Vietnamese sergeant nearby rushed to aid them and triggered a mine; the senior American advisor to the camp came to aid and also triggered a mine. When Lt. Purdy arrived, there were four wounded, bleeding in the minefield. With no options available but to take the initiative, he started an elaborate rescue by throwing sandbags ahead of each step towards the wounded and retrieved each of the four casualties. If the bag landed on a mine, the sand would protect him from serious harm, if it did not, he could step on it and advance to the wounded one step, one sandbag at a time. Three of the four died on the airstrip before they could be med-evaded.
A minefield is a boogieman for soldier and civilian alike. It has become a metaphor for uncertainty, the totally unexpected and the unintended consequences of, what might have once been a rational act. But the reality of being in a minefield is paralyzing, stupefying and heart-stopping. The unknown is powerful stuff. Whether a minefield or an IED, the effect is the same; it is a weapon of terror in its most elemental sense. To deal with a casualty in a minefield takes a rare combination of quick-thinking, inventive problem-solving, sang-froid, adrenaline, and courage that few of us are ever called upon to deliver. Lieutenant Purdy met the challenge while everyone else stood by petrified. His actions were acknowledged and honored by awarding him a Silver Star, the Nation’s third highest decoration for bravery.
The private who shot the pheasant, (I’ll have to call him “the Kid” to protect his innocence and ignorance) had a different challenge, less noble. He abandoned his post, told his squad leader and the gate guard that he needed to check out footprints in the sand strip in front of his position and proceeded to walk back, north of the fence to gather his kill. One step into the minefield was as far as he got. The explosion blew off most of his right foot and the ringed-neck pheasant was left to rot in the minefield. As he was at the edge of the minefield, his squad leader extracted the kid without much danger and evacuate him back to the aid tent just south of the gate.
When I arrived, he was on a stretcher, in great pain, awaiting the med-evac chopper. His foot was still in the black leather boot, attached by some tendons and ligaments to the calf muscle which slowly pumped blood onto the canvas stretcher until his squad leader and I got a belt tourniquet applied just below his knee. The medic, who was on call at the “ready platoon” Observation Post a half a kilometer away, finally arrived with his kit of supplies. He breathlessly entered the tent, looked down at the mangled leg and promptly passed out cold at the sight of the bloody limb. It was a “face plant” the likes of which I had seen only in cartoons. It broke his nose and left me with two bleeding troopers. I found the morphine in the medic’s kit bag and gave the kid a shot just as the med-evac chopper came to a hover on the road outside the tent. After the two casualties were loaded and turned over to the onboard medical corpsmen, the chopper lifted off and headed south to the Division Hospital and an eerie silence fell over the road junction.
The organizational structure of the US sector at that time needs some clarification here. The normal pyramidal organization, with a broad base at the bottom where all the action takes place in the companies and platoons, was almost totally inverted at that time in the ongoing conflict. The US sector had only three battalions online which meant that, with the other line units in reserve, there was a surplus of supervisory capacity at the Brigade, Division, Corps and Army staff levels. At the first report of an “incident”, we, on the ground, were overtaken by a swarm of helicopters from HHQ to get a “first hand” report. It was sort of “helicopter parenting” from operations staff and commanders who had too much free time on their hands. The time-honored Situation Reports (SITREPS) would not suffice.
Predictably, the silence at the road junction did not last long. Soon came flurry of radio calls and demands for situation reports, followed by an avalanche of demands for reports due to HHQ. And the flock of staff and commanders from HHQ. As the senior officer present at the time of the incident, I had to gather witness statements, write accident reports (since this was a casualty not involving an enemy engagement) and draft a letter expressing regrets to the parents for the CO to sign. This was the hard part, trying to offer condolences to a mother and father whose son had just blown off his leg, not engaged in some heroic action against an enemy, but due to his own stupidity and willful wrongdoing. The far-reaching implications of the wording of these reports loomed over me as I explored the events; if I took a hard line, there was a strong possibility of a court-martial and possible dishonorable discharge with no VA benefits. At the other extreme, I could have empathy with him for the harsh Winter, the numbing fog of boredom that hovers over those with duties on the fence, the known slow development of sound judgment in post-pubescent males and then choose to downplay or even ignore his motivations and the ring-neck pheasant. I did not want him to get a medal, but, with the sure prospect of having a prosthetic leg, I felt he had been punished enough and chose a middle ground in wording my reports.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the remainder of the Iron Curtain in 1991, the Korean DMZ remains the only heavily fortified border extant and the last vestige of the cold war. The middle-east wars and the ensuing flood of refugees attempting to flee the chaos in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan have generated new emigrant restrictions throughout Western Europe and the campaign threat by Donald Trump to “build a wall” to keep the Mexicans out of the US have thus far included no plans for minefields – none that have been made public, anyway.
There are thousands of minefields around the world left from old wars and conflicts, most of unmarked. Many remain from the Second World War and, since the 1960s, as many as 110 million mines have been spread throughout the world into an estimated 70 countries. The only way to deactivate them is by individual removal at a cost of US$ 300–1000 per mine. Even with training, mine disposal experts expect that for every 5000 mines cleared, one worker will be killed and two will be injured by accidental explosions. There is progress in this effort: a Belgian non-profit, APOPO, is teaching African giant pouched rats to sniff out the TNT in landmines at a rate many hundreds of times faster than humans can.
In 1997, the Ottawa Treaty, the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention was adopted and opened for signatures. It is known as Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction and to date has been signed by 162 states that are party to the treaty. 35 UN states, including the US, Russia, and China, are non-signatories. Before the treaty was drawn up and signed, landmines killed or maimed worldwide an estimated 26,000 people annually; that has dropped to around 4000 per year since the treaty has gone into effect.
When and if there is a resolution to the conflict on the Korean peninsula and the fences and barbed-wire come down, it will reveal a swath of verdant Asian land that has lain fallow for six and a half decades; no gathering of firewood, no chopping of trees and deforestation. Scientists estimate that over 1,600 types of vascular plants and more than 300 species of mushrooms, fungi, and lichen are thriving in the DMZ. Mammals such as the rare Amur goral, Asiatic black bear, musk deer and are abundant. Manchurian or red-crowned cranes and white-naped cranes are among the DMZ’s most famous and visible denizens. There are even reports of tigers, believed extinct on the peninsula since before Japanese occupation, roaming the DMZ’s mountains. The diminutive Korean Water Deer and the Ring-Necked Pheasant, with its iridescent feathers and imperious stride, still thrive in the unpopulated, restricted zone.
But the mines are still out there…just off the beaten path in the DMZ and dozens of other countries where war has steam-rolled over the peaceful pursuit of happiness and left its scat for others to clean up.