Red Ice

The plane was packed with businessmen virtually spilling over into the aisles. The lure of economically booming Korea had filled every seat. Half of the passengers stared into open briefcases while the other half exchanged information on the price in “real money” of everything from brassware to sweaters. The passenger next to me, a paunchy man in an overtailored Italian suit, droned on about the merits of his Mercedes diesel and seemed to know the smart price for everything.

I restrained my urge to offer advice. It would be futile. My fellow passenger would undoubtedly blunder through his Korean visit regardless—patronizing, using first names, and backslapping. In looking over the other Western passengers, I wondered what it was that I had been drawn to protect and why.

Yet theirs would be merely human blundering—random, small scale, and self-adjusting. What Kurganov and I fought in our own ways was institutional blundering on a mammoth scale. Its inevitable outgrowth was unending purges, liquidations, relocations, deceptions, and dragooning orchestrated by shortsighted apparatchiks whose blueprints were drafted in applied fear. One of the few luxuries of my present existence was that the foe, totalitarianism, was irredeemably corrupt and as black as Lenin’s shadow. The cause, however, was tinged with gray. Men of my fellow passenger’s stripe left me uneasy. Unlike my comrades in the established militaries, I, as a free lance, righted immediate wrongs and was not plagued with implicitly endorsing the programs that invariably followed. In his present existence Frazer had lost much, but gained purity of action.

A second reason held me back. As a veteran and expatriate I was sadly familiar with the cultural heavy-handedness of the first wave of troops to reach the beachhead. It didn’t matter whether the troops were commandos… or purchasing agents. The ability to identify with the locals was a gift and as common as broken noses among missionaries. It was even rare among such “go native” elite units as SEALs and Special Forces, where identification was a cultivated attribute. The toughness of mind required to reach your objective was the same toughness that locked out external values and influences. Too often those locked-out influences were some foreigner’s seemingly untested values. Within elite units worldwide, perhaps one man in ten stood truly capable of integrating into a combat organization of mixed origin. Yes, Frazer, you were a rare and adaptable fool.

As we began our descent, a stewardess pulled down the blinds on each of the windows. After nearly thirty years, the Republic of Korea must still function on a wartime basis. The blinds were pulled to prevent observation of the port defenses of Chinhae, Korea’s principal naval center.

At the small Chinhae air terminal, I was met by a middle-aged naval officer built low and solid like a cinder block. Commander Pak directed the maritime unconventional warfare section of the Korean 25th Squadron and consequently smiled only with his eyes. The rest of the smile had been eroded by too many covert amphibious reconnaissances into North Korea with too many good men lost and too many imprisoned—never to be freed.

The stocky, hard-bitten old frogman had logged over two decades in the simmering war between north and south. North Korea, jealous of the south’s ever-growing prosperity and self-conscious of the north’s own fall from ascendancy, devoted incredible energy and resources to harassing the south. South Korea had no choice but to counterpunch if it was to hold the harassment in check. Consequently, both sides infiltrated, reconnoitered, and sabotaged. Since Korea was a peninsula, infiltration by sea assumed preeminence as the method of choice. Infiltration by sea necessarily meant heavy use of frogmen. Through the years Pak had risen to the position of head maritime counterpuncher. Year after year, Pak, as an officer in the Naval Reconnaissance Unit, had braved the cold, swift currents of the north, had crawled the shingle beaches by night, and had awaited that final searing burst of fire that had yet to come. His expressionless face was as obdurate, unchanging, and unforgiving as his country’s coastline.

Like me, the old campaigner belonged to a thin, uncompromising strain of defenders—defenders, who, in all but the worst of times, the public viewed as embarrassments.

We had met when I was officer in charge of a SEAL Mobile Training Team in Korea. An immediate friendship developed—firmer than most of far greater years. We shared a difficulty in reconciling a sense of duty with the demands of ambitious seniors. The grade of commander was as far as he was ever going to get, and he took contrary pride in that fact.