On the Lovely Mountain

I remember the nearly perfect mornings on the china sea, still dark, and a layer of fog over the water like an apron of fat keeping warm all the sinewy delicacy beneath.  On the stoop just outside a huge steel door, or on the roof betwixt a dozen dishes and antennae, I drank the brutal and common coffee of the chow hall, delivered by Blackhawk on weekly food runs.  The cigarette I had out there each day was everything that made them so hard to quit - dry, hot, and deadly.  The great, gradual catharsis of the coffin at the end of the big musing.  I am not afraid of this self-inflicted, cancerous senescence.  I am older by degrees with each new drag, and younger for the slaking of that thirst. I am held steady.

We kept a few goats up there, with coarse black hair and even blacker eyes.  Goats have the bulbous and frightening eyes of birth-defected tragedy.  They are almost completely dead in those hellish globes, so much so that you know you cannot trust them or predict their next move.  But they entertained us on those rare nights when we broke the rules enough to bring booze up from the bustling little Korean hamlet far below.

Those mornings I would toss the last cold drops of my coffee towards the goats and tuck my extinguished butt into my pocket.  Then pass through the steel door and walk a little reverently by the two hulking, blue Cummins diesel generators that rumbled comfortingly through our weekly tests.  Enter the main building, stride past the dark kitchen on the left and the second fridge and icebox on the right, packed as heavy with meat as a man could ask - the cook would be there in a few hours to make breakfast.  If all was still going well, none of my three troops would have gotten ambitious enough to rise yet, and a glance down the hall, past "the room," would reveal three closed doors beyond my open one.

The room would wait behind its electronic lock and expectant alarm. I have always felt like alarms are constantly armed and watching me.  Scrutinizing, a hair's breadth away from screaming at me for doing the slightest thing wrong.  I selected and programmed the code for this door, this room, and yet it frightened me whenever I had to to key it.  So it would wait.  My soldiers had daily checks to perform in there anyway, and the only thing behind that door that made me comfortable was the area used for weapons storage.  I liked it back there.  In a close room full of towering lights and toggles and beeps and wires, the directness of the M-4's and the timeless design of the ammo cans made for a pleasant repose.  Unlike all those computers and receivers and encryptors; the guns, grenades, and bullets never confused me.  Never confounded me.  They wanted my help in doing their work.  The machines, by absolute directive, wanted as little from me as possible.

I would sit in what passed for our living room up there, closer as the crow flies to North Korea than to anything American, planning the day in crisp BDU's and shined boots.  The troops wondered aloud why we had to go through the motions with the pressed uniforms, why we had to bother shining our boots every day.  Why we even had to wear a military uniform this far from anything that might care.  This far from consequence.

"Because the consequence you are thinking of is administrative.  The North Koreans have a different kind in mind.  Though you might like to remember that I can get just as administrative as anyone else.  That's what they expect of me, you know.  That's why they put me here."

Leadership gets as complacent as anyone else.  Nobody was afraid of North Korea, so the natural degradation occurred:  preparing soldiers for combat took a back seat to writing better evaluation reports.  It seems to be what happens to civilization in general.  Nobody is afraid of each other, so preparing children for success takes a back seat to speaking loudly about parenting.  In an environment of overwhelming safety, preparation always gives way to posturing.  Eventually the posturing becomes convincing, and when a threat emerges, big words and haughty delivery are mistaken for defensive measures.  We stop believing that we will have to fight, to the point that we refuse to believe it even as we are being kicked in the teeth.  You can always deny that you lost if you never recognized the validity of the challenge.

Indeed, the North Koreans were not much of anything.  Not Red Menace nor Yellow Terror, just a poor, bedraggled and destitute lot, living literally in darkness across the River Han.  They were over there, making an obscure art of turning preparation and posturing into synonyms.  Still, ships seemed perpetually to be sunk out in the East China, and myths of bands of North Korean trainees being sent across the river to attack in the night in past years were kept alive.  Something was always happening to prevent the soldier in us from turning completely to desk clerk.



To be continued (hopefully)...