The Samurai
When Park Chung-hee resolved to run flood-preparedness drills in Busan, Lee Ki-jo carefully adjusted the dates on which he could lend his trucks. He fixed the window from two days before Typhoon Sarah's landfall through the day she came ashore. He wanted the military supplies kept safe.
Park Chung-hee was responsible for an immense store of matériel across the Busan area. Everything an army of seven hundred thousand required lay heaped in Busan, the nation's logistics hub—and it was not supplies alone. There were ordnance depots of every kind for repairing weapons, and under the Logistics Command seven technical units as well. Those were specialist formations answerable to the technical chiefs—the chief of engineers, the chief of signals, the chief of the medical service, the chief of chemical warfare—and they held expensive equipment.
Park Chung-hee had to look after not only ammunition, rations, and clothing, but sophisticated machinery and skilled technicians. Even if Ki-jo put every truck he owned on the road, moving all of it would be impossible. Priorities would have to be set, and the precious equipment shifted first. That was for Major General Park to decide. What worried Ki-jo lay elsewhere.
Park Chung-hee had been given the Logistics Command on the strength of his reputation for integrity within the army, but the trouble was the officers and noncommissioned officers of the units under him. The officers of the Logistics Command were notorious for corruption in Busan. It was said openly that if you needed military goods, you had only to meet one of them and slip him some money, and you could obtain anything short of a tank or a cannon. There was no assurance that, once a supply-evacuation drill began, those officers would not deliberately skim the goods.
Five days before Chuseok, the autumn harvest festival, while Ki-jo was brooding over supplies lost in the course of the drill, Park Chung-hee sent a man. It was his personnel staff officer, Park Tae-joon.
Short of stature, with fierce eyes beneath thick dark brows, Park Tae-joon came to call on Ki-jo and offered his greeting.
"How do you do? I am Colonel Park Tae-joon, serving under Major General Park Chung-hee."
"How do you do? A pleasure to meet you. I'm Lee Ki-jo."
True to his nickname, the Samurai, Park Tae-joon had a piercing gaze and a bearing of strict precision. Ki-jo offered tea to the colonel who had come to the Yeonji-dong plant and asked what brought him.
"I would like the list of truck drivers."
"The drivers' list?"
Ki-jo was mildly startled, though he already had it. The Cheongsan drivers who would be evacuating disaster victims had been given a dangerous task. They too might be killed or injured in an accident while on duty, and so he had secured a roster of every driver who had come down to Busan.
"Why do you need the list?"
Park Tae-joon explained. He wanted the names so that, if any serviceman diverted supplies during the drill, he could take the drivers' reports and punish the guilty. And should any serviceman make a crooked demand, or press them to cooperate, he hoped the drivers would refuse and come tell him.
Ki-jo nodded.
"I can give you the list."
At that, Park Tae-joon asked one thing more.
"Please gather the drivers in one place. An hour will be enough. I will make the request to them myself."
Ki-jo nodded. Handing over the list, he said, "There are more than five hundred drivers."
"That is fine. I will return the list tomorrow morning."
Park Tae-joon left with the roster, truck numbers and assigned drivers set down upon it.
Four days before Chuseok, the drivers of Cheongsan Transport assembled in the broad yard of the Yeonji-dong plant. Park Tae-joon, returned with a handful of soldiers, stood before them with a helmet and a command baton in hand. From behind, Ki-jo watched him in silence.
"I am Colonel Park Tae-joon, personnel staff officer of the Logistics Command."
He was small of build, yet once he mounted the platform and let his voice ring out, he seemed to grow. It was like him. From his days at the Korea Military Academy through his time as a regimental commander and chief of staff in the 25th Division, military discipline had been his charge.
"In two days, you will take part in a drill to move, to a place of safety, the supplies required by the Republic of Korea's army of seven hundred thousand."
Just then he caught a driver whose mind had wandered. He leveled the baton at the man and called out.
"Driver of truck forty-two, Mr. So Cheong-won! Listen properly!"
At the shout, So Cheong-won, who had been talking to the man beside him, flinched and fixed his eyes on Park Tae-joon. How does he know my name? The bewilderment was plain on his face.
Ki-jo knew the secret. When he had been asked to line the drivers up, the request had been that they stand in ten ranks, arranged by truck number. There was a trick in it. Even so, Park Tae-joon was remarkable: he had committed the names of more than five hundred drivers to memory. From the moment he carried the list off the day before, he had plainly drilled every line of it into his head.
"Mr. So Cheong-won! If a man who drives a truck lets his mind wander like that and causes an accident, what then? If a father responsible for three children is hurt, who will look after them?"
He had memorized even So Cheong-won's family circumstances, and he thundered them out. The drivers tensed before an atmosphere that was anything but ordinary. All they could do was wonder how this soldier knew their private affairs.
"You will be with me for a single hour. When I speak, listen straight, and do not forget my words."
Park Tae-joon swept them with a piercing look.
"Among you, is there anyone who fought on the battlefield in the Korean War? Raise your hand!"
A few drivers lifted their hands, cautious. Park Tae-joon singled one of them out.
"Mr. Jeong Hong-seon, speak. In the war, what unit were you with, and where did you fight?"
Once again he had the name exactly.
"The 28th Regiment of the 9th Division. I fought in the Battle of White Horse Hill at Cheorwon."
"I see. Then you fought on Hill 395."
"Yes, sir."
The driver was startled that Park Tae-joon had put his finger on it so precisely.
"What was your rank?"
"Corporal."
"Good. The 28th Regiment, to which Corporal Jeong Hong-seon belonged, held the face of Hill 395 against two Chinese divisions and fought twelve separate actions across ten days. It was a bloodbath—the hill lost to the Chinese and taken back seven times. Am I correct?"
"Y-yes. That's right." Jeong Hong-seon nodded.
"And if ammunition and supplies had not been brought up then, what do you suppose would have happened?"
"I probably would have died."
"Quite so. Would it have been only you?"
"The whole regiment would have died..."
Jeong Hong-seon answered with his head lowered.
"Mr. Jeong Hong-seon, come up onto the platform."
When he climbed up, Park Tae-joon took his hand.
"It is thanks to men like you that this country could be held. You support an aged mother and a sick wife, do you not?"
"Yes..."
Jeong Hong-seon bowed his head.
"You are a fine head of a household, working in a good place. Carry out your duty safely here in Busan, and return to your family."
"Thank you."
Park Tae-joon sent him back down from the platform.
The drivers were beginning to grasp that he was no ordinary man. By that uncommon mind and memory he had fixed in them, past any doubt, the impression of someone who remembered everything. Ki-jo thought highly of him as well.
The roster Seong Dae-ik had drawn up against every contingency, Park Tae-joon had memorized entire. Dae-ik had recorded family particulars with care, so that if a driver were killed or badly hurt, proper compensation could be paid. That he had learned even the remarks column was truly astonishing.
"Together with me, you are to move supplies furnished by the people's taxes—paid in their blood! If even a single item is lost, let us go out into the sea off Busan and drown! Born men, what use is living if we live by doing the country harm?"
Weight had begun to settle behind his words.
"And if you do not care to drown, then let us die together by this gun!"
Park Tae-joon drew the pistol at his hip. The drivers froze.
Officers who had fought in the Korean War were frightening men. Disobey an order, or commit a grave mistake, and they carried out summary execution on the spot. Plenty of those present had seen it done before their eyes, or knew of it from stories.
Shoving the pistol back into his belt, Park Tae-joon shouted.
"Your task is this. If an officer or a noncommissioned officer tries to make off with the supplies you have hauled, you will report it to me."
Having laid the charge upon them, he lowered his voice a tone and went on.
"Even if the supplies you carried vanish, truck and all, so long as you tell me who did it, I will let the matter pass. No questions asked."
Every driver nodded. They understood precisely what he wanted.
Tae-joon spun the speech out no further. Coming down from the platform, he met them one by one, calling each man by name and speaking of his family. Fierce-eyed, cold in the impression he gave, he was gentle and warm the moment the talk turned to family.
After an hour of handshakes and greetings, he mounted the platform for a last word.
"I am Park Tae-joon, and my home is this very Busan. If, in the course of this mission, you come to bear me a grudge, come find my house."
He gave his home address to every driver there.
"If I have done wrong, I will take your blade and die whenever you please. Stab me a hundred times. Only, do not lay a hand on my family."
By any modern measure it was a dangerous thing to say, and an extreme one. Ki-jo, though, thought the words belonged to the 1950s. At that last line the drivers laughed.
I will offer you my neck, so give your lives to the work. I will not touch your families, so do not touch mine.
It was threat and candor together, and it reached the men of that decade.
When Park Tae-joon called out, "I leave this in your hands!" and bowed to them in a full, deep obeisance, applause broke over the yard. Blunt and extreme as he was, he had not left them thinking him a bad man.
The lecture done, Ki-jo took him into the office. He received the list back and held out an envelope, telling him to use it for lunch. It was not that he hoped to get into Park Tae-joon's good graces. It was something like a token of regard, given because the man who had labored to memorize the roster was admirable, and Ki-jo was moved by it. Park Tae-joon declined. In those days the passing of little gratuities back and forth was as natural as drawing breath, yet he wanted none of it.
"I am grateful you thought of me, but I cannot accept money."
"I understand."
Ki-jo put the envelope away.
"Even if a few blankets go missing, or a few sacks of hardtack, I will never hold the drivers to account. I exaggerated. Rather badly."
"I understand. But please do not think little of the people of Cheongsan Transport. They are decent men. They have hauled American military supplies without causing a single accident."
"If I seemed to slight your employees, I apologize. I have a habit of speaking too strongly."
Park Tae-joon bowed his head.
Ki-jo knew very well what kind of man he was. In all his service at the Logistics Command, the only thing Park Tae-joon had ever embezzled was adhesive bandage, and even that he had taken for his mother, whose hands were cracked raw from farm work. He had brought it home after hearing her say, "They tell me a wound heals well if you wrap it in the bandage the army uses..." Beyond that, he held to principle as strictly as a blade.
So incorruptible was he, and so pinched his circumstances, that the landlord of the house he rented would take his wife to task.
"Why does an army officer live so shabbily? Down the way, the other officers' houses want for nothing. In times like these, keeping yourself pure and upright is all wasted effort—so you, young wife, talk some sense into your husband."
But there was no chance that Park Tae-joon, who had not even kept an orderly after his marriage, would be talked around by his wife. Where other officers posted several orderlies for the sake of show, he did the opposite.
Of all the stories about him, the one that ached in Ki-jo most was this: keeping the nighttime curfew, he had not been able to stay at his eldest child's side when the child, taken ill, passed from the world. To use a unit vehicle for a private reason was illegal, and the curfew was to be observed, so he waited until dawn. By the time he reached home, the child was already a cold corpse. Even after losing his firstborn that way, he held to principle when his second child, too, lay near death.
In silence, Ki-jo watched that man's back as he left the office. A thought came to him. Perhaps it was because men like Park Tae-joon existed that, with no way forward and nothing to start from, a steel mill could be raised in empty Pohang, and molten iron drawn.