The Morning the Guns Fell Silent
Morning, April 20
From the small hours of the twentieth, when Kijo came home, the protests that had been flaring in scattered bursts all across Seoul began to die away. Around Jongno there was nothing to hear — no roar of demonstrators, no crack of rifles. For a long while neither he nor Sunrye could sleep, and they kept their ears bent to the radio.
At about three-forty in the morning, Martial Law Commander Song Yo-chan issued Proclamation No. 4.
Anyone concealing weapons, or sheltering rioters, shall be punished with severity.
Read one way, it was a promise of a hard hand against the demonstrators. But Song Yo-chan, who held the martial-law command, was moving exactly as history had him move. Before the morning was out he would order the chief of the National Police not to torture the students already under arrest, and Kijo was grateful to him for it. Through the April 19 Revolution, Song had done his part to keep the army neutral.
On the nineteenth, demonstrators had met the martial-law troops entering Seoul with volleys of stones, and still the army had not answered with excess force. It was nothing like Gwangju in 1980. They threw the same stones, stormed the same police boxes, even broke into the Metropolitan Police armory and armed themselves to fight — and yet the slaughter that overtook Gwangju never came. A soldier with no hunger for power does not raise his rifle against innocent citizens. Song Yo-chan's troops used force only against the few demonstrators who fired on soldiers and police, and against those who tried to loot the armories.
Kijo, who had fallen asleep beside Sunrye, woke around six. He stepped out into the courtyard and listened to the morning of Seoul. The gunfire and the shouting that had filled the city the day before were gone. Now and then a sparrow chirped, and that was all.
He went out through the front gate and looked along Jongno. The curfew had lifted, and cars and people alike were few. Martial-law soldiers who had been up all night stood posted along the street, and far off toward Sejong-ro a tank sat where it had been left.
When he came back in, Sunrye was looking over the clothes hung on the line in the courtyard. On what Kijo had worn, bloodstains remained that would not wash out.
"You'll be going out again today?" Sunrye asked, her face drawn with worry.
He nodded, and set himself to easing her mind.
"Don't worry. The soldiers are holding the streets. It won't be like yesterday."
He ate his breakfast and set out for Yongsan. Walking the whole way, he took in the city the demonstrations had passed over. Stones from the street fighting lay scattered along the road, and a bus of Cheongsan Transportation, pulled up at the curb, caught his eye. The route must have been blocked by the crowd mid-run; the driver had set the bus at the roadside and gotten clear. Drawing closer, Kijo saw that every window was shut and the doors locked fast. The man had secured the vehicle before he stepped down.
Farther along the sidewalk, blood had dried hard into the pavement. Only the crowds were gone. Yesterday was still there, exactly as it had been left. The martial-law soldiers watched him walk and look, and they neither stopped him nor searched him. He could feel it. Their hearts were with the citizens.
He came to the front of the Yongsan base and knocked at the door of Mac O. It opened, and the manager, Seo Yong-woo, stepped out.
"You've come, sir?"
Seo Yong-woo's face was swollen and slack — the face of a man who had kept the shop through the night and had only just fallen asleep.
"You were here all night?"
"Yes, sir."
Inside, the staff lay asleep wherever they had dropped, across the chairs and on the floor. From here and there came the sound of snoring.
"When they wake, send them home. Martial law is in effect now. Nothing's going to happen from here on."
With that he walked on toward Eighth Army headquarters. He wanted to see Hausman and take the measure of the whole situation.
Hausman, in the office, wore the same sleepless face. He had a coffee cup in his hand.
"Your family come through all right?"
"Yes, Advisor. They're fine."
Hausman sat down across from him on the sofa, filled an empty cup, and asked,
"Where were you yesterday?"
"Out on the streets."
"Were you? Till when?"
"At Korea University. I got home early this morning."
Hausman looked at him as if he had not expected that.
"You were with the demonstrators?"
"Yes."
"Word is the armed crowd over by Korea University put up the stiffest fight of the lot. You mean to say you were actually there?"
"It just happened that way. I ended up moving with them."
Hausman set his cup down. The reports that had reached him through dawn were almost entirely what the army and the intelligence people had seen. No one had come back with an account from inside the Korean crowds themselves, and on the armed demonstrators especially he was short of facts. There was a great deal he wanted to ask.
"Look here, Kijo. Tell me about those fellows."
Kijo told him what he knew of the armed faction Hausman was so intent on. They had no real leader. The group had formed by chance and filled itself with people who joined of their own will. There was no agitator one might suspect of being a communist, and no organized force nested inside them. He went on to describe how those armed men, stirred by what Brigadier General Cho Jae-mi had done, had lost the will to fight in a single moment.
"If some faction had been behind them, or if they'd been an organization set up in advance, they could never have looked like that."
"True enough. That's a relief, then." Hausman nodded, agreeing.
He had been harboring a suspicion that communist elements, slipped in among the armed demonstrators, might have been directing an armed rising.
"Yesterday I thought we were in for it. I really did. Had us drawn tight. I was afraid we might see another Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion, right here in Seoul."
He seemed to have feared, as well, that an army standing with the demonstrators and an army standing with Syngman Rhee might turn on each other. Kijo's account from the ground left him satisfied enough that he began to speak of things he had not been asked.
"Last night, now. Ambassador McConaughy went to see the President."
Defense Minister Kim Jeong-ryeol and Minister of Home Affairs Hong Jin-ki, he said, had both been in the room.
"And there, the story goes, the President said he'd never heard a word about a stolen election. Then he turned it around on them — asked whether the ministers he trusted had been lying to his face."
Kijo nodded. In the original history, too, Syngman Rhee had denied the whole of it and insisted he had known nothing.
"Ambassador McConaughy told him that if this wasn't brought under control, President Eisenhower's visit in June would be called off, and American aid cut. The President's going to move. Something strong, to settle it."
"That's good to hear."
At that, Hausman dropped his voice.
"The Liberal Party and the President went too far in the last election. There's even a rumor that once President Eisenhower was briefed on how the Korean vote had gone, he said he wouldn't be coming to Korea."
Kijo had a question of his own for the man who was so sure the trouble would pass. He wanted to know what the Sixth District Command was doing. In the original history, Park Chung-hee had plotted a coup in the days around April 19. His body had been in Busan, but his efforts had been concrete enough to reach for units stationed near Seoul. This time he was commander of the Sixth District, with his headquarters at Gimpo, close to the capital, and Kijo feared he might actually move. He hoped, with everything in him, that Park would not make use of a revolution the citizens had bought with their blood. To do that would be to steal what they had spilled.
"Advisor, are you in touch with the martial law commander as well?"
"Of course. Chief of Staff Song Yo-chan comes to us first. He consults."
"Besides the 15th Division already in the city, will more martial-law troops be sent in?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Because the 15th is very close to the citizens right now. The people support them. They trust them. If another unit is marched into Seoul, I'm afraid that peace between the citizens and the army will break."
"Hm."
Hausman turned it over, then nodded.
"If the 15th is handling it, what reason is there to send more? We don't want the army in Seoul built up either."
"Is there any plan for troops to come up from the south?" Kijo asked.
By the south, he meant the Marine brigade posted around Gimpo, and the divisions under the Sixth District Command.
"No. None. Even the 15th, the one we did move, could only come because Deputy Commander Cummings released operational control. Without our leave, not another soldier can be committed. And Chief of Staff Song Yo-chan has been very cooperative with us."
The answer let Kijo breathe, for the moment. Even if Major General Park Chung-hee raised troops on his own, the 15th Division was holding Seoul, and a coup's chance of success would drop. Song Yo-chan, chief of staff and now martial law commander, was not Chang Do-young as he had been in the days of May 16. A simpler man — and, for that, a surer one. He had none of Chang Do-young's slipperiness.
"Just wait and see. Sometime today the President's remedy will come out. We're looking forward to it ourselves, quite a bit."
Hausman was optimistic. Kijo knew it would not turn out that way. Even so, he agreed.
When they were done, he left the Yongsan compound with his mind on what Syngman Rhee would do next. Around five that afternoon the President would issue a statement on the demonstrations of the day before, and with it he would disappoint not only the citizens who had been waiting on him, but the United States as well. He would refuse to concede the stolen election in any particular, offer not a single measure to follow, and speak of the uprising as though it had been stirred by the intrigues of malcontents.
Yesterday's riot has inflicted a profound shock upon myself and upon the members of my government. I can scarcely believe that the patriotic people of Korea, to whom I have devoted my entire life, could have been capable of such conduct.
That was the President's actual wording. Of his own will, Rhee was walking the road that led to resignation and exile. He ought to have been franker, more open-hearted — admitted where he had gone wrong, and said plainly how he meant to put the crisis to rest. The people would recoil from the statement at once, and they would understand, just as quickly, that nothing would end until he stepped down.
The United States would be disappointed in him just as fast. Secretary of State Christian Herter would summon Yang You-chan, the Korean ambassador in Washington, and place a letter of protest in his hands. It contained these words.
The Government of the United States understands the demonstrations in Korea to be events reflecting the anxiety of the people over the recent election and over undemocratic and coercive methods.
The language was diplomatic. The meaning was not. The government of the United States stood with the demonstrators of April 19.
Even so, the Rhee regime would not change. On the twenty-first he would take the cabinet's resignations in a single bundle, and on the twenty-third Lee Ki-poong would announce that he was willing to consider giving up his place as the elected candidate. Not a resignation. A consideration of one. That same day, by contrast, Chang Myon, the vice president still in office, would announce that he was stepping down. Rhee would then declare that he too was resigning as head of the Liberal Party, and with Martial Law Commander Song Yo-chan he would visit Seoul National University Hospital, where the wounded students lay, to offer them comfort.
No one would be moved by the sight. No one would think the President was conducting himself well. To a man, they would see Syngman Rhee playing at virtue. Kijo was certain that this time, too, Rhee and Lee Ki-poong would do exactly that. And so the regime, having thrown away hours that could not be recovered, would come at last to the twenty-sixth.
April 26. One week to the day after April 19 — Bloody Tuesday. With the announcement that Syngman Rhee was stepping down, the nation would meet Victorious Tuesday.
Kijo walked slowly home. Already the stones that had lain heaped in the road that morning, and the other wreckage of the demonstrations, were being cleared by soldiers and citizens laboring together. At the sight of it he was certain. April 19 had already succeeded. Here were the people and the army, hand in hand, laying down a new order. Someone had washed the blood from the pavement and scattered earth over what remained, and the stains were gone.