The Marines
Park Chung-hee had left the 6th District Command and was racing a jeep down the pitch-black Gimpo road.
The unpaved dark, lit by nothing but the jeep's searchlight, looked like his own future. The coup had been exposed. Seoul's 30th Division and the 33rd at Bupyeong had been neutralized, and the 6th District Command—the headquarters he had meant to use—was gone as well. On top of that, Chang Do-young, whom he had counted on to look the other way, was warning him to quit this rebel nonsense, go home, and get some sleep.
Everything was coming apart, nothing as he had planned.
Park Chung-hee was trying to quiet the burn in his chest with cigarettes. Since leaving the house in Sindang-dong he had already gone through three packs. From the front passenger seat, staring into the dark road, he spoke to Han Ung-jin in the back.
"The provinces won't know what's happening in Seoul. The units have to move, and fast. I told them to listen to the radio at five in the morning and then move out. If that broadcast never airs, a lot of men in the units that agreed to rise with us are going to end up taking their own lives."
He was worrying over the sympathizers in Daegu, Busan, Daejeon, and Gwangju who had pledged to rise alongside him. Taking the broadcasting station looked difficult now, and if the revolutionary broadcast—the signal flare for the whole affair—never went out, that was entirely possible.
Hearing the worry in his voice, Han Ung-jin said,
"Brother! If the revolution fails, let's take to the hills and hold out! We can negotiate, at least."
Han Ung-jin was Park Chung-hee's classmate from the Military Academy, but he called the older man Brother.
At his "little brother's" words, Park Chung-hee let out a bleak little laugh.
"You need troops before you can negotiate. Where are the units we've actually mobilized? If we could do what Captain Kong Le did in Laos, we might save the men under us and change the politics, too."
Captain Kong Le of Laos had raised a coup in the name of neutrality. He never fully took the capital. He seized a stretch of territory, dug in, and pressured the politicians into governing properly. With success looking ever more remote, Park Chung-hee had reached for that name.
What he had originally wanted was a coup in the style of Ne Win in Burma: sweep the political world clean, set up a new regime, then return to the army and watch over it from there.
Seeing him draw in on himself, Han Ung-jin deliberately raised his voice.
"Brother, we're going to succeed! Even if we did this for the country, failure makes us traitors for all time—so let's see it through to the end!"
Park Chung-hee nodded and reached a hand back, asking for a lighter. Han Ung-jin stared at him. The man had a lighter of his own and was still asking for one. Then he handed his over. He could feel how tightly wound his brother was, and no wonder. Hadn't the man already been arrested in '48 as a ringleader of the Workers' Party of South Korea, tortured, and very nearly killed? With the revolution looking likely to fail, Han Ung-jin thought, Park Chung-hee was remembering those days and growing uneasy.
He knew the Park Chung-hee of that time all too well. Back then he had been chief of counterintelligence at Army Headquarters, and he knew in detail how the man had been handled. Park Chung-hee had fallen all the way to the bottom, wretched enough that it hurt to look at him.
The jeep ran on through the dark and reached the Gimpo airborne. They stopped a little way outside the compound and called Park Chi-ok out. To Colonel Park Chi-ok, commander of the 1st Airborne Special Forces Group, Park Chung-hee said,
"Move out. Quickly."
Park Chi-ok shot back, almost in protest.
"Why haven't the guide officers come? And why did the vehicles get here so late?"
A mere colonel was protesting to a major general—the leader of the coup—with a sharp face and a sharper tone. Park Chung-hee was more than a little thrown. Even so, he kept his voice level and tried to soothe him.
"Was there some problem?"
Smelling the liquor on him, Park Chi-ok flared.
"The trucks from the 6th District got here at eleven! And the officers who were supposed to come as the arrest team never showed! Only Major Park Jong-gyu and a few others turned up! What are we supposed to do with this?"
He did not hold back. The vehicles had been late, and the guide officers had never appeared. On top of that the leader of the coup had shown up drunk. Coup or no coup—hadn't the whole thing already gone wrong? That was the thought that came to him.
"It's only a temporary snag."
Park Chi-ok did not believe it.
"General! Aside from the team leaders we've already brought in, the soldiers don't even know they're making a revolution! They think they're out on riot-suppression training! If it goes like this, can you even guarantee their lives?"
Park Chung-hee had no immediate answer to that edged protest.
Lee Seok-je, who had followed in another car and stepped out with a carbine in his hands, heard the protest and quietly leveled the weapon toward the airborne unit's main gate. He was afraid that if they judged the whole thing hopeless, they might arrest Park Chung-hee and turn themselves in.
"Move as soon as you're ready."
Park Chung-hee gave the protesting colonel a bitter order and turned back to the jeep. Lee Seok-je saw how dark his face was as he walked away, then stepped up to Park Chi-ok and asked, lightly,
"Sir, the airborne still isn't ready to move?"
"Ready? You think this is going to work? The general's running a revolution on liquor fumes, isn't he? From where I stand, he looks like a man who's given up."
Park Chi-ok, Korea Military Academy Class 5, spoke cuttingly to Lee Seok-je of Class 8.
"That's not it, sir. Things are going well."
"What's going well? Does this look like it's going well to you? The officers sent to arrest Chang Myon all ran off, and all we've got is Park Jong-gyu, Cha Ji-chul, and a handful of others. You call that going well?"
Lee Seok-je's temper surged. It was not only that every officer of the Chang Myon arrest team had failed to appear. It was Park Chi-ok's attitude—Class 5. Unlike Class 8, bound tight by a single-minded resolve to save the country, the men of Class 5 calculated too much and found too much to complain about in the operation. Even so, he swallowed it and appealed to his senior.
"Sir, the revolution will succeed. Please move out."
"Who said we aren't going? But you think that arrest team is going to manage it? Forget catching the prime minister—won't they be the ones who get caught?"
"Trust Park Jong-gyu and Cha Ji-chul. It will succeed."
"Fine. Go on."
Park Chi-ok turned away on those words.
Lee Seok-je took up his carbine and went back to the jeep. The engine would not catch. Flustered, he went to Park Chung-hee's vehicle and reported that his own would not start.
"Seok-je. You stay here and see that the airborne moves on time."
Lee Seok-je said he would. The airborne was the vanguard meant to break the bridges over the Han. If they did not move, the revolution itself could not happen.
"Where will you be going, General?"
"To the Marines."
"Go safely, General."
Park Chung-hee's jeep set off toward the Gimpo Marine Brigade. Lee Seok-je thought the general was placing his hopes on the Marines rather than the airborne. They had grumbled and dragged their feet, so he meant to put the Marines—the second echelon for the Han River crossing—out in front.
The jeep vanished into the dark.
On the way to the brigade, Park Chung-hee spoke to Han Ung-jin in the back seat.
"By now the Marines ought to be coming down this road, and I don't see so much as an ant. They must still be in the barracks."
Han Ung-jin said nothing. He was thinking the same thing. Like the airborne, the Marines seemed not to have moved.
"When we get there, we'll say the other units left on schedule. Even if we have to bluff, we've got to drag the Marines out."
"We should."
Han Ung-jin agreed.
Neither of them knew that the Gimpo Marines had already set out for the Han River bridges.
Their jeep stopped in front of a police substation by the roadside. Park Chung-hee and Han Ung-jin got out and went in.
"Did the Marines pass this way?"
When he asked, the police said no such thing had happened. He turned to a Marine military policeman posted at the substation.
"You. Call brigade headquarters and confirm whether the Marines have moved out."
"Yes, sir!"
The MP telephoned headquarters, checked, and reported back.
"They say the unit left thirty minutes ago."
At the news that, for the first time, a unit was moving according to the coup plan, their faces brightened. They hurried out, climbed into the jeep, and raced toward the Marine Brigade. But the unit that had supposedly left half an hour earlier was nowhere to be seen, even after a kilometer.
"What road did they take..."
Park Chung-hee muttered it, staring straight ahead. From the back seat Han Ung-jin saw headlights coming the other way and shouted.
"Brother! Something's coming!"
Park Chung-hee saw the headlights and nodded. Their jeep stopped the one approaching them, and he questioned the Marine officer who climbed out and came over.
"Have the Marines moved out?"
"Yes, sir. They have."
"Then why can't we see them?"
"They probably cut across by another road. There's a faster way than this one."
At that, Park Chung-hee had the car turned around. They tore some twenty kilometers down the black unpaved road at full speed, reached Yeomchang Bridge, and got out to wait for the Marines. There was no moon, but the stars glittered, clear and bright. Unaware that the artillery of VI Corps in Pocheon was already on the move, the two of them smoked and looked up at the stars together.
"It's a relief the Marines moved out so stubbornly, without letting anyone around them sway them."
At Han Ung-jin's words, Park Chung-hee said,
"Maybe Brigade Commander Kim Yun-geun never heard what happened to the 30th or the 33rd. So he left according to plan."
After about ten minutes they saw them at last: some sixty Marine trucks in column, a full battalion aboard, coming on in a line. Before they knew it, Park Chung-hee and Han Ung-jin were cheering, crying mansei. The Marines had become a shaft of light in an affair that had been tilting toward failure.
The lead jeep stopped in front of them, and Kim Yun-geun got out. Helmet on, he stood before Park Chung-hee, snapped a salute, and said,
"The Marines have moved out without incident!"
"Well done."
His face moved, Park Chung-hee took Kim Yun-geun's hand and spoke quietly.
"General Kim, the plan leaked at the 30th Division. So the 30th, the 33rd, and the airborne couldn't come out. From here we have to carry this with the Marine Brigade alone. I'm counting on you."
Kim Yun-geun was shocked. He had been in the dark about all of it. But he answered as calmly as he could.
"So that's how it is. Nothing else for it. We'll push through with the Marine Brigade alone."
Park Chung-hee was moved by the words.
Kim Yun-geun saluted, climbed back into his jeep, and started the column. But ahead of him everything was black. The headlights lit the road, and still it felt as if he could see nothing. His head rang as if someone had clubbed him hard across the back of the skull with a great stick.
He had thrown himself into the revolution ready to die. Before moving out he had stopped at a church to pray and had confessed everything to the chaplain, acting without a glance behind him. When he learned that not a single army unit had moved, he regretted joining the affair for the first time. And yet he was grateful, too, that Park Chung-hee had told him the whole of the present situation, honestly.
Having come this far, it was already too late to turn the troops around. The Han River Bridge lay ten kilometers ahead. If his unit broke that bridge, a chance to live would open. Kim Yun-geun's fighting spirit caught fire. Advance just one kilometer past the bridge, and the revolution could succeed. Advance just one kilometer, and he could save not only his own life but the lives of the men under him.
If the Marines can't do this, what unit could?
Once he set his mind, the road ahead began to show itself again. He did not dwell on the meaning of leading the only unit actually carrying out the revolution. He thought only of fighting in order to live.