The Time of the Monkey, Rooster, and Dog

iUniverse, Inc.

Contents

Foreword.....................................................................xiiiIntroduction.................................................................xviiThe Year of the Monkey.......................................................1Chapter One—Prologue in Madison, Wisconsin.............................3Chapter Two—Peace Corps Training in Hilo, Hawaii.......................21Chapter Three—Peace Corps Training on Oahu, Hawaii.....................65Chapter Four—Arrival in Seoul..........................................84The Year of the Rooster......................................................111Chapter Five—Life Begins in Daegu......................................113Chapter Six—Spring of the Year of the Rooster..........................139Chapter Seven—Summer of the Year of the Rooster........................179Chapter Eight—Autumn of the Year of the Rooster........................212Chapter Nine—Winter of the Year of the Rooster.........................245The Year of the Dog..........................................................261Chapter Ten—Winter of the Year of the Dog..............................263Chapter Eleven—Spring of the Year of the Dog...........................275Chapter Twelve—Summer of the Year of the Dog...........................296Chapter Thirteen—Autumn of the Year of the Dog.........................316Chapter Fourteen—Departure from Korea..................................337Epilogue.....................................................................344

Chapter One

As Dickens would have said, it was the coldest of times. It was the warmest of times. It was a season of war. It was a season of peace. It was the Year of the Monkey. I stumbled through the tear gas on Wisconsin's campus, past the armed forces of the national guard, eyes brimming in tears, and I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going in 1968.

I was trying to be a poet in those days. The shocks of assassinations, the outrages in Vietnam, and rising racial violence filled us with distaste and disillusionment. My friends and I took the graduate courses, struggled to become immersed in writing poetry and to cope with the horrific events swirling around us, and watched our country betray its ideals. It is difficult, in retrospect, to convey the depths of my despair that year. The first seven months of 1968 saw several events of which even the retelling shades the many joyous remembrances of that time in darkness.

January was a brutally cold month in Madison. In Vietnam, it was hot and sultry. On January 10, the one thousandth US warplane was lost in Vietnam.

Eleven days later, on January 21, a group of thirty-one North Korean commandos trudged undetected through the snow for about forty miles from the border to the presidential Blue House of South Korean President Park Chung-hee in downtown Seoul. Twenty-eight North Koreans and thirty-four South Koreans were killed in the fighting. The same week, on January 23, North Korean patrol boats captured the USS Pueblo, a US intelligence gathering ship, and its eighty-three man crew, charging that Pueblo and its crew had violated North Korea's twelve-mile territorial limit.

Several thousand miles to the south of the Korean peninsula, on the eve of the lunar new year, the North Vietnamese initiated what became known as the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, launching major coordinated attacks for the first time on South Vietnam's supposedly well-secured urban centers. As the Year of the Monkey began, these attacks belied the assurances of the White House of President Lyndon Johnson that victory was imminent for the American and South Vietnamese forces.

We read in amazement that the American Embassy in Saigon had been seized and held by the Vietcong (a political and military organization that fought the South Vietnamese and American forces) for six hours on the same morning. Although we did not realize it at the time, these events finally would mark a turning point in American public opinion regarding the war, but to my friends and me, the new Year of the Monkey held little promise of any change in the drumbeat of tragic news from Asia.

In February, we saw on the front pages of the Capital Times of Madison the sickening, Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a South Vietnamese official summarily shooting a Vietcong prisoner in the head with his revolver. The Valentine's Day week saw the highest American weekly casualty toll of the Vietnam War: 543 killed and 2547 wounded. Shortly afterward, an American Army major informed the world that it had been necessary to destroy an entire Vietnamese village in order to save it. An Orwellian world had become manifest sixteen years earlier than George Orwell predicted.

As New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy (former attorney general and brother of President John F. Kennedy) decided to join the presidential race in mid-March, rumors from Vietnam—substantiated years later—hinted of unarmed Vietnamese villagers being massacred by American soldiers. In My Lai—a farming village—more than half of the village's five hundred non-combatant inhabitants were reportedly killed by US Army Lieutenant Calley and the men of Company C. Accounts of such atrocities became regular reading fare in the Capital Times. My friends and I viewed the American government's initial denials of such events with the same skepticism and outright disbelief as the previous three years' weekly optimistic reports of the progress of the war.

Amid our despair, there were Americans we considered heroes. Robert Kennedy promised to end the war, if elected president. Another brave man, African-American Baptist minister and civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr., was eloquently decrying the immoral war while he battled for black equality. Dr. King led a march in Memphis in the name of peace and racial equality on March 28. Like so many such events, it turned violent, as police intervened. After King himself had been led from the scene, one sixteen-year-old black boy was killed, sixty people were injured, and more than one hundred fifty people were arrested.

That week, on the way to classes one rainy morning, we walked past hundreds of small crosses in cemetery rows on the sloping lawn of Bascom Hall. The March 29, 1968 issue of Time noted the four hundred thirty-five crosses and the cortege of mock mourners who shuffled past, chanting, "Pray for the dead and the dead will pray for you; pray for the dead." We saw the sign posted near the crosses. "BASCOM MEMORIAL CEMETERY, CLASS OF 1968."

For senior students and graduate students, the sign and funeral procession were shocking reminders that death in Vietnam was a possibility, if a student deferment ended. To my surprise, the crosses and the sign were still on the lawn in the evening, untouched by university officials, who seemed to sympathize with the protesting students and to approve of the dignified and nonviolent antiwar demonstration.

Several days later, seven friends and I gathered at the apartment of another graduate student on the evening of March 31 to listen to a speech by President Lyndon Johnson. In his "Address...