North Korean Guard Post
In early 2009, halfway through my one-year wing command tour in Kuwait, my three-star commander drops in on his way from Al Udeid Air Base to Baghdad International Airport. He claims he’s just popping in for a hello. He asks me to drive him around the base so he can pat our hard-charging airmen on the back. I know from experience he likes to shoot the shit with the young airmen making the mission happen. I enjoy watching him in action and am always envious of how much he can get done in a day while making time for gestures such as this. I also suspect he has an ulterior motive.
“Halfway done with your tour, Cam. How do you think it’s going?”
I’m driving my boss from our US corner of the Kuwaiti base on the ten-minute drive to the flight line. “Record amounts of cargo and troops moved last year, Sir. The guys are killing the mission.”
“Right. I meant ‘how do you think you are doing?’”
Not my favorite kind of question. If I tell him how great I’m doing, I come across as full of myself. If I claim that I’m not doing well—after bragging about our wing’s production this past year—it comes across as false modesty.
“Good, Sir. I feel like I have a handle on ops. I’m working on some projects that will leave the wing better than when our team came in.”
The general nods. “Yep. You’re doing good. Let’s talk about your next assignment. We’re less than six months out. You know where you’re going, right?”
“The Pentagon?” I try to keep the dread out of my voice. We’ve touched on this topic before. I’m a young wing commander and this tour is the operational pinnacle for a colonel. I won’t be seriously considered for promotion to the next rank for another five years. The plan is to put me in a highly visible staff job at the Pentagon during that period and see if I shine enough to make rank at the end.
“Yep.” He obviously detects something in my voice. “Why? You have other options you want me to look at?”
I take a deep breath. I’ve been thinking about this conversation for a month, but the general’s visit is a surprise. Working fourteen-hour days for five years at the Pentagon will destroy my marriage. My wife hasn’t told me this—hasn’t even hinted at it, yet I know in my gut it’s true. I spent two years working day and night in South Korea for an Army four-star who had a reputation for never sleeping. Last year, I served as the deputy commander for the largest air wing in Europe, manhandling the paperwork so my boss could go out and shake hands like my current commander is doing today. This year is supposed to be everything I’ve worked for. But my wife and four children are living in a rental in Colorado, counting the days until I get back. Now I face a five-year grind at the Pentagon, battling the bureaucracy, just to see if I might get promoted? And then what? Even if I was lucky enough to make one-star, I might get one assignment around airplanes, but the rest of my jobs would be pretty far removed from the action. I’ve researched an alternative.
“I’d like to go to China, Sir. Air Attaché.”
“That’s not a promotable position.”
My hands sweat on the steering wheel as I sense my boss turning his head in my direction. “I know. But here’s the thing, Sir. I took four years of Chinese at the Academy. I wrote papers at Air War College on the Taiwan issue. The current air attaché in Beijing is supposed to leave right when I’d finish attaché training. There can’t be a ton of colonels qualified for the job.” I glance at my passenger. “Plus, I can take my family.”
“You can take your family to the Pentagon.”
“Sir.”
The general either laughs or snorts—I can’t tell which. “Right. I know what you’re saying.”
Seven months later, I in-process at the Joint Military Attaché School outside of Washington DC. The next twenty-two months include a year of one-on-one training in Mandarin Chinese, five months of attaché training, and another five months of Mandarin, which includes a one-month language immersion in Beijing.
US military attachés work for the Defense Intelligence Agency, but they are not spies. An attaché is supposed to be an expert in the country in which they are assigned. They represent the United States at formal functions, coordinate with the host nation’s military, and report back to the United States on their in-country observations. That last duty is often misinterpreted by the public as spying on a nation. The key characteristic of that part of the job is that the attaché is required to collect their information using overt means. Covert operations are against the “rules.” Military attachés are fully credentialed diplomats with permission to travel about the host country, observe the culture, and talk to people.
Military interaction is easier in some countries than in others. When the Air Force Attaché in London wants to know about the secret training the UK is conducting in some far-flung region of the world, the British military will take the attaché into a classified vault and give them a briefing. When the Air Force Attaché in Moscow wants to know more about the range and load capacity of Russia’s long-range bombers, the information is more difficult to collect.
China is not on the list of “easy” countries.
I tackle my Chinese studies with the same fervor I brought to flight training. My tutoring is four hours a day, and I put another four hours in each night trying to master the language. Turns out learning to fly airplanes is easier than Mandarin fluency. Eight hours of language study leaves me sixteen for the family. We take full advantage of our two-year stint in DC. Home-schooling the kids, we maximize our visits to museums and cultural sites. We take the unused leave I’ve collected over the previous four years and travel to visit relatives. My visions of reconnecting with the family are realized.
My struggles with Mandarin are personal failures. I easily meet the language minimums for my new job, but remain frustrated that my fluency is at the fourth-grade level rather than a high school graduate. My peers remind me I’ll be having conversations with Chinese fighter pilots and, if they’re anything like US fighter pilots, fourth-grade level Chinese might be overkill.
During my one-month language immersion, I stay with a middle-aged Chinese couple in downtown Beijing. The husband takes it upon himself to improve my Mandarin skills through rounds of baijiu, a Chinese grain alcohol which smells like the formaldehyde preserving the frogs in 10th grade Biology. With each shot, my conversational skills advance. We return to the tiny apartment and I try to shower in a cramped closet-sized bathroom containing a sink, toilet, and washing machine. After attempting to explain how I’ve inadvertently knocked my host wife’s underwear from the drying rack into the toilet, I realize I’m not as fluent as I had hoped.
I’ve asked for this job to spend more time with the family. But I’ve also taken the position because the culture fascinates me. We adopted our youngest daughter from China in 2004, and during our attaché training in DC, we apply to adopt another child while living in China.
Although my intentions for the job are personal, old habits die hard. I’ve poured everything into my training because I want to do the job right. More than that, I want to matter. I want to do things in China which impact US national interests. I leave the US a tad nervous about that. Old China hands assure me the Chinese military won’t talk to me. They joke that I’ll be eating for my country at two events a week, ranging from the Bolivian Armed Forces Day to Eid al-Fitr at the Saudi Embassy. When I ask them about the third leg of the mission—the observing and reporting, they don’t say much.
We move in to a diplomatic compound ten miles north of the Embassy in mid-summer of 2011. Twenty-four hours after landing, I’m decked out in full military ceremonial regalia representing the US Air Force at China’s BaYi Day, their annual armed forces holiday. A driver delivers my wife and me to the event, and I briefly meet my Chinese Air Force counterparts. My uniform is uncomfortable, the ceremony is boring, and I engage in no meaningful conversations. I’m even more uncomfortable about my new job.
Autumn in Beijing is smoggy. My fellow attachés assure me the winds make fall the clearest season of the year. I spend most of my time meeting all the people my predecessor has advised me are essential to befriend. The People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) throws a welcome dinner for me, and I’m surprised to find it a more casual affair than I expected. I’d always assumed boilermakers were a uniquely American invention, but discover the Chinese have put a twist on it by dropping shots of red wine into beer. I stop at one.
I attend more formal events and notice I’m getting the new-guy treatment. Experienced attachés are assigned Germany’s Oktoberfest and Norway’s renowned National Day with fourteen varieties of salmon. I attend Nigeria’s Independence Day alone.
Three months into the job, I recognize my least favorite parts will always be representation at formal events and military-to-military cooperation. But I’m enjoying my time in and around Beijing, observing the people, the infrastructure, and learning more about the culture.
In December, long-time leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Il passes away. Back in 2005, I spent two years of my military career designing exercises which simulated a North Korean attack on South Korea and am still intimately familiar with the geopolitics surrounding the two Koreas. South Korea sees itself as a “shrimp between two whales,” where the US is the whale they are allied with and China is the whale which recalcitrant North Korea is partnered with. The immediate threat of another North Korean invasion of the south has remained as constant over the past 58 years as Beijing’s daily smog warning. Anything that happens in North Korea is of vital interest to both the US and China.
Our office is tasked with that thing we’re supposed to do—observe and report. Specifically, we are to look for three things: an uptick in Chinese military movement on the North Korean border, an increase in North Korean refugees trying to enter China, or any unusual activity. We put together a plan that puts several attaché teams at various border crossings along the Yalu River.
My boss and I take a crossing at the midpoint of the border about halfway between Dandong, where the Yalu empties into the Yellow Sea, and the Tumen River, close to Vladivostok where we had adopted our second oldest son in 2001. We fly into Changchun, the capital of Jilin province, and spend the night before procuring ground transportation for the seven-hour drive to the Yalu River. A cold front originating in Siberia has dropped the temperatures to zero degrees Fahrenheit in the capital city. Fortunately our car’s heater appears accustomed to working overtime.
Halfway to the Yalu, the frozen plains transition to wooded mountains and snow-packed roads. We’re grateful for the heater and functional windshield wiper fluid, but regretting not inspecting our tires before leaving. Well-worn tread makes hairpin turns a challenge as we climb over a pass near the extinct Changbai volcano and descend into the Yalu river valley.
At the border, we set up by the only bridge and settle in for observation. The temperature has dropped another twenty degrees since Changchun. It’s the coldest place I’ve ever been. The defrost can’t keep up on the car which means we’re having a tough time seeing what’s happening outside the windows. I step outside with my camera.
The bridge has a Chinese guard on the Chinese side. No guard is in sight on the North Korean end. No one is crossing the bridge. In front of us, North Koreans climb down to the river. Most are retrieving water from gaps in the ice and lugging it back up the bank to their village. Everything on the North Korean side of the river stands in stark contrast to the Chinese side. The village where we will spend the night has white buildings, red signs, electric lights, and bustling activity. The North Korean village is defined by gray. Smothered in haze there is no evidence of electrical power on that side of the river. The only people visible are North Korean guards and families approaching the river.
I make it five minutes before ripping the door open, diving inside, and telling my boss it’s his turn. It takes another two minutes before my fingers thaw enough to thumb through my pictures. Ten minutes later—my supervisor seems better suited for the cold than myself—it’s my turn again. Again, the bridge is unused. This time, instead of a water run, a family is doing laundry in the river. A woman plunges clothes through a hole in the ice and wrings them underwater. Then she pulls them out, wrings them once again, and tosses them at her children’s feet. My mouth drops as one of the kids picks up the clothing and drops it in a wheelbarrow. The garment is frozen solid and sounds like someone tossed in a rock. The Yalu is volcanic-sourced and obviously never freezes.
We alternate bridge-watch duty with drives up and down the roads along the river, looking for any sign of refugee or military activity. Nobody crosses a bridge during our entire trip. However, we note footprints indicating North Koreans are traversing back and forth into China on parts of the river where it is frozen all the way across. The path is one that tens of people are taking—probably for food, cigarettes, or booze—and not the trail you would expect to see for an exodus of thousands. There is no major refugee flow here.
Military activity is nonexistent on the border. We don’t see a single Chinese military vehicle during our two-day stay. North Korean security vehicles show up intermittently at the entrance to the bridge but exhibit no unusual activity. Nobody is massing forces in this part of the country.
We return to Changchun the same way we took to the border. Normally, we’d take an alternative route to observe different things, but the snow has us nervous and backtracking is a route we know the car can handle. Besides, this route is at least three hours shorter than any other. The zero degrees in Changchun is sounding warm right now.
“What did you think?” My boss asks.
“I think we can tell everyone nothing’s going on in our section. What did you think?”
“Same. Pretty cool though.”
My boss is understating our experience. I’ve never done anything like this before in my life. We traveled to China’s extreme north, barreled over snow-packed mountain passes to the border of one of the most notorious dictatorships in the world, and saw poverty and repression we’d only read about in newspapers and intelligence reports.
“Coolest thing I’ve ever expected to do in this job.” I can’t stop grinning. “If it’s all going to be like this, I’m putting in for an extension.”
“Nope. No extensions—you are required to turn in your diplomatic credentials exactly three years after you got here. And you’ve got more receptions and PLA meetings waiting for you when you get back.”
I roll my eyes.
“But you’re going to see some serious shit over the next couple years. If you liked this, you’re going to like the assignment.” He pauses. “They warned you before you took this job, you wouldn’t get promoted, right?”
I imagine being six months in to a four-year Pentagon tour spending my mornings on briefings to convince Congress to support the Air Force’s latest weapon system proposal, and my afternoons making sure the coffee is fresh and the PowerPoint slides are in order for a meeting of three-and four-star generals. Then slugging a ride back to a townhouse that may or may not contain a family.
“They did, Boss. They did.”
