RUE DE L A CHON
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I was writing to a squadron buddy 43 years ago. I was stuck in a Snake Ranch, the term used for officer housing at the Yongsan Garrison in Seoul, Korea. It is an odd letter, transferred in some ancient Word format via Government Xerox machines a couple times and then tucked away someplace else. It has moved in the same stack of old papers that held the accounts of the Atomic tests down at Bikini Atoll. The Snake Ranch Papers will be the next manuscript to emerge. It includes an account of the military coup d’etat that brought General Chon Tu-Hwan to the Presidency and the dozens of students shot down at the Kwang-Ju University. It was interesting!
– Vic
THE SNAKE RANCH RUE DE L A CHON
SEOUL, Republic of Korea
2 AUG 1980
Dear T.R.
It was dark that night dark enough for me to be almost fully passed out, listening groggily to some tape turned up full on the cheap Panasonic that serves as my link to the hidden electronic world. The phone rang, echoing weirdly on the linoleum and florescent hallway. It is never former, as I have few friends in the Green Machine, and don’t, on principle, give out my number. Usually, the calls are for the Military Police. You know the type.
“Riot In progress up in Itae-won. You want us to stop it, Mr. Humphry?” or, “Yeah. Right at the bottom of the excavation. No, sir, he ain’t going anywhere and he really don’t mind.”
But not this one. Glen rapped on the door and shouted it was for me. I stumbled to the door and went out into the hall. I saw the baggy white Jockey shorts disappear back into Luxury Suite One. I picked up the phone with same small amount of trepidation. When you are in my business (and remember, my business is trouble) you don’t get late night calls about safety programs or evaluation forms the Junior Officers gaffed off weeks ago. Tech Sergeant McCarron was on the line. You could hear the little click as he depressed the security buttons on the handset in the Impregnable Command Bunker.
“Say, Lieutenant Socotra, we just got something across the back channels about the Midway. Apparently she was in a crash or something.”
“Oh wow” I responded cleverly. “Tuckin’ A.” I tried to think for a minute and all the Ranger Stories flashed through my mind. Fuel oil fumes spreading throughout the ship, the towers of Singapore glinting in the darkness ahead.
“Any additional information?” I asked, thinking back to the last collision in the Malacca Strait.
“No sir, that’s all we got.” “Is it classified?”
“Not as far as we know.”
“OK, thanks Sarge. I appreciate the call.” I wandered back to the bedroom and flipped the tape over. I was just about unconscious again when the phone rang once more. I raced toward the door, colliding with only one of the upright barriers I am allowed to call ‘walls’ Instead of bulkheads. Reeling, I got to the phone and lifted the receiver.
“Hey, Lieutenant, this is McCarron again. That Information I just passed to you?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Well, we checked and It Is Secret.”
“Good. So now only us, the ROKS, the Russians, and the North Koreans are in on it, right?”
“Well, yeah, that’s right. Sorry to bother you.”
“No, No, entirely my pleasure.” I dropped the phone back on the cradle. I knew I would be walking the floor all night, or at Least that portion of it that was left before my wake up to the shrill buzzing of the clock radlo at 0330, so I went to the reefer and removed a can of Olympia beer. I popped the top and looked out into the darkness.
An Engineering Company spray truck ground up the hill outside and continued
the defoliation program against the mosquito population. The chemical cloud agent drifted up against the open window and the beer tasted sour. I went back to bed with the fan propped up against the window to exhaust the fumes.
Some people will do anything to avoid the Indian Ocean, I suppose.
Once I had gotten to work, and examined the scanty available information, I wasn’t as concerned as before. From preliminary data, it appeared that the impact of the collision had occurred around the port elevator, and it probably wasn’t our fault. The dawning horror of the possibility that it had removed a large portion of the One Hundred and Fifty-First Medium Pursuit Air Squadron at a single swell foop began to haunt me. I could barely answer the sophisticated telephone system.
“J-2 Indications Center, This is a non-secure line, LT Socotra.”
“Yeah, this is LCDR Blank over at Navy-K. Anything new on the Midway?”
“Just the press report from Manila.” I reached for the yellow file copy and pulled it across the desk. One of them has the Nuclear Carrier Midway limping back to Subic from the Palawan Channel. The second one (shuffling the large sheaf of Xerox copies, tape, flimsies and messages) “Ah here it is, the second slug says ‘Midway steams back to Subic.’ I liked that one a lot better. They have revised the aircraft totals to eight damaged. Still the same casualty figures.”
“Say, thanks a lot. I was on the Ranger for her collision, and I know how you must feel.
The Impact of the phone going down onto the hook chipped part of the ultra modern console. Which flew off and injured a light colonel reading the message on the other side of the desk. They were applying a tourniquet on it as I lit up a health cigarette and reflectively blew a cloud of smoke at the North Korean Order of Battle across the room.
After I ground out the cigarette, I said “Shit. This Is going to kill Nick Danger sales.”
In reaction to a general spiritual malaise, I was forced to go on a foray to the Ville. I scraped hundred won currency pieces out of the desk drawer. It was quite a bundle, perhaps five or six beers worth if them. I was headed out the door when Dave, the MP Captain, offered me a ride up the hill.
That suited me just fine, because the sooner I was sitting in Sam’s Club the sooner I would be unconscious and singing along with Merle. We walked down the steps to the battered Torino. The roof was partly caved in, the fenders would have made fine washboards for mama-san. Someone had gone over the interior with a razor blade.
It was a fine automobile. Dave turned the k e y and four hundred-odd cubic Inches thundered into life. We lurched out Gate Eight with a negligent wave to the guard.ave cut off two kimchi cabs, sideswiped a motor cyclist, and we moved with stately grace up the slope.
With masterful ease, Dave piloted the Torino through a gas station and into the curb across from the steps to the theater. We walked up past the 007 Club (now seeing dark days) and up an alleyway to the back door to Sam’s Club, modestly billed as “Best in Korea.”
I don’t know about the quality claim, but it certainly is in Korea. We went In and smelled the delicious Asian smell that made me homesick for the Philippines. The odor was part urine, part dryrot, part black-market Lysol, and stale beer. I drank five beers and listened to the perilous life story of the former Army Narcotics Officer in Command (OIC) for Central and South America.
Yuck.
Later, after listening to another life story, this one heartrendingly described by a diminutive bar girl about terror from the North. The Ville has been plagued by violence of late, violence of a particularly virulent and racial caste. Being pleasantly lit up, Dave wanted to see how his Military Patrol was doing. I looked downslope and saw a large crowd of Black Americans and Koreans glaring at each other. “Discretion is the better part of valour,” he started to say, but Dave was already moving into decisive action I shrugged and followed him, little knowing that I was about to play a bit part as:
好非於站於又 Vic Socotra ! 我都於料格梦好
I know, I know, this self aggrandizement has got to have a limit somewhere. I mean, it is sort of like the McCarthy show trials when the Army Secretary deflated the whole Witch Hunt by calmly asking “Have you no decency?”
Well no. But like I was saying, there I was, walking down the crude paving through a crowd of angry Americans and Koreans. This one seemed to be breaking up into component groups.
They appeared to be about to ‘apprehend’ a suspect for mashing at some windows, acting up and generally disorderly. The clubs on that part of the hill have been doing their hanging out on the street in the heat, as appeared to be the case this evening. We breezed through the one crowd and not to where they were bracing the suspect up against the wall. Two bars were spilling out into the street to watch the show. I noticed I was one of the only three pale faces in evidence and the famous line “What do you mean us, Kimo-Sabe?” occurred to me. A fight broke out upslope, and one of the MP garrison hats had come off an MP head. Dave moved towards the suspect with handcuffs and told me to race forth toward the rocks-and-shoals of the riot squad.
This was definitive tasking, and what’s more, it involved moving my feet. Ideal. I raced off downhill through a group of three or four surly looking individuals.
I made the Police Box In near record time. I rushed 1nwaving my I.D. card.lookingdebonaire In myhawalian print shirt and faded Jeans. Inl e s s time than I t takes to type these misspellinge we had summoned reinforcements, and were rushing out to jump in t h e squado oar.
If I had not already been drunk, I’m sure the rational option would have occurred to me; to wit, squaddies north, me south.
But the excitement of the moment carried me away and I leaped into the back seat with a heavily armed Korean, and off we sped, lights Flashing cattle prods drawn, Itching for Danger and Army enforcement.
We came to a halt outside the UN Club of song and story. The doors opened as our little task force raced uphill. The “suspect is struggling with his cuffs. Dave was trying to order some Blacks back into the club. Another fight was going on. The reinforcements had turned on the siren and were getting closer. I viewed it all with alarm, and a certain adrenaline-inspired truculence.
There was, I am embarrassed to say, only one prisoner.
Say: I have to go to work now, so take care. What did you mean by that crack about the village of Kami-seya in your letter? I felt the term “Area Specialist” ominously on the back of my neck…Thumbs up & Bums away
Vic Socotra
HONORARY RESERVE MILITARY JUNIOR PATROLLER
Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www,vicsocotra.com
The Snake Ranch Papers
We are at an interesting time in the Production Cycle this morning. It caused some discontinuity as the New Week edges toward the middle. There is normally a lurch toward the Weather Report for this week in an attempt to stay organized. Those things are supposed to rouse a little mirth in the general readership, since the concept of “weeks” as actionable chunks of the calendar is purely subjective.
The good news? “A Little Traveling Music” is still in manuscript format, but there have been earnest discussions about how to wrap some humor into an account of how “Official Government Travel” used to work at your expense. We talked to Christine, who has provided the final copies of the “Literary Trifecta” as those three volumes went to press. That was a little congested time for the Writer’s Section, since it involved the decade of discussions with Rear Admiral Mac Showers.
Mac had been in charge of the Estimates Section at the Pacific Fleet Forward Headquarters on Guam in 1945. He was responsible for briefing Admiral Nimitz on the things “that were likely to happen” on fluid days in a lively war. One of the more interesting sessions was about providing the Admiral the consequences of the use of the highly secret Bombs to bring peace to the Pacific. Mac was comfortable that they delivered the accurate assessment, and that was that use of the secret weapon would actually save both American and Japanese lives. “Cocktails with the Admiral” was the manuscript that resulted.
To reinforce the conclusions made in a briefing room on Guam nearly eighty years ago about weapons of mass destruction we dug out another old narrative that held a great sea story. It was the tale of Ed Gilfillen’s shanghai duty assignment as the last XO of the last Japanese battleship, IJN Nagato. Ed had been in Japan as a member of the scientific and intelligence team assigned to dig up promising bits of new Japanese technology left over from the savage conflict.
What emerged was a book called “Voyage to the CROSSROADS.” Ed had been a pal of one of our Uncles, and Ed had a problem. He had a great story to tell, but parts of it were still classified when Ed discovered he had a serious melanoma from his proximity to the atomic blasts of the Operation CROSSROADS tests conducted immediately after the war. The Uncle promised Ed that his story would be told. That promise was fulfilled last year, though Ed and Uncle were long gone from this world.
Their stories were worthy for re-telling, and there are other ones from that period that are candidates for the “Ready List” in the manuscript queue. One of those came from the recollections about our national security apparatus and The Mob. The story had some impact when parts of it were revealed some twenty or thirty years ago. Rear Admiral Tom Brooks had a lucid series of memories about how the underworld of New York City provided some of the strong-arm expertise to the Office of Strategic Services, the World War Two predecessor to the CIA.
Some of that story wound up in another one. that attempted to encapsulate some of the history about the National Security Act of 1947 that rolled out an independent Air Force, the CIA and NSA from the wreckage of an ad hoc assortment of commands and people who had won the greatest struggle in human history. That manuscript was almost complete as “The Lucky Bunch,” named for Charles “Lucky” Luciano, a New Yorker of Italian descent who learned the trade in the Five Points Gang, and wound up establishing the modern organized crime network in the United States that exists and operates today.
That story was not nearly as clear as it could have been, and there were more tidbits flying around about relationships between New York and DC organizations involved in all sorts of inappropriate activities. Recent events have shown spotlights on some of it, and work had to be renewed on research. So, as the manuscript for an otherwise only mildly controversial book is poised on the end of the assembly ramp for release, we had to think for a moment about what is coming next.
The Snake Ranch Project is one of those things that has followed us around almost as long as Ed Gilfellin’s tale and with the same sort of imperative. It represents the accidental start to a career in Naval Intelligence. We had been interested in seeing more parts of the world than we had run into, and joining the Sea Service seemed a way to do it. The orders to USS Midway seemed to meet that requirement. Midway (at the time) was home-ported in Japan and the orders were for two years duration. Included in those two years were visits to the Philippines, Australia and Keyna as well as operational tensions with Iran.
There was a complicating factor though. Most Navy orders for incoming new officers were for three years, which with training and travel completed the hour year obligation of service. Due to the distances and hardship involved, orders to Midway were only two years. In order to “even things up,” our assignment officer at the Bureau of Personnel (BUPERS) offered a one-year assignment in Korea.
That turned into a year that lasted 14-months in the midst of a Military coup d’etat in Seoul.
Seeing the World on those three sequential years included trips on The Night Train to Nairobi in East Africa, a variety of intimacies in Perth, West Australia, others in Subic Bay, and then a dramatic transition to the Night of the Generals and the Kwang-Ju Massacre.
That was a time when computers were still new and triplicate forms were used to provide “carbon” and “file” copies to normal correspondence. That limited distribution to an even smaller group that provided a certain anonymity. Like the “Last Cruise,” this manuscript was created on sheets of annoying thin paper with the scars at the top where the copies were separated. They were what we called “letters” compiled in a folder kept under the little desk in the six-man hooch on South Post, in the Yongsan Military Garrison in Seoul.
It was interesting to transition from planning military operations against Iran on a warship to observing Korean military operations against students at Chon-nam National University. That uprising began after students were “fired upon, killed, raped, and beaten by the South Korean military.” That would have been bad enough, but the North Koreans had just killed two American officers at the DMZ over what was called “The Tree Chopping Incident.” Things were tense regardless of which direction we were looking.
We could go on, but this is a morning piece and we will leave it with that. The cover attached is only a draft of what will eventually bind the volume. It but harnesses the picture of the American soldier assigned to guard the south end of the Bridge of No Return. The North Korean doing the same duty for his government at the northern end of the bridge. We saw him later, peering in through the window at the Joint Security Area, fully prepared to take us out when we walked slowly across the conference table. On the northern side.
That was our first trip to North Korea. We just finished an account of the second one, but we are trying to stay a little organized. Stay with us on this one. It will be fun!
Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Introduction to an Incorrect World
(The image above was taken in May of 1980 from an Army tour bus in the Joint Security Area (JSA) in the De-Militarized Zone just south of the armistice line between the ROK and North Korea. The young officer standing to attention at the approach to what was known as the “Bridge of No Return.” It was widely known at the time that no one did. There is a dark speck at the northern end that is a North Korean guard on his side of the Border. Peace in the JSA was then a generalized concept. Still “news” in that period was the recent murder of two US army personnel who were attempting to trim a tree which had grown to obstruct the view near the crossing point. The rest of that film roll exists, now in digital format. We will include a compilation of the images with the manuscript should we get around to it.)
– Vic
Introduction to an Incorrect World
The Snake Ranch Papers is one of those things that has followed our group around since 1981. Reading it now suggests the authors- 29-year-olds then- were what today’s reference terms would call alcohol-dependent xenophobes. All things are relative, and sequentially this had been intended to follow the first book (“The Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye”) scribbled during the previous years embarked as part of Carrier Air Wing FIVE on USS Midway (CV-41).
In that period, the ship was home-ported in Yokosuka, Japan, in order to minimize response time to events in the western Pacific from ships based on the U.S. West Coast. The ship was kind enough to publish a series of noir Private Detective stories during two deployments to the Indian Ocean. One of them had been scheduled with goodwill visits to Australia and Kenya and interrupted by the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran by student militants. The other was a more impromptu affair due to a collision at sea suffered by USS Ranger (CV-61).
Technical developments continued quite independent of international affairs. By 1989, information was available by satellite from off-ship sources. When Forrestal (CV-59) deployed to the Med, production of a sequel to Nick Danger entitled “The Adventures of Rex Bueno” gained no traction with afloat management and the crew. That story then died after a few furtive episodes in the ship’s paper. So, “The Snake Ranch Papers,” recently discovered, is the remaining account of a technological transitional year spent in the ROK during a tumultuous military coup. It represents a time when distance was still real and attempts to tell stories about it represented a vestige of communications in the (almost) pre-digital age.
In that context, there was a time when triplicate forms- that is to say “3 pieces of paper stuck together at the top with some inky stuff in between the bottom ones” were used at many Defense offices to provide “original” and two “file” copies to normal outgoing correspondence. In 1980, Xerox machines were still new technology and overlapped the older paperwork formats. Both functions were at odds. The old paper ones limited distribution to a very small group on paper and the new electrical ones opening it wildly to another.
The internet revolution was emerging as well, eliminating the safety that would have saved at least one career we know of due to use of that “reply to all” button on the computer screen. But that is a demonstration of time and change. Four decades ago, things were “typed” on “triplicate” forms and later scanned, digitized, transformed into .pdf format and back again to multiple releases of a program widely known “Microsoft Word.”
The original manuscript depicting the Snake Ranch, a modest Army housing structure also known as a “Hooch,” was in sheets of that annoying thin paper with the scars at the top where the copies were separated. The “copy” pages were held after being ripped apart, the top copy “mailed” with the copy retained and slid into a folder kept in the little desk in the six-man hooch on South Post, in the Yongsan Military Garrison in Seoul, Republic of Korea. A word of warning should you eventually see it- they are partially fiction and were intended to be the sensational basis of something else more significant later.
In the mid-1990s we wondered what our hosts on a CODEL to Pyongyang, DPRK, might have thought about the contents. We hoped then to be permitted to return south of that Bridge we once looked to the north of.
The folder was dragged to Hawaii when eventually the Republic of Korea and the 8th US Army was done with the narrators. At some point- we suspect at the Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Center- Pacific (FOSIC Pac) at Pearl Harbor it was processed, page by page, through one of the big copiers we used back in the old days. It was then transformed from ink-on-paper to digital format on a scanning device and rendered as ‘portable document files’ (.pdf). It was stored on several of those thin square magnetic “floppy discs” with the little window in the protective sleeve that served to transfer the digital version across the last dozen home computers we have managed across fifty or sixty upgrades to two major operating systems. Only one of the floppies survives, quite dusty. We have not seen a device to read it in more than a decade.
The Writer’s Section at Refuge Farm took a poll this morning about “suitability” of the manuscript and will not inflict it on you this morning. Advances in technology permit the abbreviation of ancient words into something more (or less) intelligible. It is a welcome advance in social affairs in which we have turned all that stuff over to Facebook.
– Vic
Copyright 1980 and 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
The Snake Ranch Papers
(This young American is on the only side of this little bridge you would want to visit. The other side of it is in North Korea. Taken at he Joint Security Area (JSA) in 1980 by some kid named ‘Socotra.’)
I am sure you want to talk about the Electoral College this morning, and the election of former Vice President Biden as the next President of the United States. I watched the acceptance speech, and President-Elect Biden (I think that is what he is now) cleared his throat only 14 times before Doctor Biden led him offstage. It was unifying, you know?
Anyway, I don’t expect the thrills and chills are over. There is still the matter of the Executive Order Mr. Trump signed just after the 2018 voting adventure, and the coming Georgia Senate races, and the Joint Session of Congress the day after that election, which promises to have even more excitement. What a grand year this has been!
When my attention has occasionally been drawn from the flat-screen at the end of the Great Room at the farm, I have been busy. Rather than disputing elections, I passed the plague time unearthing some strange things on the external hard-drive to the old computers. One of them struck me- an attitude-filled account of a young man who was apparently assigned to a military tour in the Republic of Korea. He seems prone to mild hysteria, and it is fun to visit him. He has no idea what is to come!
His story is in The Snake Ranch Papers. It is one of those things that has followed me around since 1981. There was a time when triplicate forms were used to provide “carbon” and “file” copies to normal correspondence. That limited distribution to a very small group and provided safety that would have saved at least one career I know of over use of that “reply to all” button on the screen.
But that is the generation we were, and the generation we are now. The manuscript was in sheets of that annoying thin paper with the scars at the top where the copies were separated. They were in a manila folder, probably the one kept under the little desk in the six-man hooch on South Post, in the Yongsan Military Garrison in Seoul.
The sheets were fed through one of the big copiers we used back in the old days and were rendered as digital ‘portable document files’ (.pdf). They were stored on one of those thin square floppy discs that transferred the digital version across the last dozen home computers I have managed badly across fifty or sixty upgrades and changes to the operating system, Word to Mac.
So that was then. In the Snake Ranch lived a cocksure little snapper like the author of these letters. I came across them while trying to find all the pieces of my Great Grandfather’s trip to Europe in 1903, before the astonishing madness of the 20th Century played out. I had transcribed them from his paper and thin ink lines to digital a couple decades ago, and it was almost ready to go with all the photos and postcards scanned in. Strange little project, but I never met the man, and thought his notebooks stuck moldering in one of the boxes of Mom and Dad’s stuff might be worth saving for his great-great-great-children.
Then I ran across this. On the ship, I had written an odd thing called “Nick Danger, Third Eye.” It was a small shipborne world, the one before satellite communications. Having nothing else to read, it was mildly popular on USS Midway. When I washed up in Korea I took the experiment in writing a little further, and invested in an actual typewriter. It was a cool thing, electric, and until the “m” key flew off, I began to try to tell stories about what was happening around me.
I don’t know how many Team Spirit exercises Midway did when I was aboard. I only remember one of them, a big-deal combined-arms exercise off the SE coast of the Republic. Marines storming ashore, jets roaring from the ship, ROK infantry simulating hunting down North Korean commandoes, that sort of thing. But landing in the middle of Seoul with a military coup underway was interesting, as was the rioting down in Kwang-Ju Province, and the usual tunneling and infiltrating under surveillance flights of SR-71s (Boom! BOOM!) and satellites whizzing unseen in low earth orbit.
Anyway, the kid who was using his typewriter to bitch about life is a little hysterical for my taste these days, and living harder than I can even imagine. It was an interesting year. Why don’t take a PX cab over to the Hooch on South Post and enjoy a year of your life somewhere you had never intended, but determined to enjoy to the extent possible.
You haven’t lived until you have visited the gigantic piles of round fresh cabbage being sold so the Capital can lay in a good season of kimchi for all hands. Or be an honorary Junior MP in a riot. But that is all in here, told by a wise ass for maximum effect and drama. And long ago. In a place far away.
If I can figure out the .pdf conversion process, you will see it in my book selection on Kindle. I will let you know how it goes!
– Vic
Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com