The officer nodded, and said, “An American?”
“Yes, I am a physician who was sent here to study an epidemic that broke out two weeks ago. I was in Seoul when you attacked. We walked here from Seoul in the hope of being evacuated from Inchon. We didn’t know you attacked here as well.”
“Americans are very smart this time. Much smarter than before. America has not entered this war. Americans are gathering at the depot. We have been ordered to direct westerners to the depot whenever we encounter them. Several hundred have probably already gathered there. You should go there immediately.”
“Can you tell us where it is?”
“You said us, and we. Are there more than you?”
“Yes, I have a friend who is sick upstairs.”
“You and your friend should go quickly. Evacuation is scheduled for today or tomorrow. If you do not make it, you will be left here. I can offer you no transportation. You will have to walk about fifteen kilometers west of here, and you will find the depot. Take your friend and go now.”
“Thank you. We will do so. You are?”
“I am First Lieutenant Soo, Choi He, and do not thank me. If I had the choice, I would kill you here and now. If you encounter more victorious North Korean soldiers, ask for an officer and tell them you are Americans looking for the depot for evacuation. They have orders to give you directions. Go now.”
Matthews nodded and rose to his feet. Holding his abdomen, he went back into the building to get Timmons. Timmons was squatting over the banjo again.
“Come on, Americans are being evacuated at the depot about twelve miles from here. We have to make it today, or we don’t get out. We have to walk it, diarrhea or not. We need to go now.”
“OK.” Timmons wiped himself again and pulled up his pants. He was sweating, Matthews noted. Timmons took the roll of toilet paper off the holder. Matthews went into the kitchen and picked up the hard-boiled eggs and a salt shaker. Timmons, especially, would need salt and other electrolytes. Together, they stumbled down the stairs and into the street. Matthews headed them west, in the direction Lieutenant Soo had indicated.
By noon, Timmons was running a high fever. Not quite delirious, he was in obvious distress. They had stopped four times for his cramps, but he could pass nothing but mucous tinged with blood. His gastrointestinal system was empty. Still, he kept walking, if somewhat unsteadily. Due to the short incubation period, judging from when they drank water from the ditch, Matthews made a tentative diagnosis of shigellosis, commonly called bacillary dysentery. He wondered when he would break with it. Maybe he had not already because he was in better physical condition than Timmons, that he wasn’t overweight, that his immune system was better, or maybe he just didn’t get as large an infective dose. Whatever the reason, Matthews prayed that he would not be affected, at least, not until they got out of Korea and he could have proper medical attention. Half-carrying Timmons, they stumbled on for two more hours when Timmons finally collapsed. Matthews carefully eased him down against a building wall. He knew they were close to the depot because he suddenly became aware of the sound of helicopters. “Come on, Rod, we’ve come this far, we have to make it. It couldn’t be that far.” Timmons was closer to unconsciousness than consciousness. Matthews tried to pick him up but couldn’t. Timmons’s legs were like rubber; they couldn’t support his body.
Matthews thought, Damn, what the hell do I do now? If I leave him, he’ll never make it. If I don’t go now, I won’t get out of here, and neither will he. Do I go for help? Where? Where exactly is the depot? Who will help? Certainly not the South Koreans watching us; sure as hell not the North Koreans who would just as soon shoot us. Matthews struggled with Timmons, finally getting him to his feet by bracing him against the wall. He took Timmons arm over his shoulder and held his arm while he grasped him around his waist, holding onto his belt. He made it a few more blocks. He could see a crowd gathered, at what appeared to be a high wall. Some people were attempting to climb the wall, others were pushing and shoving trying to get through what Matthews surmised was some sort of gate. Then he heard the machine gun fire. The crowd broke for a few moments as Matthews watched, then it surged forward towards and through the gate again. Two large helicopters lifted off, and Matthews sensed an immediate change in the mood of the mob. The pushing and shoving stopped; the din immediately died down, and Matthews struggled on, half carrying, half dragging Timmons. When they reached the rear edge of the crowd, many of the Koreans smirked at them, a few spit on them, others just stood aside. Many Koreans had now entered the compound, where many bodies lay. People were bent over their loved ones, crying and wailing. Others were running into the warehouses to see what they could find. Matthews estimated that there must be fifty people down, some dead, some wounded. One South Korean man, seeing the two Americans, leaped up behind Matthews as he passed and karate punched him in the kidney. Matthews groaned and went down to his knees, letting Timmons slide to the ground. The Korean walked around to face Matthews, and then kicked him in the solar plexus, then under the chin. At the third kick, a roundhouse kick to the temple, Matthews blacked out.
When he regained consciousness, it was night. Matthews’s head felt like it was going to explode. He sat up and almost vomited. Slight concussion, he thought. Propping himself up on his hands, he looked over at Timmons. He could see in the moonlight that his face was a bloody mess. Apparently, the angry Korean man had stomped on his face. Matthews felt his pulse. He didn’t have one. He was dead. Matthews looked at his watch. It was gone. He felt for his wallet. It too, was gone. They had been robbed while they were unconscious. Matthews sank back down and laid his head on Timmons’s body. Sorry, Rod, that I couldn’t do better, he thought as he slipped into unconsciousness again.
“Ed, we have had a complete failure of intelligence on this whole fiasco. The international order is in serious danger, and we haven’t learned crap about it. I know you are new in your job as DCI, so I don’t hold you personally responsible. Get your best people together and determine why we have had such a catastrophic failure. Why didn’t we recognize the biological attack by North Korea for what it was? Why didn’t we recognize North Korean mobilization? How did they hide it so well? How will the Japanese react to this? What is China’s role in all of this? What the hell is our intelligence community doing?”
“I can tell you some of the answers right now, Mr. President. I’ll have to talk with my folks to ascertain the others. As a generalization, the C4I concept, the high-tech boys have dominated the scene since September 11, 2001. That stands for communications, command, control, computers and information. We have collected so damned much information so fast, we can’t begin to analyze what we collect. We don’t have enough linguists; we don’t have enough people who can think independently. Perhaps more importantly, we don’t have people who think in both realms, that is technologically and the political-human experience realm.”
“What do you mean political-human experience realm?”
“I use that to describe people who are technically competent and can correctly interpret what information they have garnered when they receive it. The two fields have not meshed together. A computer scientist, Electronics Warfare Officer in the Pacific can gather the information, but it has to go to some analyst back here in Washington, where it often sits for months before its meaning, or possible meanings, are deciphered. It becomes tactically and operationally useless because it can’t be applied to the situation in a timely manner. For the last ten years, the technology folks have come to the fore in the military. They tend to think we can do everything with information, à la network centric warfare. They have left out many, if not most, of Clauswitz’s classic principles of war. We’re at the beginning of a learning curve, learning the hard way that they are still valid.”
“Be more specific, Ed, what are we talking about?”
“If you remember the old acronym, MOSS COMES, Mr. President, you will have them. M stands for mass, be it people, fires, weapons systems, or whatever. O stands for objective. What is your objective? S stands for surprise. You can overcome tremendous odds if you can strike with complete surprise. The second S stands for security. You must not allow your enemy to understand your intentions. You have to keep him guessing, keep him off balance. C stands for command. That is one of our major areas of failure. The second O is for offensive. You don’t win battles or wars by being primarily defensive. The second M is for maneuver. Anytime you become fixed in your position you are inviting destruction. You must be able to move. E stands for economy of force. You have to win the battle decisively while preserving your own force to fight another day. What good is it to win the battle if your own forces are destroyed doing it? The last S stands for simplicity. If your plans are too complicated, there is too much room for misunderstanding. Too many things go wrong.
“These technically oriented people never appreciated the value of human intelligence. You have to be able to interpret the information you receive in the way your opponent thinks. We look at it from one perspective, while it usually means something quite different to them. To paraphrase Liddell Hart, the former military historian for the Encyclopedia Britannica, you have to crawl into the mind of the enemy commander. You have to know what he thinks, why he thinks it, and how he will act. You have to know what is important to him, what his value system is. That is how you determine what is called his concept of operation. What are his objectives? This was a major reason we failed in Vietnam and failed to detect this attack in Korea. We couldn’t grasp their concepts of war. We tried to fight as if we were on the plains of Europe, not the jungles of Southeast Asia. We didn’t want to fight by their rules, but by our own, which were invalid against their doctrine.
“Back to the C4I bit, Mr. President. This dominating military thought didn’t pay enough attention to the other factors. They failed to address the moral issue, for one. As Napoleon Bonaparte once said, ‘The moral is to the physical as three to one.’ Leadership is another major factor. The admirals and generals paid leadership lip service while they continued to micromanage all their subordinates instead of giving them learning room, letting them make mistakes and grow and develop leadership skills. Many, if not most, of our senior officers are micromanagers. You could put them in business suits, and you couldn’t tell them from corporate executives. They are careerists, afraid they will suffer for minor mistakes made by their subordinates. All the information in the world is useless on the battlefield if it is misinterpreted, if doctrine is unsound or inflexible.
“Entering into this is the belief that war no longer has to be bloody. We have wasted good money on nonlethal weapons research. Sun Tzu said 3500 years ago the art of war is making the other guy surrender without a fight if possible. If that’s not possible, then Georgie Patton’s principle applies. That principle is to apply maximum lethality with whatever weapons you have at hand as quickly as possible to the enemy. Our strategic think tankers have gone soft, Mr. President. They don’t really want to kill the bad guys anymore.
“The high techie concept of a battlefield is nonlinear. In spite of what they say, it is centralized thousands of miles away as an amorphous field, without lines, where long-range weapons will dominate. The battle will be fought on video screens by generals who control computer linked weapons and people. Our soldiers only need to be a few and far between, according to them. The job of the battlefield warrior will primarily be as information gatherers on the battlefield, feeding it back to some armchair general who will launch weapons systems while he is sipping coffee. They haven’t truly experienced information overload. Information will be bombarding our analysts and armchair generals faster than they can process it. They won’t separate the wheat from the chaff in a timely manner. This is going to cause our more timid leaders to hesitate until they have a complete or bigger picture of the battlefield before they act. That is likely to have disastrous consequences. Then, our armchair generals are going to try to act upon it themselves instead of passing it down the chain of command to the operational and tactical levels where lower echelon commanders should be making those decisions on the battlefield. The fog of war will never go away.
“Training is another failure, Mr. President, although this falls more into Jim Neville’s territory. We have too much damned training on simulators and not enough field training. After we were kicked out of Korea, we reduced our training exercises because they were too expensive. We spent a lot of time and effort training people in using the network centric high-tech toys, so we have soldiers that can’t build a campfire or skin a rabbit or kill a chicken in the field.
“As for North Korea’s deployment of tularemia as a genetically engineered biological weapon, we totally missed the boat. We were grossly misled by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention who thought this was a new, novel, emerging disease coming out of Asia, like the old SARS episodes in 2003 and 2004. They thought it might be another scrambled version of influenza, with the virus mixing its genes from bird, pig and human strains into something new. That’s why we sent a number of our scientists to study it when we received the initial reports. Nobody wanted to address the possibility of a biological attack. It is just too horrendous to think about. They wanted absolute, scientific proof via identification of the organism. We learned the hard way. We didn’t crawl into the mind of the North Koreans and see they don’t care about human life.
“As for China’s role, well, we are still working on that one. Our embassy people there are going night and day trying to decipher China’s role in all of this. That’s about what I have right now, Mr. President. I’ll dribble information in to you as soon as we come up with loss or assorted facts of significance.”
“Thanks, Ed. It is the China thing that bothers me the most.”
“What scares me the most, Mr. President is just how reliant we are on the concept of Network Centric Warfare. We have put our eggs all in one strategic and doctrinal concept. Hackers from all over the world go at us thousands of times a day. If they should find a portal we missed, they could bring the whole system down like a house of cards. Digital networks just might not be as secure as we think they are. We are supposed to disrupt the enemy by electronically attacking his computer and communications networks. What makes us think ours are invulnerable? Our national security depends on computer digital networks right now. That just isn’t limited to our Defense Department either, Mr. President. Everybody knows it also controls our communications networks, transportation nets, financial institutions, power grids, water supplies, and just about everything else. If had my way, I would have special teams of highly trained people who would hunt down the more sophisticated of these hackers, worldwide, the ones most likely to break into our systems, and put an end to their hacking. Of course, that would be illegal and violate their rights to life and liberty. The ACLU would have a field day with that one.”
God help us, thought Thornton. “OK, Ed, I’ll wait with bated breath for anything you come up with. Have a good one.”
“Thanks, Mr. President. I will try.”
Chapter 17
“We do have some good news, Mr. President. We got a lot of our people out of Ascom City, there, just outside of Seoul. The Navy and Marines did a pretty good job of helicopter evacuation. We believe there are some souls still stranded there, but we don’t have a handle yet on how many and whom.”
“Thanks, Jim. We could use some good news. Keep me posted on the recovery of any stragglers, will you?”
“Roger, Mr. President. I just hope that if they are in the hands of the North Koreans, they will be treated a lot more kindly than were our POWs in the Korean War. I’ll call as soon as we hear anything.”
The Secretary of Defense was an outdoorsman at heart. He almost secretly wished that he was Secretary of the Department of the Interior rather than Defense. He loved to hunt and fish, but he had a deep love for nature and things outdoors. The last Republican administration had initiated the rape of the environment in the name of being independent of foreign sources of energy. As a result, everyone who ever spent any time out of doors voted against his re-election. Even the Green Party of Europe united with the Sierra Club and every other major environmentally oriented organization, which together, made a concerted effort to publicize his active and proposed violations of environmental regulations. It was a major plank in the Democratic Party’s platform. The threats to the National Parks that the President had parceled out in the form of permits for the mining and timber industries were particularly odious. That cost him an election.
Secretary of Defense James Neville was the last of President Thornton’s cabinet to be appointed to his office, taking office only in the last week of May. After a vigorous debate, it was his scientific and military background that made the difference. Growing up in small town West Virginia, he had the love of outdoors and hunting and fishing innate to that state. He graduated from West Virginia University with a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering and computer sciences. After a four-year stint in the Navy, mostly on submarines as an Electronic Warfare Officer, he returned to college for two years for a Master’s in electrical engineering at Stanford, courtesy of the Navy. After another five years of active duty to repay the Navy for the higher education, he faced a difficult dilemma. The first two of those years were aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, the last of the Nimitz class carriers. The Naval War College resident course followed. The last two were in the Office of Naval Research, where he was Assistant Director for Antisubmarine Warfare Weapons research. While Neville loved the research and the management of the programs, he hated the politics of the job. He spent almost as much time in the Pentagon and before Congressional Committees as he did studying and determining which research efforts had the greatest potential payoff for the money. Now, at the rank of Lieutenant Commander, Grade 0-4, with eleven years of service, he couldn’t decide whether to remain on active duty or “go commercial” and become a beltway bandit. The six-figure income offers from several defense contractors seemed very lucrative. In the end, he struck a deal with the Navy. He would attend Georgetown University part time to work on a Ph.D. in physics and computer engineering while working in the Office of Naval Research.
