Incident at China Crossing

With the 7th Operations Detachment
Hapbongam-ri, Korea


This is a memoir-cum-adventure/spy story, told in the first person, of a college-educated draftee's service in Korea in the late '50s in a small intelligence outfit near the DMZ.

The narrator, a college-educated enlisted man, is drafted into the army in the late 1950s and posted to a small intelligence unit in an isolated compound "up godforsaken north," near the DMZ. Bored by his duties and alienated by his aloof commanding officer, he engages in his own private intelligence survey of the nearby villages.

At first, the intelligence survey is a boredom-killing lark; but gradually, the survey discloses a North Korean penetration route across the DMZ and then the site of a North Korean surveillance post overlooking the 7th Division's atomic weapons depot-all unknown to army intelligence.

Then one evening, as the narrator is driving on his regular route, someone shoots at him, failing to kill him only by accidental good fortune. The game has turned serious.

The narrator does not tell army intelligence; he assumes that if the army learned of his unauthorized off-limits activities, at the very least, he would be grounded for the remainder of his tour. Instead, the narrator attempts to resolve the problem himself.

The narrator is confident that one of his unit's interpreters is a North Korean agent and the one who fingered him for assassination. But who? All the interpreters toward the end of his tour give the narrator special deference. Because of his age, education, and unorthodox behavior, the interpreters have come to the view that the narrator is not what he appears but is some high-ranking undercover US operative.

At last, the North Korean agent confronts the narrator. The agent's identity comes as a complete surprise to the narrator, who has allowed himself to be maneuvered into a dangerously compromised position.

The narrator manages to talk the North Korean agent out of executing him and (obviously) survives to tell the tale.

This is an exciting and revealing tale, interesting as a genre piece reflecting the 1950s volunteer army, and in the light of current events in the still-troubled Korean peninsula.