"Good, good. When your exercise ends here. I need to talk to all of your men. Have your crews and all your battalion support people in your enlisted mess in two hours. I'll see you there." Major Yim saluted as the colonel stepped back inside the car and it drove away.
Two hours. Plenty of time. The major worked his crews for another hour, then told them to move the tanks back into their battle stations. Each tank had a carefully built and camouflaged attack position a hundred yards from the centerline of the DMZ. Each position was dug in with ten feet of packed earth in front of the tank, and walls of earth higher than the tank on each side.
It would take a direct hit by a mortar or tank round to hurt any of the tanks. That was the defensive mode. With three minutes of warning, the tankers could be in their rigs, then backed out of the emplacements and sent charging across the centerline fence. It was an order that he prayed for each night.
He used his radio and notified the tankers of the schedule, then warned the support team that even the cooks were to be at the mee ting at 1700 in the mess hall. Every man in his command would be there under severe penalty.
Major Yim had worked hard to get into this position. He wanted to be in the very forefront of any attack southward. It was his personal payback.
The major had never known his father. He was born in 1953 after the war was over and the cease-fire had been signed. Now he was one of the oldest tank commanders in North Korea's forces. He had fought to keep his position.
His father had been captured by the Americans late in the war and turned over to the South Korean Army terrorists, who had tortured him for three days. They had used every form of torture that had been devised by man to inflict pain without death. At last, after the third horrific day, his father had died while enduring the torture of a thousand slices. No one knife cut into his flesh would kill him, but the accumulation of blood loss from hundreds of such slices on his body had led to his bleeding to death.
Yim blamed the Americans for turning his father over to the sadistic South. They knew what his fate would be. They didn't care. They wanted the military information about the division across the line from them.
They never got it.
His father had not said a word after he had been captured.
After the war, Yim had grown up without a father. In the highly family oriented society of North Korea, that put him at a terrific disadvantage. He had no strong male to support him. He had no older brothers to fight for him.
He remembered that when he was ten, he came home almost every day with new cuts or bruises after the older boys had caught him and beat him with their fists.
As he got older, the beatings became worse. He started carrying a knife that opened its five-inch blade with a quick flip of the wrist. He used it the first day he carried it. Three boys two years older than he caught him in an alley a short way from his home. He warned them. Then he flipped open the knife and cut two of them so quickly they had no chance to escape. The third boy ran away screaming. The two he'd cut had minor wounds on their hands and arms.
The next day the same three boys caught him again. This time they had knives as well, longer ones than his. His back was to the wall of a house. The three drove in all at once, and he couldn't stop all of them. He took a stab wound to his right leg and a slash on his left arm, but his right hand thrust hard with his blade and one of the boys took it full in the chest. He died minutes later in the alley.
After that the boys left him alone, for a time.
The other two remembered that he had killed their friend.
When Yim was sixteen, the two trapped him at the edge of the schoolyard. By this time he had grown to almost five feet ten, taller than any of his classmates. He had also studied Taste Kwon Do, unarmed combat. He was ready.
Chung Sik had come at him from one side and his smaller friend from the other. Each had a knife. Yim had left his knife home that day.
He decided the larger Chung Sik was the more dangerous, and turned and with a side kick stopped him, then turned to the smaller man, who hesitated.
Yim took advantage of the pause and executed a classic spinning round kick to the head, slamming the kid to the ground unconscious.
Then Chung Sik charged in from the side and the battle was on. Neither had the advantage now, but Yim's kicks and vicious elbow and hand slashes kept the knife from drawing any blood. When Chung Sik realized that he couldn't harm Yim, he waved to two policemen who had been watching the fight from across the street. Chung Sik talked to the policemen, who promptly grabbed Yim and hauled him to the police station.
"Why am I here?" he shouted at them. They beat him with bamboo batons.
"What have I done to be arrested?"
They beat him again.
Three hours later, Chung Sik came to the door and watched the officers beat him again. A policeman behind him watched as well. He wore captain's bars. He looked at Yim.
"You are not greatly injured. You are sentenced to three months in the mountain work camp building roads. Take him away."
It was much later that Yim found out that the police captain was Chung Sik's father.
Yim came back from the labor camp thin, but stronger than he had ever been and angrier. A week later he caught Chung Sik without his friends, and beat him into unconsciousness. Then he broke both the young man's arms over his knee and left him in the gutter.
Yim blamed it all, everything that happened to him, on the devil Americans. They had caused it. They had caught and let the criminal South Koreans torture his father to death.
He would never sleep well until he had repaid the devil Americans in gallons and gallons of their blood spilled on South Korean soil.
The meeting in the mess hall was brief. The colonel was kind in his remarks to the men about their maneuvers in the field that afternoon.
Then he paced in front of them. "You men are here for a glorious purpose. When the attack comes, when we smash across the DMZ into the south, you men will be our spearhead. You will charge through the American tanks like a knife through a ripe melon and you will prevail. Then you will charge south with Seoul in your sights.
"We are counting on you men to be at the very peak of your readiness, to kill the enemy, to slaughter his tanks, and to crash through every South Korean Army unit you find like it was a paper tiger."
The men stood and cheered, chanting: "We are ready! We are ready! We are ready!"
The colonel nodded and headed for the door.
"Attention." The major barked. Every man in the room shot to his feet and stood at a braced attention. Major Yim smiled and followed the colonel out the door.
Yes, his men were ready. They could charge across the border in ten minutes if the order came. He was proud of them.
The colonel stopped at his car. He motioned the major to come closer.
"Major Yim, you're doing a good job. When the order comes, your men look ready." He paused.
"That order to charge into the DMZ could come before you expect it. Good hunting, Major."
The colonel stepped into the car with a sly smile, and the sedan pulled away and out of the battalion's rear area.
Major Yim frowned. The order could come before he expected it? What did that mean? This week? This month? Did he mean that they might get into war with the South soon?
"I don't like it, Sarge," Willy Johnson said into the handset. "Too damn much noise out there.
Isn't that where the NKs have a tank battalion?"
"Easy, Johnson. Remember last week when the NKs pulled that exercise just at dawn. We had half of our guys out of their sacks and buttoned up in their tanks. We got chewed out for a half hour by the damned colonel himself. I say we sit on it for a few more minutes."