U.S. Military Insanity, Eighth Army Style

 

The editors at Covert Action magazine really outdid themselves when they found an old photograph online as the lead illustration for my article, “A Condensation of Military Incompetence.”  Although I’m sure I never saw it at the time, the sign shown in the photograph was one welcoming people to the “ASCOM AREA COMMAND” (of the U.S. Eighth Army in Korea), where I was stationed. 

 

Everything about the worn sign is curious.  It’s beside a public Korean road, but it’s written in English.  Its almost exclusive audience, therefore, would be American.  And the only Americans in that vicinity were members of the U.S. Army, restricting the audience further.  None of them had their private vehicles there at the time, so the audience would have only been U.S. Army drivers.  You didn’t get to drive an Army vehicle unless you were assigned to that task, so, in effect, they were all professional drivers, a rather select group.  Secondarily, they would have included Koreans Augmented to the U.S. Army (KATUSAs), one of whom I note in my previous article was crucial for getting us through Seoul for the dry run of our flood rescue assignment.  KATUSAs tended to be better-educated and better-connected Koreans than average, because it was a lot easier way for one to fulfill his obligatory military service than in the harsh Republic of Korea (ROK) Army.   These were hardly people who needed to be preached to about the importance of safe driving.  Not that they were likely to be able to read the sign, but one could say the same thing about the much more numerous Korean civilian drivers.  Virtually no one owned his own car in Korea at that time, and if he had enough money for a car, he also had enough to hire a driver.  Almost everyone on the road, therefore, was a professional driver, doing it for a living, driving either a taxi, a bus, or a truck, or acting as someone’s chauffeur. 

 

But now look at the embarrassingly childish doggerel with which the message begins:

 

FOR THE SAKE OF MOM AND DAD OBEY [sic]

THESE RULES AND MAKE THEM GLAD

 

and with which it ends:

 

SO DO YOUR BEST AND OBEY THESE RULES

AND SHOW THEM THAT THEY RAISED NO FOOLS

 

I can tell you with a one hundred percent degree of certainty that those lines were penned by my unhinged commanding officer, the man in charge of the Ascom Area Command, Colonel Edward Hudak, and before you have reached the end of this essay you will doubtless agree with me.

 

Korea in the Late 1960s

 

The Covert Action folks tell us that they found the faded sign at this Korean web site.  The site provides its own translation for its Korean language title: “1960s U.S. Army Ascom City in the Bupyeong Incheon Korea.”  (When I was there, 1967-1968, they were spelled “Bupyong” and “Inchon,” and that’s the way I will spell them in this article.). In the second and third photographs, scrolling down, you’ll see a dirt road, first with an American soldier walking on it and then a Korean carrying buckets of nightsoil (outhouse waste to be used on the fields for fertilizer) with a mountain in the background.  That’s Bupyong Mountain, the highest one in the area.  Late in my tour, on a weekend in the spring of 1968, I hiked to its summit in the company of a Japanese citizen, an instructor in the martial art of aikido.  Amazingly enough, he had been drafted into the U.S. Army while teaching aikido in the States.  He and I were fellow gym rats at the U.S. Army Ascom gymnasium.

 

Scrolling up to the fifth photograph from the bottom, you’ll see an alley with part of a sign over a shop on the right that says, “Vict....”  The full sign, I can tell you, reads “Victory Silk Store.”  That was the scene from the camp follower village just across the street from the entrance to the Ascom compound that was nearest to the officer’s club and the officers’ bachelor officers’ quarters (BOQ).  Scrolling up to the eighth photograph from the bottom is a scene further down that alley.  I recognize it from the vertical “KEY CLUB” sign.  The other photo says that it was taken in 1970.  I didn’t have to be told that it had to have been shot after the middle of 1967.  The car in the foreground is a Shinjin taxi.    They were Toyotas assembled at a plant in Bupyong. That plant did not begin operation until late in 1967.  Before that, none of the taxis in Korea bore model names.  They were all makeshift fabrications on the chassis of U.S. Army Korean-War jeeps, just as the larger buses you see in the photographs were built on 2 ½ ton truck chassis and the smaller ones were built on a ¾ ton truck chassis.  We GIs called those earlier taxis “kimchi cabs” just as we called those smaller buses “kimchi buses,” but, unfortunately, I don’t see any boxy kimchi cabs in the photo collection, which dates it to a degree.

 

Korean Road Traffic

 

Road traffic at the time, which also included some bicycles, but more ox carts and pedestrians, could be described, both for better and for worse, as the purest anarchy.  Korea was desperately poor, and paying for highway law enforcement personnel was apparently considered to be a luxury that the government could do without.  I can’t tell you what a Korean highway patrol car looked like, because I don’t recall ever having seen one.  Without any danger of legal punishment, what transpired on the roads is best described as one big game of chicken.  But that’s what you get when all the drivers are male professionals and there’s no law enforcement.  No one drove all that fast.  I never heard of any drunk driving.  And I never witnessed or even heard or read about any highway accidents.

 

For Colonel Hudak, jetting into Kimpo Airport (now spelled Gimpo) from the States on a Northwest Airlines Boeing 707 red tail, as I did a few months later, the scene he witnessed as he was driven to his new command assignment must have looked like chaos—and he had found his mission right off the bat. 

 

Meeting Colonel Hudak

 

One might think that life has been smooth sailing for me when I say it, but my first encounter with the good colonel deeply involved his traffic safety obsession and it was very nearly the most traumatic experience of my life.  I can still remember vividly that first day working as the Assistant Security, Plans, Operations, and Training (S-2, S-3) officer in his 20th General Support Group command, the position I had when I was assigned to that flood rescue mission described in my earlier article.  I later became the S-2, S-3 officer under Hudak when my boss, a Captain Williams, rotated back to the States.

 

I was a Transportation Corps lieutenant, and when I first arrived in Korea I was assigned to the 69th Transportation Battalion, which is one of a diverse collection of military units under the 20th GSG, located about a mile away from the 20th GSG headquarters.  I had virtually nothing to do there, but then, few of the 20 or so Americans in the 69th Trans had anything to do.  In a very curious arrangement, all our drivers belonged to the Army of the Republic of Korea, and all the maintenance was done by Korean civilians.  We were roughly "supervising," but I wasn't there long enough to figure out what that entailed.  I was there long enough to participate in a joint ping-pong tournament with the ROKs, winning the doubles competition with a Korean Army major as my partner. A black sergeant who played with a sandpaper paddle, hugging the table with a tempo game augmented with lots of trash talk, won the singles.  Our CO was a laid-back black lieutenant colonel whom I considered a homey, because he was from Raleigh, NC, and I was raised 50 miles east of there.  

 

My idyl there ended, though, after less than a month when they discovered that my orders had been misplaced.  I was supposed to be in 20th GSG headquarters.  In my first day on the job, we had a big staff meeting.  About half the staff were Army officers, all of whom outranked me by quite a bit, and half were Department of the Army civilians.  The latter tended to be even bigger Hudak ass-kissers than the former.  The glassy-eyed Hudak was announcing his big plans for traffic safety for the region.  I had had only the slightest portent of what was in store when our 69th Trans jeep driver had been stopped one day out on a public road by a couple of U.S. MPs and handed a leaflet promoting traffic safety.  The driver explained that the 20th GSG CO had some sort of weird traffic-safety bee in his bonnet, and that was the end of that.  Little did I know.  

 

Col. Hudak began the meeting by announcing the name for the program that he had formulated, “Humanities Day, Concept of a Traffic Safety Program.”  He seemed to be running it by us for our opinion.  I'm something of a language curmudgeon, so I volunteered that he might be using the word "humanities" differently from its proper meaning.  At that, I noticed a sideways glance from Captain Williams that meant in no uncertain terms, "Shut the hell up.  Our job is to salute and say, 'Yes sir.'"  So, I shut up and Hudak went on as though I had not spoken.  

 

As Col. Hudak laid out his grandiose cockamamie plans for his big celebration of traffic safety, and the assembled staff, particularly the civilians, fairly slobbered over his wild proposals, my immediate thoughts were, "I'm going to have to write this all up someday.  This is really stranger than fiction." 

 

When the meeting was over, I went immediately to the office of Hudak's deputy, a rather low-key lieutenant colonel, and asked him about the procedure for volunteering for Vietnam.  He did not disagree with my assessment that Col. Hudak was insane, but he counselled me to calm down and let it all pass.  It was wise counsel, but my trauma was hardly ended.  I had been appointed as the person in charge of publicity for the "Humanities Day" program, and I was to end up using most of the money I had in the bank at that time paying for 9,000 balloons that were supposed to say "Humanities Day" on them in Korean, which, thankfully, in the translation that one of the colonel’s Korean subordinates eventually did, was not nonsensical.  I recall how it was pronounced in Korean, and Google translate tells me that it means simply “human day.”

 

But that’s getting ahead of the story.  Here are Col. Hudak’s outlandish plans as I recall them.  The 20th GSG sponsored several orphanages, left over from the Korean War, and there was to be a parade from Bupyong to the city stadium in Inchon with floats prepared by each of the orphanages using 2 ½ ton trucks lent to them by the 69th Trans Bn for the purpose.  Once in the stadium some sort of Humanities Day celebration was to take place.  That was to be on a Saturday, and Col. Hudak had already picked the day for it.  On the evening before the big parade and celebration, there was to be something that he had already named the “Humanities Eve Ball.”  The name conjures up some sort of dance involving men and women.  As it turned out, that was the only event that came to fruition that I know of.  It took place at our Non-Commissioned Officers Club (The Officers Club lacked sufficient space.), and it entailed some airy speeches by Inchon city officials and U.S. Army officers.  I don’t recall seeing any women there.

 

I’m not sure if it came up at the meeting or later, but another of Col. Hudak’s ideas was to paint at least one swath of the civilian road leading into Ascom the color purple, after Sheb Wooley’s 1958 novelty song, “The Purple People Eater.”  Get it.  My guess is that even the average GI wouldn’t get it, and forget about the larger target audience, the Korean civilian drivers.  I don’t know if that paint job ever got done.  My guess is that it didn’t, and I know that I never saw it.

 

The Balloon Caper

 

Although Hudak might have anointed me as the Humanities Day head of publicity, all that it ever entailed was getting those balloons with the Korean language inscription on them.  I know of two other artifacts he had made in rather large numbers.  One was a metal pin, silver in color, about the size of a nickel.  The other was a clip-on card a little larger than a playing card, laminated in plastic.  The colonel made it clear that he was very Roman Catholic and of Slovak extraction.  It was his Catholic background, I think, that made him very fond of symbolism.  Both the pin and the card were full of symbols.  Each had the red and white Eighth Army symbol, the interlocking yin and yang symbols of the Republic of Korea flag, and the clasped hands symbol of the U.S. Agency for International Development.  Unfortunately for Hudak, there’s no symbol for traffic safety.  I don’t think there was any room on the pin for any writing, but the card, as I recall, was all in English.  All of us officers made certain that if we were likely to be seen on duty by Col. Hudak that we would be wearing the card clipped to the shirt pocket of our uniform or the pin.

 

Meanwhile, I had the assigned task of procuring the balloons.  Our American civilian safety officer put me in touch with the Korean Eighth Army safety officer in Seoul who had a balloon-decorator contact.  A few days after the big staff meeting, I was driven to his office in the big Yongsan Eighth Army compound, and his driver then took us both to a large open-air market in the heart of Seoul.  There we made the arrangement with the balloon merchant.  He wanted payment in advance, but our supply officer had given me no money, and I had to assure him that the entire U.S. Army stood behind me.  With the inflation we have had, I can’t recall whether the cost was $100 or $1,000, but it certainly seemed like it was the larger sum to me.  After a couple of weeks, I got the report that the balloons were ready, and I made the trek back to Seoul to get them.  There was only one problem.  The funds to buy them were still not available.  Predictably, the merchant would not part with the balloons upon our promise to pay later. I had to return to the Yongsan compound and virtually wipe out my personal checking account at the U.S. Army bank there to pay for the balloons.  Again, my memory is hazy, but I know that I ended up with only 9,000 balloons instead of the original 10,000 agreed upon.  It might have been because the money for 9,000 was all that I had in my personal account.  All I know is that I delivered them to the supply officer and that was the last I saw of them, and I spent the next few weeks hounding him for reimbursement until he finally came through.  Later, I heard of a GI bringing a balloon back onto our compound with the Korean language “Human Day” inscription on it that he said he had purchased in the local camp-follower village that one sees in the latter photographs at https://blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=pzkpfw3485&logNo=220791399829.

 

The confusion over the intended audience for Hudak’s traffic safety program is brought into relief with the matter of the balloons.  My clear orders were that the inscription was to say “Humanities Day,” but in Korean.  Not only could Americans not read it, but the Koreans who could read it would see nothing there that had anything to do with traffic safety.  To them, it was only a celebration of the human race.

 

Humanities Day Fizzles

 

The parade and the stadium celebration in Inchon came a cropper when the lieutenant in charge of the celebration made the discovery that a track meet was scheduled for the stadium for Hudak’s chosen Saturday.  There was a shady Korean lawyer with whom our command coordinated everything who went by the nickname of “Legal Rhee,” and he had not bothered to tell Col. Hudak about the conflict.  I never had any respect for the guy, but later Col.  Hudak had me write up recommendations for some sort of United Nations award for Rhee, the mayor of Inchon, and the Inchon police commissioner for their work on his traffic safety program.  From what I heard from the Inchon mayor at that NCO club gathering, I had no more respect for him than I did for Rhee, and I didn’t know the Inchon police commissioner from Adam.  Nevertheless, what I was able to manufacture from more or less whole cloth did the trick and an awards ceremony, which I later read about, took place.  Not only was I not invited to the ceremony, but after I had composed the recommendations for the awards, I had heard nothing further from Hudak about it.  The same can be said for the assigned speech extolling “Humanities Day, Concept of a Traffic Safety Program” that I wrote for the colonel.  He seemed to like it, and I’m pretty sure he delivered it somewhere, but I was never told where or when.

 

The Last of Hudak

 

It was around 6 pm on a weekday, and I was seated at what had been Col. Hudak’s desk.  I was the post duty officer for the evening when Hudak rotated back to the States.  The only other person in the large office was the Korean civilian who served as the commanding officer’s driver.  I don’t recall ever having spoken to the man before, but I noticed that he had the laminated “Humanities Day” card clipped to his shirt pocket.  I said to him, “You can take that off now.  He’s gone.”

 

Koreans are called “the Irish of the Orient” for a reason.  Very unlike the Japanese, they are not good at hiding their emotions.  The guy practically threw the card onto the floor, and months of pent-up hostility toward Hudak came pouring out of him.  The main story from him that I recall was his inability to call his family to tell them where he was after hours when he had driven Hudak for an assignation with his Korean mistress in the local village.  It was really unconscionable because everywhere in the local camp-follower village was in easy walking distance. 

 

That abuse-of-authority story matched one I had heard told about Hudak that had occurred before my arrival in Korea.  There was one other full colonel in Ascom City.  He was in charge of the Ascom Depot (pronounced depp-o, not deep-o).  It was not under the 20th GSG, reporting directly to Eighth Army headquarters.  One night he and Hudak were drinking together at the officers’ club.  Closing time had passed, but as long as the two commanding officers were there, the club could not close.   Then one of them proposed a bet.  They would call an alert, with all the officers in the command told to report to the officers’ club.  The one who could produce the most officers would win.  The officers who were out in the village sleeping with their girlfriends would hear nothing of the alert and would miss the muster at the officers’ club.  I don’t think I heard which of the two colonels won the bet.  Hudak’s personal example would not have served him well, though.

 

Thinking of Colonel Hudak and the man who succeeded him, who in a very different way was not a great deal better, and of the stories I tell in “A Condensation of Military Incompetence,” I thought maybe the problem was that Korea was something of a backwater assignment and that all the good officers must be in Vietnam where the war was going on.  Then I heard the story from a West Point graduate, a graduate school classmate, from the early days of the war, which I relate in “A Vietnam Grunt’s ‘Guardian Angel’.” Their small outpost had seen no activity for months, and then one night they came under mortar attack.  They all rushed down to the armory for their weapons and found a lock on the armory that was not supposed to be there.  It turned out that the special services (recreation) officer had put the lock there to protect the volleyball equipment, which he had chosen to store there.  So where was he?  He was out in the local village spending the night with his girlfriend, but no one knew where that was.  Fortunately, the Viet Cong didn’t have this bit of intelligence.  The mortar attack ceased, and my grad school classmate lived to tell me the story.

 

David Martin

August 12, 2025

 

 

 

 

 

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