"In the morning? Oh, no!" I snorted in disgust. "Isn't that typical."
The week after our landing in Japan, we moved out again with full GI equipment. Our enemy clothing and arms went along in sealed wooden boxes as cargo, not to be opened again until D-day. Ostensibly, we were replacements for the Korean Military Advisory Group on our way to South Korea. We landed at Kimpo Air Base, near Seoul and then moved out by truck up the road past Uijongbu into the wooded hills south of the defense line near Kumwha. In the twelve years since I had come down that road for the last time, the mud and thatched villages had been rebuilt. Now the measlepox had ravaged, once again, the stoical population. Only a few were left, the few who perhaps had fled to the mountains and stayed there starving but afraid until the pestilence had killed and passed on. So it was back to a familiar land I came—a land of silent hills; of hardwood trees standing bare and cold above the brown earth and the dead brown leaves of the Kudzu vine; a land of little streams that thawed in the sheltered spots as the February sun rose higher in the cold dry air.
We trained over the steep hills, marching up faint trails where the woodcutters once had gone. In all that wild land there was silence—the silence of the four-footed animals who, unknown to us except by some chance meeting, watched our slow approach. The long nights shortened into March and then through April. Still we waited. Rains had come now, the spring rains, forecasting the steamy monsoon of July. In the steep valleys grass showed green and the maroon-petalled anemones had already conceived. At last the cherries were in bloom. It was time to go.
The troop-carrying convertiplane dropped vertically down on the freshly prepared landing strip shortly after dark. As soon as we were loaded it took off, wavering slightly under the hammering blast of the jet engines, and then went up, sidling over the dark trees that encircled the strip, and drifting down the valley like one of their lately fallen leaves. It swung west to go out over the Yellow Sea and then circle back into North Korea. Our rendezvous was farther to the east in the wild country close to the railway that ran up the east coast from Wonsan to Hungnam. Perhaps we could lose the radar in those steep valleys. It would have been suicide to attempt it from the east, across the Sea of Japan, right into the Siberian tiger's mouth.
An hour later we were approaching the drop zone. There would be a moon before midnight to help us make contact, but now it was dark, better for concealment but difficult for recognition of our landing area. The plane slowed, the red light came on. The pilot must have picked up the signal from our agent.
"Get ready!" I shouted. The men shifted their packs and moved their feet to get the weight distributed.
"Stand up! Hook up! Check your equipment!" One by one I called the time-honored signals, the ritual so necessary before the jump. By now the air crew had the door open and I looked out. Even with my eyes accustomed to the darkness I could see little but the dark mass of hills below us and the rough black line where they met the horizon. Above, the stars were bright. To the east a faint paleness marked where the moon was hiding. I looked down again and now a tiny green light winked up at me. It was the dropzone and the all-clear signal. The aeroplane passed on and then came back to make its run.
"Stand in the door!" I yelled. My hand holding the static line shook slightly and my thigh muscles were tight with cold and adrenalin.