Since the Department of Commerce office was closed on every Sunday, my buddy Fred and I (we were both corporals at the time) would often spend hours taking a jeep into the mountains, loaded down with candies and chocolate for the children in the hundreds of small villages that dotted the landscape. We always got a hero’s reception when we appeared, and it was difficult to part from them.

One day we heard that on one of the following Sundays, there would be a big celebration in Inchon for the one-year anniversary of the reopening of the Inchon Locomotive Works, a major industrial enterprise.

The guest of honor would be Syngman Rhee, who is to the Koreans what George Washington is to the US. He would eventually become Korea’s first president. He was going to address the assembled guests who would include high-ranking civilians from the US and Korea, as well as many generals and colonels.

They were asking for volunteers to chauffeur the sedans transporting the guests from Seoul to Inchon. Although neither of us had ever driven an army sedan, we decided that it sounded like a good way to spend a Sunday. We both volunteered, and on the designated Sunday, picked up our load of guests.

We traveled in a convoy, under guard front and rear, and when we arrived in Inchon, we were directed to the factory where we dropped off our passengers. We were then taken by the guards to a motor pool (parking lot) and were told to be ready in about four hours to pick up our passengers again.

We stood on the side of the road together with tens of thousands of Koreans, awaiting the arrival of Syngman Rhee. When his motorcade finally arrived and drove past, the Koreans bent at their waist, up and down, shouting “Banzai, Banzai.”

Four hours was a long time to wait doing nothing. The other drivers left the motor pool and found themselves a bar to wile the time away. That left Fred and me looking at each other, wondering what to do. We almost simultaneously had the same thought—go to the factory and see what was going on.

When we got there, Syngman Rhee was addressing the crowd, and since he was speaking in Korean, very few Americans guests understood anything. We could not get very close but saw him from far away as a small white-haired dot in the crowd.

We walked around a little (we certainly were not supposed to be there) and discovered a large room that had been set up and decorated for a reception. With a few questions, we found out that there would be a reception line of the 15 to 20 highest-ranking guests, and that Syngman Rhee would come in, be introduced, and shake hands with everyone. At least that was what had been planned. But they had not reckoned with the presence of two corporals.

We were still standing near the entrance to the reception room, when, through another door, the guests entered and started forming a reception line along the wall, with the lowest rank nearest to the door (where the two corporals stood) and the highest rank down the line. It was only a few minutes later that we heard a commotion behind us, and there came Syngman Rhee toward the door where the two corporals were still hanging around.

He came to Fred, reached out his hand, as if that was the beginning of the reception line, and Fred shook it. Syngman Rhee stepped to the right, in front of me and I also shook his hand. By that time, he was past the door entrance and had a full view of what lay ahead. He must have decided that it was too much hand shaking, and marched into the room, waving to the reception line but not shaking a single additional other hand. The two corporals, who had no business being there in the first place, were the only ones honored with a handshake. We decided that we had pushed our luck far enough and high-tailed it out of there.

After a while, when it looked like the celebration was coming to an end, we returned to the motor pool since we did not want to be caught having left our cars. Eventually the guards picked us up again and took us back to the factory to pick up our passengers.

We naturally assumed that the convoy would immediately go back to Seoul since it was now early evening. Instead, the guards (who were MPs) took the whole convoy past a series of flashing red lights, into the red-light district, which was off-limits to all military personnel. Here we were, entering the red-light district under direction of MPs with a load full of Americans in the cars. I was already mulling over in my mind how I was going to explain to my parents the letter they would receive from jail, informing them that I had been arrested in the red-light district.

Something very interesting was bound to happen, and it did.

After a few turns, we were stopped at a building, decorated with many lights. The MP, who opened the car door for the passengers, told us that this was a geisha house. A geisha house, we had been told, in common soldier language was a house of prostitution. We would shortly find out how totally incorrect that was.

(To be continued next week)

By Norbert Strauss