South Korea has given the world K-pop, Parasite, and Squid Game. This tiny country grew to become the 10th largest advanced economy in the world, shedding itself of a “developing country” label.

It was not always like this.

Following Japan’s surrender in World War II, the Korean peninsula fell into chaos, politically rudderless and extremely poor; it became a basket case. So much so that when the US Occupation Forces in Japan were tasked to manage the Japanese surrender in the southern part of Korea, almost no one wanted to board the ship to Busan. It was said that the GIs in Japan had three things they dreaded most—diarrhea, gonorrhea, and Korea!

Then the Korean War broke out in June 1950. The war ended in 1953 with an armistice, not a peace treaty, that separated North and South Korea along a four-kilometer buffer called the DMZ.

I grew up in post-war South Korea, hearing so many stories about the war, mostly tragic and heart wrenching, from parents, relatives, and teachers. I had nightmares of being chased by North Korean soldiers. I remember my father, then in the police, managed the gathering of unexploded bombs and rockets from battlefields, and organized them to blow off in a valley. I could hear the distant but loud bangs of the explosions. I was afraid of the sound of gunshots, and of the sunglass wearing hunters from the cities with their hunting dogs.

On January 21, 1968, South Korea awakened to the sound of gunfighting near the Blue House, the residence of South Korean president Park Chung-Hee. One of the raiders, a North Korean Army officer, captured during the gunfight, told the nation on television that his mission was to cut off the head of Park Chung-hee. It was the most audacious raid on the South by North Korea since the Korean War. Three days later, the USS Pueblo and her 82-member crew were captured by the North Korean navy, followed a week later by the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. What was going on?

I was in high school, preparing for the university entrance examination scheduled for later that year. The Blue House raid changed everything. We were forced to attend military drills at school. Discharged enlisted men were required to attend training sessions at the reserve military facilities until the age of 35. I served in the ROK Army as a ROTC officer. After being discharged from active duty, we officers were required to serve in the civil defense force until the age of 45.

With the passage of time, the vivid memory of the Blue House Raid faded into history, and the country just got on with living. I moved to Australia in the early 1980s with my family.

In April 2017, I received a call in Seoul from Roger Shepherd of Hike Korea, a Kiwi mountain guide living in South Korea. I had been back in South Korea on a 10-year stint on business and was preparing to return to Australia. I had worked with Roger previously, translating his adventure essays on mountains in North Korea.

He said he was guiding a US couple, a Robert Perron and his girlfriend, through the southern mountains, and asked if I would like to join their Paju trip north of Seoul to assist Robert with translation and with his research for a novel about the Blue House raid he was working on.

The mention of the Blue House raid brought memories of that era flooding back. How shocked and bewildered we were, and since then, how the all-officer North Korean raiders have become the stuff of legend. To my knowledge, no one had ever written a book about the Blue House raid, let alone a novel. I immediately agreed to join his research trip.

What Robert was looking for was clear; he wanted to retrace the working grounds where he served in 1968 for the US Army, the military camptowns of Changpa-ri and Nullo-ri, the North Korean raiders’ infiltration routes, the area where his unit encountered the North Korean commandos trying to flee back to the North, and to talk to local people who remembered those cold January days in 1968 and life under North Korean occupation and evacuations during the Korean War in 1950.

The highlights of the research trip were crossing the Imjin River into the restricted area adjoining the DMZ to visit the site of Camp Wally where Robert worked out of for a few months in 1968, visiting a small park with lifelike statues of the Blue House raiders infiltrating through the DMZ, and interviewing Woo Seongjae who was out cutting wood in January 1968, taken prisoner by the Blue House raiding party, and managed to escape with his life, along with three cousins. 

I am glad I was able to help Robert with his research, as his book The Blue House Raid tells great stories based on accurate historical and geographical facts. The place names in the novel are real, and those can be looked up on Google Maps, for example, which would help readers follow the story with picture-perfect clarity.

I was impressed by the believable characters Robert warmly cast in The Blue House Raid. The North Korean raider lieutenant Pak Jun-seok, the antagonist sergeant Lorne Boyle from warm Alabama, Lorne’s yobo Lee Min-hee and her fellow working girls, platoon sergeant Priestly, lieutenant De Groot from New York but not the city, Lorne’s lunatic squad members, the Korean soldier augmented to his unit PFC Kim Yeong-su, and the military brass.

Whilst North Korean commandos prime themselves for an attack on the Blue House through a harsh training regimen and political indoctrination, Lorne’s unit goes through mind-numbing DMZ patrol duties and pointless field exercises, and searches for love in the nearby village of Changpa-ri. All leads to a tragic and inevitable confrontation, but Robert has skillfully structured the story lines such that they are tension packed and gripping.

The GIs’ relationship with the local people, especially the working girls, in the military camptowns of Changpa-ri and Nullo-ri are so familiar and relatable to me, as I had a couple of high school classmates whose fathers were American GIs, and heard how the frontier camptown of Changpa-ri was full of working girls and of people swarming to buy the American goods the GIs brought out from their camps. At its heyday, Changpa-ri had more than 30,000 residents, most of them working girls, and was the biggest population center in the Paju area. It was a boom time in the frontier town. Locals converted their barns and stables into hooches. Korean singers and comedians came to entertain the working girls.

The Blue House Raid also shows clearly how the military works on both sides of the divide, through Robert’s command of the situation on the ground, the technical aspect of the military equipment and operations, and the differing motivations of various combatants, especially those in the chain of command, which I find revealing.

My assistance with Robert’s book project led me to translate it into Korean.

Reading the English version of The Blue House Raid was easy enough, as the stories were so well-structured and flew by with precise and clear prose. Translating the book into the Korean language was a little more challenging as I needed not only to convey the meanings with the right Korean words but also to ensure the nuances and hidden meanings were not lost in translation as much as possible. It was fun, though, working through the American slang, military jargon, swear words, jokes, expressions, sayings, and the dynamics between soldiers from different parts of the US. None of these would have been possible without the able help of Robert, who was available online on the opposite side of the world throughout the translation process. Working through the Covid-19 lockdown periods of 2020, the Korean version was published in December 2020.

If Minari is an American movie about a Korean American family struggling to settle in America, The Blue House Raid is an American novel about Americans and Koreans who struggled to survive the war and poverty in 1960s Korea. This is a compelling read and I would highly recommend it.