Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (10 page)

Anyway, the student radicals discovered a locked ballot box
under a stack of bread and milk in a truck leaving the Kuro gu
compound. Local officials gave some lame excuse about how the
ballot box had to go to a special vote-counting place, and how the
bread and milk truck just happened to be headed that way, and how
they'd covered the ballot box to keep the votes from getting
cold. . . . The students were having none of it. They invaded the
five-story Kuro gu building, took the local officials hostage and
called for one of those massive violent student demonstrations for
which Korea is justly famous.

The way famous, massive, violent Korean student demonstrations work is that the students get a sound truck, turn the volume
up to Motley Crue and take turns screaming at themselves. Violent
student demonstrators sit around cross-legged in an appreciative
half circle and, between screams, holler "Dok chore tado! Dok chae
tado! Dok chae tado!" which means "Smash the dictatorship." The
chant is punctuated with unnerving, black-shirtish synchronized
karate chops.

This can go on for days, and at Kuro it did.

Meanwhile, extra-violent student demonstrators were breaking paving stones into handy projectiles, filling soju rice-winebottle kerosene bombs, building desk-and-filing-cabinet barricades in the Kuro gu doorways and pulling apart some nearby
scaffolding to make quarterstaves out of iron pipe. A line of
command had been created, and all defense preparations were
taking place behind a row of stick-wielding young malcontents.

Lack of press freedom in Korea is one of the big student
gripes. But the students don't like actual reporters any better than
the government does, at least not American reporters. The radicals-in counterfeit New Balance shoes, Levi's knockoffs and
unlicensed Madonna T-shirts-are much given to denouncing
American dominance of Korean culture. It took a lot of arguing to
get past these ding-dongs. One pair, a dog-faced, grousing fat girl
in glasses and a weedy, mouthy, fever-eyed boy, were almost as obnoxious as my girlfriend and I were twenty years ago at the march
on the Pentagon. However, they had some oddly Korean priorities.
"Don't you step on bushes!" shouted the fat girl as I made my way
into the building that they were tearing to shreds.

Inside, firebombs were parked neatly in crates, stones were
gathered in tidy piles, more lengths of pipe were laid in evenly
spaced rows to booby-trap the stairs, and additional barricades
were being carefully constructed on the landings.

Looking down from the roof, I saw little groups of students
break away from the chanting and form themselves into squads,
squatting in formation. They dok chore tadoed for a while then
quick-marched to the front lines around the Kuro gu compound,
where each was given an assigned position and his own firebomb to
sit patiently beside. Demonstrators continued to arrive, bringing
boxes of food, fruit juice and cigarettes.

You had to admire the students' industry and organization, if
not their common sense. The Kuro gu building faced a spikefenced courtyard with only one narrow gate to the street. There was
no way out the back of the place except through the upper-story
windows or off the roof. And right next door, completely overshadowing the scene, was a huge police station. Four thousand
policemen gathered there that evening, in their distinctive Darth
Vader outfits-black gas masks, Nazi helmets and stiff olive-drab
pants and jackets stuffed with protective padding.

The government assault came on Friday morning, two days
after the election. It was well under way by the time I arrived at
eight A. M. You go to cover a Korean riot story looking more like a
Martian than a Woodward or a Bernstein. You wear heavy clothes
for protection from the cold and rocks, good running shoes, a hard
hat or motorcycle helmet marked PRESS in English and Korean,
and the best gas mask you can find on the black market. (It's illegal
for civilians to buy them in Korea.)

Korean riot police use the pepper gas developed during the
Vietnam War, which is fast becoming a favorite with busy dictators
everywhere. I'd been hit with the stuff before, in Panama, but the
Koreans lay it on in lavish doses, until the air is a vanilla
milkshake of minuscule caustic particles. Pepper gas can raise blisters on exposed skin. Any contact with a mucous membrane
produces the same sensation as probing a canker sore with a hot
sewing needle. The tiniest amount in your eyes and your eyelids
lock shut in blind agony. Breathing it is like inhaling fish bones,
and the curl-up-and-die cough quickly turns to vomiting. Pepper
gas is probably the only thing on earth more powerful than kimchi.

There was street fighting going on all around Kuro gu, in an
orderly way, of course. First the Darth Vader cops form a line with
shields interlocked. Then the students run up and throw firebombs
at them. The police respond with a volley of tear-gas rifle grenades.
The students throw stones. The police fire tear gas again and then
charge.

The police hardly ever catch a student. That would disturb the
kibun of the set-piece battle. Instead, there's a squad of volunteers
from the police ranks called "grabbers." The grabbers dress in
down-filled L.L. Bean-type parkas, jeans, Nikes and white motorcycle helmets. They carry hippie-tourist-style canvas shoulder
bags filled with tear-gas grenades, and swing long batons that look
like hiking staffs. Their jackets are all in pleasant shades of beige
and baby blue, color coordinated by squadrons. With gas masks in
place, the grabbers look like a bunch of mentally unbalanced freelance writers for Outside magazine.

The grabbers huddle behind the riot police. As soon as the
students break ranks, the grabbers spring out and do their grabbing, beating the shit out of anyone they lay hands on. The beaten
students are then led away. Student demonstrators are not often
formally arrested in Korea. They are just "led away." What happens
to them next is, I hear, even less fun than getting caught in a Kim
Dae Jung rally.

Being out in no-man's-land between the students and the
police isn't much fun either. Rifle grenades were flying through the
air, and stones were racketing on the top of my hard hat; plus there
was this creepy xxx video rubber-fetish thing all over my face. No
gas mask is fully effective against the pepper-gas clouds, and mine
looked as if it dated back to the Crimean War. Inside it, I was
coughing and weeping and thoroughly panicked, and outside it,
barely visible through the scratched and fogged-over eyepieces,
was the world's only mayhem with choreography. I had stumbled onstage in midperformance of some over-enthusiastic Asian production of West Side Story.

Back at Kuro gu itself, the police had retaken the courtyard
and first four stories of the building, but the students were still
holding the top floor and roof.

The students don't wear gas masks. They put on those little
Dr. Dan and Nurse Nancy cotton face things, and they smear
toothpaste on their skin, but otherwise they riot unprotected. The
police in the courtyard were firing salvos of gas grenades, twenty at
a time, into the fifth-floor windows and onto the roof. The gas bursts
looked like albino fireworks. The police also have armored cars
with gun turrets that shoot small tear-gas cannisters at hundreds of
rounds a minute. Two of these had been set in flanking positions
and were raking the rooftop. That the students could even stand in
this maelstrom was a testament to Koreanness. But they were not
only standing; they were fighting like sons of bitches.

The barricades in the stairwells had been set on fire, and
columns of ash were rising above the building. I could see blurred
hand-to-hand action inside as windows shattered and pipes and
batons flashed. The students were raining everything they could lift
on the police. The "Irish confetti" was dancing off upraised shields
and bouncing and ricocheting all around in the courtyard. Two fire
trucks had been brought through the gate, and their extension
ladders were thrust as near to the roof as even a Korean would dare.

A couple of overbrave firemen went scurrying topside in a
smoke of stones. The adrenaline-zanied kids fended off water
blasts with their protest placards and with ordinary umbrellas, the
fabric tearing from the spokes in seconds. A stray gas grenade
slammed into one of the extension ladders, inspiring vivid gestures
from the fireman to his colleagues below.

The top of the otherwise modern cement Kuro gu office was
fringed, Burger King fashion, with a mansard roof of traditional
tiles. When the students ran out of stones and bottles, they began
pulling loose these fat parentheses of baked clay and sailing them
out over the courtyard. Weighing ten pounds apiece and coming
from fifty feet in the air, they had the impact of small mortar shells.
If you kept your eye on the trajectories, you could move out of the
way in time. But to stop watching the sky for even ten seconds was curtains. I saw six or seven cops carried away, heads lolling and
blood running out from under their helmets. I turned a shoulder to
the building to write that in my notebook, and half a tile flew past
me so close I felt the wind through the fly of my 501s. If I'd been
standing one inch to the south, I'd be writing this in soprano.

About 8:45 the police cleared the top floor and the grabbersor "white-skull police," as the students call them-appeared at the
windows waving victoriously. But the cops below were slow on the
uptake, and the grabbers got hit with another round of gas.

The students on the roof kept at it. One wild young fool spent
the entire battle balanced on the roof tiles, dancing back and forth,
chased by streams of water from the fire hoses and ducking the gas
grenades fired at his head. Every time a grenade missed he'd bow
grandly to the police. It's not enough that these guys are better than
we are at making cars, ships, TVs, stereos, cameras, computers,
steel and binoculars; now they're building a better Berkeley and
Kent State.

The final assault came about nine A. M. There was one double
door to the roof, and only four grabbers could get through it at a
time. Photographer Tony Suau, with whom I'd covered the AquinoMarcos election mess, was standing right behind the first wave. He
said the grabbers were obviously scared. And the first four who
charged out were flung back inside, bruised and bleeding. But the
grabbers persisted, four by four, until they secured the doorway.
Then a hundred of them pushed outside.

From the ground it was a Punch-and-Judy show. The downbulked grabbers in their helmets and masks were visible only from
the chest up behind the parapets. They were thrashing maniacally
with their long batons. You could tell when they got a student
down-suddenly a stick would be moving in a single arc with
burlesque speed: wack-a-wack-a-wack-a-wack-a-wack. I saw the
bowing kid pulled from his perch and given the Mrs. Punch
treatment.

One section of the roof was raised half a story above the other.
A dozen determined students held out here, throwing folding
chairs, bricks and roof tiles. For a few last seconds their silhouettes
were etched in heroic silliness against the sky.

The paved Kuro gu courtyard had been turned into a gravel patch by the battle. Inside the building the air was a mud of smoke
and gas. Fires were still burning in some corners, and water from
the fire hoses ran in rivulets down the stairs. The police were
making the students carry out their wounded. Several were unconscious, and one girl, wrapped in a blanket, had a hand's breadth of
skull laid open and a bad, bloodless look to her face.

The students were swollen and red from the gas. They stumbled around, dazed and stupid. The cops were gathering them in
Kuro gu's larger rooms, making them prostrate themselves, obeisant like Moslems in prayer but more tightly hunched-children
trying to make themselves disappear. These balled-up figures were
packed into perfect squares of one hundred. The grabbers strolled
over every now and then and gave the kids a few kicks for good
measure.

The building had been fought over inch by inch. Every stick
of furniture was destroyed, every breakable thing was broken. This
was Korea, however-the bathrooms were still spotless.

About one hundred hostages, including several children, were
released. They looked thoroughly sick. Nobody seemed interested
in them. (According to the next day's official report, twenty-four
policemen and forty students were seriously injured. One thousand
and five students and student-allied radicals were "led away.")

The captured students were made to "elephant walk" down
the stairs and into the courtyard, bodies bowed double, one hand
on the waistband of the student ahead. Kicks and swats hurried
them along. I noticed the dog-faced girl stumbling by, with glasses
missing and a big shiner.

Then the mommy riot began. A dozen middle-aged women
arrived at the police lines. They shoved their plump bodies against
the riot shields and screeched, "You murderers!" and "Where is my
son?!" and "I hate this country!" Then they fell into brief faints,
tore their hair, wept, screeched some more and went into other
histrionics-enough for a French actress on a farewell tour. This is
better than my mother would have behaved. She would have been
there yelling, "Keep the bum!"

That night, the journalists who'd covered the Kuro gu riothaving showered and dumped our gas-soaked clothing in hotel hallways-had a long, well-lubricated dinner. Between the blowing
of gas-scalded noses and the wiping of gas-curried eyes, we discussed Korean democracy. As I recall, the discussion went something like this:

"What the fuck?"

"Beats the shit out of me."

"Yo, waitress, more whiskey."

When the dinner was over, I went with two photographers,
Greg Davis and Tom Haley, for a little constitutional up the hill to
Myongdong Cathedral, a few blocks from the restaurant. About a
hundred students with the usual rock piles and firebombs were
sitting-in up there for no reason anyone was very clear about.