Caveat: Then and Now

I went on a little exploring adventure today.  I took the subway all the way to 동두천 (Dongducheon), which is probably about 25 km northeast of here, but because the trip has to go through downtown Seoul which is to the southeast, it was probably about  a 40 km journey.  It's not the longest possible journey on the subway by any means, but it is definitely from one end-of-the-line to another.

I didn't necessarily plan it, but it ended up being an appropriate thing to do on New Year's day – this is very close to being the exact 17th anniversary of my first arrival in Korea, and my first exposure to the country was at the U.S. Army's Camp Casey, located in Dongducheon. 

My arrival:  I was exhausted from a never-ending MAC flight from Los Angeles, via Anchorage and Tokyo.  We arrived at around sunset, I recall, at Gimpo airport (now a domestic-only airport – but Incheon didn't exist yet) and were herded onto buses bound for Casey, which was at that time (and still is?) headquarters for the 2nd Infantry Division.

I vividly remember standing in formation in the bitter, bitter cold, until well after midnight, waiting for my name to be called with my unit assignment.  I was in my dress uniform, with no long underwear and no overcoat, and the transition from California's climate to Korea's was stunning.  Finally around 3 am we were settled into overheated, overcrowded barracks, and over the next several days we did lots of "hurry up and wait" until Sergeant Wise came and collected me and took me to what would be my posting here, at Camp Edwards.

But over the next year I made frequent visits to Camp Casey and "TDC" as we called it (TDC=Tongduchon, an obsolete romanization of the same name) – fetching supplies, coming to training sessions, handling bureaucratic things.  It was Division HQ for our isolated support battalion 30 km to the west.  So it was a familiar place, and probably the only "off-post" part of Korea that became truly familiar to me during my time here.

And so on this anniversary, I strolled around TDC in the bitter cold.  The town was vacant because of the holiday, the sun was setting over the rugged silhouettes of the mountains, and the U.S. base was eerily utterly familiar and yet completely unrecognizable in any specifics, at least from the outside.  I lost my interest in the difficult memory quickly, and got back on the subway into Seoul.  There had been no subway from Dongducheon to Seoul when I'd been here in 91.

I'm watching the news in Korean.  It seemed very cold today – the high was around 15 F (-10 C), which is still not even that unusual by Minnesota standards, I admit – but I didn't bring all the layers (sweaters, etc) I would properly use to face a Minnesota winter, either – so I was underdressed.  The bits of ice in the fields and on the streets was beautiful, but there is no snow on the ground (though I did see some on the rice paddies as the train went through Uijeongbu, which is sort of a valley through the high ridge of mountains between Seoul and Dongducheon). 

Part of why I'm here is to "overwrite" those old, unpleasant Army memories, I think.  But one thing seems to repeating itself, at least so far: I'm experiencing a lot of loneliness.  So far I've failed to forge any friendships here – a combination of bad luck in my selection coworkers (in that they are all basically born-agains and it's difficult for me to find commonalities with them, though they are entirely decent people) and my own failure to get out and find alternate social activities.  This needs to change.

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