Recalling the Blue House raid of 1968

 

Recently I met an old friend, Bruce Snow, who arrived in Korea a month before me in 1965. We talked of old times in Korea and recalled the perilous night in January 1968, when our house and the neighborhood in Cheongun-dong was shook by gunfire and night-time flares that lit up the night sky like it was day. It was the North Korean raid on the Blue House on Jan. 21, 1968.

I thought it was a memorable event sufficient to warrant making a video on my YouTube channel and I soon discovered that the story has two parts — the telling of what happened on that day and the reaction to telling the story today.

Part one — it was around 10 in the evening. We were having some popcorn and getting ready to turn in when we heard the pop pop pop of gunfire and the ratatatat of machine gun fire. We went outside to see what was going on, and suddenly, the night sky was lit up with flares that made it possible to see things as if it were midday.

My friend Bruce recalled that day remembering he was one of our drivers, and he was commissioned to go pick up the daughter of our director, a girl about 10, who had been playing at a friend’s house, not far from ours. Bruce drove the car to go pick her up when, on the return, the shooting broke out. He had to get back home but ran into a police barricade that was set up to keep people out of our neighborhood where the shooting was taking place.

Here, we must note that our place in Cheongun-dong was across a little valley from the Blue House, the residence of South Korea’s president, at that time, Park Chung-hee. We first assumed that this was some sort of exercise. In those days, we had air raid drills from time to time, and if you were on the streets or on a bus, you’d have to take shelter in an underground place till the drill was over. So, we were aware of national security issues and safe practices and initially assumed that we were in the middle of some kind of military exercise.

We climbed up on the roof of the building to see what was going on. As I remember, since I had already been in the National Guard and had gone through basic training, I realized that we not only could hear the machine gun firing, but I saw the tracers — every fourth bullet had some chemical on it that would light up when it flew through the air. If you see tracers, you realize that they are not shooting blanks. This was no exercise. This was real.

Bruce, for his part, was stuck in the car at the police barricade and couldn’t get home, but he chuckled as he related how clever he was to know some back streets that would get him past the barricade and safely home. Our compound though, had a large gate at the bottom of the hill that was our driveway. Bruce and his friend Rex were tasked to go down the hill and lock the gate. As they did so, they saw an armed soldier — the North Koreans were wearing South Korean uniforms — firing his weapon. They locked the gate without getting shot, but our neighbor, two doors down, was not as lucky. A 65-year-old woman opened her gate to see what was going on when a soldier came by — he shot and killed her in the doorway of her own home. Two doors down!

They killed all the North Korean agents but two. One died when he pulled a hand grenade off the belt of a South Korean soldier, pulled the pin and dropped it on the floor to kill everyone in the room. But a savvy South Korean soldier tackled him and threw him onto the ticking grenade, killing the North Korean, but saving everyone in the room.

The other survived and eventually “turned” and became a South Korean citizen of some stature and a Christian minister. I visited him at his church ten years ago and video taped an interview with him for a documentary I was working on. He is alive in his 80s today.

Part two — the reaction to telling the story today. I was surprised to read the comments on my YouTube channel. The story divides people today. One comment said that only a foreigner could tell that story today — that South Koreans don’t want to hear the stories of North Korean provocations. Others wrote the opposite point of view, that they were pleased to see a reminder of the dangers of North Korea.

Sadly, Korea remains divided today. In more ways than one.

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is a professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.