Eye on Korea: An Insider Account of Korean-American Relations (review)

In 1963 a green second lieutenant from Oklahoma arrived in the poor and barely stable Republic of Korea. Twenty-seven years later, fluent in Korean and fully conversant with the ways of its senior politicians and military men, he left the prosperous country as a full colonel, "the U.S. Army's first fully trained and experienced Korea specialist" (p. vii). This book is his account of a career in civil-military relations, within and between Korea and America. Editor Stueck helped the author turn what was originally written for a popular Korean audience into a thoughtful reflection on American-Korean relations.

Although Young describes events from the infamous 1976 North Korean ax murders of American soldiers in the Demilitarized Zone to his dealings with North Koreans in Pyongyang and New York in the 1990s, he is at his best when probing tense relations with South Korea's military rulers. In 1975 the problem was President Park Chung Hee's moves toward developing nuclear weapons; Young lauds former Ambassador Phillip Habib for tough talk that led Park to abandon so risky a policy. In the later 1970s, the difficulty was Washington's "ill-advised" proposal to withdraw American forces from Korea. Young shows how a cabal of senior American generals, Carter's tense 1978 meeting with Park, and the defection of senior diplomats left the president alone and his Korean policy a shambles. He is at his critical best in probing American officials' failure to do more to prevent, to recognize the moral as well as the political significance of, and then to distance themselves from, ROK special forces' slaughter of civilians at Kwangju in May 1980.

This book speaks to a broader audience than its narrow subject might suggest. Young provides a rare and eminently readable account of what the life of a military area specialist and attaché, in the country of an important ally during and beyond the Cold War, was like. His discreet but firm criticism of his sometime superiors in Korea shows how systemic bureaucratic warfare in Seoul and Washington sapped their strength and clouded their judgment. But Young's most important and timely contribution may be his exposé of the American military's ongoing cross-cultural ignorance. The Army has fewer Korean area specialist officers today than when he retired nearly fifteen years ago; and neither Navy nor Air Force have career tracks to develop linguistically competent and cross-culturally savvy officers. The costs of such ignorance, hidden below the surface of events when Young served in Korea, glare at us today in the headlines from Iraq.