Korea Memoir

Robert Egan could have been a roofing contractor, like his father. Instead, he opened a barbecue restaurant. His interest in the search for Vietnam-era POWs led to an introduction to North Korean officials desperate to improve relations with the United States. So Egan turned his restaurant into Camp David, with pork ribs.

One month after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, when President John F. Kennedy pressed Congress about America’s “urgent national needs”, he named expanding US special operations forces along with putting a man on the moon. Captain William Hamilton was the officer tasked with creating the finest unconventional warriors ever seen. Merging his own experience commanding Navy Underwater Demolition Teams with expertise from Army Special Forces and the CIA, and working with his subordinate, Roy Boehm, he cast the mold for sea-, air-, and land-dispatched night fighters.

Geography dealt Korea a fateful role. Sandwiched between China and Japan, and within easy reach of Russia, Korea has suffered five major foreign occupations-by China, Mongolia, Japan, and after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union. It was in that tiny peninsula I was born when Korea was under the heel of Japan, when we were forced to take Japanese names and speak Japanese. With the end of World War II came the liberation, which was soon followed by the Korean War.

This is the true story of a young dancer, whose naïve dream of working in the Far East turns into a nightmare. She finds herself in a plethora of situations, which she is ill-equipped to deal with. Dancing her way across South Korea with two friends, she is propositioned by the Mafia, turned away by the British Embassy, caught in a student riot, and taken to Korean brothels.