The ache of parting was still gnawing at my belly like a peptic ulcer when Blackie picked me up at the airfield in a jeep. "My goodness, Colonel, I'm relieved to see you." "Why? What gives? I'm on time." "Yes sir, but the operation has been advanced, you see. We leave for Japan in the morning." "In the morning? Oh, no!" I snorted in disgust. "Isn't that typical." * * * * * The week after our landing in Japan, we moved out again with full GI equipment. Our enemy clothing and arms went along in sealed wooden boxes as cargo, not to be opened again until D-day. Ostensibly, we were replacements for the Korean Military Advisory Group on our way to South Korea. We landed at Kimpo Air Base, near Seoul and then moved out by truck up the road past Uijongbu into the wooded hills south of the defense line near Kumwha. In the twelve years since I had come down that road for the last time, the mud and thatched villages had been rebuilt. Now the measlepox had ravaged, once again, the stoical population. Only a few were left, the few who perhaps had fled to the mountains and stayed there starving but afraid until the pestilence had killed and passed on. So it was back to a familiar land I came--a land of silent hills; of hardwood trees standing bare and cold above the brown earth and the dead brown leaves of the Kudzu vine; a land of little streams that thawed in the sheltered spots as the February sun rose higher in the cold dry air. We trained over the steep hills, marching up faint trails where the woodcutters once had gone. In all that wild land there was silence--the silence of the four-footed animals who, unknown to us except by some chance meeting, watched our slow approach. The long nights shortened into March and then through April. Still we waited. Rains had come now, the spring rains, forecasting the steamy monsoon of July. In the steep valleys grass showed green and the maroon-petalled anemones had already conceived. At last the cherries were in bloom. It was time to go. The troop-carrying convertiplane dropped vertically down on the freshly prepared landing strip shortly after dark. As soon as we were loaded it took off, wavering slightly under the hammering blast of the jet engines, and then went up, sidling over the dark trees that encircled the strip, and drifting down the valley like one of their lately fallen leaves. It swung west to go out over the Yellow Sea and then circle back into North Korea. Our rendezvous was farther to the east in the wild country close to the railway that ran up the east coast from Wonsan to Hungnam. Perhaps we could lose the radar in those steep valleys. It would have been suicide to attempt it from the east, across the Sea of Japan, right into the Siberian tiger's mouth. * * * * *