You've *got* to read the entire article on the Straits Times
website. Truth is even more intensely insane than fiction.
Events began unrolling in January 1968, when a band of 31 highly
trained fighters, sworn to suicide if necessary, set out from their
camp high in the North Korean mountains and began a 60km march to
the centre of downtown Seoul and the Blue House, as South Koreans
of the Republic of Korea (ROK) call their presidential palace. The
men, all in their 20s, were from an assault team of the North
Korean army's 124th Unit.
The unit's recruits were ordered to use South Korean accents and
slang. Training was exceptionally rigorous. They were expected to
be marathon runners, sprinting for miles over icy terrain while
carrying about 30kg of gear. They had to climb a 1,000m mountain in
a snowstorm. To toughen them for the ghastliness of combat, they
were forced to sleep on corpses.
For their final, week-long pre-mission exercise, a provincial
headquarters building had served as the "Blue House". Combat
realism was not lacking: some 500 militiamen pretended to be ROK
defenders in hand-to-hand fighting that became progressively more
violent. About 30 of them were hospitalised.
Just ahead of the commandos' departure, the North Korean Public
Security Ministry's chief intelligence officer, Lieutenant-General
Kim Chung Tae, gathered them for a final meeting and issued a
brief, blunt order: "Go to Seoul and cut off South Korean President
Park's head!"
( Read on to find out what happened to their suicide mission,
and how many people from both sides died from this mission.
http://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/the-assassination-squads-of-korea
)
Subsequently, South Korean President Park Chung Hee hatched his
own revenge plan on April 1968 to send a similar special force
(named Unit 684 for that date) to Pyongyang to avenge the Blue
House attack eye-for-eye, throat-for-throat.
As former drill sergeant Kim Shin Jo, who had helped train the
South Korean commandos for the mission, has put it: "Their goal was
to blast into Kim Il Sung's palace in Pyongyang and chop off his
head."
The South Korean army did not detail its elite commandos for the
mission, unlike the North Koreans. Instead, as the training team's
surviving members tell it, they recruited ex-cons and gangsters off
the streets, telling them they would receive a lot of money and the
chance of an honourable relaunch of their lives if they accepted
the onerous mission.
The South Korean army gathered it's most feared monstrous
military instructors to put Unit 684 through unimaginably brutal
training. Seven of the young conscripts died within the first few
days.
In October 1968, after brutal military exercises that killed
three more conscripts from the unit, P (for Pyongyang)-Day was
declared. The order came from Seoul to set out in rubber boats for
North Korea.
( Read on to find out what happened to their revenge mission,
and how many people from both sides died from this mission.
http://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/the-assassination-squads-of-korea
)
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