What worried me the most, though, was what would happen when the South Koreans came to a decision about how to handle us. The Koreans, like most Asians, aren’t known for speedy decisions, because they have to go through that mutual consultation crap that’s a cultural imperative for them.

They can surprise you, though. And I wasn’t all that optimistic about how that might turn out. The city of Seoul has something like one hundred thousand riot police, as well as fleets of gray, caged buses parked at strategic locations around the city. And they have radios, and when there’s the first sign of trouble they send up smoke signals and converge with lightning speed on a single point. Katherine had 620 unarmed civilians, about half of whom were women, although some looked fit enough to fend for themselves.

Anyway, I was still calculating the odds of disaster when six of those big caged gray buses came careening down the road from the Itaewon district. And tucked right in the middle of them were two U.S. Army humvees and a black Kia sedan, no doubt containing the hanging judge himself, Barry Carruthers.

The first bus kept moving toward us, although it slowed down considerably, and I could see a Korean in the front hollering something into a radio, no doubt asking for instructions. Apparently he got some, because he turned and yelled at the driver, and the vehicle ground noisily to a halt. Another long minute passed as the guy with the radio kept yipping at somebody.

Katherine breathlessly asked me what was going on. Like I should know. Face it, she had a great deal more experience on this end of protests than I did. She’d probably been in dozens of them, whereas I was a stone-cold virgin.

Then the door of the first bus swung open and riot policemen poured out. A few seconds later the other five buses emptied, until there were what seemed to be two hundred or so blue-uniformed troops, pulling down their riot visors, forming into lines, stretching their muscles, and moving toward us.

As this was occurring a number of blue-and-white Korean police cars began arriving at the scene. Within two minutes, there were about fifteen or twenty cars skewed at various angles across the road. Several dozen policemen were milling around, scratching their heads and wondering what to do.

Katherine had to find the scene unnerving, but she coolly lifted up her megaphone and yelled, “This is a peaceful gathering. We have the authorization of your city mayor to be here. We want no trouble.”

I turned and said, “Think they speak English?”

She chuckled and lifted up her megaphone again. “I repeat, this is a peaceful demonstration.”

I examined the riot police, and it seemed they either didn’t hear her, or comprehend her, or care. They were in a rough semblance of ranks. They began moving steadily toward us, taking two measured steps at a time, straightening their lines, and getting their riot shields positioned into a straight wall. I could hear their officers yelling instructions. I wished I could understand Korean and knew what they were saying.

I looked at Katherine, and she was staring straight at them, but she calmly said, “It’s okay. It’s a standard technique. They’ll keep moving toward us until they get a few feet away. It’s called the bluff and run. They bluff, we run.”

I glanced behind me at the other protesters. Nobody seemed alarmed. Most of these folks were veterans, I guessed. They knew the game. But what if they were wrong? What if the name of this tactic was run and crunch? After all, this was a different country. Maybe American riot-control tactics hadn’t traveled this far.

As for me, I was scared as hell. I’m a soldier and I’ve been in battle a few times, but in battle I was always at least as well armed as the guy I was fighting, so the odds were squared up. Besides, there’s something grim and terrifying in watching all these highly disciplined, robotic-looking creatures moving relentlessly toward you. You can see their batons peeking over their shields, and you get this ugly mental picture of one of those things cracking the top of your skull a few times.

Soon the line was twenty yards ahead of us, then fifteen, then ten, and still they kept right on coming, inexorably – two steps, stop; two steps, stop. When they were only about five feet away, just as Katherine predicted, they halted.

A few newspeople dashed into the narrow space between us and began lying on the ground, taking their camera and film shots from horizontal positions, I guess thinking they could win an Oscar, or a Tony, or a Nobel, or a Pulitzer, or whatever asinine award you get for doing something spectacularly stupid and having visual evidence to prove it.

Katherine stood steady, but I could hear her drawing deep breaths to control her nerves. I could also hear my own heart beating furiously.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, there was a dull pop behind me. Almost immediately, I heard a bunch more shots, the sounds of a weapon shooting quickly, only this racket was coming from somewhere in front of me. And all hell broke loose. People were diving for the ground and screaming, and it wasn’t just the protesters, either, but the riot policemen as well.

I suddenly got knocked forward, right into the ranks of the riot police. I stuck my head up and looked around to see who was shooting. I spotted one man on the hill pointing a weapon – it looked like an M16 – but I heard shots coming from somewhere else, too; somewhere off to my left, I was pretty sure.

The man I’d seen was a South Korean policeman.

I started shoving aside everybody in my path and working my way to the edge of the crowd. Two protesters right in front of me went down with sprays of blood flying from their chests and heads. I saw a riot baton on the ground, bent over, picked it up, then used it to bash my way through the crowd.

Ten feet in front of me, I saw another South Korean policeman lying flat on the ground. I swung my baton and gently whacked him on the back of the head, enough to stun him, then I stooped over and pulled his pistol out of his holster. His hands had automatically reached up to protect his head, so he didn’t put up a fight.

It took only seconds before I was at the edge of the throng and running toward the gunman on the hill. He was still up there, about forty yards from me, and a voice inside my head was saying, Don’t be stupid, Drummond, don’t be stupid, don’t do this, but my legs weren’t listening to my brain, and they kept pumping of their own volition.

Then I got lucky. He’d emptied his clip and was drawing another from a pocket in his vest. He looked down and saw me swinging that baton, sprinting toward him. He made a quick judgment, threw the weapon on the ground, spun around, and fled.

I could still hear someone firing shots from off to my left, but I kept running. The Korean policeman I was chasing was one of those guys with short, squatty legs that pump a hundred times a second. I was taller and my legs were longer, and in a distance race I could take him hands down, but he was a faster sprinter. He was heading straight up a gently sloped hill for the Itaewon shopping district with its thousands of back alleys and shops – a perfect place to get lost and hide.

I looked back up and my target was nearly to Itaewon, about sixty yards ahead of me. I knew this because he was shoving people aside – old ladies, a few young kids, anybody in his path.

I tried to put everything out of my mind. I pumped my legs. My lungs were burning but I struggled to ignore them. I got to a corner street that formed the edge of the shopping district, and I went left. Korean pedestrians were diving out of my path, and for the first time I realized what this must look like to them. First they see a South Korean policeman running fearfully from something; next they see a pursuing American soldier carrying a pistol.