Americans in South Korea Practice Quick Evacuation

Satellite photos show communist North Korean troops massing at the border, and the order is sent to American civilians in South Korea: Get out fast!

The always-tense Korean peninsula has reached crisis point, and Americans are boarding planes for evacuation to Japan.

But wait. Why are these people laughing, snacking, videotaping each other, talking about buying Japanese souvenirs?

It’s just a drill--an exercise of Noncombatant Evacuation Operations undertaken twice a year in South Korea.

“We don’t have the urgency or the fear factor” today, said Lt. Col. Michael Yamashiro, helping to oversee the exercise recently at a U.S. Air Force base south of Seoul.

Indeed, a real conflict is beyond the experience, perhaps the imagination, of most Americans living in South Korea.

An evacuation in the midst of war could be among the largest and most difficult ever attempted by the American government on foreign soil.

“There’s probably never been anything that would be considered on this scale, except Europe during the Cold War,” said Robert Dolce, chief of American Citizen Services at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul. “It would be a very, very difficult one.”

North Korea has 1.2 million soldiers, most of them along its side of the demilitarized zone that has separated North from South since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War.

That war ended without a peace treaty, only a shaky armistice that is watched over by the South Korean army as well as 35,000 U.S. servicemen and women who are part of a U.N. military command.

With North Korea’s economy falling apart and its people suffering in the third year of famine, there is fear that the isolated communist regime could lash out at its southern neighbor.

Military planners in Washington and Seoul foresee the possibility of a surprise attack that could devastate Seoul, a city of 11 million people only 35 miles south of the border.

Hundreds of thousands of fleeing South Koreans could clog roads leading south from the capital. The city could be consumed by flames. Thousands could be dead.

In the midst of this, up to 110,000 Americans and other foreigners might have to be moved from harm’s way. That includes 15,000 U.S. civilian employees and the relatives of American soldiers, 35,000 American diplomats and businessmen and their families, missionaries and students, and 50,000 foreigners whose governments might ask the United States to help.

“It would be like if we had a bunch of noncombatants sitting right on the Iraqi border right before the start of the [Gulf] War,” said Sgt. 1st Class William Hall, monitoring part of the recent evacuation exercise.

For the practice, U.S. troops set up 13 processing centers across South Korea and focused on military families and civilian employees.

Commanders stepped up promotion of the event to fight the complacency and lack of participation in recent years. That--and perhaps recent world events--attracted roughly 11,600 people, compared with 7,000 to 8,000 in previous exercises.

“Right now we’re at odds with Saddam Hussein, Yugoslavia and North Korea,” Cindy Kirkland, a military wife of 27 years, said after she registered at an evacuation center. “I prayed on the way here that the real thing won’t happen.”

Art Conn, the 8th Army’s entertainment director, said he came because of the chaotic American evacuation at the end of the Vietnam War. “I watched TV when people left Saigon--and that was no practice!”

Saigon’s evacuation ended in harrowing scenes of evacuees being pulled into hovering helicopters from the roof of the American Embassy as the city fell to the North Vietnamese in 1975.

“We all use those scenes as a stick to tell us this is not how we want to do it,” Dolce said.

Of the 11,600 who filed through evacuation centers, only a previously selected 118 continued to Osan Air Base for the flight to Japan, then slept on a barge for two nights before returning to Korea. The three-day exercise involved the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, giving practice to all services that would be involved.

“I’ve been very impressed . . . with the time and effort the military here has put into trying to crack this nut,” Dolce said.

“We have a plan . . . and we feel fairly confident that, God forbid, should we have to execute something like this, we’d be able to do so.”