The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [69]
Chun Doo Hwan was born on January 18, 1931, in a village near Taegu, a major city in southeastern Korea, the home region of Park Chung Hee and many other political leaders of modern Korea. Chun's father, a Confucian scholar, was forced to flee with his family to Manchuria in 1939 because of a violent feud with a Japanese policeman. After returning to Korea, Chun's family was poor but proud. Chun graduated from Taegu Technical High School in 1951, in the midst of the Korean War, and joined the Korean Military Academy. He graduated in 1955 in the Academy's eleventh classthe first class to receive a full four-year military education and the first to have its curriculum based on an American rather than a Japanese model. Members of the eleventh KMA class, who maintained a special bond, formed the inner circle of the insurgent group that ousted their seniors in the 12/12 military showdown.
As a junior officer in 1959-60, Chun spent a year in American military schools at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Fort Benning, Georgia, which left him with a tenuous command of English and a sense of easy familiarity with the United States. Unlike Park Chung Hee, who was Japanese educated and never entirely comfortable with Americans, Chun felt he knew Americans and could deal with them without complexes. As a foreign military student, he bought a used car, obtained a U.S. driver's license, and often traveled on weekends. He was fond of telling aides-and he once recounted to me-his surprise, while driving through a small town well past midnight, to see the driver in a car ahead of him stop for a traffic light, even though no police or anybody else could be seen for miles. This impressed Chun with the law-abiding spirit of the American people, a trait he proclaimed was "essential for freedom and democracy."
After Park's military coup in 1961, Chun served for a year as a secretary for civil affairs to Park at the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, the official name of the ruling junta. Turning down Park's suggestion that he embark on a political career, Chun opted to return to army duty. Nonetheless, his military duties were often entwined with politics. In 1964 he, Roh Tae Woo, and a handful of other Korean Military Academy graduates formed a secret club within the military that they named Hana-hoe, or "One Group," devoted to solidarity and patriotism and, as it turned out, self-advancement. Park gave the members of the club, which was headed by Chun, fast promotions and special perks. Hana-hoe members made up the core of the group that took power by force after Park's death.
As a battalion commander of the politically sensitive Capital Security Command in 1968, Chun led the chase against North Korean commandos who had attempted unsuccessfully to attack Park's Blue House. After a tour as regimental commander of ROK forces fighting in Vietnam, he became assistant director for operations of the presidential security force at the Blue House, where he had frequent personal contact with Park. In February 1979, eight months before Park's assassination, he became commanding general of the Defense Security Command, which Park also used for political control and as a check on his politically active bodyguard force and the KCIA. It was in this post that Chun became chief investigator of the assassination, paving the way for his clash with Army Chief of Staff Chung Seung Hwa.
On December 14, two days after his midnight takeover of the military, Chun engineered sweeping changes in the ROK army, moving