Against All Odds: My Story (7 page)

CHAPTER 6

CRACKING THE EGG
OF INSECURITY

T
ake a look at your hands. If you're a woman, you may use special creams to help keep your hands soft and beautiful. If you're an accountant, lawyer, secretary, or a person who spends most of the day nimbly typing at a computer, your hands may be more of a tool than a finely adorned extension of your arms. Construction workers, plumbers, and other manual-labor types often have rough, calloused hands.

Regardless, as you look at your hands, it may be hard to imagine them breaking through boards or bricks. Even more difficult, try imagining your hands as lethal weapons!

In
tang soo do
, great emphasis is placed on toughening up the hands in order to be able to break boards and bricks, the theory being that if you can hit hard enough to break a solid object, you can certainly damage an opponent. To build up calluses on my knuckles, I carried a flat rock with me everywhere I went, pounding my knuckles against the rock as I walked.

When I was in my third month of training, Mr. Shin announced that we were going to perform a demonstration in the village of Osan. The exhibition went well, and I survived relatively unscathed until near the end of the demonstration, when Mr. Shin stacked up eight roofing tiles. He looked around at our group. “You,” he said, pointing to me. “You break!”

My heart began thumping wildly. I had never broken anything before. But I knew Mr. Shin would lose face in front of the villagers if I refused, so I crouched over the tiles and lined up two knuckles on top of the stack, just as Mr. Shin had taught us and as I'd seen some of the advanced students do. I took a deep breath and went for it! But somehow as my fist came down, I twisted my wrist, and instead of the two large knuckles buckling the tiles, the small knuckles in my hand took the force of the blow. I heard an awful crunching sound as my fist slammed down on the tiles. I broke the tiles, but I also broke my hand! Mr. Shin was pleased, though. That was the Korean way of teaching: the student learns through trial and error.

As I got into better physical shape, my confidence continued to rise. For the first time in my life, I had stuck with something and had not given up. I was training both my body and my mind, and as a result of my discipline and learning, I was developing a much better self-image.

As I became more proficient in the martial arts, I carried myself differently, standing more erectly, walking and talking with an air of assurance. A few months after I started training, my new confidence began to show: I was chosen Airman of the Month by my company commanders.

I soon discovered, as a
tang so do
martial artist, that I was also a member of a very elite brotherhood whose members were extremely loyal to one another. One night a Korean air policeman who worked as an interpreter on the base was going home through an alley-type passageway. Like most alleys in Korea, it was so narrow that people had to turn sideways to pass each other. Suddenly he was jumped by surprise by six
slicky
boys (young Korean muggers). One of the attackers had a knife.

Contrary to images portrayed by martial arts movies, including my own, knowing karate or some other martial art does not make a person invincible. The air policeman avoided the knife attack, but in the confined, cramped conditions, he couldn't kick and was unable to maneuver well, especially against the muggers coming at him from various directions in the dark. The ambushers beat him up badly and robbed him.

The air policeman was a black belt in
tang soo do
. When the
slicky
boys found this out, they were so horrified at the potential reprisal they might suffer, they printed an apology in the local paper. It did them no good. When somebody messes with one black belt, he or she is challenging the whole organization. One of our members tracked down several of the attackers. He killed one and injured two. The police arrested him, and he was sentenced to three years in prison. He was back out on the street in two weeks. The lesson was clear: Mess with one member of our group, and you are messing with all.

After almost a year of daily practice, Mr. Shin told me I was ready for my black belt test. Now every move I made during training was observed by critical eyes. Mr. Shin and the other black belts mercilessly drilled me over and over on the various techniques on which I might be tested, and that I had already practiced to exhaustion hundreds of times. Every technique I had learned was sharpened by constant, loudly shouted, cutting remarks. The Korean teaching method tends to focus on what a student is doing wrong rather than on what he or she is doing well.

I was a nervous and physical wreck by the time I was scheduled to face the board of examiners in Seoul. My sergeant let me borrow a Jeep from the motor pool for the forty-mile drive to Seoul. It was the dead of winter, the roads were icy, and the drive took two hours. The Jeep's heater provided negligible warmth, and I arrived stiff with cold at the
dojang
(training hall) where the test was to be held.

The
dojang
was a big unheated building with wind blowing through open spaces in the walls. It was freezing inside as well as out. I changed into my
gi
, my white karate uniform, and sat down cross-legged on the bare wooden floor, along with the other people testing. I was the only student from my school among two hundred strangers testing for various ranks. The board of examiners sat stone-faced at a table.

I watched as the others exhibited their forms and free-sparred with selected black belts. At first I passed the time by comparing myself to the other novices, whom I watched with great interest. Within half an hour, however, my mind could focus only on how cold and stiff I was from sitting on the floor waiting to test. After about three hours of sitting, my body was numb. Then I heard my name called.

I uncrossed my legs and stood, still a bit wobbly from sitting in one position for so long. I walked over to the examiners, bowed, and heard someone tell me in Korean to do the form
bassai
.
Bassai
was the final form a student must learn to qualify for the black belt exam. It was similar to a choreographed dance except that it involved displaying various defenses against an opponent in an imaginary fight. Although I had done the routine countless times before, my mind suddenly went blank. I could not, for the life of me, remember how to do the
bassai
. As a comparison, imagine taking ballroom dance lessons for months and learning all sorts of steps, twirls, and routines, but then at your recital you could not remember the most rudimentary of moves. That is how I felt. My concentration had been broken by the cold and my nervousness. After a few embarrassing moments, I confessed to the examiners that I could not remember the form.

“Go sit down,” one of the examiners said, barely concealing the disdain in his voice. I returned to my spot on the cold floor, where I sat for the next four hours, until the other students finished testing. I had already failed the examination, but to get up and leave before the others completed their test would be disrespectful and disobedient to the examiner's orders and would have effectively ended my martial arts career.

I sat, fuming over my failure on the inside and freezing on the outside. Those four hours seemed like the longest four hours of my life.

I was miserable on the drive back to the base. Over and over again I thought about the form I had forgotten. Still frustrated and angry with myself, I knew I had to put the failure out of my mind. If I continued to dwell on it, I would be setting myself up to fail again. I had to prepare to succeed, and I had to begin planting those seeds immediately.

Mr. Shin said nothing about my failing the test. It was almost as if the exam never happened. He didn't scold or belittle me for my mental lapse. He simply plowed back into a vigorous training program. I trained for an additional three months before he said I was ready to take the exam again. By then I had put the first failure out of my mind and visualized myself doing perfectly any form that was requested. I played out in my mind the scenario for any exhibition the examiners might come up with. More importantly, I saw myself completing the test successfully.

The test was just as grueling as the previous one, but this time I was ready when my name was called. I did my forms, some one-step punching and board breaking; then I free-sparred against a black belt. Everything went as I had visualized it in my mind.

A few weeks later Mr. Shin took me aside after class. Smiling broadly, he told me, “You have passed the black belt exam.” He bowed formally and presented me with a new black belt with my name written on it in Korean, as well as a silver pin designating my black belt rank to be worn on my lapel. That pin was soon to take on a special significance for me.

One night while I was walking in the village wearing my civvies, five
slicky
boys stopped me in an alley. I was about to take them on when they saw the pin on my lapel. Their eyes widened in fear, and they ran off. I felt like Clark Kent wearing his Superman costume!

Earning my black belt changed my life in many ways. I had accomplished something difficult on my own. Being a
shodan
(first degree black belt) was like getting a college degree. Belt ranks are like school levels, starting with elementary school (white belt) and proceeding to different colors, depending on the marital arts style, similar to advancing through junior high, high school, and college.

By the end of my tour of duty in the Air Force, I was a first-degree black belt in
tang soo do
, and a third-degree brown belt in judo. I had also been promoted to the rank of airman first class.

The Air Force had provided the opportunity for me to learn much about the martial arts. Now the martial arts would help me learn much about life.

CHAPTER 7

KARATE KICK-OFF

I
t's almost impossible for a civilian who has never served in the military to comprehend fully the toll that extended service to our country can take on a young married couple. Military life is tough enough on a family, even in the best of circumstances, and the strain is exacerbated when couples are separated by continents for long periods of time.

Upon completing my tour of duty in Korea, I was reassigned to March Air Force Base in Riverside, California. I had a thirty-day leave before I needed to report, and I looked forward to getting reacquainted with my young wife. Dianne had rented a small apartment on the outskirts of the Air Force base when she had learned that I'd be coming home. She busied herself decorating and getting our home ready for us, while I made the transition from Korea, to Tokyo, to San Francisco.

When I arrived in San Francisco, I was flat broke. I needed to call Dianne to let her know that I'd be landing in Los Angeles later that same day, but I had only nine cents in my pocket. At that time most pay phones required a dime to make even a collect call. With less than two minutes before my plane closed its doors, I finally found someone who would give me a dime in exchange for my nine cents. I quickly dialed the number and told Dianne that I was on my way home!

Reestablishing my relationship with Dianne, however, proved to be more difficult than I'd anticipated. Like many military couples, we had married young, and now, after having been apart for more than a year while I'd been in Korea, we both had changed, matured in many ways, and become disenchanted in others. Although Dianne and I had communicated regularly by mail throughout my absence, resuming ordinary, day-to-day life together was extremely stressful. It soon became obvious that not only had we been physically separated; we had grown apart in our relationship, as well.