Silenced by D.O.A. Worrell The wind pushed south, in phases and infrequent like a stuttering breeze, and gradually dwindling with the horizon’s narrowing light. But seated in a thick patch of bushes on the steep hillside Dae-Ho couldn’t feel a thing. His gaze entangled in the thorny shrubs and high meadow grass that thrashed back in the breeze and the fall shaded trees whipping to the side as if tossing their hair. He also noticed his own camouflaged jacket incessantly swell with wind then gradually shrink like the croak of a mute toad. Dae-Ho could see the wind clearly as an emerald ocean splashing and whirling around him but couldn’t feel it, because sometimes when he stared too closely it made him numb. They coined this the “anesthetic sense” in the North Korean army, a term originating from winter snipers in the early sixties. Their entire bodies hibernated for hours in the snow drenched hills of Kaesong with only the whites of their eyes astir. It was a state that few North Korean soldiers could achieve and Dae-Ho Jung was one of them. Though from today onward, sitting silent while countless others prayed the evening’s national anthem, he wasn’t one of them anymore. Dae-Ho sat in a thicket of bushes just a few meters east of the dirt road he trailed the night before. The bushes were dense, giving him just enough visibility to keep an eye on the jeeps and other military vehicles that routinely swept the restricted streets and dirt paths. His camouflage was a couple shades off the viridian-hued bushes around him but close enough that it wasn’t conspicuous. Though he knew the black semiautomatic rifle around his shoulder with its silver clip and the sable shaded silencer on his waist were in a word, eye-catching. Two words , Dae-Ho then thought, though he figured he had two guns and that was one word each. Dae-Ho’s thoughts slipped in and out of focus. The envelope in his breast pocket and the border a few miles off on the horizon brought thoughts of South Korea, his fiancée, or the thousand other daydreams that might branch off. Though somehow these notions would always reunite on one thought: death, and Dae-Ho would immediately regain his focus, clutching his rifle, surveying the vista and letting everything else recede. The only moment Dae-Ho let the poise slip from his trigger finger was when he tapped his chest so that the envelope with cash, photographs and other documents inside rustled like a paper heartbeat. He knew it was there. He had touched the materials just a few minutes earlier but needed to check it again to calm his constant nerves. This envelope with documents and photos of North Korean atrocities had turned into a pressure point while his finger became the needle of acupuncture. As light as it was, the envelope made a far heavier burden than the guns theMeadow 109
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