Richard E. Kim: The Military and Morality

Like Lieutenant Park, one of the characters in his first novel, The Martyred, Richard E. Kim was raised in a Christian family. His grandfather, a Presbyterian minister, was executed by the Communists during the Korean War. Kim is now an English professor and novelist; he lives in the United States.

The task of self-definition consumes both of Kim’s novels, but it produces no easy solutions. At the conclusion of the second novel, The Innocent, Major Lee, a Korean Hamlet and Kim’s hero, responds to the army chaplain when the latter asks him how he can bear to leave his country shortly after a military coup: “There is a riddle, Chaplain, a great riddle that Colonel Min has left behind me. I have to learn to live that, too.” The explanation of Major Lee’s riddle of self-definition begins in Kim’s first novel, a finalist in the 1964 National Book Awards. The novels form a continuing exploration of the riddle of young Lee, introducing him as a lieutenant, fresh from his instructorship in Western civilization at the national university. Lee’s self-discovery leads him through the Korean War and a post-war coup from which he emerges as a brilliant military strategist. Young Major Lee, the “innocent” of the title of the second novel, is deeply concerned for salvation, the salvation of the civilization whose history he has taught, and for the salvation of Korea.

As a young lieutenant and a still young major, he tries to discover where salvation lies and how it can be fitted into the confines of war-torn and post-war Korea. Lee tries to use “pure” religionless idealism as a guide through the tangle of plots, counterplots, and military jealousies that form most of the action of the two novels. Most of these plots and hidden actions remain deliberately unsolved. Lee is a post-Christian man who believes his ancestral faith is insufficient to lead him to moral stability through the tangles created by expediency, practicality, and propaganda, but his own “pure” idealism is deliberately presented as limited and ineffective.

Lee’s story opens in The Martyred in Pyongyang, a city under seige in the early days of the Korean War. Earlier in the conflict, the Communists had rounded up fourteen Christian ministers in the city and had shot twelve of them, leaving the question, “Why were two spared?” Colonel Chang, Lee’s superior in military intelligence, wants to know why. The South Korean forces hope to use the incident as a propaganda tool and plan to stage a well-publicized memorial service. However, a captured North Korean officer tells a strange story. He states that the twelve ministers were not martyrs but cowards who died denying their faith and pleading for mercy. Is the North Korean lying to excuse his own actions or not? Military intelligence must have the truth before the memorial service can be held. The truth about the “martyrs” constantly shifts along with the teller of the tale. Reverend Shin, one of the survivors of the execution, promises to reveal the truth about the cowardice of the twelve, but he chooses instead to silently bear his cross of despair to defeat the despair of his congregation. He accuses himself as the coward and begs Lee not to reveal that his story about the holy deaths of the martyrs is a falsehood. Lee asks, unbelievingly, “To give them the illusion of hope? The illusion of life beyond the grave?” Shin replies, “Yes, Yes … Despair is the disease of those weary of life, life here and now full of meaningless sufferings. We must … not let the sickness of despair corrupt the life of man and reduce him to a mere scarecrow” (The Martyred, George Braziller, 1964, p. 256). Salvation from despair is the main function of Christianity in Kim’s novels, but Lee seeks a faith based on shifting, always ambiguous facts.

When the somewhat older Lee becomes a major in The Innocent, he is no longer a supporting player in a general moral dilemma, but the hero of his own. He must decide whether he is willing to close his eyes to corrupt means, if the end, purification of a corrupt central government by military coup, is good. Lee’s decision is complicated by the fact that he has designed the military junta’s successful strategy and also by his mingled admiration of and repulsion for the enigmatic Colonel Min. Lee is still a believer in salvation, not God’s supernatural salvation, but the salvation of the good in men, obtainable by political means. Min, enigmatic as always, disagrees. Major Lee states, “Then you will agree with me that it is the good in man that will ultimately destroy the evil in the world.” The colonel replies, “Perhaps the evil in man can be destroyed only by the evil in man. Who knows?” (Houghton Mifflin, 1968, p. 71).

Not Lee. Going to a meeting with a general, Lee and Min see a mountain looming like a nightmare landscape: “The arousee mountains, black and brooding, massive and menacing, now taking part in the eerie slaughter of sounds, seemed to come closing in on us slowly and inexorably, nearer and nearer from all sides, threatening to squeeze and crush us” (pp. 73–74). Like the mountains, man’s evil nature is about to crush Lee’s burgeoning vision of a perfect Korea.

At the end of The Innocent, Lee is forced into exile before the coup he planned is successfully carried out. He is exiled because his fellows have judged him ineffectual in the complex work of uniting imperfect means to desirable political ends. Kim judges his young hero, Major Lee, as a man of simple and philosophically pure intentions, unable to bring about the good he thinks is possible. Kim’s pessimistic view of pure humanism shows the need for a faith that values human nature correctly, neither overvaluing the good nor underestimating the evil. The only person able to maintain this type of mental balance is Chaplain Koh, who ultimately achieves sainthood by living his life for the Korean refugees he cares for.

Richard E. Kim’s novels are among a small and select group that accurately examine the roles of Christian faith and moral idealism in weaving the tangled fabric of political and military life. These novels demonstrate a need for Christian faith, without advocating it directly. But this Christian faith must be a faith alternately flexible and practical in helping an intelligent man to live righteously in a decidedly unrighteous world.

Barbara Standley Worden is associate professor of communications, Friends Bible College, Haviland, Kansas.

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