Army for Sale

"I've fought 200 battles and never lost one," brags South Korea's army chief of staff, 41-year-old Lieut. General "Tiger" Song Yo Chan, and with some reason. An incorruptible, tough-minded professional, Song fought throughout World War II with the Japanese army, during the Korean war commanded South Korea's crack Capitol Division, and won his nickname from admiring U.S. General James Van Fleet. But the offensive he launched last February has proved in many ways the most arduous of his career. His mission: to root out wholesale pilferage and embezzlement in the 650,000-man Korean army, which has reached so enthusiastic a pitch that an irate U.S. Defense Department report said that open black-marketeering in "virtually every commodity required to support a military machine"—short of tanks and artillery—was "beyond description."

Immediately upon his appointment as chief of staff, Song launched an investigation of the army from top to bottom. First results: the arrest of scores of crooked officers, from generals to lieutenants. Many were found to be taking bribes from contract-hungry businessmen —and in several cases even succeeded in buying off some of Tiger's investigators, who in turn were also court-martialed. Other underpaid officers (a four-star general gets only $174 a month) had coolly pocketed payrolls for their own troops. Stolen military supplies had become so important to the South Korean economy that in June, when investigators stripped 1,829 army tires from civilian vehicles, Transport Minister Kim II Hwan had to beg Song to call them off—"Otherwise Seoul and other cities will be without any public transport."

Last week Tiger Song's nearly completed purge ran into unexpected opposition. Assemblyman Um Sang Sup, a member of the opposition Democratic Party, charged that Song's ruthless methods had prompted 153 officers to commit suicide rather than face courts-martial. Some, said Um, had actually taken their lives "while being questioned." The chief of staff disputed the suicide figures, but his own statistics of accomplishment were stern enough. For grafting on the job, he had fired, in the past nine months, six major generals, nine brigadiers and 1,683 other officers of field and company grade, including 61 colonels.