Chapter 7

How to Win Your Comrades' Hearts

Fencing, boxing, wrestling, calisthenics, gymnastics, riding, swimming, American football, baseball, basketball, polo, hockey.
English, literature, poetry and prose, political science, history, engineering, mathematics, a second foreign language.

Even without counting military drills, the education poured down on us without end.

In my previous life, the guys who had graduated from service academies used to call themselves "magazine-heads." Now I finally understood why. If you didn't fire off thirty rounds of learning and testing like bullets from a magazine—and then promptly forget them—you felt like your brain would overload and burst.

The quality of some classes was atrocious, and once I decided they weren't worth learning, the whole thing felt like pure torture.

Class. Training. Class. Bullshitting. P.E. Exercise. Class.

West Point was pounding human beings into shape far more brutally than I had imagined.

At least once a month, someone left the academy due to injury or illness.

Among the instructors, there were a few who clearly didn't care much for my skin color. Whenever they saw me, they looked ready to chew me up and spit me out. To avoid giving them any excuse, I had to be even more cautious—again and again.

Upperclassmen roughing up underclassmen was considered perfectly natural. No matter how absurd the pretext, you endured it. Just like with the instructors, there were always blockheads eager to single out the "yellow monkey."

My basic response was simple.
Heh. Kids. If you add in my previous life, how old do you think I am?

And I'd just laugh it off.

But that didn't mean I could let everything slide.
After all, these people might one day become my superiors—or my subordinates.

Throughout history, the military has always been one of the largest and most rigidly structured organizations in existence. And in such places, relationships matter more than anywhere else.

With that in mind, during these four years, I wanted the people attending the academy with me to view me positively, as much as possible.

In short, I was planning a little image-making.

Anyway, while I stood there like a stone statue, lost in a mess of thoughts, a problem far more urgent and critical than any of that was unfolding before us.

"Hey! Ike!"
"Get up! We're late!"

Bradley and Van Fleet flipped over the sleeping prince of the dormitory who was still sprawled out on his bed.

It was a beautiful display of Greco-Roman wrestling.

"Uh… ughh… five more minutes, just five—"
"Not five minutes. I could let you sleep another fifty years."
"You there! What were you doing, not even looking after your comrade?"
"No, sir, it's just that his roommate failed to wake him—"

Despite Bradley's pitiful excuse, the scratch of a quill pen informed us that our demerits had just increased.

"Due to your incompetence in preparing personnel, you will forfeit breakfast this morning. And your little gang will run drills on the parade ground for thirty minutes this afternoon. Execute!"
"No—please."
"How many times is this because of that bastard?"
"Comrades! Thank you for waiting for me!"

Leaving our wails behind, Ike—now neatly dressed—beamed cheerfully.

"Yujin Grab him."
"Yes, sir, General Bradley."
"Wait, wait, wait! Beating me won't bring breakfast back!"
"Not beating you won't bring it back either."

Watching Eisenhower, who seemed pathologically incapable of waking up properly in the morning, I was beginning to wonder whether this guy was really the future President of the United States—or just some unfortunate namesake who happened to share it.

"My… stomach… is empty…"
"Empty. Because of someone."
"I'm sorry. I'll wake up early from now on."

Despite Ike's pathetic apology, none of us even blinked.
This was the third time. How bad did it have to be for a place that said "Meals are training" to ban us from eating?

Anyway, I decided I would become the true savior of these starving lambs.

"Eat this."
"Bread? Where did bread come from?"
"You didn't stash yesterday's bread, did you? No way… then where did you get this?"

Even after I tossed the bread to those strapping idiots in their prime, instead of stuffing it into their mouths, they were interrogating me about where it came from.

They clearly weren't starving enough yet.

"If you're going to talk nonsense, give it back."
"No, no, we're not saying we won't eat it."
"Loyalty, loyalty. We gratefully accept General Kim's rations…!"

While Bradley grumbled under his breath, Eisenhower swore mock allegiance, and Van Fleet skipped the words entirely and shoved the bread straight into his mouth. Truly remarkable decisiveness.

"See? You look much better eating heartily like that."
"We're eating it, sure—but seriously, where did you get this bread?"
"The mess hall."

I answered casually, but the eyes of these blockheads were shaking violently.

"You stole it?"

Ike, who had just been savoring the soft inside of the bread, whispered quietly.

"If you get caught, you're screwed."
"Yeah. It won't end with just demerits."
"I didn't steal it, you idiots."
"If you didn't steal it, then how the hell did you get bread from the mess hall?"

Three hulking bodies crowding around me was starting to feel suffocating.

"In professional terms? I secured a local collaborator."
"The cafeteria ladies? They'd get fired if they were caught giving you bread."
"More importantly, how did you even manage to get bread out of them?"
"When someone refuses to confess properly, there's only one solution. Grab him."

All right, enough suspense. At this rate, they were genuinely about to twist my arms off.

"The colored ladies who handle the kitchen grunt work."
"What?"
"You could call it solidarity among people of color. Anyway, over the past few months, I've built a constructive relationship with them."

Becoming friendly with them had taken quite a bit of effort.

To carry out my grand plan, I needed—at the very least—to be on good terms with those ladies.

"I asked them to pack up any leftovers if there were any, and they set some aside for me. What you guys just ate was surplus stock, so don't worry."
"Huh… well. As long as you didn't steal it, that's a relief."
"Yeah, good. Now that there's something in my stomach, I feel like I can live again."

A brief silence fell.
We drifted off the walking path and headed back toward the dormitory.

"Yujin."

"What."
"I'm just asking, purely hypothetically."

Van Fleet raised his hand and whispered, looking uncannily like a junkie in a Harlem alley asking, 'You got something?'

"Yeah."
"Those kitchen ladies. They commute in and out, right?"
"Yeah."
"So then… maybe… from the outside—"
"Fatima. One pack. Fifty cents."

Grin.

Without a word, we clasped hands.

"We look forward to doing business with you, sir."
"Oh, not at all, valued customer. Please continue to patronize Kim Trading Company."

This was an era before Al Capone built a bootlegging empire.

I was going to become the smuggling king of West Point.

Needless to say, smoking was prohibited inside West Point.
Of course, nothing drives a man crazier than the word prohibited. These cadets, soaked in machismo, believed that a real man naturally snuck into the farthest corners of the vast academy grounds to smoke in secret—it was practically a badge of honor.

So then, where did they get them from?

A few blessed bastards—those with outside connections—would secretly bring cigarettes in. At this point, it felt less like a military academy and more like a penitentiary.

Right now, the smuggling king of West Point was an upperclassman named Harris.
His mother was infamous for her doting zeal. She was staying at the Crainy Hotel just outside West Point, fully intending to remain there until her precious son graduated.

Naturally, whenever his cooldown period came up, Harris would go out to visit his mother—and on his way back in, he would discreetly tuck away various "goods."

But now, with my overwhelming supply capacity and stable distribution network secured, it was time to devour Harris's side income whole.

"This week's orders. Two cartons of Fatima—"

Money was secondary.
In a tight-knit society where everyone knew everyone else's face, hogging everything for myself would only cause trouble.

"Why, hello there, sir."
"Who's your 'sir'? I don't acknowledge monkey underclassmen."
"Haha, you wound me. I heard from Senior Vicente that with your navigation skills alone, you could outmatch even the instructors. I was wondering if I might ask about something I don't quite understand?"
"You little—don't talk nonsense—"

I casually held out a textbook.
A moment later, the delicious Fatima tucked beneath it quietly vanished, and the senior's pocket grew noticeably plumper.

"…Turning away a junior who seeks learning would hardly befit an honorable cadet. Very well. What part are you struggling with?"
"Yes, sir. This section right here."

The sages of old have said that nothing expresses gratitude more clearly than a well-prepared gift set.
Besides, in Korea, when someone moves into a new neighborhood, it's customary to share rice cakes with the neighbors—a proud tradition of courtesy.

So if I, raised in the Confucian land of Korea, had effectively "moved" to West Point, wasn't it only proper that I express my sincerity more diligently than anyone else?

One thing was certain.
Even the worst blockhead among them lacked the shamelessness to call me a monkey to my face after pocketing a gift from me.

If Eisenhower won hearts with passion, and Bradley with gentleness—
I simply won them with cigarettes.

In the end, if I bought their hearts, that's what mattered, right?