Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" by P. J. O’Rourke

way by the time I arrived at
eight A. M. You go to cover a Korean riot story looking more like a
Martian than a Woodward or a Bernstein. You wear heavy clothes
for protection from the cold and rocks, good running shoes, a hard
hat or motorcycle helmet marked PRESS in English and Korean,
and the best gas mask you can find on the black market. (It's illegal
for civilians to buy them in Korea.)
    Korean riot police use the pepper gas developed during the
Vietnam War, which is fast becoming a favorite with busy dictators
everywhere. I'd been hit with the stuff before, in Panama, but the
Koreans lay it on in lavish doses, until the air is a vanilla
milkshake of minuscule caustic particles. Pepper gas can raise blisters on exposed skin. Any contact with a mucous membrane
produces the same sensation as probing a canker sore with a hot
sewing needle. The tiniest amount in your eyes and your eyelids
lock shut in blind agony. Breathing it is like inhaling fish bones,
and the curl-up-and-die cough quickly turns to vomiting. Pepper
gas is probably the only thing on earth more powerful than kimchi.

    There was street fighting going on all around Kuro gu, in an
orderly way, of course. First the Darth Vader cops form a line with
shields interlocked. Then the students run up and throw firebombs
at them. The police respond with a volley of tear-gas rifle grenades.
The students throw stones. The police fire tear gas again and then
charge.
    The police hardly ever catch a student. That would disturb the
kibun of the set-piece battle. Instead, there's a squad of volunteers
from the police ranks called "grabbers." The grabbers dress in
down-filled L.L. Bean-type parkas, jeans, Nikes and white motorcycle helmets. They carry hippie-tourist-style canvas shoulder
bags filled with tear-gas grenades, and swing long batons that look
like hiking staffs. Their jackets are all in pleasant shades of beige
and baby blue, color coordinated by squadrons. With gas masks in
place, the grabbers look like a bunch of mentally unbalanced freelance writers for Outside magazine.
    The grabbers huddle behind the riot police. As soon as the
students break ranks, the grabbers spring out and do their grabbing, beating the shit out of anyone they lay hands on. The beaten
students are then led away. Student demonstrators are not often
formally arrested in Korea. They are just "led away." What happens
to them next is, I hear, even less fun than getting caught in a Kim
Dae Jung rally.
    Being out in no-man's-land between the students and the
police isn't much fun either. Rifle grenades were flying through the
air, and stones were racketing on the top of my hard hat; plus there
was this creepy xxx video rubber-fetish thing all over my face. No
gas mask is fully effective against the pepper-gas clouds, and mine
looked as if it dated back to the Crimean War. Inside it, I was
coughing and weeping and thoroughly panicked, and outside it,
barely visible through the scratched and fogged-over eyepieces,
was the world's only mayhem with choreography. I had stumbled onstage in midperformance of some over-enthusiastic Asian production of West Side Story.

    Back at Kuro gu itself, the police had retaken the courtyard
and first four stories of the building, but the students were still
holding the top floor and roof.
    The students don't wear gas masks. They put on those little
Dr. Dan and Nurse Nancy cotton face things, and they smear
toothpaste on their skin, but otherwise they riot unprotected. The
police in the courtyard were firing salvos of gas grenades, twenty at
a time, into the fifth-floor windows and onto the roof. The gas bursts
looked like albino fireworks. The police also have armored cars
with gun turrets that shoot small tear-gas cannisters at hundreds of
rounds a minute. Two of these had been set in flanking positions
and were raking the rooftop. That the students could even stand in
this maelstrom was a testament to Koreanness.