The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States by Jeffrey Lewis

Author:Jeffrey Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Busan

Oh Soo-hyun shared a name with a doctor in a Korean soap opera. She was a doctor too, though beyond that single point of comparison, she was completely different from her fictional counterpart. The television Oh was rich and sheltered. The emergency room doctor in Busan, South Korea, was competent and thoroughly middle-class. The television Oh had a father who ran the hospital. The doctor in Busan had only her mother, who lived in a small hamlet two hours outside the city.

Korean dramas about doctors typically feature the archetype of the “genius” doctor—a person with something resembling the magical power that most cultures attribute to healers. Oh knew that the only genius when it came to practicing medicine was working hard and paying attention. Still, she cherished little moments of, if not genius, then ingenuity—fitting an extra patient into her schedule, for instance, or bending a rule to help someone. This was especially true for patients from her hometown, who came to the city only when they had a serious problem. If she thought a patient didn’t have a lot of money, she might do a test herself rather than make a referral to one of her specialist colleagues. If it proved unnecessary, she wouldn’t charge the patient for the test.

Lately, her supervisor had cautioned her about bending such rules. The warning was a mild one, but Oh took things seriously. She’d started to have a recurring nightmare in which her bosses discovered every single bent rule or infraction and then insisted that she pay them back for all the hospital resources she’d wasted. On the morning of March 22, she was tired, having spent another night wrestling with that unwelcome dream.

Still, Oh didn’t exactly stop bending rules. At 6:02 that morning, she was doing it again—walking down a hallway and carrying a blood sample she’d drawn herself, quite against the regulations, from a patient who was now seated in one of the examining rooms at the end of the hall. She was just one step from the giant window that looked out over the courtyard when there was a giant flash—“like someone taking a picture in an old-time movie,” she remembered later.

She dropped to her knees just as the blast ripped through the hospital, slapping the glasses off her face and smashing the blood sample against the wall. She shouted for the chief resident. He was in his office, badly cut by debris. The entire hospital was in chaos. The windows were blown out, beds were overturned, and parts of the ceiling had collapsed. There was blood and glass all over. Patients were screaming. Others were lying motionless. At the end of the hallway, Oh’s patient was dead. So too were the technicians in the laboratory she’d been heading to with the blood sample. In fact, Dr. Oh was the only doctor on staff who was not seriously injured—but without her glasses.

She quickly grabbed as many bandages as she could and began treating the injured, cleaning their wounds and dressing them one after another.

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