by Martin Limon
“You want a refill?”
“Yes. Only one marshmallow this time.” He patted his belly. “I’m watching my weight.”
“Watching it expand like a helium balloon,” Ernie said.
“You mind your manners,” Strange replied.
As they bickered, I rose from my chair, grabbed the mug, and proceeded to the serving line. I was in no hurry because I knew Ernie was probably telling Strange a story about the “strange” he’d received in the last few days. The stories were most often figments of Ernie’s imagination—or exaggerations of the truth—and neither of us felt good about such a sleazy way of doing business, but Strange’s information had yet to be proven wrong. It was pure, unlike him, straight from eyes-only documents and the most highly classified briefings 8th Army had to offer. I often wondered what would happen if the three of us were ever caught in violation of the regulations on the passing of classified information.
If the JAG office was turned loose on us, we really would be toast. Low-ranking enlisted men were made examples of. High-ranking officers had excuses made for them by the Command and were allowed to retire with full benefits to Florida golf courses. But so far, we hadn’t been caught. And after all, the information we received was used for only one thing: to put away bad guys. As long as that was the case, I’d keep buying Strange mugs of hot chocolate with as many marshmallows as his greedy heart desired.
At the end of the serving line, I slapped a quarter in front of the middle-aged Korean woman operating the cash register and said, “Anyonghaseiyo?” Are you at peace?
She nodded wearily but didn’t answer as she rang up my quarter and slid the receipt to me across stainless steel. I grabbed the short slip of paper but didn’t bother her any further. She’d been on her feet since the snack bar opened at six this morning.
When I returned to the table, I placed the steaming cup in front of Strange.
“Where’s my spoon?” he asked.
Without a word, I got up and pulled a teaspoon from the stainless-steel rack alongside the serving line, returned to the table, and handed it to Sergeant First Class Harvey, NCO in charge of the 8th Army Headquarters Classified Documents Center.
He frowned at the spoon, grabbed a napkin, and wiped it until it shone. Satisfied at last, he stirred his hot cocoa, looked around surreptitiously, and continued to preach. For the moment, he told us, the 8th Army honchos had decided to disregard the doctor’s orders to have Crabtree transported to the One-Two-One.
“Too embarrassing to the Command,” Strange explained. “It would make them look like idiots for appointing him as I Corps Commander in the first place.”
“Aren’t they?” Ernie asked.
“Aren’t they what?”
“Idiots.”
“No. They believe Crabtree will get over it. Besides, he has too many allies back at the Pentagon.”
“Those nephews.”
“Right. And old friends. So they’re giving him another chance. Hoping he’ll straighten up and fly right.”
“But if he doesn’t,” I said, “and this Sergeant Major Screech Owl can’t keep him in line, he could start another war on the peninsula.”
Strange shrugged. “Then make sure Screech Owl keeps him in line.”
“Thanks. And if we don’t?”
“Millions of people will die.”
“The Eighth Army honchos are really taking that chance?” Ernie said. “Leaving him up there when there’s so much at stake?”
Strange shrugged again. “Hey, look on the bright side.”
“Which is?”
“If another war breaks out, it’d be good for promotion.”
“You’d make master sergeant.”
Strange grinned.
“You said we were toast,” I told him. “What’d you mean?”
“You’re being set up. You and this Oversexed Observer broad, you’re going to be blamed for the whole hookers-transported-north business. For leaking it to the press. A phony story, Eighth Army will claim. And if General Crabtree doesn’t straighten up and fly right, they’ll blame Command Sergeant Screech Owl for not taking him in for observation early enough.”
“Which is why they’re sending us up there,” Ernie said. “So we’ll be involved, and they can pin the other half of the blame on us if something goes wrong.”
“Right. The deeper you sink into a tub of shit, the harder it is to climb out.”
We stared at him—both of us, I think, pondering his revolting imagery.
Strange lifted his cocoa, drained the final dregs, and set the empty cup down with a plop. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he told us. “Enjoy your day.”
With that, he rose from the table and shuffled off.
On the drive north to Bopwon-ni, Ernie and I reviewed our two cases.
The bank robbers were nervous as hell. Even though we had no idea who or where they were, they couldn’t be sure how much we’d found, and as such, were reacting with a violence seldom seen in 8th Army. Sure, soldiers killed fellow soldiers. Sometimes they went nuts, or sometimes they acted on a grudge or extreme jealousy. But seldom did we see groups of GIs act in concert to commit serious felonies, then once again to eliminate the law enforcement officers assigned to their cases who were simply doing their job. It was a level of malice aforethought that could legitimately be called organized crime. And they were paying careful attention to the news, now that their exploits had hit what passed for the mainstream media here in the ROK. They were monitoring the Overseas Observer, and presumably the Pacific Stars and Stripes as well.
“We know next to nothing about these guys,” Ernie complained.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “We need a solid lead. Something to sink our teeth into.”
“You think they’ll strike a third time?”
“They’ve already done the worst, which is kill for money. With all the law enforcement attention, maybe they’ll lay off for a while.”
Ernie shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Whoever’s in charge of this group,” he said, “and there’s always someone in charge, he’ll realize that he has a tightly knit, disciplined assault squad. He’ll also realize that in the Army, no group stays together too long. People get transferred out—they leave, they have a change of heart. So now’s the time to strike, while he’s got this well-oiled machine at his command.”
“But the KNPs are on alert, from the DMZ down to Pusan.”
“Sure. But greed knows no bounds. Besides, you know how many banks there are? Even the KNPs can’t cover them all. And these guys are feeling invincible. That’s why they came after us. And they have plenty of firepower.”
“They’ve shown a willingness to use it,” I said.
“That they have.”
We passed a sign that read seoul city limits and kept cruising north past acres of fallow rice paddies. Ernie’s fingers caressed the steering wheel. He was in a talkative mood, almost buoyant. Nothing like chaos to get him revved up.
“This lead up in Bopwon-ni is probably the best we’ve gotten so far.” Ernie thought about it and then corrected himself. “The only lead we’ve gotten. The crooks have to either spend the Korean won here in-country or change it into dollars and send it home.”
“Or they could save it until DEROS,” I said. Date of Estimated Return from Overseas. “And exchange it once they’re safely back in the States.”
“Is that legal?”
“I believe so. As long as when you land, you declare anything worth more than $10,000 on your customs form.”
“They haven’t exceeded that yet.”
“Not yet.”
“And if they do exceed it but they don’t declare it to customs, what happens then?”
“Nothing, as long as they’re not caught.”
We left
the outskirts of Seoul and were cruising north on the newly built Tong-il Lo, Reunification Road, past rice paddies on the left side of the road and tree-spotted hills on the right, some with huge white placards that said deng san kum ji. Don’t Climb the Mountain. The signs were there because, although twenty years had passed, many of the hills in South Korea had yet to be cleared of landmines and other explosive ordnance left over from the Korean War.
Around a bend, we reached the first 2nd Infantry Division checkpoint. A ROK Army MP waved for us to reduce our speed. Beyond him, two American MPs wearing combat fatigues and protective vests with M16 assault rifles crooked in their elbows motioned for us to stop.
“Destination?” one of them asked.
“Bopwon-ni,” I said.
“Where?”
“The biggest town in Paju County,” Ernie said, a sneer in his voice. Then he shook his head and added, “Moron.”
The MP shifted his rifle from the crook of his arm and held it with two hands. “Who you calling a moron?”
Ernie swiveled his head back and forth, pretending to search the area. “You see a big crowd around here?”
“Stuff it, wise guy.”
The other MP approached the opposite side of the jeep and motioned for our dispatch. I handed it to him. He studied the paperwork. “Eighth Army,” he said. “Emergency Dispatch. Well, la di da.”
“He can read,” Ernie told me.
“Don’t sweat it, Franks,” the guy said to his gun-happy fellow MP. “These guys ain’t nothing but rear-echelon pukes.”
He tossed the dispatch back. I caught the clipboard on the fly.
“What brings a couple of CID assholes up here to Division?” Franks asked.
“Your mom,” Ernie replied. “Didn’t you see the line?”
Franks seemed like he was about to slug Ernie, but the other MP, the one with an additional stripe, warned him off. “Go on,” he said, waving us forward. “Get the hell out of here.”
We started to roll forward. Another ROK Army MP dragged a four-foot-high contraption made of crossed steel bars out of the roadway. They were easy to transport, and when strewn together, effective at stopping vehicular traffic. Ernie wound through the maze, and soon we were back on the road heading toward the turnoff that led to Bopwon-ni.
“Did you have to mess with them?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Why wait? They’ll mess with us sooner or later. I like to get a jump on the festivities.”
“Those guys are already on the radio letting their MP commander know we’ve entered their area of operations.”
“That’ll give him time to set up the brass band.”
I turned and gazed back at the checkpoint. From this distance, the MPs looked like toy soldiers standing amidst a maze of giant jacks. All they needed to complete the image was a six-foot-high red rubber ball.
After turning off the main road, we were in a belt of natural green composed of small trees and shrubs on gently rolling hills with rice paddies and cabbage patches layering the valleys. Most of the farmhouses had tile roofs and TV antennae, but a few still had the traditional roofs of bundled straw thatch that had been used for centuries.
“It’s pretty idyllic out here,” I told Ernie.
“Unless you’re the one who has to transplant those rice shoots.”
He’d seen it done so often in Vietnam that he knew how backbreaking the work was. The road curved north, now paralleling Tong-il Lo, but about five kilometers farther inland, almost thirty klicks from the edge of the Yellow Sea.
“So Bopwon-ni was the county seat once upon a time,” Ernie said.
“Still is. Bopwon translates to ‘law hall.’ We’d call it a court.”
“Where the hanging judge presides.”
“I think they used to garrote people back in those days. With silk ropes.”
“How civilized,” Ernie said.
The first large building we saw in Bopwon-ni was an old grain storage shed with walls of rotted wood. Beyond that were more homes, then businesses, mostly catering to agricultural supply, and finally a modern wood frame building with metal siding that, if I was reading the sign correctly, was where the agricultural bounty of this valley was available for purchase by dealers from Seoul. Now, in midafternoon, it was locked and deserted, since that was the type of business that was conducted at oh-dark-thirty, so the fresh produce could be transported before dawn south toward the big city.
Finally, we reached an intersection in the main part of town. There were clothing stores and noodle shops and tea houses and a movie theater and a large bus stop with a sign that said, seoul express. And a lone taxi stand with one driver sitting in his cab, snoozing.
“Any nightclubs?” Ernie asked.
“A couple,” I said. “But their signs are in Korean, not English.” Which meant they didn’t welcome GIs.
“My favorite,” he said.
I spotted the Korean national flag, a yin-yang symbol of eternal harmony surrounded by four trigrams representing heaven, earth, fire, and water, all on a white background symbolizing the purity of the Korean people. It fluttered above a whitewashed-cement-block building, the type mass-produced by the South Korean government and placed strategically in every city, town, and hamlet in the country.
“There it is,” I said. Ernie hung a right and stopped in a narrow, gravel parking area and switched off the jeep’s engine. Something shuddered, coughed, and sputtered reluctantly to a halt.
“Damn,” Ernie said. “Needs a tune-up.”
“That’ll cost you another bottle of Johnny Walker Black,” I told him.
“Unless I can sweet-talk the dispatcher.”
“Good luck. That old buzzard only understands money.”
At the 8th Army motor pool in Seoul, which dispatched all vehicles for the headquarters complex, it could take a week or longer to get a vehicle back after turning it in for maintenance, even for something as simple as a tune-up. But whenever Ernie slipped a bottle of scotch to the head honcho—liquor that could easily be sold on the sly at over twice its purchase price—his jeep was returned the same day in tip-top shape, along with a thorough wash, vacuuming, and tire rotation.
We climbed out of the jeep and pushed through the big double doors of the Bopwon-ni police station.
“Anybody home?” Ernie yelled cheerily.
A tired cop looked up from a stack of pulp and glared at Ernie as if he was about to reach for the garrote he’d kept handy since the end of the Chosun Dynasty. I stepped in front of Ernie, bowed to the officer, and spoke in Korean using honorifics. After a few sentences, he nodded and set down his pen.
The woman we were looking for, Police Sergeant Kang Hey-kyong, was in her office. The desk officer led us down a hallway and motioned us through a large, open doorway that led to the arms room. Sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair was a husky woman with strong, masculine bone structure wearing the KNP khaki uniform. Behind her loomed a metal-reinforced cage which held neat rows of rifles and other weaponry on pegs against the wall. She held a revolver in her hand and idly twirled the cylinder, gazing at it, her lips partly open, like a Buddhist monk fondling a prayer wheel, deep in the throes of meditation.
She looked up at us and said, “Wasso?” You’ve arrived?
I started to say something, but she clicked shut the cylinder, turned halfway in her chair, pointed the revolver at me, and pulled the trigger.
-12-
That evening, we sat in a chophouse in the GI village of Yongju-gol, glancing out the steam-smeared front window. I picked listlessly with my wooden chopsticks, poking a spread-eagled crab that lay atop my bowl of lukewarm buckwheat noodles and trying to decide whether or not it was still alive.
“I’ve heard of buckwheat pancakes,” Ernie said, “but never buckwheat noodles.”
“You’ve had them pretty often,” I told him
. “You just didn’t know it.”
“Only the translucent type.” He hoisted a clump of noodles above his bowl and let them dangle like tangled hair, twisting them in the overhead fluorescent light. “These are more like mouse gray.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Tasty, though.” He bit into a clump. After chewing, he said, “You about shit a brick when she aimed that revolver at you.”
“I don’t like it,” I said, still smarting from the confrontation. “It’s not good policy to point a weapon at another human being unless you intend to kill them.”
“Well, lucky for you, that’s not what she intended.”
What she’d done was twist her wrist at the last moment and aim the revolver at a tilted bucket of sand that police officers used to clear their weapons. After checking the cylinder, they would aim the weapon into the sand and pull the trigger as a final safety check. If a bullet was fired, it slammed harmlessly into the large bucket and no one was hurt.
“It was a dirty trick,” I said, trying to sound indignant rather than petulant.
I’d berated her for pointing the gun at me, but she’d proceeded to explain in Korean that she was only trying to startle us into the awareness that the boys up here in the Western Corridor didn’t play nice. There were about a dozen US Army compounds, all manned by combat units—tanks, artillery, long-range reconnaissance patrols—and probably forty or fifty ROK Army units, in fortified defensive positions, scattered across the nearby hills. Each and every soldier was firing armaments pretty much every day. Pistols, rifles, howitzers, anti-aircraft guns, you name it. And off duty, they were almost as violent as they were on duty. Although usually, in the bars and brothels, they only used broken beer bottles, pool cues, fists, and the occasional bayonet that they managed to smuggle off base.
“Dongmul i-ji,” Sergeant Kang said. They’re animals.
After we’d gotten to talk to her, I’d realized she was competent and maybe even friendly. Still, I treated her with a wariness that I usually reserved for violent drunks. She was unpredictable. Maybe good for a cop in a tough neighborhood, but dangerous for those new to working with her. I’d stared into her black eyes, which reminded me of a shark’s, as we’d gone over our plans for the evening’s work.