by Martin Limon
They, of course, charged Sarkosian not only with bank robbery, but also with murder. More than one convicted killer—just ask Mr. Kill—had gone to the gallows. But the Korean government faced an unusual problem with Sarkosian. It had to do with the US taxpayer, who for decades had been financing the American defense of the Republic of Korea against its Communist neighbor to the north. Did it really make sense to have a story appearing in Stateside newspapers concerning an American serviceman in South Korea being hanged by the neck until dead?
The other side of the equation was domestic political blowback. Korean citizens wanted justice, or even revenge against this man. But Park Chung-hee had to keep a wary eye on the seven hundred thousand Communist soldiers just thirty miles north of their capital. The attack on Seoul via the III Corps coup that had just happened had revealed the weaknesses within his own regime; this was no time to put military support from the US at risk.
Sarkosian’s trial wasn’t covered in the Korean press, on the orders of Park Chung-hee. The AP and UPI, of course, did cover the trial, as did the Overseas Observer. Katie Byrd Worthington not only sat in the press section during the trial, but for at least a couple of hours, she was sworn in as a witness. Kidnapping was added to Sarkosian’s list of charges, almost as an afterthought. Katie didn’t mind since she used the threat of refusing to testify as leverage to coerce the Korean prosecutor into allowing her an exclusive interview with Sarkosian.
The Observer editors dedicated almost twelve column inches to Sarkosian’s rant. It was quite a screed. He still blamed Ernie and me for having “messed him up,” as Katie put it, cleaning up the vulgarity so it would be allowed in print. And he still swore that someday he would take his revenge. Which could never happen if he were subject to the same punishment any Korean criminal would for similar charges—which would certainly be death. But Sarkosian was not only an American, but a US Army soldier, and so after the guilty verdict, the Korean court sentenced him to time in a Korean prison: a total of eight years.
“Eight years?” Ernie said, incredulous, as we sat in the 8th Army Snack Bar. “With all that blood on his hands?”
“They don’t want to hang an American soldier,” I said. “And they sure as hell don’t want him locked up in Korea forever. They want to get rid of him. If the Korean government had their way, they’d send him back to the States now and never look at him again.”
“How are the families of the dead taking it?”
“Not well,” I said. “Not from what Mr. Kill tells me. Some of them are threatening public demonstrations to protest the light sentence.”
Strange approached. As he sat down, Ernie and I both stopped talking. For once he brought his own cup of hot chocolate.
“You think he’ll be able to pull it off?” he asked.
“Who and what are you talking about?” I said.
“Sarkosian. Do you think he’ll be able to keep his vow to murder you two when he gets out?”
Ernie barked a laugh. “Guess we’ll find out in eight years.”
“In eight years,” Strange said. “By then, he’ll speak Korean better than Sueño here.”
“Yeah,” I said. For that, if for nothing else, I envied the man.
-30-
Miss Kim stood on a crowded bus on her way to work when a tightly folded note was pressed into her hand. She turned quickly, but whoever had passed it to her had already slipped through the crowd and proceeded to hop off the bus at the next stop. She wasn’t even sure if it was a man or a woman.
The note had my name on it. In the CID office, when we were alone, I unwrapped it and flattened it out. Written in English was a time and a place.
I thanked Miss Kim, and she was kind enough not to ask who it had come from.
There was no signature on the note, but I knew who’d written it.
I sat on a bench in Children’s Park on the side of Namsan Mountain on the southern edge of Seoul. Toddlers played on swings and clung to merry-go-rounds, and young female attendants waved their arms and called to them when any of them started to wander away. Nobody paid much attention to the lone miguk on the bench. I’d been there ten minutes. A woman wearing a long overcoat, a pulldown wool cap, and a scarf covering her mouth strode behind me. She didn’t say anything, but when she entered the tree line at the edge of the playground, I stood and followed.
Deeper in the woods, she stopped and pulled the scarf from her face. We hugged. I squeezed her so tightly I was worried I might hurt her. I loosened my grip and stood back and studied her. Doctor Yong In-ja.
“You’re taking a risk,” I said. “Again.”
“So are you.”
“All they’d do to me is accuse me of consorting with a Red and pull my security clearance.”
“And push you out of law enforcement.”
I shrugged. “Worse things could happen.” I glanced around the wooded area, seeing nothing. “I’m worried about them catching you.”
The Park Chung-hee government had used General Bok’s attempted coup as an excuse to crack down on everyone and anyone who had ever opposed it. Hundreds of suspected dissidents had been taken in for interrogation, even torture. Dozens, our military intelligence thought, had already been “disappeared.” That was, buried somewhere in a shallow grave. Doc Yong, as leader of the revolutionary South Cholla Worker’s Union, was high on Park Chung-hee’s list for elimination.
She paused, searching my eyes. “Maybe someday, Korea will be a free country, and those of us who strive for a third way, a way outside of both brutal communism and blood-sucking capitalism, will be heard. Maybe we’ll have leaders on both sides of the line who don’t crave every last drop of power, who won’t murder those who disagree with them.”
“That could be a long time,” I said.
She stared at me. “Yes,” she replied. “Until then, you still cannot try to find me or Il-yong. You know that will lead them to us.”
I did know. The Korean National Police, and the Korean CIA, had informants everywhere. An American GI, out of place in a province or a town with no US military bases, asking questions, dropping names, searching for someone, would attract every cop in the area.
“You stopped them,” she said.
“Stopped who?”
“General Bok and that pretend heir to the throne of the Chosun Dynasty. You were there with them in the Korean Broadcasting studio.” She must’ve had spies in the KBS building. The resistance to Park Chung-hee was silent, but widespread. “You switched on the sound,” she continued, “so everyone could hear him speaking Japanese, so everyone would realize this was a ploy by the Tokyo industrialists and their Korean collaborators.”
“I didn’t do anything important,” I said. “The Korean people stopped them, by rising up against them instead of for them.”
“Did your superiors order you to foil the coup?” she asked. “Or did you decide on your own?”
“My superiors,” I said, “don’t know anything about the mechanisms of Korean society. And they care even less. As long as there’s an anti-Communist government in power, they’re happy.” And then I realized something. “Those European women who were taken to Bok’s Third Corps Headquarters—did your organization have anything to do with them?”
“We had to find a way to expose Bok to the world,” she said. “What easier way than through sex?”
Sex, GIs, and the Overseas Observer, I thought. The perfect trifecta.
“I thought you wanted Park Chung-hee to be overthrown.”
She shook her head negatively. “Not by Bok. He only wanted to bring back the elites who’d done well under the Japanese, like his own family. Park needs to be removed from power, but through a democratic process.”
She grabbed my hand. “I’m worried about that man, the bank robber. He said he’s going to kill you.”
“He’ll be locked up for a long time.”
“Don’t worry. He won’t.”
“I hope not.” She pondered it for a moment, and the smooth planes of her face wrinkled with concern. Finally, her face brightened. She squeezed my hand. “Before you go, there’s someone I want you to see.”
As if on cue, ten yards downhill, a man stepped out from behind a tree—a man I hadn’t seen before. He pulled someone gently behind him. Someone small.
“Il-yong,” his mother said, motioning with her hand for him to come closer.
The little boy hesitated, bright brown eyes opened wide. Then he stepped forward and then he was running. I knelt. He stopped next to his mother and grabbed her mittened hand. She knelt as well.
“This is your father,” she said, motioning toward me.
He looked up at her, slightly confused. “Abeoji?” he said in Korean. Father?
“Yes,” she said. “Your father.”
He turned his bright eyes and studied me. From head to toe, it seemed. His sweet face remained noncommittal.
I offered my hand. “Hello, Il-yong,” I said. “I’m your father.”
He continued to stare, unmoving.
“Go ahead,” his mother said. “Shake his hand, the way I taught you.”
He worked up his courage and stuck out his hand. I shook it, holding on a little longer than I probably should have. Suddenly, he jerked his hand back, grabbed the folds of his mother’s coat, and buried his head into her side.
She kissed him and comforted him. The man standing next to the tree shuffled. Doctor Yong In-ja looked at me, her eyes wide and moist.
“We have to go,” she said.
“When will I see you again?”
She shook her head. “No way to know.”
I choked at the madness of it all. I would gladly have put in our marriage paperwork so she and Il-yong could get their visas and leave this place. But the Korean government would never let her go. One of the reasons for the so-called “security check” on marriage licenses was to make sure that the potential Korean bride had been neither a Communist nor a member of an opposition group. The South Korean authorities would not only deny her application for marriage, they would arrest her to boot.
But more importantly, even if we could get them out, she didn’t want to marry me. Yong In-ja was committed to her comrades in South Cholla. Leaving with a foreigner would take her away from the cause that she’d dedicated her life to.
She must’ve sensed my frustration and waited a moment for me to calm down. Finally, she said, “When he’s older, what do you want me to tell him?”
I pondered the question, keeping my eyes on Il-yong, knowing my stare embarrassed him but unable to look away. “Tell him that I would never have left him, nothing would’ve made me leave him, if there’d been any other way.”
She nodded.
“Say goodbye to your father,” she told Il-yong. He stared at me with wide eyes but said nothing.
Then she stood and pulled along the now bashful Il-yong. They walked together toward the waiting man. Backs toward me, the three of them filtered through the copse of trees and disappeared down the leaf-covered hillside. I remained kneeling, listening to the crunch of their feet on the papery foliage until the sound faded into a silent infinity.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to translator, interpreter, and actor YunJung Elena Chang for her wise counsel on Korean cultural and linguistic issues. Any mistakes are mine alone. Also kudos to Coco Cugat Garcia and the folks at the Yongsan Legacy Project for helping to memorialize the US military headquarters on Yongsan Compound which existed in Seoul from 1945 until 2018. Their work was invaluable to all of us who were privileged to serve there.