by Martin Limon
“Get off him!”
I ignored him and finished locking the cuffs. “Not just illegal transference and aiding and abetting,” I said, pulling Brunmeyer to his feet. “We’re also charging you with assault with a deadly weapon. Namely, an entrenching tool. Lastly, we’re charging you with the murder of Corporal Noh Jong-bei.”
The soldiers around me, including the sergeant of the guard, stopped, stricken.
“You knew what was happening,” I said, turning to them. “But you were afraid, and you chose to look away. You knew Brunmeyer was purchasing tons of goods from the PX, coffee and liquor and cigarettes, and handing them over to Lieutenant Kwon. You can’t claim that you didn’t see anything, not in an area this small. But it made your lives easier, and anyway, that was your commander’s call, not yours. But No-Go didn’t agree. He didn’t like knuckling under to the NKs, and he confronted Brunmeyer about it. Threatened to turn him in.” I waved my arm. “To turn all of you in.”
“We didn’t do nothin’,” one of the guards said.
“But you should’ve done something,” I replied. “You knew it was wrong. You looked the other way when your commander bribed the North Koreans, and worse, you looked the other way when No-Go turned up dead.”
A few of the guys averted their eyes. The sergeant of the guard continued to stare at me with unmitigated hatred. “We could turn you over to them,” he said, nodding toward the North Korean guards crouched in firing positions at the far end of the MAC building. “After all, you just fired on their men.”
“No,” I said, “you won’t be turning us over.” I nodded toward Ernie and Staff Sergeant Palinki and Corporal Muencher, all of whom had their weapons trained on the group surrounding Brunmeyer.
Brunmeyer knelt in the dirt, his head hanging down.
Colonel Peele’s eyes bugged out of his flushed face. Moist lips sputtered and he shouted, “Back off, damn you! Let him go. Who the hell do you think you are? I’ll have you court-martialed for this!”
“There’ll be a court-martial all right,” I said. “For him and maybe for you.”
Ernie shoved through the crowd, followed closely by Palinki and Muencher. He lifted Brunmeyer by the armpits, and he and Palinki marched him past the dumbfounded JSA guards and toward the parking area. I followed close on their heels. As we left, Colonel Peele shouted after us, repeating his threat that we would be court-martialed.
“He needs a new catchphrase,” Ernie said.
We had just about reached the jeep when Lieutenant Kwon, backed up by a contingent of armed North Korean soldiers, appeared around the corner of one of the single-story buildings. Without hesitation, Palinki stepped forward. “Get the hell outta here,” he said, waving his big arm. “You got it? Get the hell outta here.”
The North Koreans didn’t move.
I stepped forward and addressed Lieutenant Kwon. “Back off, Kwon,” I told him. “You’d better clear out that warehouse and take what you can. Your black marketeering days are over.”
He pulled his pistol, a Russian-made Tokarev.
“They can’t be,” he said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“They just can’t.”
I switched to Korean so his men would understand. “Your bosses, the generals, they take all the liquor, they take all the cigarettes, they take all the food. They leave nothing for you or your men.”
Kwon didn’t answer, so I continued.
“Now it’s finished, so the generals will be angry. They’ll blame you. That’s why you’re frightened.”
Again he didn’t answer but his head lowered slightly.
“So come with us,” I told him. “To the south. You’ll be safe there. You and your men. There’s room for all of you.”
There wasn’t room in the jeep, but if they decided to defect, I’d find a vehicle somewhere.
Kwon seemed to be seriously considering my words. He knew that as the lowest-ranking officer involved in this scheme, he would be punished for having botched a good deal. More than likely, none of his bosses would suffer anything more than embarrassment. And then one of the men behind him spoke up.
“The American is a liar. Don’t listen to the big-nosed thief.”
Everyone was armed—and frightened. Kwon stood up straighter, as if instantly remembering there was no way he could defect. It might be a nice dream, but an impossible one. When you ran from the worker’s paradise of North Korea and the Great Leader could no longer lay his hands on you, he would lay them on your family. Often, they’d be executed. Three generations wiped off the face of the earth. That was the policy. If your family members were lucky enough not to be killed immediately, then they’d be thrown in a prison camp, facing hard labor for the rest of their lives; lives that figured to be short, painful, and brutish.
Kwon’s face straightened back into that of the stern officer we’d seen a few minutes ago. He’d made his decision. He wouldn’t be going with us. But would he try to save Brunmeyer?
Lieutenant Colonel Rudolph M. Brunmeyer seemed to have undergone the inverse transition. Unlike that of the brave, efficient officer who’d exited the MAC meeting room, his head now hung heavily, as if physically weighed down by his arrest.
Lieutenant Kwon studied Brunmeyer. The same soldier who’d just called us liars sidled up next to him and said in Korean, “We can’t let him go.” Kwon squinted and seemed to nod in agreement.
I tensed, my hand reaching toward the hilt of my .45. Although Ernie didn’t understand what had been said, he sensed my alarm. So did Palinki and Muencher. Without being told, they stepped slightly away from us and started to raise their weapons. The North Koreans, outnumbering us, raised theirs.
Kwon pointed his pistol at Brunmeyer. “Him!” he said in English. “He stays with us.”
“Not a chance,” Palinki shouted. “He’s our prisoner, brutha. Nobody takes him from our custody.”
Words were exchanged in Korean so rapidly I didn’t understand them. Kwon’s men stepped slightly apart, making themselves more difficult targets.
“Now!” Kwon said, pointing again at Brunmeyer. “I want him now!”
That’s when we heard it. More gunfire. I flinched. Ernie swiveled, hesitated for a moment, and then shouted, “Colonel Peele!”
The big man had stripped off his green coat, loosened his tie, and rolled up the cuffs of his long-sleeved shirt, just as we’d seen him do in his office. But now he had a pistol in his hand and he was running toward Lieutenant Kwon and the contingent of North Korean soldiers.
“Kwon, you son of a bitch,” he yelled. “Stop where you stand!”
He raised the pistol and fired. The bullet zinged wildly over their heads. The North Koreans crouched, swiveled, and one of them aimed his AK-47 and let loose with a burst of automatic fire. Bullets smashed into Peele’s body. He stood tall, his face a mask of surprise; then slowly he twisted and tumbled forward, struggling to keep his feet as more of the flying metal rammed into his torso, twirling him like a top before he slammed face-first to the ground.
The firing stopped. We’d taken advantage of the distraction to drag Brunmeyer behind the jeep and take cover. Lieutenant Kwon now faced the barrels of our pistols and Muencher’s M16 automatic assault rifle, which was pointed directly at his head. For a few seconds, he appeared to ponder the wisdom of immediate death versus an unknown fate. In North Korea, the choice between oblivion and survival can be a finely calibrated calculation.
After what seemed like a long time, he shouted an order. He and his men lowered their weapons, turned, and trotted quick time back to their command building on the northern side of the line.
Ernie and I reached Colonel Peele first. He stared up at us, saliva flowing in thick gobs from his mouth, blue eyes rolling wildly in his head.
“Did I get him?” he asked.
I patted his wrinkled forehead, not both
ering to ask who he was talking about, knowing it didn’t really matter. “Yeah,” I said, “you got him.”
“We should never have apologized,” he croaked, “to the lying sons of bitches.”
With that, he smiled, gulped a last spasmodic breath, and exhaled slowly. We waited a few seconds, and when he didn’t move, Ernie reached forward and closed shut his open eyelids.
Ernie drove us hurriedly out of the JSA, and minutes later we were crossing Freedom Bridge. No one tried to stop us since we were heading south, and soon we were on Tongil Lo, Unification Road, speeding toward Seoul. Military convoys roared north.
“Somebody must’ve called an alert,” Ernie said.
“I hope to tell ya,” Palinki replied.
I checked my hands. They were still shaking. “You want to tell us, Brunmeyer?” I turned to the backseat and spoke to him. “About you and Corporal Noh Jong-bei?”
He looked up, startled by the mention of No-Go, Corporal Noh Jong-bei. He rattled his handcuffs, checking their strength, then relaxed, laughing to himself at some untold joke.
“It seemed harmless enough at first,” Brunmeyer said. “A way to gain cooperation and get things done up at the JSA. Like oil on machinery, making it hum. After a while, the whole business became routine. Write up the Letter of Authorization, send No-Go and Fusterman to Seoul to pick up the liquor and Spam, and after they returned to the barracks, I shoved the newly purchased cases into the warehouse. Later, Kwon would take them away. Clean, easy, and simple. But then No-Go realized there was too much being brought up for our unit alone, and he must’ve heard the North Koreans talking about the stuff they were getting for free from the dumb Americans. He confronted me, threatened to blow the whole deal. I knew that once it became public knowledge, the MAC would claim that their constant carping at me to keep peace up here at JSA had nothing to do with my decision to grease the skids with the North Koreans. They’d take the easy way out. They’d lay the whole blame on me.” He looked around at me and Ernie and Palinki and Muencher. “Don’t you see? I had to do it. Everything was on the line.”
Palinki patted him on the back. “I see, brutha. But you killed a guy.”
“And the gampei,” I said. “They went to all that trouble to talk to you because they wanted to be cut into the deal.”
“More than just that,” Brunmeyer said. “They wanted to use Lieutenant Kwon and his superiors to set up a much more extensive, more powerful network of contacts in the North Korean government. So far, the Commies up north have always dealt with the Chinese smugglers on their northern border. The Korean gampei wanted to set up something closer to home. Something we could transport across the border at the JSA.”
“And you would’ve agreed to that?” Muencher asked.
Brunmeyer shrugged. “What choice did I have? They made it clear they had the goods on me. If I didn’t play ball, they’d not only hurt that American woman they were holding, they’d also turn me in.”
“No choice, brutha,” Palinki said, jollying him along.
From the beginning, the gampei had seen the setup, probably before I did, with the information they were receiving from their Korean civilian contacts on base. And once they had Evelyn Cresthill, they had an additional lever they could use to pry their way into a potentially very lucrative smuggling operation into North Korea.
Brunmeyer explained how the scheme had evolved. A GI on guard duty on a cold wintry night, offering an American-made cigarette to an exhausted North Korean soldier. The North Korean stealthily taking the cigarette, knowing he’d be punished if he were caught, and then not smoking it but hiding it in his pocket and later using it as currency to gain favor with his own superior.
“It started to take on a life of its own,” Brunmeyer said. “There we were, in the middle of the Korean winter, cold, tired, exhausted and staring at one another, with no MAC meetings and no honchos from Seoul, or honchos from Pyongyang, anywhere in sight. American GIs are friendly. It was the North Koreans who let down their guard. They accepted what they couldn’t get in their own country. A cup of hot coffee, sugar, and eventually a can of Spam, which made its way up to Kwon, the officer in charge on those long, lonely nights.
“He saw the possibilities immediately. Apparently, he was confident enough to approach one of his superior officers with the can of Spam as a gift. At first, he claimed that he’d stolen it—that is, ‘liberated’ it from the American imperialist running dogs. But when more Spam was forthcoming, and then fruit cocktail and instant coffee, the operation started to expand. The officer who was accepting the goods transferred part of the booty up the line, earning favors from his own superiors. Soon, the demand was greater than I could provide with my personal rations. I switched to LOAs.” Letters of Authorization.
“Ingenious,” Muencher said, possibly in awe of the first field-grade officer she’d ever spoken to in such a personal context.
“I thought so,” Brunmeyer replied. “I figured we were subverting the North Koreans with proof of the superiority of our own capitalist system. It made things run smoothly up at the JSA, and I didn’t see the harm.”
“Weren’t you worried about the LOAs?”
“Yes. But when nobody said anything after the first few, I worried less. And the demand from the North Koreans was growing. They offered me money to bring more things north, but I turned down any and all payment, telling them I had to keep the operation at least somewhat small or I’d be discovered. They seemed to understand.”
“What about Colonel Peele at the MAC? Did he realize what you were doing?”
Brunmeyer thought about that one. “Yes and no.”
“What do you mean?”
“Colonel Peele was Executive Officer at the Military Armistice Commission for three years, just now starting on his fourth. He must’ve been aware—in fact, he commented on it once—how smoothly things were running up at the JSA. How, other than posturing, the North Koreans hadn’t really done anything out of line in quite a while. I’m not sure about this, but I suspect that Ration Control might’ve informed him about the Letters of Authorization and he told them to leave the issue alone. Other than troops in actual combat, the soldiers at the Joint Security Area have the most dangerous assignment in the world, and they shouldn’t be subjected to petty ration control restrictions. I think it was something like that.” Brunmeyer spread his fingers, rattling his handcuffs. “Before I knew it, we had a full-fledged supply operation on our hands.”
“And Corporal Noh?”
Brunmeyer’s face clouded, then turned red. His eyes welled up with moisture. “My fault entirely. Noh and Fusterman were doing my runs to Seoul; turning in the LOAs, making the purchases at the PX and commissary, and bringing everything back to the JSA. I knew that No-Go’s family lived somewhere in Seoul, and it didn’t bother me that he would stop there with Fusterman and visit with his parents as long as they returned to the JSA by close-of-business. But then something went wrong. I don’t know if he had a feud with one of the North Koreans or if he was angry with PFC Fusterman, but for whatever reason, he threatened to turn me in for providing American product to the North Koreans. He couldn’t go to the KATUSA First Sergeant or even higher up in the South Korean Army chain of command. They’d beat the hell out of him, order him to mind his own business, and more than likely ship him off to some infantry division walking the line.”
“Right along the DMZ?” Palinki asked.
“Yes. The more remote the assignment, the better. I’d seen the Koreans do that to other KATUSAs who caused trouble. That was the sword always hanging over their heads. The threat of losing their cushy assignment with the US Army and being banished to a regular army unit. That’s what makes them such good troops.”
“Convenient for you,” I said.
“Yes. Except for Noh. When I talked to him, he said the issue was personal, and he didn’t care what the risk to himself was. He sai
d his father had fought against the North Koreans, and he had relatives he’d never met who were being held captive in North Korea, so he couldn’t abide us cutting deals with the brutal, two-faced Communists. He told me that I couldn’t stop him, that he and Fusterman were going to get word to an American newspaper reporter in Seoul. They were going to bust the entire thing wide open.”
As I listened, I couldn’t help thinking that blowing the whistle would not only get Corporal Noh transferred to the DMZ, but would also lead to the transfer of PFC Fusterman. Most likely, he’d be shipped back to the States, which would have the additional benefit of putting an end to Fusterman’s romance with Noh’s sister, Marilyn.
“So what did you do?” I asked. As the jeep raced down Tongil Lo, Ernie, Palinki, and Muencher were now barely breathing.
Brunmeyer hung his head, allowing it to loll listlessly, as if the muscles in his neck had lost power.
“I was so angry,” he said. “Noh was ruining everything. Not only the sweet setup we had at the JSA, but also ruining my chance to make full colonel. Ruining my chance to advance my career, maybe even make general someday. It was all going down the drain. Maybe even a few of my troops would be implicated, who knows? Many of them were dedicated soldiers, had been in the army for years, but if our dealings with the North Koreans came to light, those good men might be kicked out of the army, even court-martialed, for their loyalty to me. I couldn’t allow that to happen.” He turned to Palinki, then to Muencher. “Don’t you see? I couldn’t allow it.”
“So you talked to Corporal Noh?”
“Yes. Alone. I found him outside one night and ordered him to follow me to the area between the conference buildings where no one could see us.”
“What about the entrenching tool?”
“I had it in my hand. I’m not sure why. I just brought it with me when I went to find him. I told myself I was going to clean off some of the frozen snow from the guard post viewing areas. I shouldn’t have brought it. If I hadn’t carried that damned thing with me, maybe things would have turned out differently.”