Nightmare Range

by Martin Limon

  “Lucky you came along,” Ernie told him, repeating himself, still angry. “I was about to kick me some serious ass.”

  The man didn’t respond. He was thick-shouldered and broad-hipped and walked with a pronounced bow-leggedness; it would be impossible to knock him off his center of gravity. He wore fatigue pants and combat boots but no headgear and only a green t-shirt covering his upper torso.

  At a wooden gate facing the river, he stopped and knocked and shouted out, “Rodney Ohma.” Rodney’s Mother.

  Footsteps pounded on earth. A small door in the gate creaked open. The man motioned with his flashlight for us to enter.

  “Who the hell are you?” Ernie asked.

  The man seemed surprised. “I’m Singletery. The CQ runner told me you was looking for me.”

  “That’s why you came looking for us?” I asked.

  “Dangerous town,” Singletery said. His face kept its flat, earnest expression as he spoke. There was no hint of irony in his voice. Immediately, I understood why the officer corps thought so highly of Sergeant First Class Singeltery and why his tour in Korea had been extended beyond five years. He knew how to handle the troops, which was more than most of the officer corps could say, and he got the job done without the customary smirk of superiority or taunting tone of voice that many NCOs used to mask their resentment of authority.

  Ernie crouched through the small door first. I followed.

  It was a surprisingly large courtyard for the crowded village of Sonyu-ri. The wall on the left was lined with earthenware kimchi pots and the wall on the right featured two cement-walled byonso, outdoor toilets. One wooden door was slashed with black paint spelling yo, woman, and the other nam, man.

  In the center of the courtyard was a small swing set, rusty but sturdy with shiny new bolts at the metal joints. In front of us were two hooches forming an L shape and running along their front was a low, varnished wooden porch. In the awning overhead, bright bulbs shone, illuminating the entire scene. Behind the porch some of the oil-papered doors had been slid open. A small pack of children squatted on a warm ondol floor watching cartoons with various anthropomorphic creatures squawking and growling in high-pitched Korean.

  A woman emerged from one of the hooches. She was Korean, wearing a thick woolen housedress, long, unkempt hair sweeping back from a high forehead. She was a big woman for a Korean, husky. She flashed us a crooked smile that moved only the lower half of her long face and then she bowed slightly, motioning for us to enter the hooch opposite the one where the children were watching television.

  “That’s my wife,” Singletery said, but he didn’t attempt any more formal introductions.

  We slipped off our shoes and stepped up on the porch and Mrs. Singletery dealt flat cushions out on the floor. The room had sleeping mats rolled against one wall and a large inlaid mother-of-pearl armoire against the other. She folded down the legs of a small table, set it in front of us, and hurried out toward the kitchen. Singletery, after slipping off his combat boots, sat down opposite us. With moist brown eyes he stared at us, his legs comfortably crossed, his big hands relaxed in his lap. He didn’t say anything. Neither did we. We just listened to the bang, slap, roar of the cartoon next door. The children were enraptured but they weren’t laughing.

  Finally, Singletery’s wife brought a brass pot of hot water and we helped ourselves to Folgers instant coffee. Ernie took sugar in his, I took mine black. Singletery sipped on a strawberry soda.

  The cartoons ended. The children filed out of the room, slipped on their shoes, and bowed to Singletery’s wife, who stood on the porch to see them off. In a small pack they trotted across the courtyard, pushed through the gate, and tumbled shouting out into the street. A little boy of about four came over and sat in Singletery’s lap. He was obviously his son, with both the dark skin and curly hair of his father and the smooth Korean features of his mother.

  “The wife likes the kids to play here,” Singletery said. “That’s why she lets ’em watch TV.”

  Many of the poor families in Sonyu-ri, and throughout the country, could not afford televisions.

  “That’s nice of her,” I said.

  Singletery didn’t answer. He held the bottle of pop while his son drank from it. His wife didn’t join us. A pot clanged in the kitchen.

  Ernie and I already figured we were in the wrong place. The likelihood of this guy, a lifer with well over ten years in the Army, traveling to Seoul with a couple of buddies and raping a business girl on the banks of the Han River were slim to non-existent. Still, we were here. Might as well ask some questions.

  “Your boys seem a little over-exuberant,” I said.

  Singletery stared at me blankly.

  “They’re anxious to kick some REMF ass,” Ernie translated.

  Singletery smiled, brown eyes shining. “They some tough boys.”

  “In your platoon?”

  “In my battery,” he corrected.

  “Right. Your battery. Do you get down to Seoul much?”

  “Every payday,” he said proudly.

  “Get a kitchen pass?” Ernie said, smiling. “So you can run the ville down in Itaewon?”

  Somberly, Singletery shook his head. His son was growing bored with our adult conversation, his eyes drooping. He snuggled up closer to his dad. “No,” Singletery replied. “Every payday me and the wife and the boy jump on the bus out of RC-Four. Go to the commissary.”

  He was referring to 8th Army’s big Yongsan Commissary in Seoul. Whole families from the Division area mob the place shortly after end-of-month payday, and mob the free military buses going back and forth. Most of them carry empty Army-issue duffel bags down with them, then load them up with imported merchandize and lug the heavy load all the way back up north.

  “How about last weekend?” Ernie asked. “Did you or anybody in your unit go to Seoul?”

  Singletery shook his head. “We was out on alert.”

  “Where?”

  “Nightmare Range.”

  I knew where it was. A military reservation set aside for war games, at the top of the Eastern Corridor, sandwiched between the Imjin River and the Demilitarized Zone.

  “The whole battalion?” I asked.

  Singletery nodded his head.

  That was that. We’d checked on every Chief of Firing Battery in the entire 2nd Infantry Division, every NCO who could conceivably be called “Smoke,” and we’d come up with nothing. Still, Singletery had been living and working in the Division area for over five years. I decided to level with him.

  “There was a rape,” I said, “down in Seoul. A business girl named Sunny was hurt badly.”

  Singletery patted his son on the butt and told him to run off to his mother. The sleepy boy did. Singletery sipped on his strawberry soda and studied me with his brown eyes. I filled him in on the details and told him that we were up here because one of Sunny’s attackers had been referred to as “Smoke.”

  “Smoke,” Singletery repeated.

  “So we thought,” Ernie said, “that the guy might be a Chief of Firing Battery.”

  “Have you heard anything?” I asked. “About three guys going to Seoul last weekend, maybe one of them coming back with some scratches on his face or on his arms? Maybe bragging about the women they’d met? Something like that?”

  Slowly, Singletery shook his head. He set down his soda. “That’s fucked up,” he said.

  “Yes,” I replied. “Very fucked up.”

  He shoved his soda away, as if it had turned sour. His wife returned and offered us more coffee. We declined. Singletery continued to think about what we’d said, as if we’d upset him deeply. When he offered no further information, we thanked him and his wife for their hospitality, went to the porch, slipped on our shoes, and escaped into the cold night.

  A thousand lights reflected off the rotating glass disc. Rock and roll blared out of the juke box and I had to lean close to Ernie to make myself heard.

  “We should drive back tonight,�
� I shouted. “Make some more black market arrests in the morning.”

  “Why?” Ernie asked. “Five arrests in two days. That’s enough to hold ’em for a while.”

  “Not with Mrs. Wrypointe on the warpath.”

  “Screw Mrs. Wrypointe.”

  “Not with your dick,” I told him, although my heart wasn’t in it. Ernie’d glommed onto a buxom young woman wearing hot pants and a halter top. Her name was Miss Kim or Miss Lee or Miss Pak, I don’t remember which, and when the midnight curfew approached Ernie told me that he’d be staying with her at her hooch and he’d meet me in the morning.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “At the jeep. There’s a PX snack stand in front of the Battalion Ops Center. Zero eight hundred.”

  “That late?”

  “You worry too much, Sueño.”

  Patting Miss Kim or Miss Lee or Miss Pak on her tight butt, he strode out the back door of the Kit Kat Club and entered the dark maze of alleys that pulsed through the village of Sonyu-ri like purple veins through a heart.

  I finished my beer and wandered out into the street. Standing in shadow, I watched GIs, many of them arm-in-arm with business girls, scattering toward refuge before the oncoming midnight-to-four curfew. Lights in many of the shops had already been turned off, metal shutters rolled into place. Up and down the strip, neon flickered, buzzed, and then shut down.

  A woman stood next to me. “We go, GI?”

  She was older than me. In her thirties, maybe forty. I couldn’t stand here all night. I asked her how much. She told me. It seemed reasonable.

  She was surprised, I suppose, that I didn’t bargain. Most GIs would. But I didn’t believe in bargaining with business girls. They were desperate and only did what they did because of poverty. I knew about desperation and I knew about poverty. But these days I had money coming in every month, whether I needed it or not. And I had no wife to spend it on, and no son. Not that I could find, anyway.

  She took me by the hand and her flesh was warm. I held on tight as she led me into the night.

  In the morning, I was up with the PT formations. PT—that’s the army’s acronym for physical training. Or, as drill sergeants love to say, “physical torture.” Before dawn, each unit falls out in the company (or battery) street and does the daily dozen. Calisthenics, civilians call them. Jumping jacks, squat benders, leg thrusts, push-ups, sit-ups, the usual. When done with that, the next order of business is the morning run. Years ago, a mile was deemed to be an appropriate distance. But these days, longer distances are in vogue and no self-respecting firing battery would bother with a run of less than two miles. Each of the three Camp Pelham firing batteries exploded, in formation, yelling their lungs out, from beneath the arched main gate. An NCO led them, shouting out cadence, the men chanting in response, and the unit wound like a very noisy caterpillar down the main street of Sonyu-ri. “Wake up! Sonyu-ri! Wake up! Sonyu-ri!”

  No unit in the States could get away with running past a residential area and making that much noise. The civilians would complain. In Korea, the local populace doesn’t even think about complaining. Who would they complain to? The military dictatorship that runs the country? The local police who take orders from that dictatorship? The Commander of Camp Pelham? All futile. Instead, they put up with the shouting and the pounding of feet and when the sound fades away they roll over and go back to sleep.

  When the last battery exited Camp Pelham, it made its way, like the others, down the main drag of Sonyu-ri. About two hundred yards on the other end of the strip, another unit emerged from the compound called RC-4, Recreation Center Four. In addition to their regular sweatpants and sweatshirts, each member of this unit wore a red pullover cap. The lead runner carried a guidon, a pennant fluttering atop a pole that identified them as combat engineers. As the two units approached each other they both started the same chant, even louder than the chants before: “On your left! On your left! Sick call! Sick call!”

  The ultimate insult. Instead of doing your job, you spend your time running to the dispensary, claiming to be one of the “sick, lame, and lazy.”

  The units passed each other, trading barbs and descriptive hand gestures, and continued on their runs. I strode to the Camp Pelham gate. An American MP stared at me with a bored expression. I flashed my identification and passed through the narrow pedestrian entrance. A few yards inside, I found our jeep still parked in front of the Battalion Ops Center. I sat in the passenger seat, crossing my arms across my chest for warmth, waiting for Ernie. About half an hour later, the snack stand across the street opened for business. I bought a Styrofoam cup filled with acidic coffee and a cinnamon roll made of dough that had the consistency of chewing gum. Still, the breakfast warmed me and filled my empty stomach.

  I thought of the woman I’d spent the night with. Already, I could hardly remember her face. What I did remember is how deferential the landlady had been to her because she’d landed a customer. She brought us a metal pan of hot water and hand towels and soap and asked us to play the radio low so we wouldn’t disturb the children sleeping in the hooch next door. The landlady bowed to her when she brought the pan of hot water and called her “ajjima.” Aunt. It may sound crazy but I thought I’d helped the old business girl in more ways than one. I’d given her money, of course, which she clearly needed, and maybe just as importantly I’d given her face. It may not seem like much but in a lifetime filled with hardship and a constant gnawing sense of desperation, it’s something.

  Ernie always told me I was a nut case. “You can’t save the whole freaking world,” he used to tell me. I knew he was right but that didn’t make things any easier.

  I was about to purchase another cup of coffee when Ernie showed up, right at zero eight hundred like he’d promised. He jumped behind the steering wheel and started the engine.

  “You get your ashes hauled last night?” he asked.

  I shrugged.

  “Okay,” he said. “Be that way.”

  He backed the jeep out into the battalion street, jammed the gearshift into first, and a few seconds later we were outside the main gate of Camp Pelhem. Across the street stood a boxy whitewashed building with the flag of the Republic of Korea fluttering in front.

  “Pull over,” I said.

  “Why?” Ernie asked.

  “I want to talk to them. They might have something for us.”

  He groaned but pulled over and came to a screeching halt.

  I climbed out of the jeep and walked into the Sonyu-ri Korean National Police Station. Once the desk sergeant saw my badge, he became cooperative. I asked him if there’d been any incidents involving GIs this weekend, particularly on Sunday afternoon or evening. He thumbed through a ledger and finally pointed to an entry written in the neat hangul script. He read it to me. I occasionally slowed him down while I translated and made notes. When we were through, I thanked him and asked if there’d been anything else.

  Nothing, he replied, other than that one incident. It had been a quiet night. I thanked him and returned to the jeep.

  “What’d they have?” Ernie asked.

  “GIs ripping off a cab driver.”

  Ernie grunted. “So what else is new?”

  “Apparently they were local GIs,” I said. “They had the driver let them off in the middle of the Sonyu-ri strip and then they ran into the alleyways, disappearing before the driver could catch them.”

  “They knew their way around.”

  “Right. The driver was from Seoul,” I said. “Picked them up in Itaewon.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’re our boys,” Ernie said.

  “No,” I agreed. “It doesn’t. All three of them were Caucasian. At least the driver thought they were.” Sometimes Koreans aren’t so sure about race. For many of them there are only two races. You’re either Korean or you’re not.

  “Descriptions?” Ernie asked.

  “Big. Wearing blue jeans and sneakers and nylon jackets. They smoked a lot and were very noisy.” />
  “That narrows it down.”

  “Right.”

  Ernie shoved the jeep in gear and we pulled away from the police station and started rolling through the main drag of Sonyu-ri. At the Kit Kat Club Ernie downshifted, gunned the engine, and honked his horn. The front door was open. Through a beaded curtain, three pairs of manicured hands waved gaily, brightly colored bracelets dangling from slender wrists.

  Ernie grinned and waved back. “My fan club,” he said.

  And then we were on the Main Supply Route, heading south toward Seoul. I shivered and wrapped my arms tighter across my heart, sheltering myself as best I could from the cold wind of the Western Corridor.

  When we returned to the 8th Army CID office, Miss Kim looked up from her typewriter and smiled. Staff Sergeant Riley was just finishing up a phone call.

  “All right,” he said. “Got it.” He slammed down the receiver and looked up at us. “You’re here,” he said. “Officers’ Wives’ Club. Disturbance. The Provost Marshal wants you two over there immediately, if not sooner.”

  “A disturbance at the OWC?” Ernie said.

  “That’s right.”

  “What happened? Somebody stole the knitting fund?”

  “I don’t know what the hell happened,” Riley growled. “Other than that the MP patrol says there’s an ambulance sitting outside and Mrs. Wrypointe is hysterical. Now get the hell over there.”

  Ernie set his empty coffee cup on the edge of Riley’s desk and we ran outside toward the jeep.

  MP Sergeant Unsworth stood next to his MP jeep in front of the big green Quonset hut set aside for the Officers’ Wives’ Club. A green army ambulance was parked behind him. Both Ernie and I have worked with Unsworth before. He’s a grown man and a responsible adult and a hell of a good Military Policeman, so seeing tears welling up in his eyes was downright terrifying. Ernie and I strode up to him.

  “What the hell happened?” Ernie asked.

  Unsworth jammed his thumb over his should. “Mrs. Wrypointe. I just can’t talk to her.”

  His hand was shaking.

  “Why?” Ernie asked. “She hurt?”

  “No,” he answered. “I mean, yes. She says she is.” The tears were already running down his face. “She threatened me,” he said. “With what?” I asked.