by Martin Limon
“Hey, buddy,” Ernie said. “How’s it going?”
Threets didn’t answer. Mostly, he stared at his hands in his lap, but occasionally his eyes popped up to study us. Ernie introduced us and then said, “Monk up at Charley Battery says hello.”
Threets’s eyes lit up. “Monk?”
“Yeah. We smoked some reefer together. He says he wants to testify on your behalf, but so far they won’t let him.”
Threets glanced back down. “I don’t do no reefer.”
“Yeah, I know,” Ernie said. “They told me.” He paused, glancing at me to see if I wanted to say anything, but this was his show. Ernie cleared his throat and stared again. “So Monk said it was an accident. You didn’t mean to shoot nobody.”
Threets kept his eyes down. In reply, he raised and then lowered his narrow shoulders. This wasn’t good. The unwillingness to answer, in the military mind, meant agreement.
Ernie didn’t push it. “They say Smoke was riding you.”
“Smoke” meant Sergeant First Class Vincent P. Orgwell, formally the chief of Firing Battery.
When Threets didn’t answer, Ernie said, “You’re a gunner. Young for a gunner. But Monk and the other guys tell me that you can work the numbers in your head. Lay the gun faster than any other gunner in the battery. The chief of smoke knew that. He knew you were good.”
Ernie paused. Still Threets said nothing.
“Maybe that’s why he rode you,” Ernie said. “Because you’re young and you’re smart.” Ernie let the silence hang. Finally, he said. “And because you’re black.”
Threets’s mouth tightened. Still, he didn’t speak. When he finally did say something, it was almost a whisper. Both of us leaned forward to hear what he said. He repeated it, louder this time.
“He didn’t ride me because I’m black,” he said.
Ernie waited again, longer than he had before. For some reason it hung in the air, the feeling that what Threets was about to say was something that neither Ernie nor I really wanted to hear. It was intuition, I suppose, although I don’t really believe in those things. Somehow, mysteriously, both Ernie and I sensed that what was coming wouldn’t be good.
“It wasn’t because I was black,” he said. “It was because he wanted to train me.”
“To be a better gunner?” Ernie ventured.
For the first time Threets showed some emotion. Violently, he shook his head and in an exasperated voice he said, “No. Nobody understands.”
“Understands what?” Ernie asked.
“Nobody understands what Smoke really is.” For the first time Threets looked up at us, in turn, staring us both in the eye. “He told me to report to him, after work, but to tell no one. ‘For extra training,’ he said. I met him in the training room. It was empty, just him and me, and then he . . .”
Suddenly, Threets lost his nerve and stared at the ground.
“Then he what?” Ernie asked.
This seemed to enrage Threets. “What are you, stupid? Don’t you get it?” He stood up. The helmeted MP burst into the room. As he grabbed Threets by the arm, Threets twisted away and screamed at us. “Don’t you get it? Smoke is a fag. He’s a goddamn fag!”
The MP pulled Threets away.
This was not good news.
Homosexuality was a crime in the US Military, and 8th Army brass didn’t like dealing with it. It was too touchy. Nobody wanted to be assigned to a “homo investigation”; nobody wanted to type up the formal accusation, and field-grade officers didn’t like to be appointed to the boards of inquiry or, worse yet, the courts-martial that had to prosecute such a case. Still, it was our sworn duty and it had to be done. And it would explain why Threets turned his weapon on the Chief of Smoke. He was being coerced by a senior noncommissioned officer, a man older and more experienced than him, into doing things that he didn’t want to do.
As far as 8th Army was concerned, the Threets case was a simple prosecution for armed assault. It was about to get uglier.
On the trip back from ASCOM we didn’t talk much. When we returned to the Yongsan Compound, Ernie entered through the back gate to South Post. After winding through some tree-lined lanes, he parked the jeep in the lot across the street from the “One-Two-One Evac,” the 121st Evacuation Hospital.
At the front desk, a female medic told us where we could find SFC Vince Orgwell. We clattered down long tile-floored hallways. As we did so, Ernie’s head kept swiveling, checking out the nurses and the medical aides clad in their tight white jumpsuits. Finally, we reached a ward with a half-dozen beds on either side. SFC Vincent P. Orgwell was the third on the right.
“Smoke,” Ernie said. Orgwell opened his eyes. Seeing us, he pushed himself farther up on the raised bed, pulling the white sheet higher as he did so.
“Who are you?” he asked.
We flashed our badges. This time I did the talking. I asked him to describe what had happened on the firing range. He did. Everything he said matched what was in the initial MP report. He’d been the safety officer on the left side of the range. Initially, he’d pointed the green disc of his signal paddle at the fire control tower, indicating that the six firing points on his side of the range were all clear. But then he’d seen that PFC Threets was not pointing his weapon up and down range, so he’d immediately signaled with the red side of the paddle.
“I remember the voice coming over the loudspeaker,” Orgwell told us. “‘Cease Fire! The range is not clear. Repeat, the firing range is not clear!’” He mimicked it with the authoritative voice of a fire control officer.
“What was Threets doing?” I asked.
“He was climbing out of the foxhole,” Orgwell said. “I went over to see what the hell was wrong with him and, without warning, he turned and fired.”
I glanced down at his leg.
Orgwell leaned forward and touched the cast. “Won’t lose my knee,” he said. “The docs here have done a hell of a job, although they say I won’t be doing any squat thrusts any time soon.”
He was referring to one of the exercises in the army’s “daily dozen” calisthenics drill.
“Are you putting in for disability retirement?”
“Don’t want it,” he said. “All I want is to return to Charley Battery.”
“Hope you make it,” I said.
“Thanks.”
I paused. “Do you have any idea why Threets did this to you?”
Orgwell shook his head. “Fed up with the army, I suppose.”
He thought about it a moment and then he continued.
“He was like most of these kids, didn’t take it seriously. Also, you know how some of these blacks keep bad-mouthing the ‘man.’ Claiming every time their pass is pulled it’s racist.” He studied me as he said it, wondering if I was a full-blooded member of the club. Apparently, he decided I was. “Just an excuse to not pull their weight,” Orgwell said. When neither Ernie nor I reacted, he added, “in my opinion.”
“Threets says there’s another reason he shot you,” I said.
“Yeah?” Orgwell was suspicious now. “What was that?”
“You know,” Ernie said.
Orgwell swiveled his head. “I know?”
“Yeah,” Ernie said. “You know damn well.”
Orgwell pulled the sheet up closer to his neck. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Threets says you made a pass at him,” Ernie said.
“A pass?”
“You tried to enter into a homosexual relationship with him,” I explained.
Orgwell’s face flushed red. He began to sputter. “You must be out of your mind!” When we didn’t respond, his face grew more contorted, and then he’d thrown the sheet back and he was sitting up, the brace surrounding his wound strapped tightly against his leg. “You lie!” he shouted and then lunged at Ernie.
; Ernie stepped back and Orgwell tried to grab him, but his leg gave out and he tumbled to the tile floor in a heap, screaming in pain as he did so. An orderly entered the ward and started to pull him upright. Orgwell continued to sputter until a nurse hurried in and helped the orderly get him back into bed. Once he was settled, she turned to us and pointed with her forefinger for us to leave. As we walked out of the ward, Orgwell was still swearing.
“He said, she said,” Riley told us. Then he corrected himself. “Or in this case, he said and the other he said. Either way, you can’t prove nothing.”
“Not up to us to prove it one way or the other,” Ernie said. “It’ll be up to the court-martial to decide.”
“Threets better not demand a court-martial,” Riley said. “He’d better settle and take the time they give him. If he forces Eighth Army to go to trial and if he throws this homo stuff at him, they’ll put him away until he’s as old as . . .”
Riley paused, groping for the right comparison.
“As old as one of your girlfriends,” Ernie interjected.
“Right,” Riley said, and then he caught himself. “What do you mean by that crack?”
Ernie shrugged and continued reading the sports page of Stars and Stripes.
I was seated at a field desk near the coffee urn typing up our report. Ernie liked for me to do them, since he had no patience for paperwork. I liked paperwork. Sitting at the typewriter relaxed me and spelling everything out gave me a chance to put it all in perspective. Make sense of what was essentially unending chaos, like the case of the frozen lady in the red dress. By typing out our report, it was made clear to me where we had to go next. We had to go after the one lead we had. We had to find the Ville Rat.
I considered this to be a revelation. The masterstroke of a great detective. Or at least I did until Ernie stepped in front of the coffee urn, poured steaming java into a thick mug, and said, “Strange wants to talk to us.”
“Finally?”
“Yeah.”
“He found something out?”
“Apparently. He says it’s all hush-hush.”
“Where do we meet him?”
“Where else? The Snatch Burr.”
Which is what Strange called the 8th Army snack bar.
“At lunch?”
“Yeah.” Which is when we usually met him, in the middle of a crowd, where we’d be less conspicuous and less likely to be overheard.
“In the meantime,” I said, “we have to find the Ville Rat.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He knows something. More than he’s telling.”
Ernie nodded. “So where do we start?”
I thought about it. Then I said, “We start with the Colt 45.”
■ ■ ■
The Central Locker Fund was very possibly the neatest military warehouse I’d ever seen. The vast cement floor was swept immaculately clean, and the wooden shelves lining the walls and running in three long rows down the middle aisles were made of pine-smelling wood and shining nails. A purring forklift carried pallets laden with neatly stacked cardboard cases of Carling Black Label toward the small mountains of beer in the back. Toward the front, Korean workmen rolled flat metal carts laden with cases of imported scotch and vodka to the rows of shelves closer to the main office.
“Clear the booze out of here,” Ernie said, “and you’d have space for a C-130.” A military air transport.
Light shone behind a glass enclosure. We entered a short hallway and followed it to a double-doored entranceway. Inside was another vast warehouse, about half as big as the other, this one filled with rows of desks interrupted by grey hedge rows of Army-issue filing cabinets, all of it populated by industrious-looking Korean workers hunched over stacks of onionskin invoices or hauling manila folders from one wire in-basket to another or talking animatedly on heavy, black military phones.
“It ain’t easy keeping Eighth Army half loaded,” Ernie said.
He was right about the consumption. Not only did the Central Locker Fund have over 50,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen to provide beer and liquor for, but they also had about 20,000 dependents and Department of the Army Civilians (DACs) to worry about. And that might’ve been just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Ernie and I both knew that a lot of the beer and booze that the Central Locker Fund provided, if not most of it, ended up on the Korean black market. Imported liquor was extremely popular in Korea, but the Korean government, in order to protect its own fledgling industries, imposed high customs duties on all imported goods, especially luxury items. The US military shipped everything over for free, with no customs duties. As a result, a GI—or more likely his Korean wife—could sell a bottle of imported scotch on the Korean black market for three or four times what they paid for it.
A Korean woman wearing a white blouse and black skirt stood in front of us, both hands placed primly in front of her, fingers pointing downward. She bowed and asked if she could help. I flashed my badge and told her who we wanted to speak to. She bowed again and led us toward a glass-enclosed office against the far wall.
Inside, at a desk larger than those in the main work area, a figure sat in what appeared to be solemn meditation. A dapper man, he wore a suit and had brushed-back brown hair greying at the temples. Rick Mills was somewhat of a legend in 8th Army. It was said that he’d been a mess sergeant in the Korean War who’d been put in charge of setting up the Class VI stores—the branch of the post exchange that sold liquor and beer—from one end of the Korean peninsula to the other. He’d done such a good job and his work was appreciated by so many high-ranking officers that when he retired from the military he’d been given the same job, running the Central Locker Fund, as a Department of the Army Civilian. He’d held the job ever since, for more than twenty years. In military life this was common. You build relationships while on active duty and then parlay them into a lifetime job. Rick Mills had become an institution at 8th Army. Some said he was into illicit activities and more than once a zealous provost marshal had tried to bust him, but Rick Mills had always come through any investigation unscathed. Most recently, in the audit performed by our colleagues, Burrows and Slabem, Rick Mills and the 8th Army Central Locker Fund had been shown to be efficiently run and in full compliance with all pertinent regulations.
Maybe.
He stood as we approached. I flashed my badge and explained why we were here. Rick Mills studied us briefly, shook our hands, and then asked us to have a seat. Unbidden, the same Korean lady who’d ushered us in appeared expectantly at the door.
“Coffee,” Rick Mills asked, “or something else to drink?”
“A case of scotch would be nice,” Ernie said.
I overrode him. “No, nothing, thank you.”
Rick Mills turned to the lady. “Thank you, Miss Jo, nothing today.” She bowed and backed out of the room. He turned to us.
“It’s about malt liquor,” I explained.
His eyes widened.
“How much of it do you import?” I asked.
Rick Mills seemed surprised by the question. “Malt liquor? Why, none.”
“None?” Ernie asked.
Rick Mills turned to him. “Yes. We don’t get much call for it.”
“But the black troops,” Ernie replied. “Colt 45. And what’s that other one?” He snapped his fingers.
“Jazz City Ale?” Rick Mills said.
“Yes. The green death.”
“That’s what they call it.”
“So why don’t you ship it over if the black troops like it?”
Rick Mills looked down at the desk blotter in front of him, as if searching for an answer. I noticed that behind him, neatly arranged on a polished mahogany shelf, were a series of framed photographs. One showed a much younger Rick Mills in uniform, standing with a group of fellow GIs in front of a jeep. All were smiling and laughi
ng. The rest of the photos were more formal, with Rick Mills standing with one general or another, receiving a plaque or some kind of award. There were close to a dozen of them. Providing booze to the troops can be a rewarding career.
“It’s been decided,” Mills said, “that the alcohol content in malt liquor is too high. For the health and welfare of the troops, we don’t order it.”
“The alcohol content in liquor is even higher,” Ernie said. Mills didn’t answer. Ernie went on. “It’s because the black troops like it,” he said. “They like the fact that it gives them a quick kick and they don’t have the bloated feeling they get from beer. It’s a ghetto thing. You don’t want them drinking the same shit they drank back on the block.”
Mills looked up at Ernie. “It’s not me.”
“The command,” Ernie said.
Mills shrugged.
“And for the same reason,” Ernie said, “you don’t order cheap wine, like T-Bird or Bali Hai. Only the expensive stuff, for the officers.”
“Trade-offs are made,” Mills said. “We can’t order everything.”
Finally, Ernie shut his mouth. I was glad he did. No sense blaming Mills for the priorities that 8th Army demanded. In the military, it was the highest-ranking officers who made the decisions that affected the rest of us in every aspect of our lives. Invariably, they made them according to their own likes and dislikes. The likes and dislikes of the black troops, as far as I could tell, were not even considered.
Ernie leaned back in his chair. It was my turn.
“If a person wanted to get ahold of malt liquor,” I asked, “how would he do it?”
Mills slid his fingertips across the smooth white paper of the blotter.
“What type of malt liquor?”
“Does it matter?”
“No. Not really. If you ordered it directly, you’d not only pay a small fortune in transport costs, but also be hit hard by Korean customs duties.” He was silent for a moment and then he said, “The merchant marine, in the Port of Inchon or the Port of Pusan. It wouldn’t be easy, but occasionally a Korean guard at the port can be bribed to look the other way. You could bring in a shipment that way.”