by Martin Limon
Then I understood. The case had made news even down in Seoul. Two GIs, driving a two-and-a-half-ton truck near Camp Casey, had struck a young Korean girl. The accident happened early in the morning while she was on her way to middle school. The girl, they say, bounced twenty yards and, according to the eyewitness reports, died just minutes after impact. There had been demonstrations calling for the GIs to be punished, but a 2nd Division court-martial determined that the death was accidental. The two GIs were transferred back to the States. More demonstrations ensued. 8th Army’s attitude was that the Koreans were being ungrateful. After all, we are here defending their country and accidents do happen.
The price of freedom you might call it.
According to the booking agent, Pak Tong-i, Corporal Jill Matthew-son had been the first MP on the scene. She’d provided first aid— futile, as it turned out—and later she’d done everything she could to help the family of the deceased girl. As far as the citizens of Tongdu-chon were concerned, Jill was the only American who had tried to do the right thing. The rest of the American reaction—trying the GIs in a secret tribunal on Camp Casey, not calling all relevant witnesses, and finally acquitting the GIs and sending them back to the States—had been totally unacceptable. Demonstrations outside the main gate of Camp Casey were the result. And if it hadn’t been for the brutal intervention of the Korean National Police, those demonstrations might’ve turned into anti-American riots.
The missing woman’s connection to the Chon matter was news to us. Why hadn’t the 2nd Division mentioned Jill Matthewson’s involvement in this case in their report of her disappearance? Did they consider it to be irrelevant? Maybe it was. Still, I needed to know for sure. It just seemed like a heck of a big thing to leave out.
After checking Jill’s account at the bank, Ernie and I drove over to the Division motor pool.
“Anyong-hashi-motor-pool,” Ernie said as we drove in.
Anyonghashimnka is the Korean formal greeting, like “hello.” Literally, it means “Are you at peace?” with an honorific verb ending added on to sweeten it a bit. GI slang has morphed this long greeting into something more pronounceable: Anyong-hashi-motor-pool. Don’t ask me why. It makes no sense. But it sounds funny.
A red placard above a side door to a Quonset hut read: TRAFFIC SAFETY OFFICE, SECOND INFANTRY DIVISION, SECOND TO NONE!
Ernie parked the jeep and we walked in. It was a tiny office with a diesel space heater, a gray desk, and a few beat-up old metal file cabinets. Nobody home. Ernie and I walked back outside and as we did so, a small man with a bright red mustache hustled up to us.
“Had an accident?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Ernie replied. “You the Safety NCO?”
“That’s me.” He thrust a thumb into his chest. “Oscar L. Bernewright. What can I do for you?”
He was a short man, oddly proportioned, almost like a dwarf. He wore grease-stained fatigues and the insignia of a sergeant first class pinned to his collar at a slightly twisted angle. Green eyes shone brightly over his red mustache and he gazed at us intently from beneath his fur-lined cap.
“Chon Un-suk,” I said.
His wrinkled features fell. “The dead girl,” he said. His voice came out raspy.
“Yes.”
His green eyes moistened and for a minute I thought he was going to cry. Then he recovered and studied our civilian attire and our grim demeanor. “You’re those CID agents I been hearing about. From Eighth Army.”
Our fame had spread.
“That’s us,” I said.
“I been waiting for you,” Sergeant Bernewright said.
Ernie and I glanced at one another. Waiting for us?
“Come on.” Bernewright waved with his left hand. “We’ll talk. Not in my office, it’s too small. There’s a fresh pot of coffee brewing in the toolshed.”
We followed him across a vast expanse of blacktop. Engines roared. Two-and-a-half ton trucks swirled in slow circles like skaters on a field of ice. Sergeant Bernewright hustled rapidly across the lot on his short legs.
“If he’s been waiting for us,” Ernie told me, “maybe we should go in guns blazing.”
“This isn’t an ambush,” I replied. “Relax.”
The inside of the toolshed reeked of oil, diesel fumes, and coffee. After serving ourselves a hot cup of joe and finding seats on wooden benches, Sergeant Bernewright described the accident involving the now famous middle-school girl, Chon Un-suk.
“Two GIs in a deuce-and-a-half driving through Tongduchon early in the morning. Poor driving conditions. Fog. Narrow road. No sidewalk. Middle-school kids lining the muddy edge of the road waiting for their bus.”
“Were the GIs speeding?” Ernie asked.
“Of course they were speeding,” Bernewright answered. “They’re GIs, aren’t they? Nothing more than teenagers. The guy in the passenger seat has a little more rank than the other one, but do you think he’s going to ask his buddy to slow down? No way. They’re having fun. The speed limit there is thirty klicks, about twenty miles per hour. After measuring the skid and the other evidence at the scene, I figure those two bozos were doing at least forty. Maybe more.”
“Why weren’t they pulled over?”
Bernewright winced. “Korean traffic patrols never stop GIs,” he explained. “Not up here at Division anyway. That would be interfering with military operations. Not a chance. Not when the president of the country is a former general and the whole damn government is run as if it were a military operation. Which it is. Or might as well be. And on our side, we don’t have enough MPs to patrol the roads anywhere but on Camp Casey itself. So young American GI drivers are given a huge vehicle, a tank full of diesel, and they’re set loose on an unsuspecting Korean populace.”
“Sounds like you get a lot of this.”
“Over a hundred accidents a year. That’s the ones that are reported. Ten percent of them result in injury or death.”
“Chon Un-suk was standing in front of the other students.” I remembered this from Korean newspaper reports. “She was the safety monitor.”
“Right. She had a whistle, white gloves, a sash across her chest that said ‘safety first’ in Korean. The works. They tell me that she was blowing her whistle and holding up her hand, palm out, ordering the deuce-and-a-half to slow down when it slid sideways in the mud and smacked her head-on at full speed.”
Ernie grimaced.
“A mess,” Bernewright continued. “Little girls screaming, parents frantically running through the crowd searching for their children, an enraged pack of Korean men kicking the crap out of the GI who’d been driving the truck and his passenger. And then Jill Matthewson and her partner pull up in their MP jeep, siren blaring.
“Her partner jumps out waving his billy club. Jill approaches the accident victim, Chon Un-suk, trying to force the crowd back to let the girl have a chance to breathe. So far, no one’s attending to the girl so Jill kneels down and does what she can. Clears the air passage, checks for bleeding, loosens the girl’s clothing and elevates her feet. Then she takes off her own fatigue blouse and wraps the girl to keep her warm, hopefully delay the onset of shock. Meanwhile, a Korean ambulance arrives but at the same time the girl’s father erupts on the scene. He shoves Jill out of the way, sees his daughter on the ground and then, realizing she’s still breathing—barely—he lifts her up and starts to carry her home. The Korean paramedics stand by and do nothing. Jill’s shocked. She’s sure the girl’s suffering from internal bleeding, and she knows enough about first aid to know that in order to save her life the girl has to be taken to an emergency room immediately, if not sooner.
“When nobody acts, she does. Jill grabs the father and holds him, screaming and pointing to the ambulance. The father won’t hear of it. Why, no one knows.”
I did. Or at least I thought I did. I explained it to Sergeant Bernewright. And to Ernie. In Korean tradition, it is believed that if someone dies away from home their spirit, when it rises and leaves the
body, will become disoriented. It will become lost and then, being away from home, away from the shrine set up by its family, the spirit will become a wandering ghost. Without the proper ceremonies, without offerings of incense and food, without the prayers of the people who loved the spirit in life, it will never be able to make the transition from wandering ghost to revered ancestor. So Chon Un-suk’s father’s reaction was rational from his point of view. He didn’t want his daughter to be hauled away by strangers to die alone in some emergency room. He wanted to take care of her. He wanted to make sure she died at home, not on the street where she’d be lost and would wander alone for eternity—with no one to burn incense at her shrine, no one to pray at her gravesite, and no one to make offerings of food and drink to ease her sojourn through the underworld.
A hungry ghost, the Koreans call such a creature. A spirit whom no one remembers. A spirit who can’t find its way home.
Ernie stirred more sugar into his coffee. “When did this shit start?” he asked.
“What?” I asked. “Wandering ghosts?”
“Yeah.”
“In ancient times.”
“How come I never heard of it?”
“How many Koreans have you been around that died away from home?”
He thought about this. I knew the answer. None.
“Besides,” I said, “ensuring that a loved one dies at home is not a modern custom. Most Koreans trust Western medicine nowadays and most of them die in hospitals. Alone.”
“Progress,” Bernewright said.
“When Jill couldn’t stop the father,” I asked, “what did she do?”
“She wrestled with the old man,” Bernewright told us. “He wrestled back. And then a horrible thing happened. Chon Un-suk fell to the ground. ‘With a big thud,’ Jill told me. Everyone was shocked and for a moment—Jill said it seemed like hours—there was a deathly silence. Then, like one person, the Korean crowd inhaled and when they exhaled it was in a solid rush and they fell upon Jill like a pack of demons.”
“So the father took Chon Un-suk home?” Ernie asked.
“Yes. The best we can tell, she was dead before she arrived.”
“So maybe her ghost is still wandering.”
“Maybe,” Bernewright said. “Luckily, three MP jeeps arrived about the same time Jill went down. They waded into the crowd, busting heads, and pulled her to safety. She kept screaming for them to leave her alone, and one buck sergeant told me that she cracked him a good one in the chops.”
“Bold,” Ernie said.
“Yeah,” Bernewright agreed. “But he was just trying to help. When Jill pushed through the crowd searching for Chon Un-suk, the Korean mob attacked her again. The MPs pulled her out once more and this time they handcuffed her, threw her in the back seat of a jeep, and drove her to the dispensary on Camp Casey.”
“She was hurt badly?” I asked.
“Not exactly. But she was hysterical, she wanted to go back, save the girl. One of the medics told me they had to strap her down on the gurney and shoot her up with a sedative. Even then, it took ten minutes to calm her down.”
Ernie’s eyes were glassy by this time; he’d stopped stirring his coffee. The faraway look in his eye told me that, for once, Ernie Bascom had found a woman he could respect.
Later, at the Indianhead Snack Bar, I placed a call to Seoul. Sergeant Riley, the CID Detachment Admin NCO, was anxious to talk to me.
“What kind of hell are you two raising up there?” he asked. “The Division honchos have been messaging Eighth Army asking us to recall you because you’re looking into all sorts of things that have nothing to do with the disappearance of Jill Matthewson.”
“What things?”
“They didn’t specify. But they also said you’ve been running the ville, drinking all your travel pay, and punching out MPs.”
“He was tailing us,” I told Riley.
“Who?”
“An off-duty MP.”
“What did you expect? You’re in Division.”
I was getting tired of people telling me that, as if I hadn’t figured it out for myself.
“Are we withdrawn?” I asked.
“Not yet. But the Eighth Army provost marshal is taking it under advisement.”
I asked Riley to use his influence at the 8th Army Data Processing Center and pull a few ration control records for me. I heard paper rustling and ballpoint pen being popped.
“Shoot,” Riley said.
I gave him three names.
“You must be kidding,” Riley said.
“No kidding involved,” I replied. “Get me the information, Riley. I need it.”
Before he could protest further, I hung up.
The Chon family home sat on a hill gazing down on the western edge of Tonguduchon. Brick and cement apartment buildings, none over three stories tall, were interspersed between ancient-looking wooden huts that must’ve once been part of a traditional farming village. At the edge of the line of homes, fallow rice paddies stretched toward a two-lane highway that ran west from Camp Casey. About twenty miles farther on, across a range of hills, the road reached the city of Munsan in the Western Corridor.
Flagstone steps led up to the Chon residence. As I gazed at the cool, mist-shrouded morning, it was easy to see that this homestead, with its commanding view of the valley, had once been the ancestral home of the local yangban family, the educated Confucian elite who had ruled Korea during the Yi Dynasty.
How long had the Yi Dynasty lasted? From the fourteenth century right up to modern times, when the Japanese Imperial Army annexed Korea as a colony in 1910.
Carved wooden poles on either side of the pathway represented Chonha Daejangkun, the General of the Upper World, and Jiha Yojangkun, the Goddess of the Underworld. The walls of the Chon compound were made of lumber slats faded to a deep amber. The buildings behind were topped with tile roofs upturned at the edges. Clay beasts perched along the ridges, protecting the family from evil spirits.
Ancient shamanistic traditions still exist in Korea. Everywhere.
The big wooden entrance gate stood wide open. From within floated the muffled snicker of girlish laughter. Ernie and I stepped through the gate. The courtyard was well kept. Gravel raked, naked rose bushes knotted with strips of white cloth, tiny cement pagodas flanking blue ponds shimmering with golden koi.
An open area in the center of the courtyard held a shrine: A stone foundation with wooden stanchions supporting a tile roof that was a replica of the tile roof that covered the entire home. Bolted into the stanchions was a framed photograph, bordered with black silk, of a young Korean girl. Her face was unsmiling. She stared straight ahead, almost as if she were cross-eyed, trying to focus. Her jet black hair was pulled back and braided into two plaits and she wore the immaculately pressed white blouse of a middle-school student. Directly in front of the photograph was another stone stand, this one holding an ornate bronze urn. From the urn, three sticks of incense smoldered. Pungent puffs of smoke rose past the photograph, wafting their way to the gray-skied heavens above.
Two teenage girls, wearing the white blouses and long black skirts of middle-school students, knelt in front of the shrine. Nervously, they kept trying to light additional sticks of incense but as one of the girls fumbled with the match, the other berated her for her clumsiness. They both worked hard at stifling their giggles.
Ernie and I stopped and stared at the photograph for a moment. Quietly. Waiting for the two girls to finish their homage. They did. They stood and bowed. When they saw us, their eyes widened in surprise. Both smooth faces flushed red, the girls snatched up their school bags, nodded to us as they passed and, holding hands, they hustled out the main gate and down the pathway heading back toward Tongduchon.
“Cute kids,” Ernie said. “Must’ve been friends of the dead girl.”
“Maybe,” I answered. “Or just schoolmates. Koreans are very reverential of the dead. There’s an old saying my language teacher taught us.”
“Here we go.”
I pressed on. “‘A man needs three wives,’ the Koreans say. ‘A Chinese wife for his kitchen, a Japanese wife for his bed, and a Korean wife to tend his grave.’ ”
Ernie stared at me, amused. “I like the Japanese part.”
“You would. Come on.”
We walked across the courtyard to the front of the Chon residence.
The home featured a traditional elevated wood-slat floor, varnished and sparkling with cleanliness. Ernie and I slipped off our shoes and, in our stocking feet, stepped up onto the slick surface. I knocked on the edge of the oil-papered door. We waited. No answer. I knocked again and then again. Finally, I shouted, “Yoboseiyo!”
When there was still no answer, I looked at Ernie. He shrugged and I leaned forward and slid back the sliding, latticework door. Together, we entered the Chon family living quarters.
The ondol floor was covered with padded vinyl instead of a rug. Against the wall, mother-of-pearl tables, varnished chairs, cabinets. Artwork everywhere. Traditional Yi Dynasty paintings, both framed and embedded into standing silk screens.
“Yoboseiyo,” I said again. Still no answer.
Something was burning.
We followed the smell down a long a hallway: jasmine. More latticework sliding doors lined either side. Finally, we entered a wood-floored hall. Candles flickered, more incense burned, and a bronze Buddha held his left hand upright, thumb to forefinger, pinkie sticking straight out. Indicating, by this simple sign, that the universe is one.
A middle-aged Korean woman sat cross-legged on the floor. Her black hair hung down in greasy strings and she wore loose pantaloons and a blouse made of sackcloth, the traditional Korean garb of mourning. In front of her sat a short-legged serving table bearing a photograph of Chon Un-suk, the same picture as outside but smaller. A pair of chopsticks, a spoon, and a metal bowl of rice gruel had been carefully placed in front of the photograph, as if in offering. Breakfast for a spirit. In the guttering candlelight I could see that the woman’s skin was cracked and tight. Her features looked similar to the girl in the photograph. Chon Un-suk’s mother, without a doubt. Calmly, she stared at us, a look of perplexity on her face.