The Wandering Ghost
Page 35
“It’s over now,” she told me.
“Okay,” I answered. “What should I do with them?”
“Destroy them.”
“We might need them to get you out of this mess.”
“I don’t care. Destroy them.”
I did. I borrowed a lighter from one of the KCIA men and set them on fire.
While Ernie talked to the KCIA men and the photographs burned, Jill dragged the now conscious Fred Bufford near the creek behind one of the dragon’s teeth. We weren’t paying attention, all of us still in shock. Warrant Officer Fred Bufford didn’t shout for help. Maybe he couldn’t. Jill, her wrists still handcuffed in front of her, shoved Bufford’s head face-first into the mud. She held him there. By the time we realized what she was doing, Warrant Officer Fred Bufford was dead.
16
There were more student demonstrations. Tons of them. In Seoul, in Pusan, in Kwangju. There was enormous pressure for the regime of President Pak Chung-hee to reduce the number of American troops stationed in Korea. And it almost happened. Contingency plans were written up in the Pentagon, professors at American universities wrote articles about how Korea was ready to be fully self-reliant. But, at the last moment, a new evaluation of the North Korean threat was released. Suddenly, it was discovered that instead of 700,000 troops in their army the North Koreans now had one million. The South Koreans, meanwhile, could only field an army of a paltry 450,000 soldiers. So plans for a U.S. draw down were rescinded.
The incident at Camp Casey never hit the Pacific Stars & Stripes. It was reported by Reuters and the international press and, eventually, even AP and UPI. But they played it as just another student demonstration, one that had proven to be a little more violent than others but just a demonstration nevertheless.
Ernie and I kept Colonel Alcott’s ledger in a safe place, at the hooch of Ernie’s latest girlfriend in the red-light district of Itaewon.
When we were debriefed, the ledger was never mentioned. Blackmail is an ugly word anywhere but particularly in the hallowed halls of the 8th United States Imperial Army. Not only did we not want to have to threaten anyone with blackmail, the 8th Army provost marshal didn’t want to admit that he had ever been blackmailed. Therefore, the existence of the ledger, although rumored, was never mentioned in any official file.
Ernie and I were faced with a number of possible charges. The first was being absent without leave and then there was our returning to the 2nd Division area when we weren’t supposed to. That was fixed easily. The 8th Army PMO just pretended that he’d never ordered us withdrawn.
The problem of Colonel Alcott’s black-marketing was fixed by rescinding his ration control plate. Supposedly, there was a reevaluation of the entire policy of ration control plates being open and unaccountable for high-ranking officers in sensitive positions. Alcott was transferred back to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, having promised that as soon as he hit stateside he would put in his retirement paperwork. Staff Sergeant Weatherwax pleaded guilty to assisting Warrant Officer Fred Bufford in transferring the body of Private Marvin Druwood from the actual place of his death to the obstacle course on Camp Casey. He received a thirty-day forfeiture of pay and benefits and a general discharge from the U.S. Army under honorable conditions. The body of Sergeant First Class Otis was shipped back to his wife and children quartered at Fort Hood, Texas with full military honors. Our report never mentioned his antique-smuggling operation with Brandy. We didn’t want to complicate things. Besides, his family didn’t need that kind of grief.
None of this seemed fair, of course. Warrant Officer Fred Bufford, after all, had been guilty of rape. The rape of a fellow soldier. In addition, according to the testimony of the late Sergeant First Class Otis, Mr. Fred Bufford had been guilty of the murder of Private Marvin Druwood. But with Otis dead, we had no proof. And Weatherwax wasn’t talking. Colonel Alcott and Brigadier General H.K. Pacquet were also guilty of rape. Jill told me it had begun when she’d physically tried to intervene in the goings-on in one of the mafia meetings. The honchos had objected to her butting into their affairs and decid- ed to teach her a lesson. What started as a plan to humiliate her by stripping her had turned into out-and-out rape. After that, Jill started on her crusade. She swore Ernie and me to secrecy about the rape. She was too humiliated. We argued with her, told her it wasn’t her fault and she had no reason to be ashamed, but in the end she won out. We kept mum. As far as the KCIA witnesses who’d been standing nearby at the dragon’s teeth, they hadn’t seen much and what they had seen, they weren’t about to talk about.
The next problem was the death of Warrant Officer Bufford.
Ernie and I simply said that when we arrived at the scene Bufford was already dead. During his attempted assault on Corporal Matthewson, she’d exercised her right of self-defense. Bufford had hit his head against one of the dragon’s teeth, and while we were tending to her, he had apparently died of asphyxiation, facedown in the mud. 8th Army had to accept this story because they had no evidence to contradict it.
Why were Ernie and I so concerned with engineering an unwritten deal not to embarrass 8th Army? Because of Corporal Jill Matthewson.
At first, there’d been talk of charging her with treason.
After all, she’d been instrumental in the occupation—however brief—of a U.S. Army installation by foreign nationals. She’d assisted in the knocking down of the Camp Casey main gate and in the obliteration of the statute of the giant MP, not to mention the demolition of the front half of the 2nd Division Provost Marshal’s Office. In addition, she’d gone AWOL for twenty-nine days. Some of the honchos at 8th Army wanted to slap Jill Matthewson with a dishonorable discharge.
Ernie and I stood our ground. If we hadn’t retained possession of Colonel Alcott’s black market ledger, if it hadn’t been tucked away safely in a business girl’s hooch in Itaewon, we would’ve had no leverage. As it was, 8th Army knew that if they charged Jill Matthewson with treason, we’d fight back and the entire command structure of the 2nd Infantry Division would go down, all the way up to the level of a brigadier general.
We went so far as to demand that Jill be given an honorable discharge. This was a little more difficult to sell. We claimed Jill had been acting as an undercover agent and that she had to gain the confidence of the protestors. This was all nonsense but we said it anyway. The proof of this assertion was that Jill Matthewson attempted to fire on the ROK Army troops who, she thought, were about to encroach on Camp Casey.
It was crazy but it worked. The overriding desire of the 8th Army bosses was to avoid scandal. They didn’t want history to record that the first female MP ever assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division had been driven to armed insurrection.
On the day she left Korea, Ernie and I drove Jill out to the countryside north of Seoul. Madame Chon met us there, amidst hills covered with well-tended lawns and dotted with stone monuments. The two women embraced. Madame Chon led Jill over to one of the tombstones. Chon Un-suk’s name, in Chinese characters. had been freshly carved into granite. The sky glowed a greenish blue, and was veiled with wispy gray clouds. Jill and Madame Chon burned incense, breathed in the sharp odor of jasmine, and bowed to the spirit of the departed girl.
Madame Chon was happy. Now her daughter’s ghost could reside with her ancestors and would no longer have to wander.
I hoped that was true
On the drive back to Seoul, I told Jill that during her tour in the 2nd Infantry Division, she and Marv Druwood had been the only two real MPs the Division had.
From a muddy rice paddy, a white crane flapped its wings, lifted into the sky, and flew lazily off into an endless eternity of blue.
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