The Wandering Ghost (george sueno and ernie bascom)

by Martin Limon

  All I could do now was watch Ernie, pretend nothing was amiss, and be prepared to act.

  When American GIs first arrive in Korea, they receive something commonly referred to as their “Kimchee Orientation.” It is a series of briefings given by NCOs and officers appointed by the 8th Army commander. The orientation room features a huge wooden map of Korea. The jagged line of the Demilitarized Zone slashes across the waist of the country and a falling line of circular targets indicates the locations of the major cities: Seoul, Taejon, Taegu, and Pusan. Unit patches the size of dinner plates-the 8th Army red-and-white cloverleaf, the 2nd Division Indianhead patch-are used to graphically demonstrate to young soldiers that 8th Army covers Seoul and the rear areas, while the 2nd Infantry Division is stationed right up along the edge of the DMZ. After the geography lesson, a medic is brought in and the young GIs are treated to a series of films showing men suffering from advanced stages of venereal disease. Most of the young GIs are frightened so badly that they vow never to venture off base into the ville. This vow usually lasts about twenty-four hours. Then a representative from the Judge Advocate General’s Office takes the stage to inform the GIs that their Constitutionally guaranteed rights have been totally abrogated by the U.S. ROK Status of Forces Agreement. The only reaction this usually engenders is the occasional yawn. Finally, the post chaplain takes over and leads the men in a nondenominational prayer. After the amen, the men are eligible to be issued a pass to leave the compound and mingle in Korean society. After two nights in the ville, they will consider themselves experts on Korean culture. This despite the fact that Korean culture is over 4,000 years old and is based on Confucian and Buddhist traditions that are, in many cases, diametrically opposed to Western traditions.

  Once the GIs hit the ville, all hell breaks loose. These barely educated teenage Americans feel they can lord it over the Koreans. And with their abundant spending money, for the most part, they can. Until they go too far. Then the Koreans fight back, and that’s when the Korean National Police and the American MPs step in.

  When I first arrived in Korea, I assumed that 8th Army had somebody monitoring the clash of cultures that occurs when obnoxious American teenagers are thrust willy-nilly into an ancient society. The more time I spent here, the more I realized that 8th Army and the American government were not only not concerned with this phenomenon, they were unaware that it even existed. In fact, when I occasionally mentioned this clash of cultures back at 8th Army headquarters, I was looked at as if I were mad. As long as the troops returned to the compound every day, still able to perform their duties, that’s all the U.S. Army cared about.

  It was left for those of us in law enforcement to pick up the pieces. And it was left to those of us of a more reflective nature to marvel at the endless cornucopia of heartbreak and joy that was being churned out nightly on the streets of the GI village of Tongduchon.

  Ok-hi still clung to Ernie’s arm and I was still watching him. We’d passed two dozen nightclubs when, suddenly, Ernie turned and charged back through the crowd.

  Ten yards behind us, a black GI came to a sudden halt and pretended to be interested in the statuettes displayed in the front window of a brassware emporium. Ernie ran right at him. As he closed, the GI glanced at Ernie nervously, flexed his knees as if to flee, but before he could move, Ernie plowed into him with such force that the man reeled backwards, slamming into a cement-block wall.

  I let go of Jeannie and ran.

  Stunned, the GI staggered to his feet, cursing, and as he started to raise his hands to counterattack, Ernie punched him with a hard right cross. The man’s nose burst. He reached for his face but blood squirted through his splayed fingers.

  Somehow, the man launched a low kick to Ernie’s groin. Ernie dodged it but at the same time the man’s right hand snaked out and grabbed the lapel of Ernie’s dragon-embroidered jacket. Using the leverage of his crouching position, the injured man managed to jerk Ernie off balance and pull him closer in until they both crashed to the ground. Even in the split second I had to think about it, I admired the move. Whoever this guy was, he was trained in hand-to-hand combat.

  Ernie and the other man rolled and punched and grunted. Blood kept pumping from the man’s nose and now it was spread across Ernie’s hands and face and shirt. Shoving my way through the crowd, I reached Ernie and pulled him away. The black man sprang to his feet, waving his fists in the air. I stepped in front of him.

  “Keep your damn hands off me,” he said, the voice muffled.

  That’s when I realized who he was. Weatherwax. Staff Sergeant Rufus Q. The same MP we’d questioned last night while he worked on the ville patrol. He was not in uniform now; he was wearing civilian clothes: slacks, a sports shirt, and a waist-length leather jacket. All of it glistening with blood.

  Ernie pushed past me. “You’ve been following us,” he said. “Picked us up after we left the Silver Dragon.”

  “Bull,” Weatherwax said.

  “Just enjoying the weather then?”

  Weatherwax launched himself at Ernie. The left jab was ineffectual. Ernie dodged it easily and I grabbed Weatherwax and held him.

  “Calm down, Sarge,” I said.

  “You calm the hell down,” he replied. Then he grabbed his nose again, trying to stanch the bleeding.

  I let go of him but kept myself between the two men. A crowd of jerks had gathered. I knew the type. When a fight erupts they’re always there. It happened when I was a kid in school. They’d gather around like a pack of baboons, hopping and hooting. This type of behavior knows no ethnic boundaries. I’d seen it in blacks, in Anglos and, I’m not proud to say, in Chicanos. But this type of man, when challenged personally, finds a way to deflect the insult or, better yet, pretend it didn’t happen. Now, gathered safely around the glow of a fight, their faces gleamed. A few of them even hopped on the balls of their feet, pretending that they wanted to fight, too, searching for approval from their fellow gawkers.

  How I despised them. If I could’ve, I would’ve pulled my. 45 and shot as many of them as I could until the rest scattered like the cowards they were. Instead, I kept my mind on business.

  With his left hand, Weatherwax fumbled in his jacket for a handkerchief and held it across his nose. Gradually, the flow of blood subsided.

  “MPs don’t run the bars,” I told him. “Too dangerous. GIs you’ve busted get juiced up and want to come after you. And I don’t really believe you’re interested in any of this brassware.”

  Inside the display window, a brass index finger pointed toward the sky.

  “So what?” Weatherwax said. “I’m off duty. I can go where I please.”

  “Where you please,” Ernie said, “is where Warrant Office Bufford tells you to go.”

  “He got nothing to do with it.”

  “Then why are you following us?” I asked.

  Weatherwax looked away, as if he were very tired, still holding the handkerchief to his nose. I could see it coming. I believed Ernie saw it, too. Weatherwax was still enraged and he was about to try something.

  Men in the crowd hooted. One of them bounced too close and Ernie shoved him so hard the skinny guy reeled backwards, slammed into his buddies, and fell backward on his butt. More angry voices erupted.

  Ok-hi and Jeannie stood behind the growing crowd, huddled beneath a plastic awning, looking worried.

  That’s when Weatherwax tried it. I’m not sure where it came from. There must have been a stone or a brick lying on the ground and suddenly it was in his hand, then winging through the air, heading straight for Ernie’s head. Ernie flinched. The missile sliced his ear, barely making contact, veered to the right, and hit one of the GIs in the crowd.

  It was as if a hyena had been thrown into a gaggle of chimps. The howling started. Ernie was trying to punch Weatherwax and Weatherwax was trying to punch Ernie and, as I strained to hold them apart, the same guy who’d been knocked backward onto his ass sneaked out of the pack of gawkers and slammed his puny fist into E
rnie’s kidney. I lunged for him but he retreated into the crowd and then Ernie and Weatherwax were going at one another again. Brutally.

  “MPs!” someone shouted and over their heads I could see, heading our way, bobbing black helmets.

  I grabbed Ernie, ripped him away from Weatherwax. The front of his jacket was slathered in blood. Weatherwax wheeled drunkenly, unable to follow. I shoved through the gawking crowd. It wasn’t difficult because most of them were starting to back off now that the MPs were on the way. Ok-hi and Jeannie stood at the mouth of an alley about half a block farther down the narrow road. They waved us on. Together, the four of us-me supporting Ernie, Ok-hi and Jeannie leading-entered the darkness, Ernie still howling about how he was going to kick some MP ass.

  The alley narrowed, the darkness grew, and the hooting voices behind us faded.

  We spent the night with Ok-hi and Jeannie in a yoguan, a Korean inn. Sitting on the warm ondol floor Ok-hi did her best to nurse Ernie’s wounds, but Jeannie had to do most of the practical work: bringing in a pan of hot water; washing out the scratches and bruises; asking the middle-aged woman who owned the yoguan to loan her some antiseptic ointment. Ok-hi mainly cooed and rubbed Ernie’s shoulders and nibbled on the edge of his damaged ear.

  “He was clumsy,” Ernie told me. “I spotted him before we entered the Silver Dragon Club and then, when we came out, he was standing down the street, staring our way. Don’t they teach MPs up here how to conduct a proper tail?”

  “I don’t think Division needs to tail people too often.”

  I’d bought four cold liters of OB at a local shop and while the girls ministered to Ernie, I popped the bottles open and poured the frothing beer into porcelain drinking glasses, the type usually used for serving barley tea. Ok-hi downed hers almost as fast as Ernie. Jeannie left her beer for me.

  “Bufford and Colonel Alcott put him up to it,” Ernie said. “You can bet on it.”

  “Probably,” I agreed.

  “Sure they did. They want to keep tabs on what we’re up to. The Division chief of staff is probably breathing down their necks.”

  I’d heard stories about the Division chief of staff: Brigadier General H. K. Pacquet, a decorated veteran of combat in Vietnam. “Hong Kong” Packet is what they called him. Had something to do with a special type of antipersonnel explosive he’d devised while working with the Special Forces. Pacquet had been wounded in Vietnam. Wounded so badly that his face was hideously deformed but he was otherwise healthy, which is why the army decided to keep him on active duty. He’s a hard charger and a bad ass and everyone in Division is terrified of him. Even the honchos at 8th Army back off when “Hong Kong” Packet catches a case of the ass.

  “So they send Weatherwax out to watch us,” I said. “And you beat the crap out of him for his troubles. That’s certainly going to help our position back at Division PMO.”

  “Screw Division,” Ernie said. “They’re interfering with an official investigation.”

  “All they were doing, Ernie, was watching.”

  “Same difference.”

  I wished Ernie would’ve talked to me before he punched out Weatherwax. Maybe there’s something we could’ve done to mislead him. Make him-and the Division honchos-believe we were doing one thing while we were actually doing another. Too late now. By punching out Weatherwax, Ernie’d given Division PMO ammunition to use when they approached 8th Army and asked-as I believed they would-that we be removed from the Jill Matthewson case. They’d wanted us gone from day one. Outside law enforcement nosing around in their territory would never sit well with the Division honchos. I didn’t bother to mention all this to Ernie. Bureaucratic infighting meant nothing to him.

  Ok-hi ordered chop from the woman who owned the yoguan, and twenty minutes later a Korean boy of about twelve years of age brought in a square metal box that he set in the middle of the floor. As he shuffled into the room, the boy kept his eyes down. Respectful in the Confucian tradition, but it also gave me the impression that he was ashamed to look at us. Two debauched American GIs and two even farther-fallen Korean women. It was as if this delivery boy did- n’t want to be contaminated by evil. Without speaking, the boy slid open a side panel on the metal box and pulled out steaming bowls of pibim-bap, fried rice; meiun-tang, hot mackerel soup; and a plate of yaki-mandu, fried pork dumplings. Then he closed the box, bowed, and backed out of the room. All performed without once having actually looked at us.

  Jeannie broke open my wooden chopsticks, unfolded a paper napkin, placed it on my knee, and motioned with her open palm. “Duh-seiyo,” she said. Please partake. It wasn’t quite as polite as “chapsu-seiyo,” which means the same thing but is spoken to one’s superior rather than to one’s equal. I was pleased to be equal with this Korean business girl named Jeanie, so I dug in.

  After chop, Ernie and Ok-hi retired to their own room. Jeannie cleaned up, setting the empty dishes outside in the vinyl-floored hallway. Then she slid shut the oil-papered door and rolled out two down-filled sleeping mats. I was tired, but not tired enough to ignore her.

  In the morning, Ernie and I were up just after dawn. We said our goodbyes to Ok-hi and Jeannie who lingered in the yoguan since both rooms were paid for until noon.

  The narrow alleys of Tongduchon were quiet and cold in the early morning hours. All the shops and nightclubs and bars were padlocked and shuttered with heavy iron gratings. A low mist spread along cobbled lanes. As we walked, Ernie stuck his hands deep into his pockets and breathed deeply of the frigid air, pungent with the odor of fermented cabbage and stagnating beer and ondol charcoal gas floating from the hotels and yoguans that dotted the bar district.

  Most of the GIs had already left. A mandatory PT formation was held at 0630 and it was now almost 0700 hours. In the distance, on the other side of the main gate of Camp Casey, we could hear huge groups of GIs doing jumping jacks while they shouted martial cadences.

  The narrow walkway we were following bled onto the main drag of the bar district and soon Ernie and I were walking past the shuttered facades of the Oasis Club, the Montana Club, and finally the Silver Dragon Club. Then we crossed the railroad tracks, went through another narrow alley, and came out on the four-lane wide Main Supply Route. Down the road about a half mile we could see the illuminated arch of the 2nd Division main gate. Beyond that, the twenty-foot-high MP, still standing at the ready, still observing everything. When I thought of what we would face at the PMO today, after the Weatherwax incident last night, I groaned inwardly.

  Ernie seemed completely unconcerned.

  A unit of GIs emerged from the main gate. All of them wore sneakers, gray training pants, gray sweatshirts, and red woolen caps pulled down low over their ears. All fifty or so men ran in unison, a senior sergeant shouting out the cadence. One man ran in front of the formation holding the unit flag. The guide-on, he’s called. We could tell by the colors they wore, and by the unit designation on the flag, that they were combat engineers.

  “Where are the MPs?” Ernie asked.

  “Don’t be so anxious to see them,” I replied.

  We trotted across the MSR until we reached the southwestern corner of Camp Casey. A ten-foot-high cement-block wall on our right, topped with concertina wire, stretched along the sidewalk all the way to the main gate. Ernie and I walked it quietly, both lost in our own thoughts.

  Me, I was thinking about Jeannie. She was a slender woman, and tall for a Korean, but sweet and gentle and considerate. I’d had some good times since I’d been in country but last night had been one of the best.

  Ernie heard it first.

  “What the hell’s that?” he asked.

  It was the typical shouted cadence of a military unit doing its morning physical-training run. The sergeant shouted something out and the men answered as if in one voice, almost like singing. But this sound was close and loud and garbled. Ernie and I glanced around, unable to figure where the noise was coming from.

  It couldn’t be the combat engineer unit. They
’d run off in the other direction.

  And then I understood. It came from the narrow alleyway we’d just walked out of. It had been barely wide enough for Ernie and me to walk abreast, certainly not big enough for a company formation four-squads wide. But that’s where the sound was coming from, and that’s why Ernie and I were having trouble locating it. The narrow alley concentrated the sound, causing it to reverberate between its brick walls. And then the sound erupted onto the MSR and spread out every which way.

  “Why in hell did they go down there?” Ernie asked.

  “They came out of the main gate,” I said. “We know that. Then they must’ve entered the village and taken a left down the road running along the railroad tracks.”

  “So close to the ville?”

  Ernie meant that there’d be a lot of civilians woken up by their shouting and the pounding of their feet. In the States, that’s never allowed. Even in Seoul, it’s frowned upon.

  Now it was my turn to shrug. “This is Division.”

  “But why turn up that narrow alleyway?” Ernie asked. “They’ve hardly run a half mile.”

  I didn’t know. But the question was answered almost as soon as it was out of Ernie’s mouth. The guide-on of the unit, holding the unit flag at port arms, emerged from the mouth of the alley. He wore a green cap pulled down low over his ears, the same gray sweat pants, same gray sweat shirt, same cheap sneakers. But the realization of the meaning of the designation on the flag fluttering in the breeze smacked Ernie and me at the same time. Right across the chops.