The Wandering Ghost (george sueno and ernie bascom)

by Martin Limon

  “Yeah.”

  “And an air-conditioned office, heated in the winter, cooled in the summer.”

  “Of course.”

  Ernie thought about it. Finally, he seemed to come to a decision. “Nah. Wouldn’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’d get my secretary pregnant and punch the presiding judge on the Chon Un-suk court-martial right in the nose.”

  “You probably would.” I shook my head. “All that schooling gone to waste.”

  “Exactly.”

  A few minutes later the secretary returned and beckoned for us to follow. She ushered us down the long corridor, past well-appointed offices with military officers behind teak desks and their Korean civilian assistants in dark suits and ties. We turned right and then left and at the end of the hallway, we were ushered into the office of Lieutenant Colonel Wilbur M. Proffert. The secretary hurried out of the office as Ernie and I saluted the man.

  His face was narrow and his glasses were polished so brightly that they shone like cheap jewelry. After chewing us out for a while about arriving without an appointment, Colonel Proffert checked our identification thoroughly and jotted down each of our names and badge numbers. He cleaned his glasses and told us to be seated. Then he shoved across his desk a copy of the trial transcript of the court-martial involving the death of Chon Un-suk. He told us that beyond what was included there, the 2nd Infantry JAG Office had no further comment.

  Ernie thumbed through the transcript, snorted, and handed it to me. “Were they speeding, sir?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “The two GIs driving the deuce-and-a-half. Were they exceeding the speed limit just prior to plowing into Chon Un-suk?”

  Colonel Proffert rose from behind his desk and placed his hands on narrow hips. He was a jogger, that was for sure. Officers have to stay thin in today’s army if they expect to be competitive for promotion. Especially staff officers.

  He wagged his forefinger at Ernie’s nose.

  “Whether those two young men were speeding or not,” Colonel Proffert said, “has no bearing on this case.”

  It was my turn to be surprised. “No bearing?”

  “None,” Colonel Proffert repeated. “Driving conditions in Korea are atrocious. The roads are narrow, jammed with pedestrians, choked with bicycles and pushcarts and Korean drivers who don’t know even the rudiments of safe motoring. On top of that the weather is treacherous, there’s little de-icing equipment or anything as fancy as snow plows and despite all this we expect young soldiers to go out in the middle of night, in the middle of howling storms, and perform their duty and drive where and when their military missions require them to. Under these stresses, can we punish them for driving ten or fifteen miles over the speed limit?”

  He waited for our answer. I gave him one.

  “When there’s thirty school girls standing on the side of the road, yes.”

  He shook his head vehemently.

  “You’re missing the big picture.” Dramatically, he pointed toward the north. “We have seven hundred thousand bloodthirsty communist soldiers less than twenty miles north of here. Every one of them just waiting for a chance to push south past the Second United States Infantry Division and invade Korea. What do you think would happen to those middle-school girls then? Rape. Pillage. Murder. That’s the big picture we’re looking at, and we can’t have GIs driving out into ungodly dangerous road conditions while at the same time having to look back over their shoulders, wondering if Division JAG is going to nail them for violating some petty traffic regulations. We can’t do it. Our job, first and foremost, is to protect freedom here in Korea.” He wagged his forefinger once again, more forcefully this time. “And don’t you ever forget it.”

  I tossed the trial transcript onto his desk.

  “Thanks for your time, sir.”

  I grabbed Ernie by the elbow but he wouldn’t budge. He kept staring at Colonel Proffert.

  “So the facts of the case don’t matter?” Ernie asked.

  I tugged on his arm. Ernie shrugged me off.

  “I didn’t say that,” Proffert answered mildly.

  “The hell you didn’t. That’s exactly what you said.”

  Colonel Proffert’s face started to turn red. “Don’t you come in here and lecture me, young man. Eighth Army CID or not.”

  “No point in lecturing you,” Ernie replied. “Because you know what you did.”

  Colonel Proffert’s voice lowered. “And what exactly,” he said, “was that?”

  “You let two GIs get away with murder.”

  Colonel Proffert sputtered but before he could reply, Ernie plowed on.

  “And what’s more important, you sent a message to every GI in Division that no matter how recklessly they drive, no matter who they kill or maim, the Division will protect them from having to take responsibility for their actions.”

  “Out!” Colonel Proffert roared. “Get out of my office!”

  I practically lifted Ernie off of his feet and dragged him out of the office and down the hallway. JAG officers in their neatly pressed fatigues were standing in front of their cubicles now, watching Ernie and me struggle down the corridor, listening to Colonel Proffert cursing behind us.

  As she held the front door open for us, the cute Korean secretary stared at the floor. Very modest. Very Confucian. I dragged a struggling Ernie Bascom out of the JAG Office and onto the gravel-covered parking lot. We stood by the jeep until Ernie’s breathing became regular once more.

  This time I took the wheel. As we drove away, Ernie sat in the back seat of the jeep, arms crossed, fuming.

  Late that afternoon, when Ernie pounded on the door to Kimchee Entertainment, we knew it was futile because the hasp was still padlocked from the outside. He did it out of frustration and to attract attention. A ploy that worked. Within seconds another resident of the two-story brick building emerged from her lair and began sweeping the blacktop in front of the building with a short-handled broom.

  I greeted her in Korean and asked her if she knew where Mr. Pak Tong-i, the owner of Kimchee Entertainment, had gone.

  “Moolah,” she told me. I don’t know. “Haru cheingil anwasso.” He hasn’t been in all day.

  I asked her if he did this often and she told me that he’s in show business and therefore very unreliable and she never knows when he’s going to show up and start making noise. I asked her what kind of noise and she told me that he often plays the radio too loud or has some musician banging away on drums or other foreign instruments. When she couldn’t give us his home phone number or his address, we thanked her and went on our way.

  About a half block down the road, Ernie asked me, “Did you see him?”

  “See who?”

  “The chubby guy. Korean. Bald head. He bought a newspaper at the stand next door and stood around pretending to read all through your conversation.”

  “He wasn’t Pak Tong-i, was he?”

  “No. Too husky for that little twerp. Just a big guy in pajamas.”

  Koreans, especially middle-aged men, think nothing of parading around their neighborhoods in pajama bottoms and slippers.

  “What makes you think he was paying attention to us?”

  “Maybe he wasn’t. I just wondered if you noticed.”

  “I didn’t. Where did he go?”

  “Back to the alleyway on the far side of Kimchee Entertainment.”

  “Probably just a local resident.”

  “Probably.”

  The purple Korean night started its slow descent upon the city of Tongduchon. Bulbs burst into brightness; neon flickered to life. Clumps of uniformed students pushed past us, toting backpacks bursting with books. Farmers rolled empty carts back toward the countryside. Without really planning to, Ernie and I wandered closer to the bar district.

  “We’ve talked to just about everyone who knew Jill Matthewson,” Ernie said. “So now it’s time to stop talking and do something.”

  I thought about t
hat for a minute. A girl in a dirt-floored mokkolli house, an establishment that sells warm rice beer to cab drivers and construction workers, gazed out at us in mute awe. Despite all the American movies and television programs they see, most Koreans still think of Americans as being odd. Almost nonhuman. In all her life, she’d probably never spoken to a foreigner. For a moment, I was tempted to go in and talk to her. Let her know that although we looked strange, Ernie and I were still human. Sort of.

  And then I thought of Corporal Jill Matthewson on her first night of ville patrol. How strange the ville must’ve seemed. How awful. Wailing rock music, drunken GIs, desperate business girls, persistent old farm women selling packages of warm chestnuts to overly made-up cocktail waitresses. She wasn’t in Terre Haute anymore. But she must’ve seen humanity too. People who were fundamentally the same as her. That’s why she’d become friends-or at least we thought she’d become friends-with the stripper, Kim Yong-ai. That’s why, together, they’d disappeared.

  But had she become friends with anyone else?

  That’s when it hit me. Brandy. The bartender in the Black Cat Club. Of course. There must be more she knew, more facts that we could pull out of that sharp brain beneath that bouffant Afro hairdo.

  I told Ernie. He liked it. Any nightclub in a storm. Besides we had an entire evening to kill until the midnight to four a.m. curfew, which was when I wanted to try something else I’d been planning.

  Had I proposed the plan to Ernie yet? No need. It was crazy and bold and reckless, and that’s why I had no doubt he’d love it.

  Brandy wasn’t in. We checked with the old mama-san behind the bar and she said Brandy wasn’t feeling well. I asked for her address but the woman claimed she didn’t know it. How then, did she know that Brandy was sick? A boy arrived with a note, she claimed. I pressed but the old woman wasn’t budging. Can’t say that I blamed her. In a joint like the Black Cat Club a woman’s privacy is important. A drunken GI would be likely to barge in on her at any hour of the night or day if they gave out her address to anyone who asked.

  I considered flashing my badge and threatening the old woman with calling in the Korean National Police if she didn’t cooperate. But that wouldn’t ingratiate me to Brandy and it was her goodwill and cooperation that I needed. Besides, a few of the soul brothers were beginning to mumble amongst themselves, upset that a couple of “T-shirts” were monopolizing the women at the bar.

  Ernie grinned at them and flashed the thumbs-up sign. He could either defuse a situation with his charm or punch somebody and end up causing a riot, depending upon his mood. Rather than wait for that decision, I thanked the old woman and asked her to please tell Brandy that we’d been in.

  She agreed and Ernie and I strolled out of the Black Cat Club.

  Outside, I told Ernie what I wanted to do tonight. Ernie not only agreed but he laughed and rubbed his hands in glee. We decided to bypass the neon lights of TDC and return to Camp Casey. There were three reasons. One, we wanted to have some Miguk chow: meat and potatoes. Two, we needed to stay relatively sober. And three, we wanted to change out of these suits and ties and into clothing more appropriate for the task I had in mind.

  Ernie kept running ideas and scenarios by me, thrilled to have something to do other than just walk around interviewing people. His enjoyment was further enhanced by the fact that what we planned to do tonight after the midnight curfew was, and still is, completely illegal.

  On Camp Casey, we stopped at the Gateway Club, less than a hundred yards in from the main gate, eighty yards past the Provost Marshal’s Office and the twenty-foot-tall statue of the MP. The Gateway was theoretically an all-ranks club but mostly young enlisted men used it. The officers had restaurant/bar establishments of their own, as did the Senior NCOs. Ernie and I sat at the bar, sipping on beers, studying the Gateway Club menu in the dim glow of an overhead blue light. Behind us, a Korean go-go girl gyrated wildly on a raised stage. GIs cheered. Rock music blared from a jukebox. Both Ernie and I felt completely at home.

  The plastic-coated menu bore the Indianhead 2nd Division patch on the front. The numbered list inside featured the usual adventurous fare one found in military dining facilities: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fries, sirloin steak, fried chicken, and a couple of exotic foreign dishes like onion rings and coleslaw.

  The dining room was operating, the cocktail lounge was operating, but the main ballroom of the Gateway Club was still closed. Later this evening a rock band would start and the ballroom would be packed with young GIs-and the twenty to thirty business girls whom the club manager was authorized to escort on post. Right now, the big room was dark and empty except for one man sitting alone at a table on the far edge, hunched over a plate of food. I recognized him. Sergeant First Class Otis, who’d greeted us upon our arrival in 2nd Division and the NCO who’d been leading the physical training formation this morning, the formation that had been so anxious to express their feelings-in a knuckle sandwich kind of way-toward Ernie and me.

  I told Ernie I’d be back, rose from my barstool, and sauntered toward Sergeant First Class Otis.

  “I don’t want no trouble,” was the first thing he said to me when he looked up. He was eating fried chicken with rice and gravy. A glass of iced tea stood next to his plate.

  “No trouble.” I pulled a chair out from the table and sat down across from him. “Thanks for saving our butts during the run this morning.”

  He shook his head and shoveled a spoonful of rice into his mouth. “I ain’t your friend,” he said.

  I let that sit for a while. Then I said, “So why’d you stop your MPs from beating the crap out of us?”

  “Nothing to do with you,” he said. “When I’m in charge of a formation, it don’t turn into a mob.”

  I appreciated that. Whatever those MPs did, right or wrong, would reflect on his ability to lead. His ability to control men in formation. NCOs, most of them, take their leadership role seriously. Obviously, Sergeant Otis did.

  “Weatherwax had it coming,” I said. Ernie had punched him for following us through the ville.

  Otis shrugged. “You say.”

  A middle-aged Korean waitress approached and poured more iced tea into Otis’s glass from a plastic pitcher. He knew her, they seemed relaxed with one another, and Otis probably tipped well to convince her to serve him dinner some twenty yards from the boisterous young GIs in the well-lit dining room. I figured Otis was working the desk tonight. That’s why he was wearing a freshly pressed set of fatigues and why he was having chow at the Gateway Club, the eating establishment nearest to the Provost Marshal’s Office. The waitress gazed at me quizzically, feeling the tension between me and Otis. When she asked if I wanted anything I told her no. She left. I waited for her footsteps to fade.

  “You know more than you’re telling me,” I said.

  Otis didn’t even look up from his plate. “Of course I know more than I’m telling you. What the hell you think?”

  “Why aren’t you telling me?”

  “First, you didn’t ask. Second, you a rear echelon motherfucker just up here to make Division look bad.”

  I paused again, letting the silence grow. It wasn’t silence exactly. We could still hear the rock music from the cocktail lounge and the clang and buzz of people talking and eating and laughing in the dining room. But for Camp Casey, a place where men and heavy equipment were always on the go, it came as close to silence as we were going to get.

  “Druwood,” I said. “You know what they’re saying about him isn’t right.”

  Otis picked up a drumstick and chomped into it, chewing resolutely.

  “Private Druwood didn’t die out at the obstacle course,” I continued. “Crumbled cement was still lodged in his skull. I saw it. No way he could’ve jumped from that tower. No cement around there. Somebody dumped him at the obstacle course. Said he jumped from the tower. Said it was an accident.”

  Otis stopped chewing.

  “He was an MP,” I continued. “White. Young. No
t black and old and wise like you. But he was your responsibility, Sergeant Otis. Your soldier. You were supposed to look out for him.”

  Otis swallowed the last of the chicken, as if it were something dryer than sand. He stared at his plate, at the half-eaten remains of the bird and the gravy smeared through glutinous Korean rice. Slowly, he looked up at me.

  “He wasn’t in my platoon.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said.

  Otis stared so steadily that for a minute I thought he was going to come across the table at me. I wouldn’t use my pistol, I knew that, but I might pick up a chair to hold him off. Although I was taller, and probably heavier, he was a strong man, the thick muscles of his shoulders bulging through the material of his green fatigues. I held his gaze. If we had to fight, I’d fight.

  Instead, his lips started to move.

  “Bufford,” he said. It was almost a rasp, as if his vocal chords had suddenly been stricken by laryngitis.

  “What?”

  “Bufford,” he repeated. “Maybe he drove Druwood on compound, maybe he didn’t. But he was behind it. Arranged it so it would look like a training accident.”

  “Druwood was killed off base?” I asked.

  “Maybe not killed. Maybe he killed himself.”

  “But you’re not sure?”

  “No. But the excuse to bring him on base was that the Division suicide rate is too high. Had to make it look like an accident.”

  “Bufford didn’t want Division to look bad.”

  “Not him,” Otis said. “Somebody higher.”

  “How high?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I listen,” he said. “And I think.”

  “So they don’t confide in you?”

  “I don’t know which ‘they’ you’re talking about but no, they don’t.”

  “Where was Druwood killed?”

  “You don’t know that he was killed.”

  “Okay. Where was his body found?”

  “In the ville, that’s what I heard. Where the black-market honchos operate. An off-limits area.”