by Martin Limon
What kind of pawns were we being played as, and by whom? Of what international consequence was one European prostitute? None, I imagined, other than good copy for Katie Byrd Worthington.
We grabbed some chow to go and hurried to the CID office. We had a military-style assault to organize.
-17-
The group was locked and loaded and ready to move out at zero-eight-hundred hours. I showed everyone a sketch map of the Camp Mercer compound. Using a pointer to indicate the front gate, I told Staff Sergeant Palinki and Corporal Muencher to stay there with a jeep, keeping the gate locked and making sure no one escaped. Two other MPs I assigned to the rear gate, and the rest of us—six MPs plus me and Ernie—would search Headquarters Company barracks, the Refrigeration Repair and Inspection warehouse, and any other associated 19th Support Group functions. We were searching for the GIs we suspected of robbing two banks, assaulting a security guard, killing a teller, and attacking a money changer by the name of Old Hwang in Yongju-gol. Not to mention attacking me and Ernie.
“Brotha’,” said Palinki, who was from Hawaii, “we stopping a crime wave.”
Everyone laughed.
With Ernie leading the way, our convoy of four jeeps took about a half hour to reach Camp Mercer in Bucheon. As instructed, Palinki and Muencher secured the front gate while Ernie and I barged into the Headquarters Company Orderly Room and served the unit commander with the Provost Marshal’s signed order permitting us to search the premises and detain any and all 19th Support Group Personnel we considered to be suspects. While the CO sputtered after reading the order, Ernie led the armed posse to the RR&I warehouse, rounded up all GIs there, then went outside to the associated supply offices and the barracks. Within ten minutes, we had a ragtag formation of GIs standing in the small central parade field, all of them bitching about being away from the comfort of their diesel space heaters, some of them smoking despite the MPs’ barked orders to put ’em out.
“What are you gonna do?” one of the GIs asked. “Shoot me?”
I studied the face of each GI, not seeing the dark-haired man who’d knocked me down in Yongju-gol. Ernie checked with the Motor Pool NCO and determined that a guy named Poulson, Corporal Wilford R., had been the dispatched driver of the vehicle yesterday—and for a number of days before that.
“Where’s Poulson now?” I asked one of the senior NCOs.
“You just missed him. He left right after morning formation, about twenty minutes ago.”
“Alone?”
“No. With the same three guys who usually travel with him. Gottfried, Wells, and Sarkosian.”
“What’s their duty?”
“They’re refrigeration inspectors. Check the ration storage facilities and the mess halls to make sure the refrigeration equipment is maintained and functioning and that perishable foodstuffs, especially meat, are transported and stored at the correct temperatures.”
“Sounds like a get-over,” I said. “On their own, wandering around the countryside from compound to compound?”
The sergeant shrugged. “They have a regular route to follow. And inspection and maintenance check sheets that have to be reviewed and signed off on by the mess sergeants and officers in charge of the storage facilities. If the job’s done right, there’s plenty of work to keep them busy.”
“And if it’s not?”
He shrugged again. “Then we all die from food poisoning.”
“Who’s in charge of this detail?”
“Sarkosian, Spec Five.” A Specialist 5, the same pay grade as a buck sergeant. “His first name’s Karim, which is what everybody calls him.”
Based on the way he said it, I thought the name was pronounced care-em, rhyming with “harem.” But I knew that probably wasn’t right, so I checked the official records in the Orderly Room and eventually found that it was Karim—said as car-EEM—a fairly common Middle Eastern name. The butchering of the original pronunciation wasn’t surprising, based on the creative Army interpretations of my own last name.
Once we were sure the guys we were looking for were no longer on compound, the formation was dismissed. GIs wandered back to their work stations, kicking dirt and cussing.
In the Headquarters Company Orderly Room, I asked the CO if anybody had a photograph of Sarkosian or the three guys traveling with him. It turned out that the Company clerk was a shutterbug. He showed me and Ernie some black and-white-snapshots he’d taken a few months ago at the unit’s summer picnic.
“There’s Gottfried and Wells,” he said pointing to two guys playing volleyball. “And there’s Karim.”
He was a muscular guy with a scowl and close-cropped bristly black hair. Ernie and I glanced at one another and nodded. Definitely the guy we’d tangled with in the alley in Yongju-gol. The one we’d almost slapped handcuffs on before his two pals jumped us.
I asked if I could keep the photos. When the clerk hesitated, I told him to write down his name and address so I could mail them back to him as soon as we no longer needed them. He agreed and addressed the front of a large pulp envelope with a felt marker, then handed it to me.
“Where were these three guys headed this morning?” I asked.
He phoned the RR&I unit, spoke to someone for a minute, hung up, and said, “They’re on their way to Camp Humphreys.”
Down in Pyongtaek, about forty miles southeast of our current position.
“A long trip,” Ernie told me.
“But worth it if we can corner them there.”
We decided to leave two reliable MPs here, Palinki and Muencher, in case Sarkosian and his crew doubled back at any point.
Usually, Ernie and I operated alone without bothering to keep the 8th Army CID office apprised of our whereabouts, which drove Staff Sergeant Riley nuts—which also happened to be the fun of it. But with this many MPs traveling with us, I thought it was best to check in. Using the Company clerk’s phone, I called our office, expecting to hear Miss Kim’s lovely voice. My plan was to leave a brief message with her and hang up. I’d only spoken a couple of words when Riley snatched up the phone.
“Where in the hell are you guys?” he said.
“You know where we are. Camp Mercer.”
“Still? You better get off your lazy butts and get over to Suwon.”
“Suwon?”
“Yeah. Where in the hell else would you go?”
Suwon was about twenty miles southeast of Seoul. It was known for its ancient Hwaseong Fortress and the beauty of its reconstructed palaces and temples, plus the relaxed atmosphere of its scenic countryside. It also wasn’t too far out of the way for someone traveling from, say, Camp Mercer to Camp Humphreys.
“What happened in Suwon?” I asked.
“Seriously? A goddamn bank robbery, that’s what. Except this time, the guys with the M16s weren’t as nice as they were before.”
“How many bodies?”
“The KNPs are still counting. All I know for sure is that there’s a hell of a lot of blood and they haven’t even sorted it out yet. The Provost Marshal is about to shit a brick.”
“We’re on our way,” I said and hung up.
Suwon was small enough that our little convoy entering the outskirts attracted quite a bit of attention from the locals. We weren’t met with pleasant smiles, which did sometimes happen with Koreans who liked the American effort to help defend their country, but rather with worried looks and furtive steps back into doorways. At a KNP roadblock, I showed the officer our 8th Army dispatch. The heading was, of course, printed in English, but with hangul type beneath that. He handed the dispatch back to me and shook his open palm in a gesture that meant no. “No go,” he said in English. “You no go.”
I answered him in Korean, telling him we were military police. Relieved to be able to communicate, he explained that there’d been a bank robbery which had resulted in a number of casualties, and he and
the other five armed cops at the roadblock were under orders not to allow anyone to proceed into or out of Suwon. I explained that we were working for Chief Homicide Inspector Gil Kwon-up. This received the startled reaction I expected it to, and I challenged him to use his radio to confirm that we should be allowed in to view the crime scene. I also flashed him my badge.
The mention of Mr. Kill, as it often did, changed his attitude. After a brief radio conversation, the KNP nodded, saying, “Yeh, yeh, yeh,” then turned and waved us through.
The Kukchei Import-Export Bank sat about thirty yards from the main gate of the stone-walled Hwaseong Fortress, on the edge of a traffic circle that surrounded a green-tile-roofed pagoda with a giant brass bell in the center.
“What’s that bell for?” Ernie asked.
“Buddhist monks ring it in the morning to call people to prayer or meditation,” I said, “and in the evening to put them to sleep. It has a calming effect.”
Van-sized Korean ambulances and blue police Hyundai sedans, red lights flashing, jammed the entryway to the cement edifice that fronted the bank. Bodies were still being wheeled out on gurneys, and what appeared to be fresh blood stained the front stone steps. People stood scattered, hugging one another, and crying.
“Holy hell,” Ernie said, his voice filled with awe.
We parked our three jeeps where we could. It looked like we were the first Americans on scene since the perpetrators of these murders. I told the uniformed MPs to wait in their jeeps. The nervous gazes of the KNP technicians processing the crime scene turned to us as Ernie and I strode forward. We stopped at the yellow tape strung in front of the bank. Up close, I saw there was more blood on the steps than I had thought. Its smell was metallic and frightening.
After the first surprised glance, everyone quietly returned to their work, ignoring us. We stood there for a couple of minutes before Ernie said, “Fuck this,” and ducked beneath the tape. I followed. We stepped gingerly into the bank, and this time Korean cops in white shirts with rolled-up sleeves, hands in plastic gloves, turned to look at us. The bank was enormous, more like a high-windowed cathedral. Apparently the Kukchei Import-Export Bank was one of the more prosperous businesses in the city of Suwon. A couple of teller windows had been shattered by gunfire. Behind the counter was most of the activity, everyone focused on things on the floor that we couldn’t see.
A uniformed cop, right hand on the hilt of his pistol, hurried toward us.
“No,” he said, waving his palm. “No can.”
We flashed our badges, and I told him we were looking for Inspector Gil Kwon-up. Per usual, this gave pause. The chief homicide inspector of the Korean National Police was well known to every cop in Korea. “Wait,” he said. He rushed off and conferred with a gray-haired man in a suit. Next to him stood a female cop holding a pen and clipboard. After receiving some sort of instructions, the uniformed cop bowed to the gray-haired man and returned to us.
“Wait by the tape,” he told me in Korean. “Inspector Ahn will speak to you soon.”
“How many are dead?” I asked.
“Three, so far. Others,” he said, shaking his head, “we don’t know.”
“They’re in the hospital?”
He nodded and insisted once again that we return to the tape.
We did.
“See?” Ernie told me, pulling out a stick of ginseng gum and popping it into his mouth. “If you play by the rules, like you do all the time, nothing gets done.”
“Rules are good,” I said.
“Huh,” Ernie said dismissively. “What’d they ever get you?”
“This job,” I said.
Ernie chomped loudly on his gum. “See what I mean?”
For me, serving in the Army as an agent of the Criminal Investigation Division was a step up in life. My mother had died when I was very young, and for reasons I still hadn’t figured out, my father ran off to Mexico, his home country. I’d grown up in foster homes at the sufferance of the Supervisors of the County of Los Angeles. Some of my foster parents were okay, some not so much, but as soon as I turned seventeen, I joined the army. A line I once heard in basic training had always stuck with me. “Three hots and a cot. I’ve never had it so good.”
Of course, the guy saying it was doing so sarcastically. But for me, it was true. I had a job, clean clothes, three regular meals a day if I wanted them, plus a paycheck at the end of the month. More importantly, I was somebody. I had a name and rank and fit firmly into a hierarchy. The Army had become home for me. And when I was transferred to South Korea, I was mesmerized by the beauty and mystery of the country’s traditions. Ever since, I’d been studying as hard as I could to understand its culture. The more I learned the more I understood how little I really knew.
“Wake up,” Ernie said, elbowing me. “Here comes the head honcho.”
The gray-haired cop in the sharp suit approached us with a blue-clad female officer tagging closely at his heels. He reached out his hand and we shook. I bowed as he told us in English his name was Inspector Ahn.
Ernie stopped chomping quite so loudly on his ginseng gum—which was his way of being polite—and let me do the talking. I showed Inspector Ahn my badge and explained who we were and that we’d been working with Mr. Kill on the string of GI robberies. I felt a wave of guilt as I said it, wondering if we might’ve prevented this by arriving a half-hour earlier at the 19th Support Group.
His eyes narrowed as he studied me. Eventually, he said, “Come.”
He turned, and Ernie and I ducked under the tape and followed. The four of us stepped gingerly around the edge of the bank of teller windows and the half-dozen desks that had been pushed out of the way from the center of the floor. One of them had been turned on its side, as if being used as a barricade. Behind the desk lay two bodies. Both Americans. One of them with part of his skull blown off, blood and brain matter spattered everywhere. The other seemed to have taken a shot to the gut. He was curled into a fetal position, his hands by his stomach, as if trying to hold in the gray intestines that had partially spilled out onto the granite floor.
Ernie and I breathed in and out heavily, trying to maintain our cool in the face of this carnage. Both GIs wore standard-issue fatigues and combat boots. I knelt to get a better look. Their faces were slathered in camo stick, and it took me a minute to look past the purposeful concealment and discern the contours of their eyes and mouths. Reaching into my side pocket, I pulled out one of the photographs we’d been given by the company clerk back at Camp Mercer. I looked closer at the two young men leaping for a volleyball, then back at these death masks.
“Gottfried and Wells,” I said to Ernie, handing him the photo. He knelt and compared the corpses to the picture.
“Right,” he said, handing the print back to me. I stood and stuffed it back into my pocket.
I turned to Inspector Ahn. “Any others?” I asked.
He walked me through the large room, pointing to his right and left. One corpse after another, huddled against walls and booths.
“Christ,” Ernie whispered.
At the big door leading deeper into the bank, we stopped and I asked Inspector Ahn, “How many total?”
“Korean employees,” he said. “Five dead now, seven more in hospital.”
He turned right and led us to the end of a hallway. Ernie stepped closer to me and said, disbelief in his voice, “They waged a freaking war.”
Halfway down a long passageway stood what appeared to be a large cashier’s cage embedded into the side wall. The barred, steel-reinforced window had been completely blown out with an explosive. The hallway continued straight ahead and eventually led outside to a green garden area with magpies and robins flitting around.
“What did they use?” I asked Inspector Ahn, pointing to the bent metal and shattered glass.
“Hand grenade,” he said. “We think.”
; He warned us against touching anything. We retraced our steps back down the hallway, past the small foyer leading into the catacombs of the massive bank, through the desk-strewn work area, to the other side of the teller windows, and finally across the entrance hall and out the front door.
Gazes followed us as we passed. Cops and forensic techs, their eyes betraying a less-than-professional hatred.
“Okay,” Ernie said sotto voce, “maybe I won’t get a date in Suwon tonight.”
Outside, Inspector Ahn paused to explain. “Because of the bank robberies in Seoul, we worried that soon these men come to Suwon. We were right. So every bank in Suwon have two police officers with rifles.” He mimicked aiming a rifle. “They hide in office, behind tellers. When American GIs come inside through front door, start yelling, tell everybody get down, our Korean police officers come out. Shoot.”
“And the GIs shot back?”
“Yes. They have better weapons.” The Korean cops were armed only with old-fashioned M1 rifles. “GIs get all the way to cashier’s cage, use hand grenade to get inside.”
And so, about two dozen employees and a handful of customers suddenly found themselves in the middle of a firefight. I wasn’t sure this was the technique police departments would have used in the States, but in Park Chung-hee’s South Korea, they didn’t play around.
After finishing his explanation, Ahn led us off the stone steps to a cement curb on the side of the bank, and we followed him as he spryly hopped down onto a neatly tended garden area. At the side of the stone building, the shattered window we’d seen from inside loomed about ten feet above us. Below, as if he’d fallen head first, lay another GI on his back, mouth open, staring at the sky. I didn’t have a photograph to compare him against, but the nametag on the front of his fatigue shirt was plain: Poulson. Rank insignia, corporal.
“The driver,” Ernie said. “The one who dispatched the jeep.” Ernie knelt and felt for a pulse, then stood back up, shaking his head.
“By the way,” I asked Inspector Ahn. “Did you find a US Army jeep?”
