by Martin Limon
“Why’d they call this now?”
“The ROK government must be worried about what’s happening at the JSA. They probably think the North Koreans will overreact. Who knows? I bet they’re preparing for war up there.”
Ernie nodded. I pulled out the note Corporal Noh’s sister had given us.
In local Korean custom, folding a missive into an origami-like shape indicated that it was personal and not intended for anyone but the addressee. But this was no time for niceties; we couldn’t afford to miss something important regarding Noh Jong-bei’s murder to preserve the privacy of his lovestruck sister. Carefully, I unwrapped the note. It was written in English, a flowing cursive neater than my own. When I finished reading it, I handed it to Ernie. He glanced through it quickly. As he clumsily attempted to refold it, I took it from his hands.
“I’ll ask Miss Kim to fix it for us.” The CID Admin secretary was the only person who had a prayer of putting the note back into its original orchid shape.
“Are we going to deliver it to this guy Teddy,” Ernie asked, “or are we just going to arrest him?”
I didn’t answer. What we had was motive for murder. Teddy Fusterman had been seeing Marilyn against her family’s wishes. As the oldest and only son, it was Corporal Noh’s filial duty to uphold his father’s wishes. Confucian tradition still held in principle here, even if not always in practice. But if Corporal Noh had followed these dictates as a good son and tried to stop his sister from seeing Fusterman, that might’ve been enough to drive the guy into a rage. We’d have to sweat the young trooper and see if their disagreement had spiraled into an argument serious enough to lead to murder.
I reread the note.
At the bottom, Marilyn had drawn a happy face.
When the all-clear siren sounded, Ernie and I ran to the jeep, and with some very aggressive driving, he managed to make it about a mile along the road before traffic bogged us down again. A half-hour later, we reached Yongsan Compound. We pulled into the narrow parking lot next to the two-story brick building that housed the Criminal Investigation Detachment.
After turning off the engine, Ernie took a deep breath. “Prepare for heavy swells,” he said.
“What are you, a swabbie?”
“I feel like one,” he said, “in the middle of a typhoon.”
Inside, Staff Sergeant Riley, the admin NCO, was waiting for us.
“Where the hell you guys been?”
Ernie ignored him and checked the coffee urn in back, which was unplugged, cold, and empty.
“We’ve been investigating,” I told Riley.
“Is that what you call it?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “What would you call it?”
“Goofing off. It doesn’t take all day to question a few GIs about what they saw or didn’t see.”
Frustrated, Ernie returned from the dormant urn. “What the hell would a pencil-pusher like you know?” he asked.
“I know that those North Korean Commies murdered one of our KATUSAs, and by God, we’re going to make them pay for it.”
“Relax, tiger,” Ernie said. “I’m sure the Great Leader is shaking in his boots.”
Miss Kim, the statuesque admin secretary, stopped typing and looked up at me, worried. When Riley wasn’t looking, she asked in a soft voice, “Was the young man murdered by the North Koreans?”
She, like the rest of the eight-million-plus people living in Seoul, was terrified by the prospect of another war breaking out. North Korean artillery along the Demilitarized Zone was powerful enough to reach not only the city limits, but into the heart of downtown Seoul itself. Over the years, the North Korean army had moved entire battalions of heavy weaponry into hidden mountain caves and beneath heavily fortified positions. By now, 8th Army analysts predicted that within the first few hours of an outbreak of hostilities, the capital city of Seoul would be engulfed in fire.
“Kokjong hajima,” I said, patting the back of her hand. Don’t worry.
Then I showed her my notebook, dog-eared from a few cases’ worth of bookmarking. “From what we’ve found, it’s possible that Corporal Noh wasn’t harmed by the North Koreans at all.”
Her eyes were wide. “No?”
I shook my head.
“Then who?” But she caught herself and placed her fingertips to her mouth as if to retract the question. I pulled out the note Corporal Noh’s sister had given us and asked Miss Kim if she could refold it. She did. Her long, deft fingers accomplished the task in under thirty seconds. It looked just as it had when Marilyn had handed it to me.
“Thanks,” I said, slipping the note into my pocket.
I sat down at a field desk and started to type up my report.
“No time for that!” Riley shouted.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Ernie said. “All you ever do is nag Sueño for reports so you’ll have more paper to push.”
Riley bellowed at me. “You were supposed to have been over at the MAC headquarters two hours ago.”
Ernie sauntered toward Riley’s desk, grabbed the wrinkled copy of this morning’s Stars and Stripes, and began searching for the sports page. “What do they want to talk to us for?” he asked, apparently having decided to mess with Riley a little.
“To chew your butts,” Riley replied. “Now get over there and report to Colonel Peele. I’ll call and let them know you’re on your way.”
“Does the Provost Marshal know about this?” I asked, joining in on Ernie’s game.
“Of course he does.”
“And he doesn’t mind another officer telling off the men who work for him?”
Riley’s eyes widened. “Why should he?”
I shrugged. “Just thought he might want to provide us a little protection so we can do our jobs without interference.”
Riley scoffed. “Who the hell do you think you are? A reporter for the Washington Post or something?”
I hadn’t actually thought our boss, Colonel Walter P. Brace, Provost Marshal of the 8th US Army, would stick his neck out to protect us in a situation like this. In the army, everything was a power play. This was usually based on rank, but almost as often on who in the broader power structure you were connected to. The Military Armistice Commission had a direct line to Washington, DC. The conundrums they ran into when negotiating with the North Korean government were addressed not only by the Secretary of Defense, but sometimes the president himself.
Nobody messed with the MAC. And if a couple of low-ranking enlisted men had to be sacrificed on their altar, so be it.
“Relax, Riley,” Ernie said, snapping the paper open to the comics. “We’ve already had our butts reamed.”
“You’ve already been to the MAC?”
“What’d I just say?”
Interrupting, I asked Riley to call his buddy Smitty over at 8th Army Personnel and check whether there was a Teddy Fusterman assigned to the JSA security unit.
“Why should I?”
“Because I’m asking nicely.”
Riley always acted as if Ernie and I were a couple of screwups. But the truth was, he respected our work. And he knew that unlike the other CID agents, who only handled cases on base, we could roam around outside the walls of the US military compounds and get results, something no other investigators in country could claim. I was the only American law enforcement officer in 8th Army who spoke Korean, and Ernie had a knack for mingling with the lowest of the low and earning their trust. Staff Sergeant Riley also knew from experience that when we went after a criminal, we never gave up.
He lifted the phone and dialed.
After he got through, Riley waited on the line while Smitty looked up the requested information for him. Thirty seconds later, he started jotting furiously on a notepad, thanked Smitty, and read off the intel to me.
“Fusterman, Theodore H, Private First Clas
s, Infantry. He’s been in the army a little over a year and assigned to the Joint Security Area for almost six months.”
“Thanks, Riley.”
I also asked him to look up Fusterman’s ration control records. He grumbled but placed a call to his contact over in 8th Army Data Processing. As he waited again to be transferred, he covered the receiver and said, “Anything else I can get for you? A new Corvette?”
“No,” I said. “That’ll be plenty.”
Somebody came back on the other end of the line. Riley listened and mumbled a couple words of affirmation, then told the number cruncher that this was top secret and the guy needed to keep this request under his hat, but the information had something to do with the incident up at the JSA. By now, everyone on compound had heard about it. Finally, Riley said thanks and hung up.
“He’ll try to have the printout for me by tomorrow, even if it means he has to work late tonight.”
So we weren’t the only GIs who were nervous about seven North Korean divisions being mobilized just thirty miles north of Seoul.
-6-
When the seventeen-hundred close-of-business canon went off, I waited for the office to empty out, something I occasionally did. I liked being in the office alone. It gave me a moment of peace. I didn’t mind coming in early in the morning, which was also a quiet time, but Riley was often in early too, and there went my calm. But at close of business, Riley usually didn’t stick around long. During the last few hours of the workday, he could already hear the siren call of the bottle of Old Overholt lounging seductively between the folded cotton drawers and rolled T-shirts in his footlocker in the barracks.
Finally, with everyone gone, I could hear only the low hiss of the ancient steam radiators that lined the hallway.
I sat down at my favorite Olivetti typewriter and rolled in a sheet of white paper and two carbon onionskins, a green and a pink. The green copy for the CID files, the pink copy for the accordion file folder I kept in my wall locker. I started typing. Remembering that morning, reproducing it in as much detail as I could muster. I wrote of us being ordered to the Joint Security Area, meeting Lieutenant Colonel Brunmeyer there, seeing the body, our confrontation with the North Korean army, and the subsequent area-wide alert. But I left out the part about me and Ernie dragging the corpse back to the south.
I pictured the wound to the back of Corporal Noh’s skull and described it. Deep, as if he’d been split open with an axe, but by something with a longer blade. I wasn’t sure if Ernie had thought of the same thing when he’d first looked at the cracked bone and oozing brain matter, but I had. An item that every GI was issued in his field equipment: an entrenching tool. Civilians would call it a shovel; short-handled, with a metal blade capable of being folded over so it fit more easily into a canvas sheath. Entrenching tools are heavy, sturdy, and made to be used by troops to claw out a foxhole in the middle of a battle. The edge of the iron shovel itself was about twice as long as the cutting edge of an axe. In the part of the report reserved for planned actions, I typed: Finding and examining Private Teddy Fusterman’s entrenching tool. Even if he’d cleaned it, lab techs might be able to find traces of blood; if it had once been there.
I wanted to look at Corporal Noh’s body again. I made a note to do that first thing in the morning. It was at the Eighth Army Morgue now, but would soon be turned over to the ROK Army and then to the Noh family in Inui-dong. Eventually, it would be taken to what the bar girls in the GI villages called Happy Mountain. A burial mound atop a hill. Graveyards in Korea were in elevated areas, the fertile valleys below reserved for agriculture.
It was stupid to speculate, in writing, about the entrenching tool. Telling the US Army what you’re thinking or planning to do was never a good idea. Somehow, they’d turn it back on you like a weapon.
When I finished the report, I dropped it with the green file copy attached into Staff Sergeant Riley’s inbox. The pink copy I kept in my coat pocket as I trudged uphill in the dark toward the barracks.
First thing in the morning, Ernie and I stopped by the 8th Army Morgue.
At the front counter, a clerk checked his clipboard. “Noh Jong-bei,” he repeated. “Corporal.” Then he stopped riffling through the paper and looked up at us. “The KATUSA,” he said, “the one from the JSA.”
“Yeah. That’s him.”
“The ROK Army took his body last night.”
“That quick?”
The clerk shrugged. “High priority. That’s what they told us.”
“Where did they take it?”
He shrugged again. “To their morgue.”
“Where’s that?”
“Hell if I know.”
We continued to bother him until he checked with one of the civilian morticians in the back. He returned and told us, “ROK Army headquarters. Just down the road, across from the Ministry of National Defense.”
We thanked him and left.
The ROK Army denied us permission to view the body. We argued with them for almost half an hour but in the end the only promise they made was to forward black-and-white photographs along with the autopsy report.
Out in the parking lot, Ernie said, “Mox nix.”
“Doesn’t mean nothing? Why?”
“When you mentioned this morning that it looked like a wound from an entrenching tool, I realized you were right. What else would they have up there at the JSA that could cause a wound like that?”
“Still, it would be nice to examine the body more closely. See if there’s anything like chipped paint or splintered wood that could help us match it to an entrenching tool.”
“The autopsy guys are supposed to do that.”
“I hope so.”
“Better,” Ernie said, “to find Noh’s blood type on Teddy’s shovel.”
“That would be good.”
“So let’s go up to the JSA. Go through his field gear. We have to question him anyway.”
“But Colonel Peele told us the JSA was off-limits.”
“Screw him.”
When we returned to Yongsan Compound, we noticed that there were fewer armed MPs at Gate Five. As we were about to be waved through, Ernie slowed and talked to the guard.
“Where’s all your backup?” he asked.
“Gone. The alert was called off.”
“When?”
“About twenty minutes ago.”
“No more crisis up at the JSA?”
“So they tell me.”
Ernie waved in acknowledgment, and we rolled through the gate and past the two-story redbrick buildings of the 8th Army headquarters complex.
“Odd,” I said.
“What?”
“Peele said he planned to keep the pressure on the North Koreans, at least until the next MAC meeting, by blaming them for Noh’s murder. That meant he was supposed to keep our side on combat alert.”
“Yeah,” Ernie said. “Maybe he was overruled.”
“I don’t think so. Not by the MAC. Squaring off with the North Koreans is the reason the US Army is here in Korea in the first place.”
“Keeping the pressure on like that could literally blow up in everyone’s face.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t think Peele gives a damn. You saw how he acted when he talked about the North Koreans.”
“He practically popped a valve. Hates them almost as much as he hates us enlisted pukes. So there must be another reason Eighth Army pulled the plug on the alert.”
“Yeah.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure.” But I was worried about it.
At the CID office, Riley waved us over as soon as we walked in the door. “The Colonel has another job for you.”
He was referring to Colonel Brace, our boss and the Provost Marshal of the 8th United States Army.
“What job?” Ernie a
sked. “You have something more important than the murder of a soldier at the Joint Security Area?”
“If the Colonel says it’s more important, then it’s more important.”
“Like what?”
“Like this.” Riley tossed a handwritten note toward Ernie. Ernie glanced at it but then handed it to me. “I can’t read this chicken scratch.”
The writing was indeed barely legible. It said something about “I can’t take it anymore,” and “Take care of Jenny.”
“What’s this bullshit have to do with us?” Ernie asked.
“Missing person. Evelyn Cresthill. Wife of Major Bob Cresthill, Army Corps of Engineers.”
“Bob?” Ernie asked sarcastically. “You know this ‘Bob’ personally?”
“I don’t. But Colonel Brace does. He wants this kept off the books. Mrs. Cresthill disappeared. He wants you two to talk to Major Cresthill and then go find her. ASAP.”
“Sorry,” Ernie said. “As much as I’d love to, we’re all booked up. We have to go to the JSA.”
“To check Fusterman’s entrenching tool?” Riley asked.
Ernie froze, for once allowing himself to show surprise. “How’d you know about that?”
Riley glanced at me. Ernie stared at me also.
“I mentioned it in my report,” I said.
Ernie turned back to Riley. “What the hell did you do?”
“Nothing,” Riley said. “I turned the report in to Colonel Brace. He called the Eighth Army Chief of Staff and then he called the MAC, talked to Colonel Peele.”
Now I knew why the alert had been called off. Once 8th Army believed that someone other than the North Koreans might’ve been guilty of the murder of Corporal Noh Jong-bei, the flame beneath the boiling pot of water could be lowered. Colonel Peele’s rationale for keeping a heightened alert status along the DMZ—that the North Koreans had murdered a KATUSA—was gone. Not completely. The guilt of Private Fusterman had yet to be proven—far from it—but just the possibility was enough for the 8th Army Commander to overrule the MAC and lower the level of tension at the Joint Security Area.
“Next thing I knew,” Riley continued, “two JAG officers are on their way to the JSA, to interview this Private Fusterman and to check his field gear for an entrenching tool.”
