by Martin Limon
My eyes burned with pain. Tears flooded out of them, so fast I couldn’t see. I knew the worst thing you could do when under assault by CS gas is to wipe your eyes because that just makes them burn worse. But if I couldn’t see, I couldn’t fire. Using my sleeve I bent and wiped moisture from by eyes. Then, with an act of will, I opened them as wide as I could and through the fog and the gas I took aim with the .45 and fired at the two men assaulting Sergeant Singletery.
I didn’t mean to hit them, I only wanted to scare them, but it was too late. They’d finally managed to shove the huge man off his center of gravity. As I fired, he reeled, waving his arms in the air, and tilted backward. He fell away, tumbling off the end of the barge. The sickening sound of a splash hit my ears.
I fired again, this time aiming to kill. I hit something and the two men went down.
“Don’t move,” I shouted. “I’ll blow your heads off!”
The man wrestling with Ernie lay flat on the deck. Ernie backed away, staggering toward the two-and-a-half ton truck. When he was next to me, he knelt on the wooden deck. Down the barge I heard men shouting, their voices muffled by their protective masks. “Man overboard!”
There was no rescue craft that I knew of, and no Coast Guard to notify. What I did know was that the waters of the Imjin were freezing and the current not only flowed quickly but was also known for its treacherous undertows.
Ernie crawled toward the machine spewing out the gas and pawed at the controls. Somehow, he managed to get it turned off. A couple of minutes later we bumped against the quay on the opposite bank and the air started to clear, the gas and the fog flowing swiftly downriver. Although my eyes were watering way too much for me to read it, I managed to recite from memory a prisoner’s rights from the Uniform Code of Military Justice to the three men lying motionless on the deck.
A search was launched for Singletery. They spent two days looking for him. His body was never recovered. At 8th Army JAG, murder was added to the long list of charges against the three combat engineers.
Two months later Ernie drove his jeep and I rode shotgun, literally. I held an M-16 rifle across my chest while in the back seat sat a representative from 8th Army Finance. He carried a leather briefcase with a combination lock on it.
Mei-lan Burkewalder had long since lost her ration control privileges and her command sponsorship. This meant that she no longer received the cost-of-living housing allowance, which was apparent as Ernie drove us down bumpy lanes, splashing through mud, honking his horn at the crowds of taffy vendors and trash dealers and old ladies holding huge bundles of laundry atop their heads. Finally, we found the address: painted on a grease stained board: 21 bon-ji, 37 ho, in the Mapo district of Seoul. Ernie parked the jeep against a moss covered brick wall and we climbed out and tromped through the mud toward the splintered wooden gate. I pounded and we waited.
Mei-lan Burkewalder opened the gate herself. Her face was wan and gray, with no hint of makeup. The bracelets that used to dangle from her forearms were also gone. She didn’t bother to invite us into her hooch. She just let us into the courtyard and sat on the narrow wooden porch that ran in front of the sliding oil-papered doors. The guy from 8th Army Finance sat next to her. He unlocked the briefcase, pulled out a sheaf of paperwork, read it to her and asked if she understood. She nodded.
“Would you say that out loud please,” he said, “in front of these witnesses.”
He nodded toward Ernie and me.
“I understand,” she said.
Then he handed her a pen and she signed the paperwork. He kept the top white copy and the yellow copy, which was for her husband’s pay and earnings folder, and handed her the bottom pink copy.
Captain Irwin Burkewalder had been killed in action while on combat operations in a support role with the 2nd Ranger Group near Pleiku. Word had come down about a week ago. Mrs. Mei-lan Burkewalder had been notified and now, as spousal beneficiary, she was receiving her ten thousand dollar payout from Serviceman’s Group Life Insurance. The finance guy pulled the money out of the briefcase and counted the twenty dollar notes out in front of her. They made an impressive pile. Then he handed her some paper bands and let her bundle them up. She fumbled the job. He helped her finish.
When he was done, he shoved his signed paperwork into the briefcase and clicked it shut. He stood and nodded to her.
As he walked back to the gate, Mei-lan Burkewalder looked at Ernie and then at me. Her eyes were dry. Too dry. The eyes you see when there are no tears left.
We backed out of the hooch and returned to Ernie’s jeep.
THE GRAY ASIAN SKY
Puffed bruises spotted the young faces, and their black hair stuck out in disarray. The girls were still angry. The boys just frightened.
In the States a police station full of student demonstrators would have been a madhouse of noise and activity. Here there was an eerie silence. Two of the Korean policemen chatted quietly while another dialed the telephone.
Order. That’s what you can count on in a police state. Law if you’re lucky.
Ernie and I waded through the crowd to the desk sergeant. He stared up at us, mouth slightly open. I spoke to him in Korean.
“We’re here to see the body.”
“Of the American?” he said.
“Who else?” Ernie whispered in English.
I nodded.
“Just a moment,” the policeman said. He got up and strutted into the back room.
The glaring eyes of the students sitting around us were like forty pairs of laser beams burning into my body. America. That’s what they saw in Ernie and me. The country that had allowed thinly veiled dictatorships to rule on this peninsula since we liberated them from the Japanese at the end of World War II. Ernie and I were almost as disliked in our own military bureaucracy; a couple of flakes, they called us. Here we represented the power and influence of the mightiest country the world has ever seen.
You can’t win.
The policeman reappeared and waved for us to follow. Forty sets of eyes swiveled as we walked out the back door.
A couple of policemen and a white-clad ambulance driver stopped their mumbling as we walked into the room. Batons, riot control shields, padded vests, and gas masks hung from pegs lining the walls. Lumpy linen draped a stretcher on the floor.
The desk sergeant stepped forward and ripped back the sheet.
His chest has been crushed, and his face was so purple and distorted that even if he were my brother I wouldn’t have been able to recognize him. I kept my face straight. The desk sergeant watched us, a greedy gleam in his eye.
“Did he have any identification?” I said.
The desk sergeant pulled the sheet back over the corpse, then walked over to a metal cabinet and retrieved a plastic sack filled with keys, some US coins, and a wallet. We went back to the front desk where he had us sign a receipt for the personal effects.
The GI’s name was Ralph Whitcomb. He had a weapons card that showed he was assigned to Headquarters Company, 8th United States Army. The photo on his green military ID was more revealing than the anguished distortion we had just seen. I showed it to Ernie.
“Seen him around,” he said.
His wallet contained four thousand won, twenty-three dollars in wrinkled Military Payment Certificates, and seventy-five cents in change. The desk sergeant accounted for everything on the receipt. I signed it, fitting my long horizontal signature into the little vertical box on the form. He gave me a copy.
“Did any of these students know him, or see what happened?”
“No. Not that they’ve told us yet.”
I handed him my card, inked by the 8th US Army printing plant in Bupyong.
“If they tell you anything, will you call us?”
He clenched his fist. “They will tell us something.”
We walked out of the Sodaemun Police Station, glad to be away from the little room so filled with hatred.
Ernie and I had been the only two agents at the 8th A
rmy CID Detachment headquarters when the report came in.
“I want you guys to get over to Chungang University,” the first sergeant said. “Fast. There’s been an American hurt, maybe killed, in one of their demonstrations.”
Ernie was still rubbing his sore arm. The reason we had stopped in the administration office, instead of staying out in the field and pretending to search for some black market arrests, was that it was autumn and time for our annual mandatory flu shots. The army has a thing about flu shots. Every year. And they check to make sure each unit attains one hundred percent compliance. We were bringing our freshly stamped shot records back to Reilly, the NCO in charge of the CID Detachment’s administrative section. A new vaccine has to be developed every year to ward off whatever brand of flu might have mutated into existence in the last twelve months, and the army’s a great place to test it. If it kills a few GIs, you make a few adjustments and try again.
Mine felt as if it were going to kill me. I get sick every year after the flu shot. I’m not sure if it’s from the vaccine or from the forced penetration.
“Get his name and service number,” the first sergeant said. “And if he’s hurt, make sure they hold him until one of our ambulances arrives. I’ll wait until you call because I don’t want to send a US Army ambulance into that part of town with all those students milling around.”
“What about us?”
“You’re expendable. Get going.”
We studied the big map of Seoul on the wall of the admin office until Ernie was sure of the directions. Then we hopped in his jeep and made it over to the Sodaemun, Great West Gate, Police Station.
The one thing we had going for us on this foray into enemy territory was that our jeep was unmarked. There are a lot of jeeps operating in this country, all part of the generous US government military aid. And as Criminal Investigation Division agents we were required to wear coats and ties rather than our uniforms.
Of course, with our short hair the bad guys still spotted us for what we were. Might as well hang a neon sign around our necks.
The narrow lane in front of the big stone archway that led into Chungang University still glistened with the water from the fire hoses. The sky was overcast and spotted with dark patches of rolling gray. I breathed deeply of the damp air and inhaled the scent of flowers mingled with the diesel fumes of the just departed military vehicles.
Ernie found a spot in a back alley for the jeep and padlocked the steering wheel to the chain welded to the floor.
“What do you expect to find here?” Ernie asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe a witness.”
“And maybe a lot of angry shopkeepers. The Korean National Police aren’t going to like it; it’s their jurisdiction.”
“Yeah, but it’s our GI.”
Ernie parked the jeep, and we walked down the roadway. The street was lined with shops, the type you’d expect in front of a college: a florist, a few stationery stores, bookstores with titles in English, French, and German, a couple of dress boutiques, and a whole bunch of teahouses. Not the type of teahouses that serve crumpets in mid-afternoon but the type that serve espresso and apple wine and sponsor poetry readings and political rallies.
A few remaining blossoms on a large treelike shrub still splashed the lane with purple. Mukung-hua, the Korean national flower, prized more for its sturdiness and beauty than for its rarity. Ahead, beyond the archway, a vast lawn unfolded around stately old trees. The campus of Chungang University.
It was an exciting neighborhood, and suddenly I was overwhelmed with the desire to have parents who could afford to send me to school. Hell, it would be nice to have parents even if they couldn’t afford to send me to school.
I shook it off.
There were a few riot police in padded vests and huge caged helmets still hanging around. Mopping up.
Actually, it was incorrect to call them riot police. They are a branch of the armed services, and most of the so-called riot “police” are actually conscripts. The children of rice farmers who are drafted and sent to a few weeks of basic training, then deployed to college campuses to knock the heads of their peers who happen to come from wealthier families and can afford to attend university. Class warfare, controlled by the state.
When they saw two Americans approaching, an officer in a fatigue uniform was summoned. Ernie and I both flashed our identification.
“Where was the American killed?”
The officer gestured with his hands toward one of the tea shops. “This way.”
The shop was located at a curve where the narrow road crooked like an elbow toward the university gate. A portly Korean woman, her hair done in a little round permanent and her body wrapped in a long white apron, rustled out of the shop. Her face was wrinkled in worry. I spoke to her in Korean.
“Did you see what happened, Aunt?”
“You mean the American?”
“Yes.”
“I saw him. After he was hurt. It was horrible. One of their big war vehicles rolled right over him. Both sets of tires, they say, the front and the back. Blood was everywhere.” She pointed toward the gutter. “They’ve washed it with their fire hoses, but it was everywhere.”
Tears sprang into her eyes, and she shook her head. A gray-haired man, probably her husband, hustled out of the shop and pulled her back in. Other merchants came out into the street when they saw the two Americans with the Korean officer. They gathered around us, and I didn’t have to ask any more questions, just strained to understand what they were saying.
“They ran over him and killed him. They ran over anything in their path.”
“I saw it, I saw it all. They don’t care what they do to these young people. They don’t care.”
“It’s their fault, the army’s fault. No one would have gotten hurt if they hadn’t attacked.”
I found an opening in the hubbub and shouted my question.
“Did anyone see the American fall?”
There was a silence and then mumbling as they looked around at one another. A trim man with jet black hair and a full-length blue apron stepped forward. I figured him to be about forty.
“I am the florist,” he said. “I saw the American fall. He was with a small group of Korean students, two girls, two boys. I remember them because the American stopped in my shop to buy one of the girls a flower for her hair. When the armored vehicles charged up the lane, spewing water, I ran out of the shop. The American and the girl were right here, along the sidewalk at the curve. One of the vehicles took the curve too sharply and went up over it, and as the students jumped out of the way, I saw the American fall forward, very abruptly, as if he’d been pushed. He landed face first in the gutter. When the armored vehicle dropped back to the road, it landed right on top of him. Everyone was running my way and another vehicle was closing in, so I had to run back into my shop.”
“Did you see who pushed the American?”
“No. I couldn’t. I was too far away, and there were too many people.”
A siren wailed and then got louder as it turned down the lane toward us from the main road a block away. The merchants began to disperse, and when the young officer saw that it was a police car he said goodbye to us and trotted back to his unit. Another police vehicle followed, and khaki-clad men jumped out and began to cordon off the neighborhood with white tape. One of the policemen came toward us.
“May I be of assistance?” he said.
Ernie answered. “We were just leaving.”
We walked up the road to the florist’s shop and went inside. The proprietor braced himself against the counter.
“What type of flower did the American buy?”
“A chrysanthemum.” He went to a vase full of them and caressed the petals. “A foreign flower. But very beautiful. And very expensive this time of year.”
I thanked him and went back to the jeep. Then we drove back to the police station and found a parking space across the street where we could see in through the big front window
s. Ernie waited in the jeep while I went in. I spoke to the desk sergeant.
“Did you get any information from the students about the American’s death?”
He nodded. “It appears to have been accidental. From a taxi cab trying to clear the area too quickly. We’re looking for him now. When we find him, we’ll let you know.”
Back outside, I told Ernie what he had said. He snorted. “They don’t want to admit that one of their army vehicles killed an American. It’s an international incident. All hell could break loose.”
“I’d hate to be the cab driver they accuse of hit and run.”
“He’ll be somebody on their shit list.”
I found a pay phone and called the first sergeant.
“Who’s the dead American?”
“A GI.” I gave him the name, service number, and unit.
“What the hell was he doing out there during a demonstration?”
“What else? Trying to make it with one of the coeds.”
I held the phone away from my ear while the first sergeant expressed his opinions. Colorfully. “The meat wagon’s on its way. Make sure they pick up the body and all his personal effects.”
“Sure. It might take awhile. You know how the Koreans are with paperwork.”
“You and Bascom stay away from those demonstrators, you understand me, Sueño? And get back here as soon as the body’s been transferred to our custody.”
“You got it, Top.”
He hung up without even asking how Corporal Ralph Whitcomb had died.
We watched a parade of well-dressed, middle-aged Korean men and women walk into the Sodaemun Police Station. They stood at the front desk, did a lot of bowing, filled out some paperwork, and then, one by one, they were ushered into back rooms.
