by Gus Lee
Mrs. Fan was a Chinatown I-jing ba-kua, horoscope seer, known for penetrating insights and prophetic powers. I was seven when she told us that I was to be an American officer. Fan taitai had averted her eyes; she detested soldiers.
Seven years ago, she had demonstrated a loss of prowess by predicting I would have a wonderful time in Vietnam.
BaBa disliked Mrs. Fan's predictions and Ma never doubted them. “So is true! Fan taitai say you go faraway mountain. Meet wu lady”—a shaman. “She help you get jen back.” Jen was Confucian benevolence, which I had lost in a rain forest with three rivers. “Hu-ah, you come back, you give her gift.
“Then I smile, so happy my son can live with lady!” Ma and her focus on a society of women. “Make lady happy, make happy son. You know Fan taitai say you meet foreign white lady who love you? Yes, true! No tell you, ji hui, make it happen!
“How your back? Here, for you.” She pressed salted gwei-yu, Mandarin fish, into my hand. “Eat upriver, like old days.”
Nodding as if I had answered, she tried a smile, weights on her words. “Hu-ah, you want marry Cara?”
I was leaving Cara without a word, inviting disaster.
Ma's eyes darkened. “Hu-ah, you sleep her bed, you marry her.” She pulled hard at my cheek for good yuing chi.
“Murray syensheng say shoot gun, you say no. You thirty! We need grandson! You lu-shih, not k'u-li” Lawyer, not worker.
She wept, in profile, as if I had died. “Hu-ah, you have my heart. Moonrise, I think, is your lantern. You come back, then I sleep. And smile.” She smiled, then sighed. “Your father, he not worry, he talk to God like man smoke opium.”
Fiercely, she hugged me, fingers searching, feeling in me the lost futures of my two brothers. “Hu-ah, you close to river, light joss for Hu-hau and Hu-chien.” Good Tiger and Strong Tiger. “Okay?”
“Okay, Ma.” I slowly dried her tears.
“Hu-ah, oh Hu-ah.” She cried again. “Manmanlai,” she whispered. Go softly. Clutching me like a Chinese mother, so I could not move without hurting her.
We landed on an icy runway with three hard, leapfrogging, bouncing touchdowns at Kimpo, southwest of Seoul on the south side of the frozen Han River. Korea looked like an icebox. I had gloves, longjohns, a heavy cashmere overcoat and no fondness for Arctic winds. Snow fell past the bulkhead windows. It was Tuesday afternoon, 15 January 1974.
Customs was cold and filled with tension as agents rototilled luggage. One studied me, my civilian passport and packed uniforms. I offered the blue Department of Justice ID folder and he bowed low. I gave him the Browning and the ROK Ministry of Defense Permit, which brought more bows. After a conference, he bowed again, returning the weighted weapons bag and the letter.
“See you, Jack!” shouted Jubala. “Take care a yourself.”
“Where do I find you at Casey?” He left.
A ROK national policeman in a dark blue uniform pointed at an elevated counter where sat an American soldier.
“Orders, sir,” said the troop, a Spec Five in class-A greens. He wore JAGC insignia, a Second Infantry Indian-head shoulder patch and an Army union-leader, I-like-drugs center-part in a longish blond mop. He was from Camp Casey, and all legal personnel there were assets of Colonel Frederick C. LeBlanc. The Wizard's point man. He smelled of stale tobacco. I gave him the U.S. Attorney ID.
“Army has no jurisdiction in Korean customs,” I said.
Korean passengers stopped to stare at us, and mostly at me.
“Sir,” he said, froggily, “how come you got uniforms?”
“Answer my question.”
He stiffened. “Sir, I'm just doin’ my job.”
“Which is?”
“I log in all officers comin’ in-country.”
Not a job of an Army lawyer or legal staff. “What if the uniforms are for someone stationed here?”
He thought about that and nodded. “Oh, yeah. I dig.”
He had a black Army telephone.
“What's this for?” I asked him.
“Sir, none a your business.”
“Think again. I'm a federal prosecutor.”
He considered that. “Well, sir, I call Casey if any JAGCs or IGs come in-country. Uh, that's Army for judge advocate general's corps officers—lawyers—and inspector generals. IGs are kinda like cops and the FBI.”
I looked at the phone. “How'd the Army get you in this room?”
“Wizard, he has ROK Army generals as drinkin’ buddies.”
“Do U.S. attorneys count as—what'd you call them?— JAGCs?”
He shook his head. “Negative, sir. You're civilian.”
I gave him a pack of spearmint gum. “This is better than smoking.” He admitted me to Korea, where spirits of four million war dead were remembered in shaman rituals and American wizards played tricks across jurisdictional lines.
I entered the terminal and its deafening din. It was like the fall of Rome, citizens at the back door and Visigoths coming fast with axes. We snaked through the building, where two thousand people screamed and raged at each other in a space designed for a quiet family of ten. All sought to locate dear ones by screeching hysterically in a place packed with people of uniform height and black hair. I didn't like the screaming.
Outside, the icy wind hit me like a two-by-four. Mobs fought for cabs. No one offered me a ride. I waited, my blood thinning.
A short ROK Army corporal ran to me. He slipped sharply on the ice, crying “Ai-guuuuu!” as he sailed upward and then fell square on his rump with an ice-cracking thump. He struggled up to render a pitiful, shuddering salute. “Kan dae-wi?” Captain Kan.
I returned the salute. “Corporal.”
“Dae-wi, I Corporal Min Oh-shik, KATUSA.” To Americans, he would be Oh Shik Min. He struggled to form the words: “Ko-rean Army, attach-ee to U.S.-ah Army, K-A-T-U-S-A.”
I had heard of KATUSAs—ROK troops lent to the American Army for driving and translation services.
He rubbed his backside. “I drive you and other dae-wi up Camp Kay-shee, neh?” He peered at my coat. “Oh! numbah-one coat, dae-wi!” He fondled it.
Other dae-wi meant other captains.
He wore thick, black-framed fright glasses and smiled hopefully with two of the largest front teeth this side of Bugs Bunny. He reeked of garlic. He seemed constricted, skinny, genderless and stupid, had trouble breathing, and seemed to be mostly head and huge feet. He was the cruel Hollywood stereotype of the neutered Asian male which Jerry Lewis and Mickey Rooney had turned into bigoted art forms. He blinked. He was all I had tried not to be in an America defined by movies.
“Your ID.” I couldn't be sure, but it looked good. He took my bags. I checked out the staring crowd. A man in a dark suit observed us.
I moved for him and he barged into the terminal, shoving desperately, making people cry out.
He disappeared. Medium height, short haircut, athletic, quick. Tall for a Korean.
Corporal Min sucked in breath, fumbling to give me a TWX, a military cable communication. It had already been opened.
“Who opened this?”
“Molla-yo, do not know, dae-wi”
CPT HU KAN: CPT B.K. MAGRIP, JOGC USMA 1968, YOUR ASSET. MEET KIMPO NOW. CPT P.K. LEVINE, JAGC, TO FOLLOW. MESSENGER IS ROK ARMY AND IS YOUR DRIVER. TRUST HIM. GOD BLESS AND GOOD HUNTING. JUSTICIO.
Murray had given me a team. And a driver who read my mail. If Captain B.K. Magrip landed now, he would run into Colonel LeBlanc's customs gate watcher, who would pick up his phone and tell the Wizard we had come. A bad start. “Wait here.”
I pressed into the masses. A stout woman elbowed me in the ribs and climbed over me, screaming at the file of escaping passengers. She punched me in frustration. I smiled, but there was no winning her favor. The din elevated as I headed into the maelstrom. I looked for the tall, dark-suited Asian who had crashed into the terminal. I didn't see him.
Murray had sent me B.K. Magrip. Three years behind me at the Point, a Wisconsin farm boy and a v
icious killer in close combat, known for a vast anger and poetically called the Butt Kicker. Now, a rookie JAGC. Carlos had not sent him for his legal skills.
Using my size, I made steady progress, twenty meters in four minutes. I had never heard of Captain Levine. Murray had assessed the Wizard as a team project. I felt like spitting; I didn't want to risk any more losses or add to my correspondence list of survivors. I hoped Magrip and Levine were bachelors.
But Magrip would be an asset. We needed to be a team, and West Pointers majored in that stuff in college.
Too late: a big American emerged from the demented mob as whistles blew and police used nightsticks to fight their way into the terminal. He struggled toward me, his big body parting the short crowd like a downhill bulldozer. B.K. Magrip. I knew him from the Time cover.
I saluted, the drill for Medal of Honor recipients.
He spat, making pedestrians whine and jump. “Can that crap.”
“What do you do when people try to shake hands, shoot them?”
He recoiled. “Aw, shit on a Hershey bar. Jackson Kan. Murray didn't tell me you were team chief. Screw me to tears.” He was pink with sunburn and wore a garish red-and-yellow aloha shirt with skewed collar under an ugly brown, collar-up overcoat, tails flapping in the cold, biting wind. The crowd jostled us.
“Damned Oriental people.” He gritted teeth.
“Glad you can discriminate.”
Magrip tossed me a black telephone with a dangling cord. I caught it. “That asshole in there,” said Magrip, “calls no one.”
It was the GI's phone from customs.
“He kept dialing. I took it. He went batcrap so I stuck a grenade in his shirt. Cops took him in custody.” He plunked a spearmint; he had the packet I had given the sentry.
My new colleague had just committed destruction and larceny of government property and ten federal weapons violations. “I felt better before you explained.” I studied him. “Magrip, you just cross the Pacific with a grenade in your pocket?”
“Don't get your panties in a bunch. Got two left.” He glowered. “Dumbwad, this is Korea. Wanna use bare hands? Listen, Captain Kan, Pentagon boy scout, I like area weapons.” He smiled sickeningly. “They don't discriminate.”
“How'd you get grenades through security?”
Magrip flashed a brown box. “Plastic demagnetizer.” A mob stared at our quiet entry into Korea. So Jimmy had been snatched because he had left home without his grenades.
Cops emerged with the Wizard's Spec Five on a stretcher, his long arms dangling. Magrip shook his head. “Only hit him once.”
Add battery to the list of federal and international offenses. “Magrip, we're supposed to be covert.”
This amused him. He lifted his chin. “Ha ha ha!”
I introduced Magrip to Corporal Min. Magrip spat; Min saluted and bowed. Corporal Oh Shik Min took the phone and luggage and led us to an olive drab Willys M38A1. As senior officer, I sat in the front, responsible for all accidents. We lurched as the tires spun and the jeep sped wildly into thick afternoon traffic. The flathead 134's heads yammered under poor maintenance.
The congested traffic was predatory—midtown Manhattan on St. Pat's Day after a garbage strike, a snowstorm and a Presidential visit.
Min drove indifferently, as if blind or already pronounced dead. Magrip was my height, six-two. Overhung brows, modest nose, a wide gap between front teeth, light blue eyes, a buzz cut, and the kind of mouth dentists see when they do root canals. He cursed Min, the traffic, Korea, Carlos Murray and all Korean drivers while we dodged death. A truck filled with hippolike pigs avoided a head-on collision with us at the last instant. Horns blared like wounded beasts.
“Magrip, I'm glad you're here.”
“You're the fucking Lone Ranger on that one,” he said.
“You ever smile?”
“I am smiling, asshole.”
Horns blared as we skidded in and out of a traffic circle. Crunching collisions were occurring with each light change. Some angry drivers brawled on the street as traffic zoomed past them. Corporal Min seemed unperturbed and unskilled.
“Crap,” declared Magrip. “Can't fucking believe I came back here to die.”
We rode the traffic as if borne by an intoxicated, enraged water buffalo. In a crazed herd of smog-spitting vehicles, we passed the European-styled Seoul Railway Station and immense crowds of understandably concerned pedestrians. Buses and taxis fought each other for inches of advantage, as if each driver had taken a pledge to die horribly in traffic, taking with him an optimum number of cars and pigs. The presence of another vehicle was invitation to a passing game of suicidal Chicken.
We escaped Seoul for the frenzied vehicular combat zone of the MSR, Military Supply Route 3, the north-south artery that led to the DMZ. I had a chain of cardiac arrests as taxis, buses, head-on drivers, tanks, yapping dogs and fleeing pedestrians formed a kaleidoscope of absurd death while Magrip cursed me.
“Not happy to be here?”
His square features shifted. He opened his mouth and shut it. Deadly blue eyes and a bad shave over sunburn. “Hell, no. I'm back with a million Inmingun on a Carlos Murray TIG carnival for the dumb and stupid. I did my goddamn tour. Ate the Korean crapburger and did two sucking Korean winters and—AW SHIT!”
We jolted hard in a sharp crash of metal that made us grunt like a single beast. Steel screeched and snow was in the jeep. A big ugly truck with teetering crates of frantic, flapping chickens bounced off us, wrenching off our side mirror and catching the roof. With a loud, wailing tear, it ripped away our canvas top.
“Crap!” bellowed Magrip as the top whipped away and the wind blew maps out the back in a feathered jet stream. Wet snow pelted us. A mass of chickens squawked at the tops of their little red combs, their fluff filling the jeep and our gaping mouths, coating us. We sputtered blindly in sleet and chicken debris.
I remembered the brochure. We love you to visit us. Welcome to the Land of Morning Calm. We pay attention to you.
The good news was that Magrip had been here before. The bad news was I had left Cara to die in a pointless Korean highway accident, for which I would be held posthumously accountable.
With a jarring crunch, we rear-ended the chicken truck. It popped backs, whipped necks, and blew out air. We caromed, skidded, plowing thick snow to swerve back onto the road, chassis and axles groaning, heads bouncing like dashboard figurines.
Magrip sputtered feathers as they covered his big body.
“DAMMIT! JUST SHOOT ME NOW, YOU SICK TWISTED SONOFABITCH!” He shook Min violently in his big hands as the jeep nauseatingly swayed. Min, awash in feathers and snow, cried “Ae-ae-gu-uu-uu!”
“Let go!” I shouted in the wind. “He's got the wheel!” Magrip was engrossed in the Academy axiom of undertaking positive action in a negative environment. He was past listening. We swerved badly.
I bent Magrip's fingers until pain defeated rage. He released Min, who, like a snapped rubber band, smacked his head into the wheel. He moaned but kept to the road. Snow fell more heavily and we spat feathers.
“GOD, WHY ME?” bellowed Magrip.
“Because you tick me off,” I muttered. He was bad yeh in two boots.
We used the Braille method of driving, hitting the truck with a resounding crash. Magrip flipped me his pinky. “When you don't care enough to send the very best.”
Nice team, Carlos. We jerked as we hit the truck again, jolting my bad back with white-hot, incandescent pain. A crate hit my head, splintered into planks and whipped into the wind.
Flying slivers, flaky chicken flotsam and a cascade of live, miserable, kicking, stinking, screeching, flapping birds with sharp little claws and beaks rained into the jeep compartment. Most of the debris ricocheted off my cashmere coat to land on Magrip, who roared as he shredded the poor chickens as they wildly shrieked and scratched to escape him.
I knew how they felt. My back ached and I needed a drink. I popped five Army APC aspirins and opened a warm D
iet Pepsi. I tilted it to my mouth as Min rammed the truck.
6
CASEY
We entered a mountainous, snowbound valley with a remarkable number of black-hatted elders ambling innocently down the dead center of the military highway. It was five P.M. Eight more minutes on the icy macadam and we would be at the DMZ, having tea with the Inmingun.
A moldy slice of America lay beyond a faded green security kiosk. At a sad angle hung the division's Indian-head emblem. Rusted concertina lay like steel tumble-weed below snow. An old U.S. flag whipped in storm winds. Sentries emerged to stare at two men in civvies, casually touring Korea in January with the top down, driven by Chicken Man.
“God,” intoned Magrip, “I am sorry for whatever the fuck I did to be sent back here.” We looked like we had been tarred and feathered. Magrip seemed cheerful; I looked like a politician.
“Why me, God?” he sighed.
“Holy cow crap,” said a worried MP, unsnapping his holster.
“We're on your side.” I gave him military ID. “We're in disguise. We need to move on ASAP.” I waited for his salute.
“Say again, sir?” he asked, molasses in January.
“The Three fuckin’ Stooges are here,” said Magrip. He had included Min. “Gimme a scotch and no one gets hurt.”
Moe, Larry and Curly were not on the guest list; the MP licked his pencil and slowly took our names and rank. I said we were going to headquarters for showers and rabies shots.
A Sergeant Myers emerged, banging his gloves. “Sir, you gentlemen TIGs?” Everyone worked for the Wizard.
“Right,” said Magrip. “We look like peckerwood IGs?”
He laughed. “Check.” He looked hard at us. He pointed at Min. “Pull over to the interrogation hut.”
“Fuckin’ A,” said Magrip. “Here, IGs are the suspects.”
We shook ourselves and stiffly entered a gray hut with clanking heat registers, a radio playing Armed Forces Korea and faded safety signs that looked like old bullfight corrida posters that covered the GI bars on the Mexican border.
A stocky, mustached MP major in a small, worn, brown watchcap looked up from his incident and blotter reports. Coffee steamed from a heavy, chipped mug that said, “Don't Ask.” He peered, as if we were in a blinding Arizona sunrise, with a tired poker face that had seen far worse than us. His name was Foss and he was quietly filing our features into memory, an accountant forming suspect sums for later audits.
