The Usual Santas

by Peter Lovesey

  Staff Sergeant Riley slapped his pointer against the flipchart and barked out the title of today’s training session. “Suicide Prevention,” he shouted. Then he lowered the pointer and paced in a small circle as if contemplating all the burdens of the universe. He looked up suddenly and aimed the pointer at me.

  “Sueño. How many Eighth Army personnel committed suicide during last year’s holiday season?”

  I shook my head. “Molla the hell out of me.”

  He growled, glancing around the room. There were about thirty GIs in various stages of somnolence slouched listlessly in hard wooden seats. About half were 8th Army Criminal Investigation Agents and the other half MPI, Military Police Investigators.

  Riley slammed his pointer on the table in front of him. “On your feet!” he shouted.

  Slowly, every student rose to a mostly upright position. The last person up, as usual, was my investigative partner, Ernie Bascom.

  “Okay, Bascom. Do you know who General Nettles is?”

  “He’s the freaking Chief of Staff,” Ernie replied.

  “Outstanding,” Riley said. “And do you know how many ways he can screw up your life if he takes a mind to?”

  “About thirty?” Ernie ventured.

  “At least,” Riley said. “He can mess up your life and the life of every swinging dick in this room in about as many ways as you can imagine.” Riley paused to let the dramatic tension grow. “And there’s no doubt in my military mind that that’s exactly what he’ll do if the 8th Army Christmas suicide rate doesn’t come down and come down fast. Is that understood?”

  A few bored voices said, “Understood.” Then someone asked, “Can we sit back down now?” Riley barked, “Take your seats!” Which everyone did.

  My name is George Sueño. I’m an agent for the 8th United States Army Criminal Investigation Division in Seoul, Republic of Korea. Riley wasn’t telling us anything we didn’t know. When you’re stationed overseas, pretty much constantly harassed by the pressures of military life, and Christmas rolls around and you’re pulling patrol along the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, life can become pretty depressing. Some guys fire a 7.62 mm round into their cranium. Others eat a hand grenade. This, of course, causes quite a bit of consternation back home. Not only do the moms and dads and wives and brothers and sisters complain about the suicide rate but more importantly—as far as the honchos of 8th Army are concerned—Congress complains about it. And Congress controls military funding. So the Department of the Army rolls the shit ball downhill from the Pentagon to the Pacific Command to 8th Army headquarters to the Provost Marshal’s office until it splats into those of us working law enforcement on the front lines.

  Now that Riley had our attention, he said, “You’re probably wondering what law enforcement personnel have to do with suicide prevention.” Then he grinned, taking on the visage of a death’s head. “The Chief of Staff is initiating a new program. We’re going to be proactive. All personnel who seem to be displaying evidence of depression or suicidal thoughts will be placed in the new twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week Suicide Prevention Program. They’ll be provided counseling and psychiatric treatment if necessary and they’ll be kept under observation at all times.”

  “They’ll be locked up,” Ernie said.

  Riley glared at him. “Not locked up. They’ll be provided extra care. And extra training. We want to make sure they make it through the season without harming themselves.”

  Another of the investigators raised his hand. “Once they’re stuck in this Suicide Prevention Program, will they be allowed to leave?”

  Riley looked embarrassed and turned to his flipchart. After tossing back a few sheets, he found his answer. “They’ll be allowed to leave upon release by medical personnel and the OIC.” The officer in charge.

  “So they’ll be locked up,” Ernie repeated.

  “Can it, Bascom,” Riley told him.

  “What about us?” another guy asked. “What are we supposed to do?”

  “You’ll be picking them up.”

  “You mean, taking them into custody.”

  Riley shrugged. “It’s thought that since CID agents and MP Investigators work in civilian clothes it will be less obtrusive if you take them in rather than having armed and uniformed MPs make the pickup.”

  “You want to make it look as if we’re not treating them as criminals.”

  “Which we are,” Ernie added.

  “I told you to can it, Bascom.”

  Riley flipped through the sheets until he found a map of the Korean Peninsula. Assignments were made based on geography, starting in Seoul, then working south and north. We’d be receiving a list daily as to who to pick up, the name of the unit they were assigned to, and where they worked. Then we were to transport them over to the new Suicide Prevention facility behind the 121st Evacuation Hospital here on Yongsan Compound South Post.

  “Any questions?” Riley shouted.

  Ernie raised his hand. “What about me and Sueño? You didn’t give us an assignment.”

  “You two are staying on the black market detail.”

  A guffaw went up from the crowd. Some wise guy said, “Somebody has to protect the PX from the yobos.” The derogatory term for the Korean wives of enlisted soldiers.

  Ernie flipped him the bird.

  As everyone filed out of the training room, somebody murmured, “Lock ’em up. That’ll help lift their spirits.”

  ***

  We sat in Ernie’s jeep outside of the Yongsan Main PX, the largest US Army Post Exchange in Korea. With only ten shopping days until Christmas, the place was packed.

  “I don’t get it,” Ernie said. “What the hell are they buying?”

  “Presents,” I said.

  “Like what?”

  Ernie stared at me, honestly wanting an answer.

  “Like toys for kids,” I told him, “or clothes for the family or decorations for the house. How the hell would I know?”

  We were both single, in our twenties, and we both lived in the barracks. About the only things we ever purchased were laundry soap and shoe polish for the Korean houseboys to make our beds and keep our uniforms looking sharp. And consumables, like beer, liquor and the occasional meal of kalbi, marinated short ribs, or kunmandu, fried dumplings dipped in soy sauce. That and women was about all we ever went shopping for.

  Here in the mid-1970s, in the middle of the Cold War, one would’ve thought that the honchos of 8th Army would’ve been primarily concerned about the 700,000 Communists North Korean soldiers just thirty miles north of here along the Korean DMZ and the fact that war could break out at any moment. One would’ve been wrong. What seemed to obsess the 8th Army bosses most was stopping the black marketing out of the PX and the Commissary.

  Twenty years ago, at the end of the Korean War, the economy of the ROK was flat on its back. In Seoul and almost every other city in the country, hardly a building remained standing. Even the rice paddies, which had been plowed out of the fertile earth millennia ago, were fallow and overgrown with weeds. During the fighting that raged up and down the peninsula, virtually everyone had become a refugee. And those were the lucky ones. Estimates varied but it was believed that between two to three million Koreans had been killed during the war, this out of a population of about twenty-five million. Things were getting better. People for the most part had roofs over their head and were employed. However, wages were desperately low, and if you cleared a hundred bucks a month you were doing just fine.

  Still, the demand for imported products was growing. Such things as American cigarettes, blended scotch, maraschino cherries, freeze dried coffee, instant orange juice, and powdered milk. The Korean economy wasn’t producing those things. Not yet. And it was a crime for GIs to buy such items on base and sell them off base. The official reason was, suppo
sedly, so fledgling Korean industries wouldn’t have to compete with cheap foreign products, thereby giving them a chance to grow.

  The real reason was more visceral. On a crowded shopping day like today, American officers and their wives hated to stand in long lines behind the yobos, the Korean wives of GIs. Once legally married, the Korean wife was issued a military dependent ID card so she could come on base, and a Ration Control Plate, which allowed her to buy a specified dollar amount each month in the PX and the Commissary. Some of the wives resold what they purchased to black marketeers for twice or even three times what they paid for it. The extra money, for the most part, wasn’t wasted. Often they had elderly parents to take care of or younger brothers and sisters to support. The money garnered from black marketing could often be the difference between continued misery for a family versus having a sporting chance to rise out of poverty. However, the 8th Army honchos didn’t look at that side of it. They only knew that their PX and their Commissary was being invaded by foreigners.

  It was my job, and Ernie’s, to arrest these women for black marketing and thus keep the world safe for Colonels and their wives to be able to buy all the Tang and Spam and Pop Tarts their little hearts desired.

  “So who should we bust?” Ernie asked.

  We were watching the women parade out of the front door of the PX pushing their carts toward the taxi line.

  “Those illuminated nativity scenes seem to be popular this year,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Those.” I pointed. “In the large cardboard box. Cheap plastic replicas of a manger and three wise men bowing before Baby Jesus. Just screw in a bulb and plug it into the wall.”

  “Koreans buy those?”

  “Yeah. It makes sense. They can keep it indoors. Makes them seem modern.”

  “Modern? That happened two thousand years ago.”

  “Christianity came to Korea less than a century ago.”

  “They consider that modern?”

  “Korea’s four thousand years old, Ernie.”

  “Damn. People have been eating kimchi and rice all that time?”

  I ignored him and studied the line. “Let’s make one bust this morning and another this afternoon. That should keep the Provost Marshal off our butts.”

  “How about her?” Ernie said.

  A statuesque young Korean woman wearing her black hair up in a bun and a blue dress that clung to her figure pushed a cart toward the taxi stand. The wait wasn’t long. A black-jacketed Korean cab driver helped her put her bags in the trunk of his big Ford Granada, including one of the illuminated nativity scenes. After she was seated in back, the driver drove off. Ernie and I followed.

  ***

  The driver wound his way through the narrow lanes of the district known as Itaewon and finally came to a stop in front of a wooden double door in a ten-foot-high stone fence. Keeping well back, Ernie stopped the jeep and I climbed out and crept up to the alleyway and peered around the corner. The trunk remained open as the statuesque woman conferred with an elderly woman who Ernie and I both recognized as a well-known black market mama-san. Money changed hands and then some product. I motioned to Ernie and he started the jeep’s engine and rolled forward, blocking the taxi’s escape. I hurried forward, showed the woman my badge and told her she was under arrest for the illegal sale of PX-purchased goods. Even in the US it’s illegal to resell PX goods. The idea is that the shipment and the warehousing of the goods is subsidized by the US taxpayer, to keep prices low for servicemen and their families. To resell under those conditions would be to rip off the taxpayer who is footing much of the bill.

  We had no jurisdiction over the mama-san who purchased the goods. We could’ve reported her to the Korean National Police, but they already knew about her operation and were probably receiving a cut of her profits. We didn’t bother. The younger woman was nervous and close to tears but willing to comply. Ernie pulled forward and allowed the cab driver to leave. Then we sat the distraught woman in the back of the jeep and drove her to the 8th Army MP Station.

  While I filled out the arrest report, Ernie called her husband, one Roland R. Garfield, Specialist Four, assigned to the 19th Support Group, Electronic Repair Detachment (Mobile). When he arrived his face was grim. His wife, whose name I’d determined was Sooki, nervously fondled a pink handkerchief and dabbed tears from her eyes.

  He was a slender man, with moist brown eyes and a narrow face that was filled out by surprisingly full cheeks. I didn’t bother to shake his hand. He didn’t seem to be in the mood. I showed him the arrest report, had him sign it, and turned over an onion-skin copy.

  “You’re responsible at all times for the actions of your dependent,” I told him.

  “I know that.”

  “You’ll retain PX and Commissary privileges but the amount of the monthly ration will be reduced.” By about ninety percent, but I saw no reason to rub it in. “Take this form over to Ration Control and they’ll issue you and your wife new plates.”

  He nodded but said nothing. His wife continued to stare at the floor.

  “Kuenchana,” he said to her. It doesn’t matter.

  That made her cry more.

  After coaxing her to stand, he held her elbow lightly, and they walked out the door.

  ***

  The Suicide Prevention Program was going swimmingly. After only two days, according to Riley, the original facility was full and more Quonset huts had to be identified to provide housing for the “inmates,” as he was now calling them. In fact, the program was going so well that Ernie and I were taken off the black market detail and handed a list of a half-dozen GIs to pick up.

  I showed the list to Ernie. “Look at this,” I said, pointing.

  “Garfield, Spec Four,” he read. “Yeah. What of it?”

  “That’s the guy whose wife we busted for black market a few days ago.”

  “Oh, yeah. The tall gal in the blue dress.”

  “Yeah. Her.”

  “Garfield didn’t seem so depressed then. Pissed off, sure, but not depressed.”

  “Guess you never know.”

  “No, I guess you don’t.”

  We picked up everyone on the list, saving Garfield for last.

  ***

  When he emerged from the back of the electronics truck, his fleshy cheeks were covered with bruises.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Ernie asked.

  Garfield glanced around. No one seemed to be within earshot but he said, “Not here.”

  We’d already given the paperwork to his commanding officer so we had him hop in back of the jeep and we drove him over to the 121st Evac. In the gravel lot in front of the new Suicide Prevention Center he said, “I need your help.”

  I turned in my seat and looked at him. “What is it?”

  “My wife.” He hung his head for a few seconds and looked back up at me. “She took the black market bust pretty hard. I told her to forget it but it means a lot to her. The money she was making she was sending to her family. I knew about it but I didn’t put a stop to it. Her father’s sick and her mother still has a son and a daughter of school age and they can’t even afford uniforms, much less the tuition.”

  Ernie and I sat silently, waiting.

  “She went to Mukyo-dong,” he said. “Do you know where that is?”

  “Sure,” Ernie replied. “The high class nightclub district in downtown Seoul.”

  “Most GIs don’t know about it,” Garfield said.

  “Most GIs can’t afford their prices.”

  “Right. Sooki’s resourceful, and good looking. You saw that. She landed a job. Dancing, I think. Maybe as a hostess. Serving drinks and lighting cigarettes for those rich Japanese businessmen. I told her to stop but she said she had no choice. If she stopped sending money home, her brother and si
ster would have to drop out of school and worse, they’d probably go hungry.”

  “How about your paycheck?” Ernie asked.

  “We’re barely making the rent as it is. We can send some but not enough.”

  “You’re not command sponsored?”

  “No.”

  Officers and higher ranking NCOs often are assigned to billets that are considered “command sponsored.” That is, although Korea is generally considered an “unaccompanied” tour, if you are command sponsored you can bring your wife and children over here and you’re given a housing allowance to help you make the outrageous downtown Seoul rents. Low ranking enlisted men, like Garfield, are seldom offered command sponsorship—especially if they have Korean wives.

  “Okay,” I said. “Things are tough. I get that. What do you want us to do?”

  “She didn’t come home,” he told me. “For two nights in a row. Last night, I went down there, to the nightclub where she works. The sons of bitches wouldn’t let me see her. I tried to push my way in and the bastards did this to me.”

  He touched the bruises on his cheek and then unbuttoned his fatigue shirt. Red welts lined a row of ribs.

  “When the CO saw me this morning he asked me what had happened. I couldn’t tell him. I didn’t want the entire unit to know what she’s doing.”

  “So he called Suicide Prevention,” Ernie said.

  “Seems like the popular thing to do these days.” He shook his head and re-buttoned his shirt. “I’ll break out of this place,” he said, nodding toward the Suicide Prevention Center. “And this time I’ll take something with me.”

  “You mean like a weapon?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. For all I know, they’re holding Sooki against her will.”

  “Unlikely,” I said. “She’s probably fine.”