The Ville Rat

by Martin Limon

  On the way out, Ernie said, “That was a waste of won.”

  “You don’t think she’ll ever call?”

  “Not a chance in hell.”

  The MP at the front gate of Camp Pelham was ready for us.

  “No, I don’t talk to rear-echelon motherfuckers, and no, I wasn’t on duty last night, and no, I didn’t see nothing.”

  He stood tall with his hands on his hips, a .45 in a polished black leather holster hanging from his web belt. The embroidered name tag on his fatigue blouse said Austin. His rank insignia was Specialist Four.

  “You wanna talk to somebody,” he continued, “you head your rear-echelon butts right over there to the head shed and talk to Lieutenant Phillips. He’s the officer on duty tonight.”

  A contract-hire gate guard, a middle-aged Korean man in a khaki uniform, stood behind the MP, his face turned away from us. I spoke to him in Korean.

  “Ajjosi, ohjokei ku yoja boasso-yo?” Uncle, did you see that woman last night?

  He didn’t answer, or even turn his head our way.

  The sound of the Korean language seemed to enrage the MP.

  “None of that shit!” Specialist Austin held out his palm as if stopping traffic. “No Korean around here. You wanna talk to somebody in the Second Division, you speaky English, you arra?” You understand? “You don’t talk to my man here.”

  “Was he on duty last night?” Ernie asked.

  “None of your freaking business.”

  Ernie stepped up close to Specialist Austin. They were nose to nose.

  “A woman’s dead, Austin. Found almost naked in the frozen Sonyu River. If you were on duty last night, you talked to her, only minutes before she died.”

  “I didn’t talk to nobody.”

  Ernie stepped around him, reached into the open window of the guard shack and snatched a clipboard off a nail. Austin shoved him, but before he could get his hands on the clipboard, Ernie tossed it back to me.

  I twisted it and held it up to the light of the huge overhead bulb. Quickly, I scanned the dates on the left and found Austin’s name and read the name right above it. As he was unsnapping his holster, I tossed the clipboard back to Austin. He caught it on the fly.

  “Groverly,” I said. “Buck sergeant. He was on duty last night. Where can I find him?”

  By this time, Austin had stepped away from Ernie, tossed the clipboard clattering back into the guard shack, and the business end of his .45 appeared in front of him.

  “Back off!” he screamed. “Back off or I’ll fire, by God!”

  Ernie and I both raised our hands and stepped away from the gate. As we did so, the Korean guard appeared at Austin’s side. In the reflected light, I read his brass nameplate.

  We backed away into the darkness, Austin still swearing. Once safely around the corner of the nearest building, we trotted away. No sense waiting around to see if he called an MP patrol to come after us. He probably wouldn’t though. It would be embarrassing to admit that two unarmed guys from 8th Army had snatched his clipboard away from him. GIs can be relentless in their teasing. Austin probably wouldn’t want to give them the opening. We slowed to a brisk walk.

  “You got the name?” Ernie said.

  “Yeah. And the name of the Korean gate guard.”

  “What is it?”

  “Kim.”

  “That doesn’t narrow it down much.”

  A third of the country was named Kim. Another third was named Park or Lee.

  “No,” I said, “but it’s a start.”

  After lying low for a while and downing a couple of shots of soju, Korean rice liquor, we set off through the narrow alley Angela had pointed to, heading for the banks of the Sonyu River.

  There were no lights down here, and as we walked single file down the muddy lane we kept our hands on the grease-stained bricks on either side of us. Finally, we emerged onto the runway that paralleled the river. Moonlight reflected off the frozen expanse. To our left, about fifty yards away, the glare of floodlights illuminated the flat bridge leading into Camp Pelham.

  “The MPs patrol back here?” Ernie asked.

  I shrugged. “That’s what the business girls tell me.”

  “They should know,” Ernie said.

  We wrapped our coats tighter around our shivering bodies and settled back to wait.

  -3-

  The MPs emerged from the darkness beneath the bridge.

  There were three of them. Black helmets glistened, reflecting rays from the Camp Pelham floodlights.

  “No ROK Army,” Ernie whispered.

  In Seoul, 8th Army always has a Korean MP and an American MP patrol together, usually accompanied by a representative of the Korean National Police. The idea is that whatever miscreant they might come across—be he Korean military, American military, or civilian—one of the cops would have jurisdiction over him. Apparently, here at Division, they didn’t worry about such niceties.

  As the MPs moved down the far edge of the Sonyu River, Ernie and I stepped back into darkness. About fifteen yards from the bridge, the lead MP stepped into what I first thought was running water, but when his lower leg didn’t disappear, I realized that he was following a line of stepping stones. Deftly, the three men lunged and hopped from one stone to another until they were on our side of the waterway. As they approached, they shone their flashlights into the narrow alleys, but having anticipated this, Ernie and I had each stepped into recessed stone doorways on opposite sides of the pathway. Beams of light slithered up the muddy walkway and disappeared as quickly as they’d appeared. Ernie and I emerged from our hiding places and looked out on the banks of the river just in time to see the last MP turn up a lane at the far end of the row of jumbled buildings.

  “They’re heading for the main drag,” Ernie told me. “Come on.”

  We followed quickly.

  I expected them to pause once they reached the bright lights of Sonyu-ri and from there start their patrol of the bars and nightclubs. Instead, they surprised us and continued across the two-lane road. After winding past a few storage sheds, the patrol found a meandering pathway that led through a clump of chestnut trees at the far end of the village. We had less cover here, so Ernie and I proceeded cautiously, letting the MPs gain a lead until they were out of sight. After a steep incline, the pathway emerged onto a plateau. I turned around. Behind us, in the valley below, the neon of Sonyu-ri sparkled. Ahead, scattered across neatly tended lawns, were dozens of egg-shaped hills, each about six feet high.

  “Burial mounds,” Ernie said.

  We wound through them. Many were adorned with stone carvings of ancient patriarchs, some with bronze tablets embedded into mortar. I would’ve liked to stop and read them, but we didn’t have time. At the far end of the plateau, we heard the rushing, gurgling noise of a huge volume of water. Ernie held out his hand. I stopped. Below us rolled the dark, murky waters of the Imjin River. North of here was the Demilitarized Zone and beyond that, Communist North Korea.

  “Where are they?” I asked.

  Ernie pointed.

  In the distance, the beam of a lone flashlight flickered. One by one, moonlight revealed three helmets.

  “That pathway,” Ernie said. “It leads back toward the village, to the rear of the buildings lining the main drag.”

  “First they surround Sonyu-ri,” I said, “then they invade it.”

  Ernie shrugged. “They’ve probably caught GIs smoking pot up here before. An easy bust.”

  With our Olympian view, we decided not to follow the MPs any longer but to sit back and observe their progress. As we’d expected, it was time to start the exciting part of their evening’s activities: patrolling the nightclubs. They started at the RC-4 end of the strip; first a nightclub, then a bar, and after that a teahouse. We knew how it worked. One MP waited out back, cutting off any means of escape,
while the other two entered through the front door, checking for drug use or unruly behavior and walking into both the men’s and women’s byonso, the bathrooms, to make sure there was no untoward activity going on in there. Once they were through, they moved on to the next joint.

  “Let’s go to the main gate,” Ernie said. “We’ll wait for them there.”

  I agreed. We scurried downhill, careful to avoid the MP patrol as we made our way toward the front gate of Camp Pelham. We didn’t want to confront Specialist Austin again, not yet, so we lingered about a hundred yards from the main gate itself, near the rolling carts that had appeared with the night. They were filled with souvenirs and hot snacks and bottles of soju for the off-duty GIs parading out of the pedestrian exit after a hard day’s work in the 2nd Infantry Division.

  One old woman wore a wool scarf and three or four heavy sweaters as she stirred a vat of simmering oil heated by a charcoal briquette. “You eat,” she told me as I approached. “Number hana French fry.” Number one.

  “How much for onion rings?” Ernie asked.

  “Same same French fry,” the old woman said. “Fifty won.”

  “Too much,” Ernie replied.

  “Big bag,” the woman countered, holding a folded paper container about the size of a splayed hand. There was printing on the paper. numbers and letters in English. Probably printouts salvaged from the compound itself and then recycled for a more practical use. There’d been times when top-secret documents had been retrieved, folded neatly, grease-stained, and used to serve four ounces of deep-fried cuttlefish.

  Ernie nodded his okay. The old woman reached beneath her cart and pulled out a generous handful of sliced onion. She plopped them into an earthenware bowl thick with batter, then lifted them again and dropped them dripping into the boiling oil. Steam and burning grease sizzled into the air. A few seconds later, using metal chopsticks, the old woman fished the onion rings out of the hot oil and deposited them into the paper holder. Ernie munched on an onion ring to see if it met his approval. When it did, he handed her the money. He offered me an onion ring. I accepted it and asked the old woman if the young girl in the red chima-jeogori had bought any of her food last night.

  “She no have time,” the old woman replied.

  Ernie’s eyes flashed but he said nothing; just kept chomping on the onion rings.

  “You talked to her then?” I said.

  “No talk. She talk MP. Crying.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “I don’t know. My English not so good.”

  “Did she come from the ville?”

  “I don’t know. I busy, sell French fry. I look up, she talk MP. How you say . . .”

  “Hankuk mallo heiju-seiyo,” I said. Say it in Korean.

  Her eyes widened. “Hey, you speaky Korean pretty good.”

  “She talked to the MP,” I prompted in English.

  “Sallam sollyo,” she say.

  “She asked for help?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  The old woman shook her head. “I don’t know. She scared something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How long did she talk to the MP.”

  “Maybe one minute. Pretty soon she karra chogi.”

  “She left. Which way?”

  “That way.” The old woman pointed along the main drag of Sonyu-ri.

  “Did you see where she went?”

  “I no see. Do you want French fry now?”

  I contemplated buying some just to keep her talking, but Ernie elbowed me in the ribs.

  “Company.”

  The MP patrol was about halfway down the strip, but apparently they’d spotted us. They stopped entering the bars and nightclubs and marched three abreast, heading straight for us. One of them held a walkie-talkie to his ear.

  “Should we un-ass the area?” Ernie asked.

  “Naw. We have to talk to them anyway. I want to ask some questions.”

  By now, the old woman had seen the MPs coming and begun to roll her cart toward safer ground. They were still about ten yards away when, from the main gate, a roar arose from the engine of a vehicle whining at full torque. We turned. Specialist Austin raised the vehicle barrier just in time to avoid it being smashed by an MP jeep barreling out of the compound. The vehicle must’ve been doing thirty miles an hour and was aimed right at us. There was nowhere to run, so Ernie and I stood our ground. At that last second, the driver slammed on the brakes and the vehicle swerved sideways in a cloud of dirt and exhaust, stopping just three feet in front of us. Before the engine stopped whining, a tall MP leapt out of the jeep and charged directly at us.

  Discipline in the army is a malleable thing. Sometimes, for example in basic training, it’s as inflexible as a Prussian riding crop. Other times, as in a headquarters garrison unit, it can be a set of unwritten rules and gentlemanly agreements, sort of like a country club full of trust-fund babies trying not to annoy one another.

  But in the US 2nd Infantry Division, discipline can be brutal. Regardless of the hour, one is expected to appear within minutes of an alert siren being sounded, and if you’re not present, you can face court-martial. You’re expected to be standing tall before dawn for the physical training formation, and if you’re late you can face non-judicial punishment. Enlisted men are restricted to their compounds like prisoners unless an off-duty pass is granted, and that pass can be rescinded for the most minor of infractions—or on a whim. As the NCOs love to say, “A pass is a privilege, not a right.” The 2nd Infantry Division officer corps and senior enlisted non-coms can force a young enlisted man to do just about anything—scrub a floor, clean a grease trap, pull guard duty all night—and justify it as either needed to accomplish the mission or, when that rationale grows thin, as additional training that is beneficial for personal development. After a few months, or even just weeks in the heady atmosphere of the 2nd Infantry Division, even a lowly first lieutenant can begin to believe he’s a young god gifted with mighty powers.

  And it was just such a young god, with an MP helmet on his head, a single silver bar on his lapel and a name tag that said Phillips, who exploded out of the still-sputtering jeep and strode toward us, face aflame, pointing his forefinger at Ernie and then me like an avenging demon, shouting at the top of his lungs.

  “You don’t mess with my people!” With that one shout, his voice was already hoarse. Doggedly, he kept at us. “You don’t mess with my people! Do you understand me, Troop?”

  He was nose to nose with Ernie. Too close. Ernie grimaced but let the silence stretch for a moment. Then he said, “You think you’re hot shit, eh, Phillips?”

  Phillips leaned in closer. “You will address me as Lieutenant Phillips or sir. Is that understood?”

  Phillips must’ve had bad breath. Ernie leaned his head back slightly but then, without warning, snapped his skull forward and butted the helmet of Lieutenant Phillips, hard. Lieutenant Phillips’s head bounced back like a bowling ball and, startled, he took a step backward, instinctively reaching for his .45. The MP patrol closed in, at least one of them unsnapping the leather cover of his holster. Specialist Austin, the MP at the gate, had stepped outside of the guard shack, along with the Korean guard named Kim, and both men were staring at us. All of the food and souvenir vending carts had disappeared. Along the strip, made-up faces craned out of bead-covered doorways. Some of the bar girls were walking forward now, arms crossed, but oblivious to the cold night, craving an exciting show.

  Lieutenant Phillips reached for his forehead. “You hit me,” he said, incredulous.

  “No,” Ernie replied. “I headbutted you. There’s a difference. If I’d hit you, you’d be flat on your ass by now.”

  One of the MPs reached for my elbow. I shrugged him off. Another MP started to reach for his handcuffs, but Lieutenant Phillips
held out his open palm and waved them off. By now, word had spread throughout the nightclub district of Sonyu-ri; bar girls and teahouse dollies and half-drunk GIs were streaming our way like a small parade.

  Phillips reached toward the center of his chest, undid one of the buttons on his fatigue blouse and reached inside his shirt. Grinning, he pulled out a sheet of paper.

  “Message for you boys,” he said. “Straight from the head shed.” Without taking his eyes off of Ernie, he handed it to me. It was a strip ripped from a larger roll of teletype paper. A “twixt,” the army calls it. A telegraphic transmission.

  “I can’t read this,” I said.

  Obligingly, one of the MPs pulled out his flashlight and held it steady for me. I read the message and sighed.

  “What is it?” Ernie asked.

  Before I could answer, Lieutenant Phillips said, “You CID pukes are hereby ordered back to Seoul, immediately if not sooner. You’re off the case. Your services are no longer required. So get the hell out of the Division area.” He turned toward the MPs. “You three men, escort these two to their vehicle. No bullshit this time. Make sure they leave Sonyu-ri.”

  Lieutenant Phillips adjusted his helmet and turned to walk toward his jeep. On the way, he waved his forefinger at Ernie. “Your assault on a superior officer will be noted in my report. And I’ve got witnesses.”

  He hopped in his jeep, started it up, and backed away in a swirl of burnt gas.

  “Bite me!” Ernie shouted after him.

  One of the MPs snickered. Another stared at him sternly and the offending MP straightened his face.

  “Where’s your jeep?” one of the MPs asked.

  “This is your village,” Ernie said. “Don’t you know?”

  I grabbed Ernie by the elbow and we walked up the MSR away from the village of Sonyu-ri. The MPs watched us. About a hundred yards east of the Camp Pelham gate, on the opposite side of the road, was a small nonappropriated fund compound known locally as maekju chang-go. The beer warehouse. It was a transshipment point for the food and beverages used by the Division officer and enlisted club system. The guards were Korean contract hires. Not MPs. I’d tipped them with some PX-purchased cigarettes and they said they’d keep an eye on our jeep, which they did. It was waiting for us just inside their compound near the small guard shack.