The Wandering Ghost (george sueno and ernie bascom)

by Martin Limon

  Someone knocked on the gate outside. Jill jumped up, slid open the oil-papered door, stepped outside the hooch, and, wearing big plastic slippers, clomped across the small courtyard to the outer wall. There, she unlatched a small door in the larger gate.

  A woman ducked through. A Korean woman. Her hair was long and curly and she kept a thick cloth coat wrapped around her slender body to ward off the chill of the cold Korean night. She started to walk across the courtyard but stopped when she saw Ernie and me sitting in the well-lighted room. Jill held a whispered conversation with the woman. As she did so, I studied her features. Kim Yong-ai. The stripper pictured on the locket we’d found on a chain around the forearm of the booking agent, Pak Tong-i.

  When the two women stopped whispering, they approached the hooch. Jill entered first. Sullenly, Kim Yong-ai followed but rather than speaking to us, she kept her eyes averted, ducked through the small entrance to the cement-floored kitchen, and shut the door behind her.

  Jill sat and picked up her tea. “She’s not comfortable with men. Not yet.”

  “You want us to leave?”

  “Where would you go? Curfew hits in five minutes. You’re stuck here tonight.”

  And so we were. Jill continued to talk and heated more water for coffee; Kim Yong-ai stayed in the kitchen. Pots and pans rattled, so apparently she ate some kimchee and rice. Eventually, Jill took a couple of silk comforters into the kitchen for her.

  Jill and Kim Yong-ai were two terrifically good-looking women. Ernie and I had been known, from time to time, to be attractive to the opposite sex. But there was no orgy in that small hooch that night. After talking until she was exhausted and answering all my questions as best she could, Jill lay down against the far wall of the hooch, bundled herself in blankets, and slept with her back toward us. Ernie and I lay on the warm ondol floor, our necks propped on cylindrical cloth pillows filled with beads.

  We’d found her at last.

  When I dozed off, Ernie was already snoring.

  It wasn’t a sound so much as a vibration. A vibration that traveled through the air and the stone wall outside and the wood of the hooch and through the soil of the earth beneath us. I felt it before I heard it and when I sat up it was still vibrating. A deep, profound, low wail of a sound. Soft but rich. Powerful. Unstoppable. The gong of the bronze bell of the Buddhist temple.

  I was fully alert. But calm. Reassured, somehow, by the deep low sound that had awakened me. Ernie still snored. Jill Matthewson had already folded up her blankets and piled them in the far corner of the hooch. Inside the small kitchen, brass pots and earthenware jars bumped against one another, making the gentle sound of early morning activity.

  I rose and made my way to the outdoor byonso and, after squatting there for a while, I used the water spigot and a metal pan in the center of the courtyard to wash up. Jill provided soap and small towels and even a razor blade so I could shave. Ernie was up shortly thereafter and performed the same ablutions, what the Koreans call seisu, the washing of the hands and face.

  Kim Yong-ai prepared a breakfast of rice gruel and dried turnip and while we ate, I became less surprised that Jill Matthewson had lost so much weight. On this diet, anybody would. She looked great, by the way.

  Ernie noticed, too. Jill wore blue jeans and a T-shirt with a tight- fitting sweater. Her hair was tied up in the Korean style with a pair of wooden chopsticks holding the topknot in place. Kim Yong-ai looked terrific also but we barely saw her. She refused to come out of the kitchen.

  What was their relationship, these two? Ernie and I were wondering the same thing, occasionally casting one another knowing looks. Kim and Jill were constantly whispering to one another and seemed as close as twin sisters.

  I was still collating all the information Jill had given me last night, trying to see it from the perspective of a trained investigator. What should I go after first? How could I make a case that would stand up not only before a panel of judges in a court-martial, ultimately, but also to the honchos at 8th Army who would have to give the green light to go ahead with such a prosecution?

  It wasn’t going to be easy. Both Ernie and I were keenly aware that this was the start of our second day of being absent without leave. And we also both knew that if we returned to Seoul, 8th Army would take over our investigation and although some people might be prosecuted and some things might be changed, for the most part the nefarious activities Jill Matthewson had reported to us would be corrected bureaucratically, not by criminal proceedings. 8th Army would never tolerate the bad publicity that would come from admitting that the leadership at the 2nd Infantry Division was rotten to the core.

  While Ernie and I sipped more coffee and pondered our next move, Jill Matthewson made up our minds for us.

  “First,” she said, “we kick some serious butt.”

  Ernie looked up from his coffee.

  “Starting,” she continued, “with the asshole who offed Marv Druwood.”

  “Maybe Druwood’s death was an accident,” I said, “like Division claims. Or suicide.”

  “No way. I go AWOL, Marv Druwood goes nuts and becomes dangerous to them, a few days later they find a way to kill him, making it look like an accident. That’s what happened.”

  She reached inside the plastic armoire, the only piece of furniture in the room, and pulled out what GIs call an “AWOL bag.” A traveling bag, smaller than a suitcase. Carefully, Jill packed her combat boots and her web belt and her MP helmet, along with a few more civilian “health and welfare” items. Finally, she packed her most prized possession, her army-issue. 45 automatic pistol.

  She stood and said, “Time to move out.”

  “You could go back to Seoul,” I told her. “You’d be safe there.”

  “So would you,” she said. “But you won’t. You want these ass-holes as bad as I do.”

  “Once we start arresting people,” Ernie said, “it could get hairy.”

  For the first time since I’d known her, Jill Matthewson’s face flushed with anger. “I’m an MP! Don’t tell me about danger.”

  I glanced at Ernie. He stared at her with a look of goony admiration. Not insulted in the least. I wondered if we were doing the right thing. As Ernie had said, once we started arresting people, the stuff would really hit the fan. And as dangerous as that would be- up here alone in the Division area with no backup-it would be even more dangerous if 8th Army decided not to sanction our investigation. If they decided to actually carry us as AWOL and therefore pull our jurisdictional authority. Then we’d be wallowing in deep kim-chee up to our nostrils. Ernie knew all this. Still, he looked at me and nodded his approval.

  Now it was up to me. Should we actually go through with this? Start arresting men of higher rank than us while standing on jurisdictional ground that could turn into quicksand? Take the risk of accruing another day of AWOL? Another day of time that would never count toward our twenty? Or should we just handcuff Jill Matthewson and transport her back to Seoul?

  I thought of Marv Druwood’s lifeless body, the pale coldness of his flesh. I thought of Madame Chon, bowing her forehead to the ground before a row of flickering candles. I thought of the open mouth of Pak Tong-i, gasping for a last gulp of air that would forever be out of reach. I thought of the haunted, hunted look that festered even now in the exotic, dark eyes of Kim Yong-ai.

  “Okay,” I said finally. “Let’s do it.”

  For the first time since last night, Kim Yong-ai emerged from the kitchen. She and Jill embraced. As we crossed the courtyard Kim Yong-ai followed us and then stood at the gate, holding the door open, watching as we ducked through and made our way down the narrow pathway. At the end of the pathway, Jill stopped and turned and waved to Kim Yong-ai. The frightened Korean woman bowed, lowering her head all the way to her waist.

  What Jill had told me last night, during our long conversation in her little hooch, matched what Ernie and I had picked up since arriving in Division. The honchos were black-marketing; they were using the m
oney to have mafia meetings; women were being abused; but it was in the details, as they say, that the devil lurked.

  When she first arrived in Division, Jill Matthewson was familiar with the catcalls and lewd remarks and gestures that GIs make whenever they see a female soldier. She’d suffered it innumerable times in the two years she’d already spent in the army. But what she wasn’t used to was the intensity. Up here in Division, GIs are far away from home, far away from their families, far away from their churches, and so far away from their normal way of conducting their lives that they might as well be stationed on another planet. And like men adrift anywhere, they’d lost all sense of proportion. In Korea-especially in Division-anything goes. GIs could hoot and howl and rub themselves to their heart’s content when Jill Matthewson was around and nobody did anything about it. The Division honchos wanted American GIs to be on time for military formations, on time for alerts, and on time when they reported to work every day. Other than that, GIs in Tongduchon could do whatever in the hell they wanted to do. Why not? The honchos were doing the same damn things.

  As one of the first females in Division, and the very first to be assigned to the military police, Jill didn’t have to be a genius to figure that she wasn’t wanted. Camp Casey-and especially Tongduchon- had been an all-male American enclave for decades. A GI playground. Nobody needed a stuck-up American female around to ruin things. No matter how Jill tried to conduct herself, whether in a professional manner or as one of the “boys,” she was never accepted. She was always the odd woman out.

  Jill told me, while we sat sipping coffee in the middle of the night in her cozy hooch in Wondang, that she could have lived with all that. It was to be expected. If she wanted to succeed in her military career, if she wanted to make her mother proud of her, she’d known from the day she enlisted that it wouldn’t be easy. She’d deal with it. She was determined to do so.

  It was corruption that pushed her over the edge.

  At first it seemed innocent enough. Go over to the main PX and purchase a new wristwatch using the provost marshal’s open ration control plate. Every GI in Korea is issued an RCP and he is severely limited as to what he can or cannot buy in the PX. For example, a male GI is not allowed to purchase perfume or nylon stockings. Because the worry is that he’d give them-illegally-to an unauthorized Korean yobo down in the ville. He could, however, buy a wristwatch, but only one per year. And, upon leaving the country, he had to produce the wristwatch, to prove that he hadn’t sold it on the black market.

  Colonel Alcott, however, was buying a wristwatch every week. That is, Jill Matthewson was taking his RCP to the PX and purchasing it on his behalf. Before the purchase, she was handed cash by Warrant Officer Fred Bufford and a handwritten note with the exact model and brand of wristwatch to buy. This one’s for Colonel So-and-so, Bufford would tell her, a ROK Army officer, the Commander of the Such-and-such Infantry Battalion, and Colonel Alcott is providing the watch to the Division chief of staff so he can present it as a gift to the Korean colonel in return for the support his battalion has provided to the Division during Operation Freedom’s Shield. At first, Jill told me, it seemed innocent enough. It was for contingencies such as these that the open ration control plate was provided to high-ranking officers in the first place. But week after week, Jill purchased more wristwatches, for one Korean colonel after another, until she thought the entire ROK Army would soon be outfitted with the latest in timekeeping instruments.

  Eventually, Alcott and Bufford had her buying other things: radios, expensive clocks, stereo equipment, toaster ovens, even television sets. And other MPs were performing the same services, including Private Marv Druwood. The amount of marketable goods and the amount of cash needed to purchase them was enormous. Jill started wondering where the cash was coming from. And she won- dered why some of the male MPs weren’t wondering the same thing. She asked Marv Druwood about it. He was the one who told her about the Turkey Farm.

  “They even had live rock bands up there on the roof,” Jill told me, “especially on Saturdays and holiday weekends. And the beer and liquor were provided free along with food. All of it procured by that old woman who ran the place, the one they called the Turkey Lady.”

  Even the yobos, the Korean girlfriends, were provided with gifts. The largesse of the military police corps, according to Jill, was common knowledge amongst the business girls in Tongduchon. And it went a long way in making a young MP appear a lot more attractive than he might normally be.

  In addition to buying black-market goods in the PX, MPs were also tasked with transporting the merchandise, in MP vehicles, to the Turkey Farm. There it would be logged in and sold and the money, supposedly, returned to Colonel Alcott.

  “He was pocketing the money himself?” I asked.

  “No,” Jill said. “He was only the front man. The group of colonels controlling the Division, the ones who attended the mafia meetings were behind it. Alcott presented formal reports to them during those meetings, accounting for every penny made and spent. All such business was conducted before they brought out the strippers and the business girls.”

  “You’ll testify to this?”

  “I was there, supposedly providing security for them. Actually, just running errands. They liked the way I kept the business girls calm.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  “I didn’t, actually. I just talked to them, treated them like human beings. At first I had no idea why they were there.”

  I didn’t press Jill further on this because I knew from other sources that it was at one of these mafia meetings that her friend, Kim Yong-ai, had been raped. Not only raped, but apparently gang raped.

  “You were seeing bits and pieces of what was going on,” I said, “but how did you know for sure how the operation was run?”

  “Fred Otis told me about it one night.”

  “Sergeant Otis?” I asked. “The guy who works desk sergeant?”

  “Yeah. Him. He told me that all the black-marketing had start- ed innocently enough. Years ago, when he was first stationed at Division, the ROK Army colonels were constantly inviting the American honchos over to their compounds for meetings and shows of traditional Korean dancing and Taekwondo demonstrations and stuff like that. The American officers could hardly refuse and while they were there they were treated to food and drink and even, once they were away from the compound, offered girls at kisaeng houses. Of course, the American officers were flattered and enjoyed the attention, but after a while they started to feel guilty that they never gave anything back to the ROK officers.”

  Korean hospitality can be prodigious. And when an honored guest is invited to your home, it is expected that you will do your best to entertain him. Even if that means going into debt. However, I doubted that these ROK Army officers were going into debt, personally, while entertaining the American officers. The U.S. government provides millions of dollars every year to the Korean defense establishment. Most of the money is earmarked for spending on contracts with the U.S. arms industry, but some of it is for discretionary spending. My guess is that some of those U.S. dollars filtered down to a level as low as battalion commander, especially when he needed an entertainment budget to provide good face for his country. Ironically, the American officers were probably being entertained with American tax dollars. However, they’d still felt obligated to reciprocate.

  “So they started black-marketing,” I said.

  Jill nodded.

  In order to reciprocate, the American officers didn’t want to pull that much money out of their own pockets. Even though an American colonel is well paid-especially from the point of view of a corporal who clears 140 dollars a month-they often don’t have a lot of spending money while stationed in Korea. Their family is back in the States. They have a house payment, a car payment, a household budget, maybe one or two kids attending college or getting ready to start college. After all that, even a full-bird colonel might only have a hundred dollars a month to spend on himself, if he
was lucky.

  The Division brass had to come up with an alternative source of income. Back in the sixties, local commanders controlled the nonap-propriated fund budget, the profits of the NCO clubs and the officers’ club on base. Although prices were purposely kept low and little was made from club operations themselves, the shortfall was more than made up for by slot machines. The one-armed bandits produced plenty of money for everyone. But in the late sixties, Congress got wind of widespread corruption and banned slot machines from military bases. After that, the 2nd Infantry Division brass was desperate for a source of off-the-books revenue. That is, money not available for inspection by government auditors.

  Open ration control plates, and the Korean black market, was the answer.

  Human nature being what it is, soon the operation expanded far beyond what was necessary to host a few Korean officers four or five times a year. The mafia meeting came up with new projects to fund. Some of them were good, according to Jill. Equipment like electrical generators and imported refrigerators were donated to Korean orphanages. A Christmas party, complete with an NCO dressed up like Santa Claus, was thrown every year for the few American dependents who lived outside Camp Casey. Medical supplies were provided to farming villages in the Division area of operations that had been hit by fire or flood or other disasters.

  But once those things were taken care of, there was the free booze and food and entertainment for the MPs at the Turkey Farm, and the fee to rent a hall and provide refreshments and entertainment at the mafia meeting. Then, when a ranking American officer completed his tour of duty in Korea and was on his way back to the States, a going-away party had to be thrown in his honor. And a gift had to be provided. Not something routine out of the PX, but something that would be a true memento of his time in Frozen Chosun, like a valuable Korean antique. The fact that it could be shipped back to the States in the officer’s hold baggage, and was not likely to be checked by U.S. Customs, and the fact that he could legally resell the item once it was in the States for ninety days, was only incidental, supposedly, to the sentimental value of the gift. An overworked and underpaid American colonel could clear a few thousand dollars by reselling that antique back in the States. And who said he didn’t deserve it? After protecting his country selflessly as he’d done? And the money would go for a good cause. To remodel his retirement home or pay for junior’s college tuition or allow a harried military wife to have that plastic surgery that she’d always dreamed of. So what’s wrong with feeling good about yourself?