The Wandering Ghost (37 page)

Jill stepped over Colonel Han’s body until she was straddling it, kneeled down in his spreading blood, and kissed him on the forehead. When she stood again, she started to raise the .45 in her hand.

That’s when I broke free of Ernie’s grip and charged at the ROK soldiers in front of me. “
Sagyok chungji
!” I shouted. Hold your fire!

Jill looked back.

It was just that one or two seconds of hesitation that allowed me to sprint across the road. I slammed into her and executed a tackle that would’ve made my old coach at Lincoln High proud. Jill fell, Ernie arrived, and soon we three were stumbling away from the line of ROK soldiers. Jill struggled but Ernie punched her and I slipped handcuffs on her.

We were in a Hyundai sedan, heading south, Ernie driving. The vehicle had been loaned to us by Madame Chon. While we were still in Tongduchon, Jill had changed into civilian clothes and since none of us were now in uniform—and we were riding in a civilian vehicle—we hoped that we could slip past the southernmost 2nd Infantry Division checkpoint on the MSR. They had no jurisdiction over civilians. With any luck, we could make our way back to Seoul.

“Back there,” Ernie said, “you told us that you all but killed Pak Tong-i.”

“He died the same night. So I’ve felt responsible for his death. His heart must’ve been weak.”

“You weren’t the one who killed him, Jill,” I said.

“Then who did?

“Bufford. And maybe Weatherwax. They interrogated him after you left. That’s how they obtained the information that led them to the Forest of Seven Clouds.”

Jill sat in silence, thinking about that.

“Did you use a rope on him?” Ernie asked.

“A rope?”

“To strangle Pak Tong-i. To scare him into talking.”

Jill shook her head.

“Then it wasn’t you who killed him. It had to be Bufford and Weatherwax.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said finally.

“I’m right,” Ernie replied.

Stanchions blocked the road ahead. Ernie slowed.

“Easy now,” I told him. “These civilian license plates should ward them off. Of course, they’ll see we’re
Miguks
, and Ernie and I have short hair and look like GIs, so they might try to talk to us anyway. But what we do is we ignore them and keep rolling slowly through the checkpoint. They have no authority to stop us.”

“Seems like up here at Division,” Ernie said, “people don’t worry much about the legal extent of their authority.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But these MPs have no reason to stop us.”

“Unless they figure that you’re those Eighth Army CID agents they’ve been looking for,” Jill said.

“Or that you’re an AWOL MP,” Ernie shot back.

“Not AWOL any longer.”

We’d taken the handcuffs off of Jill and she’d voluntarily submitted to our instructions to return with us to Seoul. So she was once again under military jurisdiction and—technically—no longer absent without leave. And since she’d returned to military jurisdiction prior to thirty days after leaving her unit, she couldn’t be charged with desertion.

We passed the reinforced concrete bunker with the M-60 machine gun. Beyond that stood an armed ROK soldier. He peered into the car, saw our civilian license plates, and waved us on. The last obstacle was the American MP. He was tall and skinny and held his M-16 rifle at port arms, his back toward us.

“He isn’t even paying attention,” Ernie said.

We were about to cruise past him when suddenly he turned, lowered his rifle, and stepped in front of us. Ernie slammed on the brakes. From beneath the MP’s helmet, a long skinny nose pointed out.

Jill screamed.

Ernie shouted a curse but it was too late for him to step on the gas. The MP had leveled his weapon and was pointing it right at Ernie’s face. Warrant Officer Fred Bufford. In the flesh. I popped open the passenger door and rolled onto the blacktop. Ernie sat frozen behind the wheel. Jill ducked but it was too late, Bufford had spotted her. He started shouting for us to get out of the car, hands up. Shielded by the side of the vehicle, I pulled my .45.

Boots clomped behind me. I turned. The ROK Army soldier’s rifle was pointed directly at my face. I lowered my .45, dropped it to the ground, and raised my hands in surrender.

At the point of a gun, Bufford marched Jill Matthewson into the bushes.

Ernie and I stood at the side of the road, our hands up, guarded by the ROK Army MP. Another ROK Army MP had taken over at the checkpoint, glancing into vehicles, waving them through. What had happened to the American MP who normally worked here? Probably, Bufford had sent him back to his unit, with a bullshit story about the move-out alert. Ernie and I were both worried about the same thing. What was he going to do to Jill?

I started speaking Korean to the ROK soldier. His name tag, hand embroidered, revealed that he was Private Yun. I told him that I was an agent for 8th Army Criminal Investigation Division and that my credentials were in my inside coat pocket. At first he ignored me. I kept at him. I told him that Warrant Officer Bufford was a fugitive from justice and Yun was now taking orders from the wrong man. I warned him about how much trouble he would be in if he didn’t listen to me. Finally, Private Yun, still holding his rifle on us, reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out my CID badge. I warned him that he now had thirty seconds to lower his rifle and return our weapons.

The young man’s face flushed with indecision. He shouted at the other ROK Army MP. They conferred in rapid Korean. Finally, they decided that one of them would cover for the other while they used the radio to call the sergeant of the guard. That wasn’t quick enough for us. By the time they ran the information up the chain of command and a decision came back down, Corporal Jill Matthewson might be dead.

From the north, from the 2nd Division area, a car screeched up to the checkpoint. A long sedan. Black. A driver in a dark suit popped out of the front door and another dark-suited man emerged from the passenger’s side. The driver opened the back door and a man climbed out. Agent Sohn, the KCIA man. When he held up his badge, the ROK Army MP nearest him shouted a martial greeting. Private Yun, still standing in front of us, glanced back. That’s all Ernie needed. He charged low, diving for Yun’s ankles. I stepped to my left and then threw myself at the ROK MP. A shot rang out. Apparently, it didn’t hit me because I was able to thrust my shoulder full force into Private Yun. He went down. Ernie scrambled for the rifle, seized it, and pointed it at the KCIA men. They backed off. While Ernie held them at bay, I retrieved our .45s.

Ernie shot out the tires of the KCIA sedan. We ran into the woods, following a trail of broken branches and trodden grass left by Bufford as he’d forced Jill at gunpoint into the forest. Through the tree line and beyond, ten-foot-high cement megaliths stretched in a double row. Dragon’s teeth. As far as the eye could see.

Ernie and I stopped when we saw them. They lay between two dragon’s teeth, near a creek in a grass-covered meadow, perhaps twenty yards away. It was clear what was happening.

He was naked. Bony knees, pale flesh, elbows rubbed raw and red. He held Jill’s .45 in his hand, finger on the trigger, the barrel propped beneath her jaw. Her pants were pulled low but her legs were still locked, and she lay back with her butt pressed against mud. Her eyes were clenched tightly and she was crying. Not tears of helplessness but tears of rage.

Ernie pointed the rifle and fired. A round caromed madly off one of the dragon’s teeth. Bufford looked at us but he didn’t climb off of Jill. He shouted that he’d pull the trigger if we didn’t back off.

“You’re finished, Bufford,” Ernie shouted. “Even if you kill her, there’s no way out.”

“I’ll kill her now!” Bufford said.

As he shouted at Ernie, the barrel of his .45 shifted, just slight- ly. But it was enough. Enough for Jill Matthewson to know that this was her chance.

She brought a fist up in a looping left cross and at the same time propelled her knee up right between Bufford’s legs. He screamed. The gun went off. Ernie and I sprinted forward. Through the smoke and confusion I couldn’t tell what had happened to Jill. We stumbled and clawed our way through the mud and as the smoke cleared I realized that she was still alive. I’ve never seen anyone in such a rage. By the time Ernie and I approached she was on top of Fred Bufford. His pistol lay uselessly in the mud and Jill Matthewson was pulverizing him and had started to gouge out his eyeballs. It took Ernie and me two minutes to pull her off of him. We handcuffed her because it was the only way we could stop her from killing Bufford with her bare hands. Our mistake was that we handcuffed her with her hands in front rather than behind her back.

Bufford lay unconscious next to the creek. Blood trickled from his eyes, nose, and mouth.

I policed up the .45 and found Jill Matthewson’s wallet lying next to her torn blue jeans. A couple of photographs had fallen out. I picked them up and held them up to the light. A rape scene. I saw three men: Lieutenant Colonel Alcott; a man I recognized as H.K. Pacquet, the Chief of Staff of the 2nd Division; and Warrant Officer Fred Bufford. All naked. All working on some poor young woman who’d been bound and gagged. The lighting was dim. I studied the woman. I expected her to be the stripper, Jill’s friend, Kim Yong-ai. But then I realized that she wasn’t Kim. She wasn’t even Korean. She was American. And then I realized who she was. The impetus for Jill Matthewson’s rage became clear to me.

Ernie was too busy to look at the photos, what with handcuffing Bufford and helping Jill climb out of the mudhole she was lying in. When the KCIA men appeared at the edge of the clearing, Ernie warned them back with the M16 rifle. They stood and observed, as Jill pulled up her pants and adjusted what was left of her torn shirt and blouse.

Before Ernie could notice, I stuffed the photographs into my pocket. I didn’t want Ernie, or anyone other than Jill, to see them. I handed her the wallet. Automatically, she searched for the photos. When she didn’t find them, she looked up at me. I pulled them out of my pocket and handed them to her. She refused to take them.

“It’s over now,” she told me.

“Okay,” I answered. “What should I do with them?”

“Destroy them.”

“We might need them to get you out of this mess.”

“I don’t care. Destroy them.”

I did. I borrowed a lighter from one of the KCIA men and set them on fire.

While Ernie talked to the KCIA men and the photographs burned, Jill dragged the now conscious Fred Bufford near the creek behind one of the dragon’s teeth. We weren’t paying attention, all of us still in shock. Warrant Officer Fred Bufford didn’t shout for help. Maybe he couldn’t. Jill, her wrists still handcuffed in front of her, shoved Bufford’s head face-first into the mud. She held him there. By the time we realized what she was doing, Warrant Officer Fred Bufford was dead.

16

T
here were more student demonstrations. Tons of them. In Seoul, in Pusan, in Kwangju. There was enormous pressure for the regime of President Pak Chung-hee to reduce the number of American troops stationed in Korea. And it almost happened. Contingency plans were written up in the Pentagon, professors at American universities wrote articles about how Korea was ready to be fully self-reliant. But, at the last moment, a new evaluation of the North Korean threat was released. Suddenly, it was discovered that instead of 700,000 troops in their army the North Koreans now had one million. The South Koreans, meanwhile, could only field an army of a paltry 450,000 soldiers. So plans for a U.S. draw down were rescinded.

The incident at Camp Casey never hit the
Pacific Stars & Stripes
. It was reported by Reuters and the international press and, eventually, even AP and UPI. But they played it as just another student demonstration, one that had proven to be a little more violent than others but just a demonstration nevertheless.

Ernie and I kept Colonel Alcott’s ledger in a safe place, at the hooch of Ernie’s latest girlfriend in the red-light district of Itaewon.

When we were debriefed, the ledger was never mentioned.
Blackmail
is an ugly word anywhere but particularly in the hallowed halls of the 8th United States Imperial Army. Not only did we not want to have to threaten anyone with blackmail, the 8th Army provost marshal didn’t want to admit that he had ever been blackmailed. Therefore, the existence of the ledger, although rumored, was never mentioned in any official file.

Ernie and I were faced with a number of possible charges. The first was being absent without leave and then there was our returning to the 2nd Division area when we weren’t supposed to. That was fixed easily. The 8th Army PMO just pretended that he’d never ordered us withdrawn.

The problem of Colonel Alcott’s black-marketing was fixed by rescinding his ration control plate. Supposedly, there was a reevaluation of the entire policy of ration control plates being open and unaccountable for high-ranking officers in sensitive positions. Alcott was transferred back to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, having promised that as soon as he hit stateside he would put in his retirement paperwork. Staff Sergeant Weatherwax pleaded guilty to assisting Warrant Officer Fred Bufford in transferring the body of Private Marvin Druwood from the actual place of his death to the obstacle course on Camp Casey. He received a thirty-day forfeiture of pay and benefits and a general discharge from the U.S. Army under honorable conditions. The body of Sergeant First Class Otis was shipped back to his wife and children quartered at Fort Hood, Texas with full military honors. Our report never mentioned his antique-smuggling operation with Brandy. We didn’t want to complicate things. Besides, his family didn’t need that kind of grief.

None of this seemed fair, of course. Warrant Officer Fred Bufford, after all, had been guilty of rape. The rape of a fellow soldier. In addition, according to the testimony of the late Sergeant First Class Otis, Mr. Fred Bufford had been guilty of the murder of Private Marvin Druwood. But with Otis dead, we had no proof. And Weatherwax wasn’t talking. Colonel Alcott and Brigadier General H.K. Pacquet were also guilty of rape. Jill told me it had begun when she’d physically tried to intervene in the goings-on in one of the mafia meetings. The honchos had objected to her butting into their affairs and decid- ed to teach her a lesson. What started as a plan to humiliate her by stripping her had turned into out-and-out rape. After that, Jill started on her crusade. She swore Ernie and me to secrecy about the rape. She was too humiliated. We argued with her, told her it wasn’t her fault and she had no reason to be ashamed, but in the end she won out. We kept mum. As far as the KCIA witnesses who’d been standing nearby at the dragon’s teeth, they hadn’t seen much and what they had seen, they weren’t about to talk about.

The next problem was the death of Warrant Officer Bufford.

Ernie and I simply said that when we arrived at the scene Bufford was already dead. During his attempted assault on Corporal Matthewson, she’d exercised her right of self-defense. Bufford had hit his head against one of the dragon’s teeth, and while we were tending to her, he had apparently died of asphyxiation, facedown in the mud. 8th Army had to accept this story because they had no evidence to contradict it.

Why were Ernie and I so concerned with engineering an unwritten deal not to embarrass 8th Army? Because of Corporal Jill Matthewson.

At first, there’d been talk of charging her with treason.

After all, she’d been instrumental in the occupation—however brief—of a U.S. Army installation by foreign nationals. She’d assisted in the knocking down of the Camp Casey main gate and in the obliteration of the statute of the giant MP, not to mention the demolition of the front half of the 2nd Division Provost Marshal’s Office. In addition, she’d gone AWOL for twenty-nine days. Some of the honchos at 8th Army wanted to slap Jill Matthewson with a dishonorable discharge.

Ernie and I stood our ground. If we hadn’t retained possession of Colonel Alcott’s black market ledger, if it hadn’t been tucked away safely in a business girl’s hooch in Itaewon, we would’ve had no leverage. As it was, 8th Army knew that if they charged Jill Matthewson with treason, we’d fight back and the entire command structure of the 2nd Infantry Division would go down, all the way up to the level of a brigadier general.

We went so far as to demand that Jill be given an honorable discharge. This was a little more difficult to sell. We claimed Jill had been acting as an undercover agent and that she had to gain the confidence of the protestors. This was all nonsense but we said it anyway. The proof of this assertion was that Jill Matthewson attempted to fire on the ROK Army troops who, she thought, were about to encroach on Camp Casey.

It was crazy but it worked. The overriding desire of the 8th Army bosses was to avoid scandal. They didn’t want history to record that the first female MP ever assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division had been driven to armed insurrection.

On the day she left Korea, Ernie and I drove Jill out to the countryside north of Seoul. Madame Chon met us there, amidst hills covered with well-tended lawns and dotted with stone monuments. The two women embraced. Madame Chon led Jill over to one of the tombstones. Chon Un-suk’s name, in Chinese characters. had been freshly carved into granite. The sky glowed a greenish blue, and was veiled with wispy gray clouds. Jill and Madame Chon burned incense, breathed in the sharp odor of jasmine, and bowed to the spirit of the departed girl.

Madame Chon was happy. Now her daughter’s ghost could reside with her ancestors and would no longer have to wander.

I hoped that was true

On the drive back to Seoul, I told Jill that during her tour in the 2nd Infantry Division, she and Marv Druwood had been the only two real MPs the Division had.

From a muddy rice paddy, a white crane flapped its wings, lifted into the sky, and flew lazily off into an endless eternity of blue.