Other MPs surged forward, but I held as many back as I could and after a lot of yelling and shoving, the desk sergeant waded into the melee and started ordering people to back off. Gradually, cooler heads prevailed and the desk sergeant told everyone to get back to work. No one was hurt. Just a little wounded pride. The MPs filed out of the foyer, mumbling and cursing all G.I. s from Seoul.
I turned to Ernie. “Do you always have to start something?”
He straightened his jacket and examined his knuckles. A couple of them were bruised. “That’s what I’m here for,” he said.
8
Corporal Robert R. Pruchert worked at a commo site in a village known as Horang-ni, about twelve miles north of Pusan. In ancient times, Siberian tigers prowled these mountains. The wildlife was gone now, but what remained was a farming village that had wood huts with strawthatched roofs, and oxen in the field, looking like something out of the Brothers Grimm. Atop a rocky hill sat a First Signal Brigade microwave relay site. A few cement-block buildings were surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with concertina wire; but the main feature, right in the center of the site, was a huge white geodesic dome, looking for all the world like a two-story-tall golf ball.
“What the hell is that?” Ernie asked.
“Science,” I replied. “That class you skipped in high school.”
“Why the soccer ball?”
I shrugged. I really didn’t know, but I told Ernie it was to protect the equipment inside. He bought it. We were driving a puke-green army-issue four-door sedan that we’d checked out of the Hialeah Compound Consolidated Motor Pool. The engine needed work. It stuttered and puttered along but, so far, it had gotten the job done, carrying us out of the city and into this idyllic countryside on a cold, gray, overcast afternoon. We pulled up to the main gate of the signal compound. A listless Korean contract guard in a khaki uniform checked our dispatch. He called ahead. Two minutes later, a buzzer sounded, the gate opened, and we drove through. Ernie parked on a gravel lot near the largest building. We climbed out of the sedan and, before we could reach the front door, an officer burst out, asking us what we wanted. His fatigues were sloppy, as if they hadn’t been pressed in a week. His name tag said Wilson, and his rank was major. I told him what we wanted.
“Pruchert’s not here,” he said. “He’s on leave.”
“Where did he go?”
“Hell if I know.”
I nodded toward the inside of the signal site. “Maybe some of your men know.”
“No. None of them know either.” When I continued to stare at him, he started to get nervous, and suddenly he spoke. “Pruchert is an odd bird. He does his own thing. Into all this Buddhism stuff. Where he goes, nobody here has any idea.”
“Then we’ll want to look at his personal effects. His wall locker, things like that.”
Major Wilson sighed as if it were the biggest imposition he’d ever faced. “All right. Come on.”
As we walked through the orderly room and started down a long hallway, Ernie leaned toward me and whispered, “Talk about a plug in his butt.”
This morning, before we left Hialeah Compound, I’d called Staff Sergeant Riley at the 8th Army CID admin office and asked him to have the Provost Marshal call ahead to the Horang-ni Signal Site to make it easier for us to get access. These signal types were fanatics for security. Not that I blamed them, but the way they kept everything-and everybody-under lock and key made me glad I didn’t work for them.
Corporal Robert R. Pruchert’s bunk was neatly made, and both his footlocker and his wall locker were secured. There were no personal photos tacked to the wall, only a poster of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, perched on a flaming lotus leaf, the thumb and forefinger of his raised hand forming a circle in the air.
“What’s with the circle?” Ernie asked. “Does that mean the spaghetti’s done?”
Major Wilson hovered near us, looking worried.
I studied the poster too. The Buddhist idea that human beings could perfect themselves and attain nirvana was stunning, especially for those of us under the influence of a religion that asked only for grace. It was odd for an American G.I. to take up Buddhism and to spend his precious leave time-time away from this signal site-on such a demanding religious pursuit. But the United States Army is composed of many odd ducks. Chinese characters were sketched below the Buddha. In my notebook, I copied them down.
Major Wilson was watching my every move. “What’re you copying that for?” he asked.
“Buddhism’s a profound religion,” I said. “Maybe I’ll take it up some day.”
He snorted in disbelief.
Ernie fidgeted, probably about to say something, either about Major Wilson’s lousy attitude or about finding somebody with a crowbar or a bolt cutter so we could bust into Pruchert’s wall locker. I waved him off.
“That’ll do it, sir,” I said, snapping shut my notebook. “That’s all we need.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
I smiled, and Ernie and I walked down the long corridor. Surly G.I. s slaved over blinking equipment, occasionally glancing at us over their shoulders. Jealous, I thought, that we were able to walk out of there.
Outside, Ernie said, “Don’t you want to search that wall locker?”
“No. I have all I need.”
We climbed back in the sedan, Ernie behind the steering wheel. He stared sourly at the automatic transmission.
“It’s just not natural,” he said.
“What?”
“This,” he said, pointing at the steering wheel. “No stick shift. It just doesn’t seem right, not like real driving. All I’m doing here is pointing and aiming.”
“That’s all you do with your. 45,” I said.
“But that’s different.”
“How?”
“After I point and aim and then pull the trigger,” he said, “people start paying attention to me. With this piece of shit, they just laugh.”
We backed out of the parking space, turned around, and waited until the khaki-clad guard pulled open the gate. Then we drove out into freedom.
“Where’s this place again?” Ernie asked.
I had an army-issue map open on my lap. It had been printed almost twenty years ago, so some of the roads had changed: some had been paved, others had disappeared.
“Hang a left up ahead.”
“Past that oxcart?”
“Yeah.”
We were way out in the boonies. The Chinese characters I’d copied off Pruchert’s poster were the name of a Buddhist temple. Even without being able to read all of the characters, I could understand that much because I knew the character for the word “temple.” The rest was just a matter of looking them up in the dictionary. Unfortunately, out here in the countryside in the middle of Kyongsan Province, some twenty klicks north of Pusan, I didn’t have a Chinese-English dictionary with me.
“So, how you going to read it?” Ernie asked.
“I’ll get help.”
At the first village we came to, I had Ernie pull over in front of a shack with a sign tacked to the door. The sign was a sheet of red paper with a single Chinese character printed on it, pronounced in Korean as chom. The word meant “divination.” It was the home of a fortune-teller.
“Fortune-teller?” Ernie asked. “I thought you didn’t believe in that stuff.”
“I don’t. But the fortune-tellers can usually read Chinese characters, because they have to look up
