which the U.S. Army’s 19th Support Group headquarters at Camp Henry was located.
“We finally caught a break,” Ernie said.
“What do you mean?”
“Camp Henry is where Marnie and the girls are playing tonight.”
After finishing up their performances near the Demilitarized Zone, the Country Western All Stars had been systematically working their way south. Last night Waegwan, tonight Camp Henry.
The Korean countryside is beautiful this time of year, with trees covered in red and brown and yellow, distant mountains capped with white, and miles of rice paddies dotted with piled straw. But we were both tired of driving all over hell and gone, and sick of taking leaks on the side of the road, finding nothing to eat other than a bowl of hot broth from a roadside noodle stand.
Camp Henry was about three miles south of the East Taegu Train Station, the place where Pruchert might have bought a ticket and climbed aboard the Blue Train. Ernie drove slowly through town, following my directions as I studied our army-issue map. Old ladies hustled across streets with huge piles of pressed laundry atop their heads. Children in school uniforms marched across intersections in military-like formations, finally heading home after their long school day. Empty three-wheeled trucks made their way back to the countryside, and taxicabs with their top lights on cruised slowly by, searching for passengers heading home after the end of the workday.
Ernie rolled down the window. “Garlic,” he said. “The whole city reeks of it.”
“A lot of agriculture around here,” I told him. “Pork bellies, rice, cabbage, garlic. It’s what makes the world go round.”
The front gate of Camp Henry was protected by a guard shack and a stern-looking American MP. We continued past the gate and then turned around, drove back past the gate again, and turned east across the railroad tracks. There were a few nightclubs we could see from the main road: the Princess Club, the Pussycat Lounge, the Half Moon Eatery. But most of the joints lurked back in the narrow pedestrian alleyways inaccessible by car.
When the G.I. village petered out, Ernie turned around and found a spot along the cement-block wall topped with concertina wire that marked the boundaries of Camp Henry. He pulled over and locked up the car.
We purposely didn’t drive into Camp Henry proper. Not yet. The MP at the gate would check our emergency dispatch and our CID badges, and in about five seconds he’d be on the horn to the Camp Henry Provost Marshal. Other military law enforcement agencies track 8th Army CID agents more carefully than criminals, worried that we might file a negative report that could reflect poorly on their command. I didn’t want the hassles. And I certainly didn’t want any nosy MPs following us around the village.
We trotted across the main supply route and after half a block entered a narrow alley that housed the dark world of bars and brothels and business girls that lurks outside every army compound in Korea. The air was moist, from the flowers that stood in pots along the cobbled lanes and from the panfuls of water that were tossed by shopkeepers to discourage floating dust. Ernie strode confidently down the street.
“It’s good to be back,” he said.
From the windows above barrooms, feminine eyes stared out at us. Ernie spread his arms, wanting, it seems, to embrace the entire debauched alley and everyone in it.
We walked up and down three narrow roads and six alleys and a dozen byways but saw no sign that said “G.I. Heaven”-or, for that matter, “Migun Chonguk.”
We stopped a couple of business girls on their way to the bathhouse. They both wore G.I. T-shirts without brassieres, and tight shorts enveloping their shapely posteriors; their straight black hair was tied up and clasped by stainless-steel clips. They balanced pans full of soap and washrags against slender hips. When I said, “Anyonghaseiyo,” they giggled and stared at us boldly.
“I’m looking for a club,” I told them in English. They seemed to understand, so I continued. “They tell me that its Korean name is Migun Chonguk.”
“Migun Chonguk?” they both asked, brown eyes opening wide.
I nodded.
They looked at each other, looked back at me, and broke into laughter. In a few seconds, one of them regained her composure, waved her arm to indicate the entire area, and said, “Da migun chonguk.” It’s all G.I. heaven.
I stood there sheepishly, realizing that the cab driver back in Chonhuang-ni by the name of Kwok had been pulling my leg. Then I saw a sign behind the girls. It was a rectangular stripe of red paper pasted onto ancient brick. Slashed on it in black ink were the characters mi for beauty, gun for soldier, chon for sky, and gook for kingdom.
I pointed. The girls swiveled to look. Their expressions remained blank. With only sixth-grade educations-the mandatory minimum in Korea-they probably couldn’t read the hanmun, Chinese characters. I walked over to the sign and pointed again and read it off for them. “Migun Chonguk.” An arrow on the sign pointed down the darkest and narrowest walkway we’d seen yet.
“There?” one of the girls said, crinkling her nose.
They both snorted, turned, and walked away from us. Under her breath, I heard one of them say, “Nabun nyon.” Evil bitches.
Ernie strode over next to me. “They didn’t seem too happy with the place.”
“Disgusted would be a better word for it.”
Ernie grinned. “We ain’t there yet.”
The entrance to the place known as Migun Chonguk, or G.I. Heaven, was a splintered wooden doorway at the end of a narrow pedestrian walkway lined with brick walls. In the center of the lane, filth flowed in an open sewer. Ernie and I hopped back and forth to either side of the path, finding precarious footholds on the moss-slimed rock.
“Stinks back here,” Ernie said, trying not to inhale the stench of raw sewage and ammonia.
I tried the door. Locked. I pounded with my fist. We listened. Nothing. I pounded again. Finally, the slap, slap, slap of plastic slippers. The door slithered open. A weathered woman’s face peeked out. The mouth opened. It spoke.
“Whatsamatta you? Too early. Anybody sleep time.”
“Too early?” Ernie said. “The sun’ll go down in an hour or two.”
He shoved the door open and crouched through the small opening. I followed. The courtyard was minuscule. Only enough room for a byonso made of rotted lumber, no bigger than a phone booth, and a half-dozen earthenware jars, each capable of holding about fifty pounds of cabbage kimchee.
The old woman closed the door behind us and slid a rusty bolt into place. She was less than five feet tall, hunched at the shoulders, her face marked with wrinkles and liver spots. Most of her teeth were missing.
“Anybody sleep time,” she said again.
“Mekju isso?” I asked the woman. Do you have beer? After all, Kwok the cab driver had told us that Migun Chonguk was a G.I. mekju house.
The woman studied me and squinted her eyes. “Nighttime mekju have,” she told me. “Now no have. Anybody sleep time.”
Ernie wandered around the courtyard, peeking into the gap between the main hooch and the courtyard wall. He must not have found anything out of order, because he wandered over to the opposite side.
“G.I.,” I told the old woman. “Mori oopso.” No hair. “Odiso?” Where is he?
She stared at me blankly. Out of my wallet, I pulled the photocopy I had made of Corporal Robert R. Pruchert’s personnel records snapshot. The copy machine needed toner, so it was not a clear copy; but the old woman snatched the paper out of my hand and studied it carefully.
“He no have hair?” she said, pointing at the photo.
“No. All cut off,” I said.
“Why?” She looked up at me quizzically.
“He want to be deing deingi chung,” I said. A Buddhist monk ringing an alms bell.
“Deing deingi chung.” She laughed. “How you know deing deingi chung?”
I shrugged and pointed at the picture. “You see that G.I. before?”
“Maybe,” she said. “All G.I. same same. All the time Cheap Charley. All the time argue mama-san.”
“How about the others?” I asked, pointing toward the hooch. “Do they know him?”
