than a Korean would have seen before.”
“So you think her creamy white flesh drove some Korean mad with lust,” Ernie said.
Colonel Alcott nodded vigorously. “And why not?”
Before Ernie could answer, I jumped in.
“There’s always more evidence to be found,” I told Colonel Alcott. “Ernie and I will go over the same ground again, although I’m sure it’s been covered thoroughly by Mister Bufford. Like you said, sir, ‘a pair of fresh eyes.’ Maybe, just maybe, we might find something new in her personal life.”
“Not possible.” Bufford crossed his arms so tightly that his skinny elbows stuck out like spikes.
Ernie’s face was turning red. He’d heard enough.
“What do you mean, not possible?” he said. “If my partner wants to talk to her acquaintances, he’ll talk to her acquaintances. Until he’s blue in the face if he wants to.”
“Waste of time,” Bufford said.
I was about to say something when Colonel Alcott, once again, raised his open palm.
“Personal,” he said. “I agree. A good place to start. You never know what secrets lurk in someone’s background. You never know what nugget might be turned up that was missed the first time around. Don’t you agree, Mr. Bufford?”
Bufford unfolded his arms and placed his palms flat on his desk, leaning forward. The look on his face was so reverential that, for a moment, I thought he was going to bow. “Absolutely, sir,” he said. “Starting with her personal acquaintances makes sense. That’d be the way to go.”
I glanced back and forth between the two men. The complete 180-degree revolution of opinion that Bufford had just performed was being ignored by both of them. They’ve done this before, I realized. Warrant Officer Bufford floats his ideas, Colonel Alcott floats his, and immediately they agree to do it the colonel’s way.
I glanced at Ernie. He rolled his eyes. His opinion was clear. Colonel Stanley X. Alcott and Warrant Officer Fred Bufford were both nuts.
“Regarding Private Druwood,” I said. “Has the body been examined yet?”
Colonel Alcott swiveled in his chair and studied me head on. Warrant Officer Bufford sat up straighter and re-wrapped his skinny arms around his chest.
“Why, yes,” Colonel Alcott said. “By local staff. The body will be shipped down to the coroner in Seoul later this morning.”
“Suicide?” I asked.
Colonel Alcott grimaced. “Oh, no. Accident. Strictly an accident. But how did you know? The report hasn’t been sent to Seoul yet.”
Ernie’s eyes were as wide as the headlights on his jeep, wondering how I knew all this. I ignored Colonel Alcott’s question and asked one of my own.
“Did Private Druwood know Corporal Jill Matthewson?”
“Know her?” Colonel Alcott glanced toward Bufford but received only a blank stare. “I suppose so,” Alcott replied. “They were both MPs. But there’s no relationship. None at all. Druwood was simply a highly motivated young soldier who hadn’t done well on the obstacle course and he wanted badly to improve his skills. He climbed to the top of the tower in the middle of the night, to practice and gain more confidence we imagine. Unfortunately, he must’ve lost his balance. A tragedy. Head first. Cracked his skull on cement.”
“He was alone?” Ernie asked. “And he climbed to the top of the obstacle course tower in the middle of the night?”
“That’s what the evidence indicates,” Alcott replied.
“Was he a boozer or a druggie? Had he received a Dear John letter?”
“If what you’re implying,” Alcott replied, “is that Private Druwood committed suicide, you’re dead wrong. He was a highly motivated soldier. Dedicated to his mission. Besides,” Alcott added, “there was no note.”
“Alone in the middle of the night,” Ernie said. “Sounds like suicide to me.”
Alcott’s face turned red. He’d had enough. Suicide is one of the problems that the army hates to talk about, but every year in every duty station in the United States and around the world, young GIs take their own lives. What are the reasons? Loneliness. Mental illness. Depression from drugs or alcohol. Harassment from other soldiers. The day-to-day pressures of military life. You name it. But whatever the reasons, the honchos hate to classify any GI death as a suicide. Every commander looks bad when his suicide statistics go up and if there’s an excuse to classify a suicide as an accident, they’ll take it.
Colonel Alcott spread his stubby fingers. A gold wedding band twinkled on his left ring finger. “I think,” he said, slapping his knees, “this concludes our interview.”
As he rose to his feet, the three of us rose also. Then Alcott waggled his forefinger at my nose. “Stay away from Druwood,” he told me. “Corporal Matthewson will keep you busy enough.”
The provost marshal of the 2nd Infantry Division swiveled and left the office.
We were outside of the Provost Marshal’s Office, back in the cold crisp air of the 2nd Division morning, walking across blacktop beneath the shadow of the twenty-foot-tall MP, heading for our jeep. The snow had stopped. Only a few clumps still clung to slumping pine boughs and to the corrugated iron roofs of Quonset huts. Now, in late February, the question everyone kept asking was: Will winter ever end?
Ernie cleared his throat and spit on ice. “How in the hell did you know all that stuff about Druwood?”
“Most of it I guessed,” I said.
“How?”
“Well, Druwood was clearly on everyone’s mind in the Provost Marshal’s Office. Sergeant Otis figured that’s why we’d come up here from Seoul, and the other folks were whispering his name as we walked down the hallway. So something must’ve happened and happened recently. If it was a routine sort of incident-theft, AWOL, a fight in the ville-there wouldn’t be such a consensus of concern. So it must’ve been serious. Death. Not a vehicular accident, Sergeant Otis never would’ve expected Eighth Army CID to come north to investigate that. So it had to be murder. Or at the very least, suicide. The way everybody seemed sympathetic and concerned led me to believe that Druwood must’ve been the victim and not the perpetrator. Therefore, Druwood was dead.”
“But you called him ‘Private Druwood’ right off. How’d you know his rank?”
“If he was an officer, Otis or somebody in the Provost Marshal’s Office would’ve mentioned his rank. The death of an officer is rare in Division and would’ve been remarked upon. So he had to be enlisted. Otis said that Druwood was young.”
“He did?”
“Yeah. You weren’t listening. Young means low rank. Corporal, PFC, private. If he somehow got himself killed maybe he was inexperienced. So I guessed the lowest rank: private. Just lucky on that one.”
Ernie studied me as we walked. “Too bad you didn’t finish high school, Sueno. You might’ve developed some brains.”
When we reached our jeep, Ernie jumped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Using a stenciled map attached to the serious incident report, I guided him through the maze of Camp Casey, the headquarters compound of the 2nd Infantry Division.
We spent the morning visiting the chow halls and the administrative buildings and the barracks that had been home sweet home to the missing Corporal Jill Matthewson. After inventorying her personal effects, we realized that one complete set of fatigues had disappeared from her room, along with Jill’s MP helmet and her combat boots and her army-issue pistol and her web gear.
Why had Jill packed her full MP regalia? Most GIs, when they go AWOL, don’t take their uniforms. After all, the whole point of bugging out is to flee all things military.
We interviewed the “house girl.” Actually, she was a middle-aged Korean woman allowed on post to clean and do laundry for the female soldiers billeted on Camp Casey. She told us that Jill had also packed a tote bag full of clothes, a hair brush, and other things a woman needs. But not much. Only one pair of soft-soled shoes was missing and a couple of blouses and a pair of blue jeans and a skirt. The rest of Jill’s civilian clothes and uniforms were lined up and pressed, hanging neatly inside her open wall locker.
What we did not find, no matter how hard we looked, was the birthday card Jill’s father had sent her when she was five years old.
In ten more days, when Corporal Jill Matthewson had been gone a total of thirty days, she would cease being merely AWOL, absent without leave; she would be dropped from the 2nd Division roles as a deserter. She wouldn’t
