what’s really going on in Division.”
I did. But first I thought I’d show her something. I pulled out the photocopy of the letter that her mother had sent to her congressman. I handed it to her. While Jill read, Ernie stirred more sugar into his coffee, content for the moment to let me handle the interview. Anything touchy-feely, Ernie held no truck with.
Jill read the letter, then read it again. She began to cry. Angry at herself, she wiped the tears from her eyes.
“It’s understandable why you didn’t write your mom. Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I said.
“It’s not that,” Jill replied. “It’s just that she pulled it off so well.”
“ ‘Pulled it off’?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“Mom’s not real good at writing letters. But I called her from a pay telephone on Camp Casey. Told her what I was planning to do.”
Now it was Ernie’s turn to be amazed. “You told your mom that you were planning to go AWOL?”
“Right,” Jill said calmly, stirring more sugar into her coffee. “And I told her why.”
Ernie and I glanced at one another. Waiting. Both of us afraid to interrupt Jill Matthewson.
“I told my mom to write the letter to her congressman,” Jill said. “And I told her what to say, and I told her when to send the letter.”
“Why?” I ventured to ask.
Jill stopped stirring her coffee and stared at each of us in turn.
“To get you guys up here,” she said. “I need help. From Eighth Army or the Marines or the FBI or somebody.” She waved her arms in a broad circle. “I can’t do all this on my own. And somebody has to put a stop to what’s happening in Division.”
Neither Ernie nor I responded. Maybe we were both too dumbfounded by this turn of events. Or maybe it was because once a principal in an investigation starts answering questions you didn’t ask, the best thing to do is keep your trap shut. Jill examined the cover letter from the office of the congressman from the district that encompasses Terre Haute, Indiana. She snorted a laugh.
“Finally, somebody up top is interested in what goes on in Division.”
“What do you mean ‘finally’?” I asked.
“‘Finally,’ because first I went to the IG.” The Inspector General.
“The Division IG?”
“Yes. I told him about the black marketing, the whole thing, from A to Z. Then he called the provost marshal.”
“They called the very guy you were complaining about?”
“Right. Told him I needed some ‘extra training’ as they put it.”
“What about the IG report?”
“There was no report. Not that I ever saw anyway.”
Any 2nd Division IG report would’ve made its way to 8th Army. Ernie and I’d checked before we left Seoul. No reports concerning Jill Matthewson existed. In addition, a copy of any IG complaint should’ve been attached to the Division serious incident report. It wasn’t.
“So they buried your complaint?” Ernie asked.
“What else?” Jill replied. “The Division IG is one of the colonels who attends their mafia meetings.”
The inspector general is, theoretically, an independent ombudsman who examines all aspects of the operational capability of military units. This includes reports of wrongdoing that can’t be handled through the normal chain of command. This independence is theoretical. In fact, he lives cheek by jowl with the rest of the officer corps and you can bet the Division commander watches his every move. It takes a lot of nerve to be a truly independent IG. Most of them don’t have enough of what it takes.
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.
