While Ernie and I sipped more coffee and pondered our next move, Jill Matthewson made up our minds for us.
“First,” she said, “we kick some serious butt.”
Ernie looked up from his coffee.
“Starting,” she continued, “with the asshole who offed Marv Druwood.”
“Maybe Druwood’s death was an accident,” I said, “like Division claims. Or suicide.”
“No way. I go AWOL, Marv Druwood goes nuts and becomes dangerous to them, a few days later they find a way to kill him, making it look like an accident. That’s what happened.”
She reached inside the plastic armoire, the only piece of furniture in the room, and pulled out what GIs call an “AWOL bag.” A traveling bag, smaller than a suitcase. Carefully, Jill packed her combat boots and her web belt and her MP helmet, along with a few more civilian “health and welfare” items. Finally, she packed her most prized possession, her army-issue. 45 automatic pistol.
She stood and said, “Time to move out.”
“You could go back to Seoul,” I told her. “You’d be safe there.”
“So would you,” she said. “But you won’t. You want these ass-holes as bad as I do.”
“Once we start arresting people,” Ernie said, “it could get hairy.”
For the first time since I’d known her, Jill Matthewson’s face flushed with anger. “I’m an MP! Don’t tell me about danger.”
I glanced at Ernie. He stared at her with a look of goony admiration. Not insulted in the least. I wondered if we were doing the right thing. As Ernie had said, once we started arresting people, the stuff would really hit the fan. And as dangerous as that would be- up here alone in the Division area with no backup-it would be even more dangerous if 8th Army decided not to sanction our investigation. If they decided to actually carry us as AWOL and therefore pull our jurisdictional authority. Then we’d be wallowing in deep kim-chee up to our nostrils. Ernie knew all this. Still, he looked at me and nodded his approval.
Now it was up to me. Should we actually go through with this? Start arresting men of higher rank than us while standing on jurisdictional ground that could turn into quicksand? Take the risk of accruing another day of AWOL? Another day of time that would never count toward our twenty? Or should we just handcuff Jill Matthewson and transport her back to Seoul?
I thought of Marv Druwood’s lifeless body, the pale coldness of his flesh. I thought of Madame Chon, bowing her forehead to the ground before a row of flickering candles. I thought of the open mouth of Pak Tong-i, gasping for a last gulp of air that would forever be out of reach. I thought of the haunted, hunted look that festered even now in the exotic, dark eyes of Kim Yong-ai.
“Okay,” I said finally. “Let’s do it.”
For the first time since last night, Kim Yong-ai emerged from the kitchen. She and Jill embraced. As we crossed the courtyard Kim Yong-ai followed us and then stood at the gate, holding the door open, watching as we ducked through and made our way down the narrow pathway. At the end of the pathway, Jill stopped and turned and waved to Kim Yong-ai. The frightened Korean woman bowed, lowering her head all the way to her waist.
What Jill had told me last night, during our long conversation in her little hooch, matched what Ernie and I had picked up since arriving in Division. The honchos were black-marketing; they were using the money to have mafia meetings; women were being abused; but it was in the details, as they say, that the devil lurked.
When she first arrived in Division, Jill Matthewson was familiar with the catcalls and lewd remarks and gestures that GIs make whenever they see a female soldier. She’d suffered it innumerable times in the two years she’d already spent in the army. But what she wasn’t used to was the intensity. Up here in Division, GIs are far away from home, far away from their families, far away from their churches, and so far away from their normal way of conducting their lives that they might as well be stationed on another planet. And like men adrift anywhere, they’d lost all sense of proportion. In Korea-especially in Division-anything goes. GIs could hoot and howl and rub themselves to their heart’s content when Jill Matthewson was around and nobody did anything about it. The Division honchos wanted American GIs to be on time for military formations, on time for alerts, and on time when they reported to work every day. Other than that, GIs in Tongduchon could do whatever in the hell they wanted to do. Why not? The honchos were doing the same damn things.
As one of the first females in Division, and the very first to be assigned to the military police, Jill didn’t have to be a genius to figure that she wasn’t wanted. Camp Casey-and especially Tongduchon- had been an all-male American enclave for decades. A GI playground. Nobody needed a stuck-up American female around to ruin things. No matter how Jill tried to conduct herself, whether in a professional manner or as one of the “boys,” she was never accepted. She was always the odd woman out.
Jill told me, while we sat sipping coffee in the middle of the night in her cozy hooch in Wondang, that she could have lived with all that. It was to be expected. If she wanted to succeed in her military career, if she wanted to make her mother proud of her, she’d known from the day she enlisted that it wouldn’t be easy. She’d deal with it. She was determined to do so.
It was corruption that pushed her over the edge.
At first it seemed innocent enough. Go over to the main PX and purchase a new wristwatch using the provost marshal’s open ration control plate. Every GI in Korea is issued an RCP and he is severely limited as to what he can or cannot buy in the PX. For example, a male GI is not allowed to purchase perfume or nylon stockings. Because the worry is that he’d give them-illegally-to an unauthorized Korean yobo down in the ville. He could, however, buy a wristwatch, but only one per year. And, upon leaving the country, he had to produce the wristwatch, to prove that he hadn’t sold it on the black market.
Colonel Alcott, however, was buying a wristwatch every week. That is, Jill Matthewson was taking his RCP to the PX and purchasing it on his behalf. Before the purchase, she was handed cash by Warrant Officer Fred Bufford and a handwritten note with the exact model and brand of wristwatch to buy. This one’s for Colonel So-and-so, Bufford would tell her, a ROK Army officer, the Commander of the Such-and-such Infantry Battalion, and Colonel Alcott is providing the watch to the Division chief of staff so he can present it as a gift to the Korean colonel in return for the support his battalion has provided to the Division during Operation Freedom’s Shield. At first, Jill told me, it seemed innocent enough. It was for contingencies such as these that the open ration control plate was provided to high-ranking officers in the first place. But week after week, Jill purchased more wristwatches, for one Korean colonel after another, until she thought the entire ROK Army would soon be outfitted with the latest in timekeeping instruments.
Eventually, Alcott and Bufford had her buying other things: radios, expensive clocks, stereo equipment, toaster ovens, even television sets. And other MPs were performing the same services, including Private Marv Druwood. The amount of marketable goods and the amount of cash needed to purchase them was enormous. Jill started wondering where the cash was coming from. And she won- dered why some of the male MPs weren’t wondering the same thing. She asked Marv Druwood about it. He was the one who told her about the Turkey Farm.
“They even had live rock bands up there on the roof,” Jill told me, “especially on Saturdays and holiday weekends. And the beer and liquor were provided free along with food. All of it procured by that old woman who ran the place, the one they called the Turkey Lady.”
Even the yobos, the Korean girlfriends, were provided with gifts. The largesse of the military police corps, according to Jill, was common knowledge amongst the business girls in Tongduchon. And it went a long way in making a young MP appear a lot more attractive than he might normally be.
In addition to buying black-market goods in the PX, MPs were also tasked with transporting the merchandise, in MP vehicles, to the Turkey Farm. There it would be logged in and sold and the money, supposedly, returned to Colonel Alcott.
“He was pocketing the money himself?” I asked.
“No,” Jill said. “He was only the front man. The group of colonels controlling the Division, the ones who attended the mafia meetings were behind it. Alcott presented formal reports to them during those meetings, accounting for every penny made and spent. All such business was conducted before they brought out the strippers and the business girls.”
“You’ll testify to this?”
“I was there, supposedly providing security for them. Actually, just running errands. They liked the way I kept the business girls calm.”
