pulled his. 45. He fired into the air. Startled, the men dropped back.
For just a moment, after the gunshot, the advancing hive of ROK soldiers halted. Warily, they searched the crowd. When they realized no gunfire was directed their way, they resumed their advance.
Colonel Han shouted at his followers to let us through.
When we reached him, Jill stood at his side.
I shouted at both of them. “It’s over. Those ROK Army soldiers are going to use whatever force is necessary to quell this demonstration. Blood will be shed. People will be hurt. Time to call it off, Colonel.”
“No,” Jill shouted.
“No?” Ernie mimicked. “What are you? Out of your mind? Those ROK soldiers mean business.”
“We’ve worked too hard,” Jill said, “and planned too long. The world has to know what’s happened here, that innocent children are being killed and women raped, and something has to be done about it.”
“Done? Like what?”
“Like what we planned.” She turned back to Colonel Han. Smiling beatifically, he patted her on the shoulder.
It was then that it hit me. I’m not sure why. It had nothing to do with what we were facing at the moment but maybe it was the depth of Jill Matthewson’s emotion that triggered all the contradictory information I’d gathered in the last few days to suddenly fall into place. Maybe her reaction was the last clue I needed. But I knew now and so I said it.
“You were there,” I told Jill. “The night Pak Tong-i died.”
She looked at me, so did Colonel Han, so did Ernie, all of them waiting for me to continue. I did.
“You slipped back into Tongduchon and maybe you had a key but somehow you gained entrance to his office.” I was staring directly at Jill now, daring her to deny my words. “When you found him there you tried to force a full confession out of him. About how he’d provided women to the Second Division honchos for years, about how he’d set the women up, letting them think they’d be dancing or performing, although Pak knew they’d be raped by whichever officer took a fancy to them. And you wanted his records, to document the years of black-marketing that had gone into paying for all these mafia meetings and other boys-will-be-boys excursions. You were too close to Kim Yong-ai to let it go. You wanted to prove it all to the world. But there wasn’t enough there. Pak was cagey. He kept few records. But he was so frightened that he told you about Colonel Alcott being deathly afraid of being cheated by Koreans, or by Bufford or Weatherwax so that he kept meticulous records of all black market transactions. When you questioned Pak Tong-i, you had to threaten him with your. 45. He was a weak man, a man who never exercised and ate too much and smoked too much and drank too much, and suddenly something inside of him went bust. His face flushed red, he couldn’t breathe and you knew the symptoms meant heart attack. When he died, you shoved him into the closet, closed it, and exited Kimchee Entertainment without being seen. That’s what happened, Jill, isn’t it?”
The ROK Army suddenly halted. The commanding officer shouted more orders and repositioned his forces. They broke into smaller groups, then reformed again. Now five V-shaped formations were pointing right at us. Then they started, once again, their slow forward shuffle.
“He deserved it,” Jill snarled.
Even Colonel Han flinched at the sound of her voice.
“They all deserve it,” she continued. “Paying for sex with girls who are just out of middle school. Girls who still have their hair bobbed, for Christ’s sake, because they finished the ninth grade only weeks ago. Now those same girls are made-up like whores and dancing in sequined outfits and these middle aged men with wives and children in quarters back on army bases in the States grab them and paw them and make them giggle and then stick their tired old pricks inside that soft virgin flesh. And the men laugh about it. And boast. And don’t even seem to care that I’m a woman and despise every one of them, and then they have the nerve to make comments about me. About my butt. About why a woman would be an MP. And they ask me dumb questions, like if I’ve ever burned my bra, and there were so many times”-Her fist tightened into knots-”so many times when I came that close to pulling out my. 45 and blowing their fuck-ing brains out.”
“Jill,” Colonel Han said. He placed his hand gently on her shoulder. Her face relaxed and she turned to him and smiled.
“It’s time, Jill,” he said. “Time for us to do what we planned.”
“Yes,” she said.
Jill stepped away from Colonel Han and stared at me once again. She pointed at the ledger in my hand. “You have the proof now. I know you two guys. I respect you. You’ll make sure that the truth comes out. And one other thing. It’s true that I roughed Pak Tong-i up a bit. But when I left him he was still breathing. Maybe later, God forgive me, he died of a heart attack. I’m not proud of that.”
Colonel Han shouted something to a group of men who’d been hovering nearby. They stepped between me and Ernie and the quarter-ton truck. Colonel Han climbed back on top and helped Jill up. Then he started to address the crowd.
Exactly what he said, word for word, has been transcribed from tape recordings made by protestors who were there. The transcribed speech has been passed around Korea and has now, in translation, been passed around the world. What he said, in effect, was that Korea must control its own destiny. It was time for Koreans, both in the North and the South, to reject foreign influence, to expel all foreigners, and to reunite. The first step was to take back Korean sovereignty, both on the land and in the courts. Once he’d made these points he said that Koreans were strong enough to defend themselves and, once the Americans were expelled, if the northern communists refused to reunite, then the soldiers of the Republic of Korea should march north and force reunification. Blood would be shed, people would die, but to prove his sincerity he was going to do more than just talk. He was going to act.
Most of the speech was in language too sophisticated for me to follow. But the last part, when he said he was going to act, I understood.
He and Jill Matthewson leaped off the truck, strode past the destroyed Camp Casey main gate, and marched across the open pavement toward the advancing ROK Army troops. The crowd was silent. Jill Matthewson pulled her. 45.
“No!” I shouted. Frantically, I lunged forward. Both Ernie and the men assigned to us by Colonel Han held me back.
“No!” I shouted again, because what they were about to do seemed perfectly obvious to me.
Jill held her. 45 aloft and then aimed it at the KCIA man standing behind the row of KNPs. She popped off a round. At that range, twenty or thirty yards, the round flew high but the reaction of the KNP brass was immediate. They fell to the ground. Now Colonel Han stepped in front of Jill. He pulled his pistol and aimed it at the advancing ROK troops. They didn’t wait for an order. A fusillade of M-16 rounds slammed into Colonel Han’s body. He didn’t twirl in the air as he would’ve done if this had been a movie. His body slammed to the pavement as if he’d been sucker-punched in the chest by a twenty-foot-tall giant.
Jill stepped over Colonel Han’s body until she was straddling it, kneeled down in his spreading blood, and kissed him on the forehead. When she stood again, she started to raise the. 45 in her hand.
That’s when I broke free of Ernie’s grip and charged at the ROK soldiers in front of me. “Sagyok chungji!” I shouted. Hold your fire!
Jill looked back.
It was just that one or two seconds of hesitation that allowed me to sprint across the road. I slammed into her and executed a tackle that would’ve made my old coach at Lincoln High proud. Jill fell, Ernie arrived, and soon we three were stumbling away from the line of ROK soldiers. Jill struggled but Ernie punched her and I slipped handcuffs on her.
We were in a Hyundai sedan, heading south, Ernie driving. The vehicle had been loaned to us by Madame Chon. While we were still in Tongduchon, Jill had changed into civilian clothes and since none of us were now in uniform-and we were riding in a civilian vehicle-we hoped that we could slip past the southernmost 2nd Infantry Division checkpoint on the MSR. They had no jurisdiction over civilians. With any luck, we could make our way back to Seoul.
“Back there,” Ernie said, “you told us that you all but killed Pak Tong-i.”
“He died the same night. So I’ve felt responsible for his death. His heart must’ve been weak.”
“You weren’t the one who killed him, Jill,” I said.
