“It feels good,” he said, “to be investigating real crime for once.”
I inhaled the crisp autumn air. Wisps of smoke rose through metal tubes atop tile-roofed farmhouses. Men in straw hats and women huddled in linen hoods balanced wooden hoes and scythes across their backs as they trudged toward distant fields.
“What’d Riley find out about that kisaeng we busted yesterday?” Ernie asked.
“She’s a third country national,” I told him, “from Taiwan. Mother’s Korean, father’s Chinese. They fled mainland China with the Kuomintang to Taiwan a couple of years before she was born. Somehow she met this Captain Burkewalder. They got married.”
“Where’s he stationed?”
“Vietnam. MAC–V advisory group.”
Ernie whistled. “Lucky dog,” he said.
Ernie’d spent two tours in Vietnam, loving every minute of it. The first tour he drove big trucks up and down Highway One and spent his off-duty hours smoking pungent hashish in his sand-bagged bunker. By the time he returned on his second tour, things had changed. No hashish available. The only way for a GI to get high was to buy pure China White from snot-nosed kids through the concertina wire.
“Uncle Ho used it as a weapon,” he always said, “and it worked.”
For Americans, the war had wound down. Richard Nixon’s Vietnamization program had succeeded and the few thousand American GIs still left in-country were mostly advisors to ARVN troops. Still, it was a dangerous job, maybe more dangerous than being part of an American combat unit, and I didn’t envy the assignment.
“So you think they’ll notify Captain Burkewalder about his wife having her PX privileges revoked?”
“They have to,” Ernie replied. “He’s her sponsor, theoretically responsible for everything she does. Helluva thing to have to worry about when you’re concentrating on staying alive.”
We reached the outskirts of the city of Uijongbu and Ernie downshifted the jeep.
“Where to?” he asked.
“Turn right up there, toward Songsan-dong.”
We were headed to Camp Stanley, headquarters of the Division Artillery.
I riffled through the printout Staff Sergeant Riley had collated for me yesterday: the names and ranks and DEROS (date of estimated return from overseas) of every Chief of Firing Battery in the Second Infantry Division. Two battalions of artillery were stationed at Camp Stanley, another battalion of 155mm howitzers nearby at Camp Essayons, and a final battalion closer to the DMZ up at Camp Pelham, about thirty miles northwest of here in the Western Corridor. There were three batteries per battalion so that made a dozen NCOs who held the official designation of Chief of Firing Battery or, in GI jargon, Chief of Smoke.
If taking these guys down involved violence, that would be fine with us. Ernie’d brought his brass knuckles. I’d brought my.45.
“Smoke?” the young GI asked. “You want to talk to the Chief of Smoke?”
“That’s right.”
“Hold on.”
He trotted away.
We were on Camp Stanley, in the motor pool of Bravo Battery, 1st of the 38th Field Artillery. Six 105mm howitzers were aligned in a neat row, leather-sheathed barrels pointing toward a crisp blue sky. Next to them, in geometrical counterpoint, sat six square equipment lockers; everything air mobile, everything ready to be airlifted by chopper into a combat zone at a moment’s notice.
Ernie unwrapped a stick of ginseng gum and popped it into his mouth. “This is man’s work,” he said. “Not all that sissy paper-pushing like back at Eighth Army.”
“Nothing sissy about Eighth Army,” I said. “You think it’s easy busting housewives who purchase too many packages of sanitary napkins?”
“No, I guess not,” Ernie replied. “I’ve got the scars to show for it.”
A man wearing the three-stripes-up and two-down insignia of a Sergeant First Class strode toward us. Using a red cloth, he cleaned grease off his hands.
“You looking for me?”
I showed him my badge. “You’re the Chief of Firing Battery,” I said.
“Chief of Smoke,” he corrected.
He didn’t bother to shake hands because he was still cleaning them, which was okay with us. His nametag said Farmington. We asked about leave policy and if a senior NCO had to sign out on pass.
“No,” he replied. “In the Division if you’re E-6 or above, your ID card is your pass. What’s this all about?”
“Where were you this past weekend? On Saturday night to be exact.”
He crinkled his eyes. “Why do you want to know?”
We told him about Sunny, and how she’d been brutally raped.
“The guys who did it,” he asked, “they were in this unit?”
“We don’t know yet,” Ernie said. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
Sergeant Farmington told us that he had a steady yobo out in the village of Songsan-dong and that was where he’d been. “I don’t see the point of taking the bus all the way down to Seoul and then paying too much for pussy. I’d rather stay up here where things are cheap.”
“Can you prove that you were here?”
Farmington thought about it. “Yeah, I suppose I can. First, I bought a case of beer at the Class VI on Friday night, that should be in their records. And Saturday morning I checked in with the CQ about two of my soldiers who were assigned to weapons cleaning duty.”
“The Charge of Quarters put that in his log, you suppose?”
“I suppose.”
“What about Saturday night?” Ernie asked.
“My yobo can vouch that I was there. And by Sunday night all the beer was gone.”
Farmington grinned.
I took notes and knew that if we had to, every step of Sergeant Farmington’s alibi could be checked out, but I also knew that, for the moment, we wouldn’t bother. Farmington’s long record in the service and his easy-going attitude left little doubt that he was telling the truth. Time was everything. We’d move on to the other names on the list.
“Anyone else from your unit went to Seoul recently? Maybe a group of three guys?”
“Not that I know of. Nobody was bragging about anything. And they usually do when they come back from Seoul.”
When we told him more about Sunny, and what had happened to her, his face clouded with concern. He volunteered to go into the Bravo Battery Orderly Room and check the sign-out register. This was a big help because we didn’t need any hassles from some Battery Commander suspicious of 8th Army investigators from Seoul.
After about ten minutes, Farmington returned. “Nobody in the unit went to Seoul last weekend.”
“At least not that they admitted to,” Ernie replied.
“Right, at least not that they wrote in the pass register. But I’d be surprised if anybody did. We were out in the field last week, came in late Friday. There was still a lot of maintenance to do Saturday morning. So they wouldn’t have been able to get away until mid-afternoon Saturday at the earliest.”
“How long does the bus to Seoul take?”
Farmington shrugged. “Maybe an hour. Hour and a half when the traffic’s bad.”
“So still possible.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Definitely possible.”
Ernie and I conducted the same type of interviews at Alpha Battery and then Charlie Battery and then at the other three batteries on the far side of Camp Stanley and then three more 155mm howitzer batteries at Camp Essayons. Each one of the Chiefs of Firing Battery was suspicious at first but then cooperative when we described what had been done to Sunny.
It was mid-afternoon by the time we were finished.
“A lot of alibis,” Ernie said.
“One for each Chief of Smoke.”
“We have to check them out.”
“No time,” I replied. “The Provost Marshal will be busting a gut by now.” I checked my watch. Our whole trip up here had been a long shot. We thought maybe, with the knowledge that one of the rapists had been called “Smoke,” that we might be able to stumble on a Chief of Firing Battery without an alibi. Of course, things are not usually that easy. “If we leave now,” I said, “we’ll still have three or four more hours to bust people at the commissary.”