Occasionally, a big deuce-and-a-half or a box-like chow truck passed us, heading south toward Liberty Bridge, returning to civilization for re-supply.
Signs written in English and hangul guided us toward the Range Operations Center. Again, a sheet-metal Quonset hut, this one painted in darker shades of camouflage green. Inside were ROK Army officers. One of them, a Lieutenant Park, spoke English. When we asked him where we could find Charley Battery, 2/17th FA, he frowned.
“Moving,” he said. “Far north. Where they stop, nobody know right now.”
The war games were still on-going. They could last for many hours, until the generals back in their bunkers had enough data to keep themselves busy analyzing it for the next couple of weeks.
“Where are they now?” Ernie asked.
Lieutenant Park led us into a room filled with a topographical map spread out on a flat table. South of a red line, tiny tanks and artillery pieces were arrayed in a line facing north. Even more tanks and artillery pieces were arrayed north of the line, facing south. Lieutenant Park grabbed a wooden pointer and slapped the brass tip into the center of a broad valley surrounded by jagged hills.
“Charley Battery,” he said.
Ernie and I studied the map. The valley was about fifteen kilometers from our current position. At the southern edge of the valley sat a village known as Uichon.
When I asked Lieutenant Park the name of the valley, he answered in Korean. I didn’t understand, so he repeated the name in English.
“Nightmare Range,” he said.
We thanked him and left.
Uichon was a dump.
One paved road, right down the center of town, wide enough for two big military re-supply trucks to rumble through without slowing down. Toddlers wearing wool sweaters, but no pants, stumbled through the muck on the side of the road, chasing chickens and an occasional small pig. Adults with wooden A-frames strapped to their backs hoisted hay, firewood, and gunny sacks full of cabbage toward the village’s open-air market. On the outskirts of town, a few farmhouses were visible but not many. Some roofs were tile, like the whitewashed police station, but most of the hovels settled for the traditional straw-thatched roofs that had been used in Asia since the beginning of recorded time.
About a hundred yards on the far side of the village we came to a road that Lieutenant Park had told us we’d find. An arrow-shaped sign pointing north said USFK firing range No. 13, north 2km. The road was made of hard-packed mud and gravel and sat a few inches above the swampy grasslands surrounding it. Ernie shoved the jeep into low gear and made the turn.
“Hold onto your hat,” he said.
He was enjoying this a lot more than I was.
Was all this effort really worth our time? What would the members of Charley Battery have to tell us? If the sketch we showed them wasn’t Boltworks, all would be for naught. If it was him, we still wouldn’t learn much. Since he’d been AWOL for over a month, it was unlikely that anybody in the unit would have any idea about where to find him. Still, we had to ask. That’s what police work is all about.
Major Oliver back at Camp Pelham told us that Nightmare Range had been the site of a series of ferocious battles between the 8th United States Army and what was called, in those days, the CHICOMs, the Chinese Communist People’s Army. Known to GIs as “Joe Chink.” In the foreboding terrain we were traveling through now, I could imagine what it must’ve been like. Explosions everywhere, bayonet charges, hand-to-hand combat, men screaming, rolling through the cold mud and hot blood. And the mountains around us made things worse. They looked primevaclass="underline" jagged, muddy, ringed with low-lying clouds that blocked the afternoon sun.
I shivered and hugged myself, wishing we were back in the cozy alleyways of Itaewon.
It took us ten minutes to drive the two kilometers the little sign had been talking about. When we arrived, we found a flat swampy area, but no field artillery unit.
“Charley Battery’s moved out,” Ernie said.
Fresh tire tracks were everywhere. I climbed out of the jeep and studied them.
“They’re heading north, up this road,” I said.
“Good work, Tonto.”
You didn’t exactly have to be an Apache tracker to see where they’d gone. The mud and gravel had been plowed up everywhere.
9
We continued after them. All that afternoon we followed Charley Battery of the Second of the 17th but each time we drew close, they had already loaded up and moved out. Finally, the sun went down. Ernie and I were just about to give up, when we had to swerve off the side of the road for a huge diesel refueling truck that was barreling down the muddy path. We pulled over and Ernie flashed his lights, and the trucker rolled to a stop.
I climbed out and talked to him.
“Charley Battery?” he said. “Yeah, up the road about three klicks.”
The driver was a young Spec 4 from Dubuque, Iowa. He bragged that he knew the firing ranges up here like the back of his hand.
“You’re in luck,” he told me. “Charley Battery’s been given clearance to stand down for the night. That’s why I was able to refuel them. They’ve already put up the wire.”
He meant set up a defensive perimeter and unraveled coiled concertina wire around the battery’s position. When I asked him for directions, he started to explain, but the winding and turning grew too complicated. I pulled out my notebook and asked him to draw me a map. He did, using two sheets of paper. When he handed it back to me, I used the light inside his cab to read it and I asked questions to make sure I understood. Finally, we said our goodbyes, and he rumbled off down the road, red taillights fading.
“You know where they’re at now?” Ernie asked.
“Yeah. Got the map right here.”
Ernie started the jeep back up and, with his headlights on high beam, rolled north on the narrow lane. In the dim red glow of the dashboard, I studied the map again. At the end of the winding road, the fuel truck driver had drawn a large X.
Next to it, in childish script, he had written the words: Nightmare Range.
When we finally found Charley Battery, we didn’t just drive right up to the concertina wire surrounding the perimeter. Instead, we decided to reconnoiter. Ernie switched off the high beams and approached with only his parking lights on. While we were still a hundred meters away, he parked beside a hill. We climbed to the top and gazed down on the encampment of Charley Battery, Second of the 17th Field Artillery.
Six 105mm howitzers. That’s the first thing you noticed, long firing tubes glowing dimly in the moonlight. All six were covered with camouflage netting, and all six were pointing straight toward North Korea. Behind them, two rows of tents. Inside each, the faint glow of portable space heaters. Next came a row of two-and-a-half ton trucks. Eight of them. Six of the trucks were to pull the guns, one each, and also to haul each weapon’s “basic load,” its full complement of high explosive ammunition. One of the remaining trucks was for the maintenance crew and its associated equipment, and the last truck was for chow, a big box-like wooden cab teetering on its back.
Concertina wire was strung hapzardly around the entire bivouac.
Occasionally, some GI tromped from one tent to another. Spaced evenly around the perimeter, three armed guards, rifles carried at sling arms, paced within the wall of wire.