“Anyong-hashi-motor-pool,” Ernie said as we drove in.
Anyonghashimnka is the Korean formal greeting, like “hello.” Literally, it means “Are you at peace?” with an honorific verb ending added on to sweeten it a bit. GI slang has morphed this long greeting into something more pronounceable: Anyong-hashi-motor-pool. Don’t ask me why. It makes no sense. But it sounds funny.
A red placard above a side door to a Quonset hut read: TRAFFIC SAFETY OFFICE, SECOND INFANTRY DIVISION, SECOND TO NONE!
Ernie parked the jeep and we walked in. It was a tiny office with a diesel space heater, a gray desk, and a few beat-up old metal file cabinets. Nobody home. Ernie and I walked back outside and as we did so, a small man with a bright red mustache hustled up to us.
“Had an accident?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Ernie replied. “You the Safety NCO?”
“That’s me.” He thrust a thumb into his chest. “Oscar L. Bernewright. What can I do for you?”
He was a short man, oddly proportioned, almost like a dwarf. He wore grease-stained fatigues and the insignia of a sergeant first class pinned to his collar at a slightly twisted angle. Green eyes shone brightly over his red mustache and he gazed at us intently from beneath his fur-lined cap.
“Chon Un-suk,” I said.
His wrinkled features fell. “The dead girl,” he said. His voice came out raspy.
“Yes.”
His green eyes moistened and for a minute I thought he was going to cry. Then he recovered and studied our civilian attire and our grim demeanor. “You’re those CID agents I been hearing about. From Eighth Army.”
Our fame had spread.
“That’s us,” I said.
“I been waiting for you,” Sergeant Bernewright said.
Ernie and I glanced at one another. Waiting for us?
“Come on.” Bernewright waved with his left hand. “We’ll talk. Not in my office, it’s too small. There’s a fresh pot of coffee brewing in the toolshed.”
We followed him across a vast expanse of blacktop. Engines roared. Two-and-a-half ton trucks swirled in slow circles like skaters on a field of ice. Sergeant Bernewright hustled rapidly across the lot on his short legs.
“If he’s been waiting for us,” Ernie told me, “maybe we should go in guns blazing.”
“This isn’t an ambush,” I replied. “Relax.”
The inside of the toolshed reeked of oil, diesel fumes, and coffee. After serving ourselves a hot cup of joe and finding seats on wooden benches, Sergeant Bernewright described the accident involving the now famous middle-school girl, Chon Un-suk.
“Two GIs in a deuce-and-a-half driving through Tongduchon early in the morning. Poor driving conditions. Fog. Narrow road. No sidewalk. Middle-school kids lining the muddy edge of the road waiting for their bus.”
“Were the GIs speeding?” Ernie asked.
“Of course they were speeding,” Bernewright answered. “They’re GIs, aren’t they? Nothing more than teenagers. The guy in the passenger seat has a little more rank than the other one, but do you think he’s going to ask his buddy to slow down? No way. They’re having fun. The speed limit there is thirty klicks, about twenty miles per hour. After measuring the skid and the other evidence at the scene, I figure those two bozos were doing at least forty. Maybe more.”
“Why weren’t they pulled over?”
Bernewright winced. “Korean traffic patrols never stop GIs,” he explained. “Not up here at Division anyway. That would be interfering with military operations. Not a chance. Not when the president of the country is a former general and the whole damn government is run as if it were a military operation. Which it is. Or might as well be. And on our side, we don’t have enough MPs to patrol the roads anywhere but on Camp Casey itself. So young American GI drivers are given a huge vehicle, a tank full of diesel, and they’re set loose on an unsuspecting Korean populace.”
“Sounds like you get a lot of this.”
“Over a hundred accidents a year. That’s the ones that are reported. Ten percent of them result in injury or death.”
“Chon Un-suk was standing in front of the other students.” I remembered this from Korean newspaper reports. “She was the safety monitor.”
“Right. She had a whistle, white gloves, a sash across her chest that said ‘safety first’ in Korean. The works. They tell me that she was blowing her whistle and holding up her hand, palm out, ordering the deuce-and-a-half to slow down when it slid sideways in the mud and smacked her head-on at full speed.”
Ernie grimaced.
“A mess,” Bernewright continued. “Little girls screaming, parents frantically running through the crowd searching for their children, an enraged pack of Korean men kicking the crap out of the GI who’d been driving the truck and his passenger. And then Jill Matthewson and her partner pull up in their MP jeep, siren blaring.
“Her partner jumps out waving his billy club. Jill approaches the accident victim, Chon Un-suk, trying to force the crowd back to let the girl have a chance to breathe. So far, no one’s attending to the girl so Jill kneels down and does what she can. Clears the air passage, checks for bleeding, loosens the girl’s clothing and elevates her feet. Then she takes off her own fatigue blouse and wraps the girl to keep her warm, hopefully delay the onset of shock. Meanwhile, a Korean ambulance arrives but at the same time the girl’s father erupts on the scene. He shoves Jill out of the way, sees his daughter on the ground and then, realizing she’s still breathing-barely-he lifts her up and starts to carry her home. The Korean paramedics stand by and do nothing. Jill’s shocked. She’s sure the girl’s suffering from internal bleeding, and she knows enough about first aid to know that in order to save her life the girl has to be taken to an emergency room immediately, if not sooner.
“When nobody acts, she does. Jill grabs the father and holds him, screaming and pointing to the ambulance. The father won’t hear of it. Why, no one knows.”
I did. Or at least I thought I did. I explained it to Sergeant Bernewright. And to Ernie. In Korean tradition, it is believed that if someone dies away from home their spirit, when it rises and leaves the body, will become disoriented. It will become lost and then, being away from home, away from the shrine set up by its family, the spirit will become a wandering ghost. Without the proper ceremonies, without offerings of incense and food, without the prayers of the people who loved the spirit in life, it will never be able to make the transition from wandering ghost to revered ancestor. So Chon Un-suk’s father’s reaction was rational from his point of view. He didn’t want his daughter to be hauled away by strangers to die alone in some emergency room. He wanted to take care of her. He wanted to make sure she died at home, not on the street where she’d be lost and would wander alone for eternity-with no one to burn incense at her shrine, no one to pray at her gravesite, and no one to make offerings of food and drink to ease her sojourn through the underworld.
A hungry ghost, the Koreans call such a creature. A spirit whom no one remembers. A spirit who can’t find its way home.
Ernie stirred more sugar into his coffee. “When did this shit start?” he asked.
“What?” I asked. “Wandering ghosts?”
“Yeah.”
“In ancient times.”
“How come I never heard of it?”
“How many Koreans have you been around that died away from home?”
He thought about this. I knew the answer. None.
“Besides,” I said, “ensuring that a loved one dies at home is not a modern custom. Most Koreans trust Western medicine nowadays and most of them die in hospitals. Alone.”
“Progress,” Bernewright said.
“When Jill couldn’t stop the father,” I asked, “what did she do?”
“She wrestled with the old man,” Bernewright told us. “He wrestled back. And then a horrible thing happened. Chon Un-suk fell to the ground. ‘With a big thud,’ Jill told me. Everyone was shocked and for a moment-Jill said it seemed like hours-there was a deathly silence. Then, like one person, the Korean crowd inhaled and when they exhaled it was in a solid rush and they fell upon Jill like a pack of demons.”