“Okay,” Bufford said. “I overreacted. But you make that statement,” he told Ernie, “and sign it and answer all our questions. You got that?”
Ernie crossed his arms and shrugged.
Before anyone could object to the deal, Colonel Alcott shouted, “Back to your duties! Everybody. Move it!”
While Ernie was making his statement, Colonel Alcott called me out into the hallway. When we were alone, he came so close I had to retreat a step. He was clean shaven and smelled of cologne and his civilian clothes were neatly pressed. My guess was that he’d encountered us as he’d taken a last turn through the Provost Marshal’s Office before heading off to the Indianhead Officers’ Club. Socializing is a big part of an officer’s life, if he’s ambitious.
In a low voice, Alcott said, “You will not make any further false accusations about the Druwood case. That was a training accident and only a training accident. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” I understood only too well. These guys were not going to let two low-level 8th Army CID agents rock their cozy little boat.
“If you persist in these accusations,” Alcott continued, “you will be guilty of spreading false rumor concerning the integrity of the chain of command, a crime that is prohibited under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. And, I might add, a crime that is taken extremely seriously up here at Division. Do you understand?”
“I understand, sir.” Colonel Alcott was right about the UCMJ. One of its provisions specifically states that it is a criminal offense to spread rumors that can be shown to have a deleterious effect on the morale of a military unit. But one man’s rumor is another man’s fact.
Two armed MPs marched down the narrow hallway. Colonel Alcott stepped away from me and acknowledged their greeting. After they’d passed, he closed in on me again.
“I suggest, Agent Sueno,” he told me, “that you and your partner wrap up your investigation and wrap it up soon.”
“We haven’t found Corporal Matthewson, sir.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found. Did that ever occur to you?”
“It did, sir.”
“So maybe you’d better cut your losses and head back to Seoul before one of these peripheral issues you’ve been nosing into explodes in your face.” Colonel Alcott paused and stared at me. “Now I’m not going to ask again if you understand me because, let’s cut the shit, I know you understand me. I’m telling you, for the last time, wrap up your report and get the hell out of Tongduchon.”
With that, he swiveled smartly and marched his little body down the hallway.
Ok-hi led the way, the heels of her black leather boots clicking down a flight of stone steps that led toward the East Bean River. About twenty yards below us, lining the muddy banks, were row upon row of wooden shanties. Candles glowed from within, as did an occasional cooking fire; some of the homes were lit by electric bulbs. The river moved sluggishly beneath the weight of moonlight, and the odor from the almost stagnant flow was what you’d expect from any waste dump. Rancid. Laundry fluttered from lines; water sloshed from buckets; old men barked; children shouted.
“The Turkey Farm,” Ok-hi said. “No more bad thing here. KNPs say no can do.”
So the brothels had been replaced by poor families. Families that had probably traveled from all over the Korean countryside, looking for work in Tongduchon, a city that, because of its proximity to Camp Casey, had become an economic boomtown.
A three-quarters moon hovered above the hills on the far side of the valley, its red glow shining on the Confucian shrine, a pagoda-like structure made of stone. The back of the pagoda was to the river but its face frowned out onto a small plaza. The entrance to the shrine was guarded by stone heitei, mythical lionlike creatures that guard all religious sites in Korea.
“There,” Ok-hi said, pointing with her open palm. “Old king die.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Ernie said. “How old was he?”
“No.” Ok-hi shook her head vehemently. “Not old. King young but he die long time ago.”
“How long ago?”
“Long time.” Her cute nose crinkled. “How long? How you say?” She looked at me. “Menggu.”
“Mongols,” I said.
“Yeah. King die when Mongol come.”
Ernie whistled. “That had to be before I got drafted.”
About seven hundred years ago, to be exact.
Surrounding the plaza were shops and teahouses and what looked like chophouses and bars. None of the buildings were very big. The largest, an ancient wooden edifice some three stories tall, stood directly opposite the shrine. The people milling about appeared, from this distance, to be Koreans. I didn’t see any GIs. I did notice, however, that a paved, two-lane road ran north from the shrine. Large enough for a KNP patrol car or an American jeep or even, with a good driver, a two-and-a-half-ton truck.
So here it was. The Turkey Farm that I’d heard so much about. An eyesore that had caused so much embarrassment for both Korean and U.S. authorities that they’d finally mustered the will to clean it up. What stories this village must hold. Of young girls sold into indentured servitude, forced into prostitution. Of GIs during the Korean War, and in the years after, rolling their vehicles down muddy roads, pulling up along the banks of the river, paying for sex with a bar of soap or a pack of cigarettes. The girls from the impoverished countryside being brought in younger and younger, being used, worn out, and tossed aside to make room for more. Whole seas of young women ruined, lost, ravaged by disease. And GIs, their biological lust never sated, experiencing all this, experiencing the unbridled satisfaction of all their desires and then returning home to Dubuque, Iowa or Little Rock, Arkansas, or Pasadena, California, trying to forget what they’d seen. Putting it out of their minds. Getting on with their lives. But never, by no stretch of the imagination, being the same again.
“Sueno!”
It was Ernie’s voice. Angry.
“You just going to stand there all night or are we going to get some work done?”
“Work,” I said. “Right.”
I stepped gingerly down the steep stone steps.
Ok-hi looked at me quizzically, unable to figure me out. Then she shrugged her shoulders, turned, and resumed tip-toeing sideways down the narrow steps. Wading through moonlight.
I’d seen hookers in L.A. Some just high school girls, working to pay for their drug habit. But how did their drug habit start? When they fell in with gang members and pimps. Gang members and pimps who brought the curious young girls along until they were hooked, under their power, and then, and only then, would they put them out on the street.
Even when I was still in junior high school I saw this and marveled at how young girls could fall for it. One of my classmates, Vivian Matatoros, started hanging out with gang members. Everything about her changed. The glasses she wore disappeared, the brown hair pulled back into a pony tail became a frizzed-out mess, and she slid down from the classes that held the top students to the lowest rung of academic hell. So I seldom saw her or had a chance to talk with her or laugh with her. I spotted her only occasionally in the hallways, swaggering with girlfriends who chomped on as much gum and wore as much makeup as their jaw capacity and facial measurements would allow.
One morning, in the passageway behind the girl’s gym, I cornered her. I stood in front of her so she couldn’t ignore me and she couldn’t walk past me. When she realized that she was trapped, she gazed up at me, ready to fight.
“What’s happened to you, Vivian?” I asked.
“Get away from me.”
I wouldn’t let her go. I forced her to talk.
“I was bored,” she told me finally. “No one was paying attention to me.”
I knew the feeling. I told her I often felt the same way. I offered to talk to her, to meet her after school. She looked at me with contempt.