G. I. Bones

5

That night, Ernie and I caught a kimchee cab out to the ville and then entered into the den of iniquity known as the King Club. We were wearing our running-the-ville outfits: blue jeans, sneakers, sports shirts and nylon jackets with fire-breathing dragons embroidered on the back. In other words, we looked like two typical G.I. s out to spend a mindless evening of drinking beer and playing pinch-butt with as many Korean business girls as we could get our hands on.

During the duty day, Ernie and I are required to wear a white shirt with a tie and a sports jacket. Not uniforms. That getup, coupled with our short haircuts, fairly screams that the two guys you’re looking at are 8th Army CID agents. But that’s the military mind. They want us in civilian clothes in order to blend in with the civilian population but they don’t want us wearing the clothes that civilians actually wear.

At least now, after work, we could dress like two regular G.I. s. Not that we were fooling many people. Itaewon is a small village and most everybody knew who we were.

Miss Kwon hadn’t arrived at work yet and the all-Korean rock-and-roll band on the stage was still tuning up so I started talking to the middle-aged woman behind the bar, Mrs. Bei. She managed the place for the real owner.

“Who’s the G.I. who complained about Miss Kwon?” I asked.

Mrs. Bei frowned. She didn’t know his name. She only knew that he was a black man, that he wasn’t a youngster, and then she held her splayed fingers at the side of her head to show me that his hair stuck out farther than army regulation allowed.

There are over 1,500 American G.I. s stationed at 8th Army headquarters on Yongsan Compound. After you’ve been here awhile, and especially when you’re in my line of work, you get to know quite a few of them. In fact, 8th Army is much like a small town, full of gossip and backbiting, and everyone knows all about everyone else‘s business.

Back at my barstool, I told Ernie what Mrs. Bei had said.

Without hesitating, Ernie said, “Hilliard.”

He was referring to Sergeant First Class Quinton A. Hilliard, the NCO-in-charge of the 8th Army EEO Office. Equal Employment Opportunity.

I agreed. It sounded like Hilliard.

After the “race riot” in Itaewon in 1972, the 8th Army honchos finally acquiesced to setting up what other government agencies already had: a staff to monitor race relations within the command. Prior to 1972, Itaewon had been segregated. White soldiers, and other “honorary” whites like Chicanos and Asians, frequented the red-light village of Itaewon. The black soldiers had their own smaller ville on the other side of Yongsan Compound, in a district of Seoul called Samgakji. Samgakji is still there, and still thriving, but now black soldiers can venture into Itaewon without fear of reprisal, for the most part. However, when Ernie and I had occasionally gone to Samgakji on an investigation, we’d never once seen a white G.I.

Ernie and I ordered beers and sat through the rock band’s first set. After a half hour, when the club was almost full, Miss Kwon still hadn’t shown up. We decided to look for her. I asked around amongst the business girls and received directions to her hooch which was, as I suspected, located in the maze of dark alleys behind the nightclub district. We pushed through the double doors of the King Club and stepped out into the street. After some searching through narrow pedestrian lanes and knocking on doors, we found the hooch the King Club business girls had described. It was a three-story building behind a high brick wall.

I pounded on the wooden gate. When a cleaning woman opened up, I explained who we were and who we wanted to talk to. The bent-over old woman nodded and shuffled off slowly and led us to Miss Kwon’s hooch on the top floor. She slid open the oiled-paper door. Darkness. Ernie stepped into the room and switched on the single naked bulb hanging from the ceiling.

The room was just a ten-foot-by-twelve-foot square with flowered paper peeling off the walls and yellow vinyl pasted to the floor, empty except for a few scraps of newspaper crumpled at the bottom of a plastic armoire.

“Domang kasso,” the cleaning woman said. Miss Kwon had run away.

I was happy for the shy young woman. Maybe she could escape from this life, escape from doing things that she hated to do.

Ernie was less optimistic. “She’ll be back,” he said.

Cort was reassigned to other investigations; the usual ones that came up back in those days, thievery-of heating oil, food, medical supplies- anything that could alleviate the unrelenting poverty the Koreans were living in, being the most prevalent. At that time G.I. s weren’t allowed to wear civilian clothes. They were ordered to be in uniform at all times, on and off compound. In spring and summer, they wore puke green army fatigues. But in the autumn, when the leaves turned red and yellow and brown and the nights became longer and colder, G.I. s started to wear their woolen winter fatigues. The tailor shops in Itaewon specialized in sewing a silk lining inside them and, if a G.I. popped for the money, he enjoyed the luxury of wearing a very comfortable set of clothes-smooth on the inside, warm on the outside.

That was the type of uniform Moretti was wearing on the night of the Itaewon Massacre.

During his off-duty time, Cort searched the Korean open-air markets looking for Moretti’s uniform. It was a long shot, he knew, but what Cort was counting on was that in Korea at that time, nothing was wasted, not even a wool uniform stolen from a dead G.I.

Cort knew Moretti’s uniform size and, of course, Moretti would’ve had his name tag sewn onto the front of his fatigue blouse but that could’ve easily been removed. But what might’ve been overlooked by the person selling the garment would be the laundry tag, a strip of white cloth with the G.I.’s initials written on it, attached to every piece of clothing a G.I. owned so that during the massive laundry operation conducted each morning in the 8th Army barracks, each item could be identified. Even socks.

The old women dealing in salvaged clothing at the canvas lean-to stalls in the Itaewon Market must’ve thought Cort was a very careful shopper. In the weeks following the Itaewon massacre, Cort sorted through mountains of used clothing. Finally, his diligence paid off. He found a pair of wool pants with the silk lining ripped out, but with a small white patch sewn on the inside of the left cuff bearing the initials FRM.

Three spots of crusted blood had dried into the material.

Cort made a show of bargaining with the proprietress. In the end he paid too much for the garment but he didn’t mind. He immediately had the blood tested at the 121 Evacuation Hospital. The result was O-positive, the same blood type as Moretti. That didn’t prove it was his, not for sure, but it was indicative.

Cort indicated in his notes that this discovery gave him a certain sense of accomplishment. It also gave him a sense of sadness. Now hope of finding Moretti alive was all but gone.

Based on the new evidence, Cort asked for permission to upgrade the Moretti case from absent without leave to murder. Eighth Army thought it over but without a body, they wouldn’t upgrade the case. And furthermore, Cort was ordered to lay off. If he didn’t, his investigative specialty would be pulled from his personnel records and he’d be sent back to where he came from. The infantry. That meant walking the DMZ in three feet of snow in the freezing Korean winter.

In his notes, Cort speculated as to why 8th Army had refused. To him, the answer was obvious. For public relations reasons they wished the Itaewon Massacre had never happened. And if they ignored it, it would go away.

Cort saluted, said nothing, and, on his own time, continued to investigate the death of Technical Sergeant Flo Moretti.

The next morning, I sat in a teahouse in the Namyong-dong district of Seoul and watched as Doctor Yong In-ja studied the copies of the building plans I’d purchased from Seoul City Hall. She immediately absorbed the meaning of what I was trying to do.

“You compare these,” she said, pointing to the short stack of papers, “to the buildings today and see if you can find some place where they might have, a long time ago, buried Mori Di.”

“Exactly.”

“But they might’ve buried the body some other place.”

“Maybe not,” I said. I explained my theories of how crowded Seoul was in those days-and still is-and how digging a grave and dropping a body in it wouldn’t likely go unnoticed. And the culprits couldn’t take the chance that someone might spot them, report them, and an honest cop might be called. Or at least a cop who would then blackmail them for more money than they wanted to pay.

Doc Yong frowned at my implication that the Korean cops in those days were corrupt.

“Everybody was poor at that time,” she said.

I nodded in agreement. People were poor now too but, thankfully, not as desperate as they were then.

“Maybe they took the body to mountain,” Doc Yong said. By “mountain” she meant the countryside. Korea is a mountainous country and every square inch of arable land is either cultivated or used for human habitation. So when Koreans refer to the wilderness they often use the word mountain because only on craggy peaks does any sort of wilderness still remain.

“There were too many roadblocks in those days,” I replied. “Some by the Korean army, some by the American army. Everybody was looking for North Korean Communist agents. It would be too dangerous for the killers to rent a truck and take the body out of Seoul. If they were stopped by 8th Army MPs, they’d be toast.”

“Toast?”

“It means they’d be burned, like a slice of bread.”

She nodded, not quite sure what I meant. I also explained why I didn’t believe the Han River was a good place to dispose of a body. And no unidentified G.I. bodies, floating or otherwise, had been reported any time after the Itaewon Massacre. Cort had checked.

“So they bury him someplace safe,” she said.

“Exactly.”

“In the buildings they own.”

“They didn’t own the buildings on paper but they controlled them.”

“Same-same,” she said.

I agreed. “Same-same.”

In her agitation, Doc Yong was stooping to using business-girl slang. It figured she’d pick some up, working with them all the time. Probably she had picked it up unconsciously, what with the empathy she felt for those downtrodden women.

I’d already told Doc Yong about Miss Kwon packing up and leaving Itaewon. She took the news stoically but asked me to continue to check out the details of the complaint that had been filed against the young woman. I promised her I would.

She riffled through the photocopies of the old building plans, as if airing them out, and then slid the pile back to me.

“So where are you going to look?”

“Moretti’s headquarters,” I said, pointing on the drawing to the southwest corner of what is now the basement of the Grand Ole Opry Club. “Here. In the basement, where they make the beer deliveries.”

I looked into her black eyes. I longed to reach out and take her hand in mine but that would be inappropriate in this formal setting. Instead, I cleared my throat and said, “On your day off, when you’re not working, can I see you? We could go somewhere. We could talk.”

At first Doc Yong seemed puzzled, as if she was having trouble translating my words, mentally, from English into Korean. And then, once my full meaning sank in, she looked alarmed. Regaining control of herself, she smiled.

“That’s very nice of you,” she replied. “But I’ve been very busy.”

“We can go where you feel comfortable,” I said. “On the compound, if you like.”

I knew that being seen in public with a foreigner was not what most respectable Korean women wanted. On 8th Army compound we’d be away, if not from all gossips, at least from the Korean ones. She hesitated, thinking things over.

“Maybe some day,” she said finally. “But not now. Many things are happening.”

The disappointment knotted in my gut. I hoped my face showed nothing.

“When things quiet down,” she said, smiling.

But we both knew that in Itaewon things never quiet down.

The Yongsan Compound Facilities Command is located in a cement-walled building with Roman pillars out front that looks vaguely like the home of an old southern cotton plantation owner. However, it was built by the Japanese Imperial Army during the three-and-a-half decades after 1910 when they forcibly colonized what had been the Kingdom of Korea. The 8th Army Equal Employment Opportunity Office was one of the many bureaucracies housed here.

When Ernie and I walked into the EEO Office, a black female soldier at the front studying some paperwork didn’t bother to look up to greet us and ask, “Can I help you?” She kept her eyes glued to the paperwork.

She was an attractive young woman, a private first class. Her name tag said Wallings. Her shoulders were tense and she clutched the paperwork as if she were afraid it might make a break for freedom.

“Is Sergeant Hilliard in?” I asked.

She didn’t look up. Instead she said, “Who wants to know?” Racial tension was high in the early seventies in the army just as it was throughout American society.

I pulled out my CID badge, opened it, and lowered it until it was between her nose and the paperwork she was still reading. She snorted, twisted her face, but still didn’t look up at us. “You gonna have to wait,” she said.

Ernie’d had enough. He slammed his open palm down on her desk. “Hilliard!” he said. “Now!”

The young woman rose from her desk and started cursing. Ernie cursed back. While they shouted at one another, I walked back toward a room with a nameplate that said: Sergeant Firs t Class Quinton A. Hilliard, 8th Army EEO NCO-in-char ge.

PFC Wallings shouted at me. “Get your ass back here, damn you!”

I went through the door to Sergeant Hilliard’s office. He was on his feet-Afro a little too wide for his head, green fatigues neatly pressed, a belly just slightly protruding over his highly polished brass belt buckle.

“Why you messing with my secretary?” he shouted. He rushed past me out into the front room and pointed a finger at Ernie. “You keep your damn white-ass hands to yourself.”

Ernie hadn’t touched anyone, not yet, and he told Hilliard to get bent.

Hilliard stepped toward Ernie and I rushed forward and placed my body between them. PFC Wallings was still shouting and waggling her finger, her pretty face contorted in rage. Suddenly, from down the hallway, about a half-dozen more people joined us. One of them was a second lieutenant, a white female with short-cropped blonde hair, doing her best to be heard amidst the yelling, beseeching Sergeant Hilliard to calm down, asking PFC Wallings to take her seat behind her desk.

Ernie had vented as much as he wanted to and now he was grinning, arms crossed. I kept my face straight, standing protectively in front of Ernie, not because I was worried that either Wallings or Hilliard would hurt him but because I was worried that they might try and then Ernie would be in trouble for knocking them out.

The second lieutenant rushed back and forth between Wallings and Hilliard, pleading for calm. Hilliard never would’ve confronted Ernie like this out in the ville. Only here where he felt safe, with plenty of witnesses and plenty of co-workers to protect him, was he a tiger. PFC Wallings, however, was truly angry-and ready to fight. A real hellion, with pent-up anger, the cause of which I could only begin to imagine. The young lieutenant, whose name tag said Beresf ord, kept most of her attention on Wallings. Smart girl. Finally, Lieutenant Beresford convinced PFC Wallings to stop shouting and take her seat.

Whatever happened to giving orders? Second Lieutenant Beresford was acting more like a social worker than a commanding officer. A young female lieutenant, that’s why she’d been assigned to this office. EEO had no real power in 8th Army except the power to occasionally embarrass the command. No officer who was ambitious would accept an assignment to EEO. Beresford was either too naive to realize that or, more likely, she had no plans to make the military her career.

When things calmed down, Lieutenant Beresford turned to Ernie and me and asked to see our credentials. We flashed our CID badges.

“Is this an official visit?” she asked.

“That’s the only reason we’d be here,” Ernie replied.

Hilliard glowered at him.

I spit out what we were after, mentioning the King Club and Miss Kwon’s name.

“Yes,” Beresford said. “I remember that one. We have a copy of the complaint here, don’t we Sergeant Hilliard?”

“We gonna turn it over to them?”

“Why not?”

“Don’t they have to subpoena it or something?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary. They just want to look at it. Isn’t that so, Agent Sueno?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Hilliard crossed his arms. “Well, I don’t like it.”

Beresford looked dismayed and her face reddened. Her complexion was pocked from teenage acne and she wore thick-lensed glasses. She seemed like a nice woman; probably recently graduated from college, she was trying to do her best here although, with our long history of racial tension at 8th Army, I believed she was in over her head. Fights between black and white soldiers were common, hard feelings ubiquitous.

“Well, I ain’t giving them nothing,” Hilliard told Lieutenant Beresford, “If you want to turn one of our reports over to them, that’s your lookout. I’m leaving.” Hilliard grabbed his garrison cap and stormed toward the exit. “Hold my calls,” he told PFC Wallings on the way out. It didn’t make any sense but I suppose he thought it sounded good.

Ernie grinned again. “On his way over to the NCO Club for a shot and a beer.”

Lieutenant Beresford’s face turned even redder. Misconduct on duty reflected poorly on a soldier’s immediate supervisor. Or at least it should.

“What was the name again?” Beresford asked.

“Miss Kwon,” I replied. “At the King Club.”

PFC Wallings sat at the front desk, her back to us, fuming. Lieutenant Beresford didn’t ask her to retrieve the file. Instead, she walked over to a row of gray metal filing cabinets, rummaged through the green folders inside until she found what she was looking for. The complaint was a typed, onionskin sheet, three pages long. She disappeared down the hallway and two minutes later she returned with a photocopy.

“Here you are,” she said.

We thanked her. PFC Wallings was so angry that she rapped the heels of her combat boots rhythmically on the floor

Once we were outside the building, Ernie said, “Nuthouse.”

I didn’t argue.

In the Serious Incident Report concerning the Itaewon Massacre, Cort never revealed his thoughts on what might’ve happened to Moretti’s body. But despite being taken off the case, he continued to interview everyone he could locate with knowledge of the incident. Even the Buddhist nuns.

Once the Seven Dragons took over as the new landlords, the Buddhist nuns, and the orphans, were run out of Itaewon. Someone had written, in Korean, the name of the Buddhist order that the nuns belonged to. The same person also had written down the area of Kyongki Province where their nunnery was located. I could tell it was the same person because the note was still in the file and the handwriting matched perfectly. On a Sunday afternoon about a month after the Itaewon Massacre, Cort signed out a jeep from the 21 T Car motor pool, filled it with mogas and, using an army-issue map, drove out to a Buddhist temple known as the Temple of Constant Truth.

When the nuns greeted him, they were confused at first as to why a G.I. had driven all the way up to the slopes of Yongmun Mountain. Then, Cort showed them the black-and-white photograph he had retrieved from Moretti’s military personnel file. They understood immediately and soon Cort was sitting cross-legged on a warm floor drinking tea with a half-dozen, bald-headed female Buddhist nuns. He came to understand through sign language and some broken English that these nuns had been the cadre assigned to operate the Itaewon orphanage and take care of the children.

Cort asked them where the children were.

The nuns didn’t want to talk about it but some of them started crying and then apologized for their unseemly display of emotion. Cort assumed that because of lack of funds, the nuns had been forced to turn the kids over to one of the many international organizations which were actively saving children all over South Korea. Being a polite kind of guy, Cort didn’t press the issue. Instead, he sipped on his tea and waited for them to calm down.

Then Cort asked them about the night of the Itaewon Massacre.