Martin Limón - Nightmare Range

The mama-san didn’t know how long the body had been out there. “Three, maybe four days,” she said. Her girls had just conducted their business a few yards farther away from it each day.

“Where is it now?” I asked.

“Policeman take go.” She waved her cigarette, and smoke filtered through the darkened gaps between her teeth.

The morgue was in Chorwon-ni, ten miles to the south. Ten miles south of Nightmare Range, and fifteen miles from the Demilitarized Zone that slashes like a surgeon’s knife through the heart of the Korean Peninsula.

The war had been over for twenty years but still it lingered: a big dumb ghost that refused to go away. No peace treaty had been signed-just a cease-fire. So the fourth and fifth largest armies in the world, armed to their squinting eyeballs, faced each other across the line, fingers on trigger housings, knuckles white, dancing to the sound of no breathing.

Our police escort, Lieutenant Pak, stood back, arms crossed, glaring at the squatting woman. He was a tall man for a Korean, slim but muscular. His khakis were starched and fit as if he had been born in them. I didn’t ask him why it had taken so long to dispose of the body. The non-person status of a “business girl” follows her into death.

One by one the doors to the hooches slid open and groggy young women, their faces still puffed with sleep, gaped at us curiously. Some squatted in long underwear, their arms crossed over their knees, while others lay on the floor, beneath the wrinkled patchworks that were their blankets. All of the girls were ugly in some way: ravaged complexions, tufted hair, splotches of discolored skin. It seemed more like a ward for the incurably ill than a whorehouse.

Maybe it was both.

Lieutenant Pak asked a series of questions of the old woman and I managed, struggling, to keep up with most of it. There had been a number of American units in the field that day and just before nightfall the old woman had stationed a few of her girls near each encampment. As darkness approached, the girls called to the young GIs from just outside the concertina wire.

I’d seen the game before. Sometimes the GI would wade out into the tall grass and lie on the blanket, both he and the deformed girl protected by the enshrouding night. Sometimes the bolder fellows would bring the girls into their tents, risking the wrath of the Sergeant of the Guard and sneaking in and out of the camp with the stealth of a North Korean infiltrator.

I pulled out a map, showed it to the mama-san, and pointed to the area around Nightmare Range and the village of Mantong-ni. The old woman looked at it carefully and consulted with some of the girls. A few of them were up and dressed now. They chattered for a while and then came to a conclusion. With my pen, I marked the area beneath the old woman’s gnarled fingernail.

I asked what type of unit it was. Big guns, they decided.

Lieutenant Pak wiped his hands on the sides of his khaki trousers and took a step toward the gate.

“Mama-san,” I said. “This girl. What was her name?”

“Miss Chon,” the old woman said. “Chon Ki-suk.”

I wrote it down. “Do you have a picture of her?”

The mama-san barked an order and one of the girls handed me a tattered piece of cardboard folded in half like a small book. A VD card. Chon Ki-suk peered out at me from a small black-and-white photograph. She had a round face with full cheeks that sagged like a bloated chipmunk. All visible flesh had been pocked by the craters of skin disease. She differed little from her sisters now breathing heavily around me, a timid little girl awaiting death.

Lieutenant Pak stomped into the mud.

I stood up and walked with him to the gate. As he stooped to get through the small opening, I looked back at the rows of blemished faces sullenly watching our every move. None of them smiled. None of them said goodbye.

My partner, Ernie Bascom, was in the jeep curled up with a brown-paper-wrapped magazine from somewhere in Scandinavia. He unfolded his six-foot frame as we approached and started up the jeep. Some people said he looked like the perfect soldier: blue eyes behind round-lensed glasses, short-cropped sandy-blond hair, the aquiline nose of the European races. What had blown it for him was Vietnam. Pure horse sold by dirty-faced kids through the wire, women taken on the dusty paths between rice paddies, the terror rocket attacks during innocent hours. His placid exterior hid a soul that had written off the world as a madhouse. Looks were deceiving. Especially in Ernie’s case.

We dropped Lieutenant Pak off in Mantong-ni. A dozen straw-thatched farmhouses huddled around the brick-walled police station as if longing for an extinguishing warmth.

Ernie popped the clutch, our tires spun, and we lurched forward into the misted distance.

The roads were still slick, but all that was left of the early morning rain were ponderous gray clouds rolling like slow-motion whales through the hills surrounding the long valley. We plunged into a damp tunnel, and when we came out, the valley widened before us. Dark clouds in the distance glowered at us like fat dragons lowering on their haunches for a nap.

“Nightmare Range,” Ernie said. “Where generals meet to see how much their boys can take.” He pumped lightly on the brakes and slid around a sharp curve. The water-filled rice paddies on either side of the road strained impatiently toward our spinning tires. This valley had been the scene of some of the most horrific battles of the Korean War. Americans, Chinese, Koreans, had all died here, and the bones of some probably still embraced each other deep beneath the piled mud. I had looked it up in the military section in the library, how many had died here. All I remember is that there was a number followed by a lot of zeros.

The austere cement-block building of the Firing Range Headquarters was painted in three alternating shades of green. Inside, a brightly colored relief map of Nightmare Range covered a huge plywood table.

A ROK Army sergeant with short, spiky black hair and a crisply pressed khaki uniform thumbed through a handwritten log of the units that had been using the training facility. He came to the correct date and the correct position and pointed to the entry: Charlie Battery, 2nd of the 71st Artillery. They had returned to their base at Camp Pelham.

“Our next stop, Camp Pelham,” Ernie said.

We returned to the jeep.

“Tough duty, pal.” Ernie leaned back in a patio chair at the snack stand just inside the front gate of Camp Pelham, sipping a cold can of PBR. We were dressed the same way: blue jeans, sneakers, and black nylon jackets with brilliantly hand-embroidered dragons on the back. Standard issue for GIs running the ville.

The outfit usually got us over. We were the right age, both in our early twenties, and we both had the clean, fresh-faced look of American GIs. If we played with the girls enough, laughed, horsed around, toked a few joints, no one would suspect that we were conducting a criminal investigation.

Ernie looked like the typical GI from the heartland of America. I looked like his ethnic sidekick, taller than him by about three inches, broader at the shoulders, with the short jet-black hair of my Mexican ancestors. My face often threw people. The nose was pointed enough, and the skin light enough to make them think that maybe I was just one of them. But I’d grown up on the streets of east LA and I’d heard the racial slurs before. When some GI started in on “wetbacks” somebody usually elbowed him, whispered something in his ear, and looked nervously in my direction. They didn’t have to worry though. That’s part of America, after all. I wouldn’t deny them their fun.