Martin Limon - The Wandering Ghost

To me, the tower had always been the most frightening part of any obstacle course. Standing here in the moonlight, staring up at the sleek structure, I discovered nothing to disabuse me of that opinion. And just last night, Private Druwood had climbed this tower, stood on the top-who knows for how long-and then leaped off, head first, to his death.

I stuck my flashlight in my pocket, marched to the base of the tower, and started to climb. Resolutely, I stared at the silver moon. Praying to it. Making it my own personal goddess. Trying not to look down. Maybe it was my imagination but the higher I climbed, the more fiercely the wind howled.

I remember the day I hit five feet.

I was eleven years old and proud after I measured myself because I was taller than most of the kids in my elementary school. I was proud because now I had a chance to protect myself. And protect the kids who I lived with while being shuffled around to various foster homes.

Some kids were more vulnerable than others. When they were shoved or spanked or shouted at, they took it to heart. They identified with the criticism and little by little the life in their eyes began to fade, and that’s when they began to die. I remember Fausto. He was a cute kid always ready to smile, but the foster father who was raising us wouldn’t stop badgering helpless little Fausto. This foster father saw the entire world as conspiring to keep him down and he not only resented the food and space that Fausto took up, he also resented Fausto’s cheerful attitude. So from the day Fausto arrived in our home, the guy started in on him. Day by day, I saw the life dying in Fausto’s eyes. I tried to stop it and as a reward for my efforts, I was slapped myself. But I was older than Fausto. And three years had passed since I’d hit five feet. I was fourteen now, and five foot ten. The football coach measured me in the high school gym and I was surprised that I’d sprouted up so much. There was something about the magic number. Five-ten. I felt like an adult. Like a man.

One day I arrived home from school and my foster father was already slapping Fausto-enraged because he’d been caught stealing a slice of bread from the cupboard. But it wasn’t stealing. Fausto was hungry because he’d been forced to skip breakfast and then lunch. It was the foster father who was stealing, from the money provided to him by the County of Los Angeles. He slapped Fausto one more time.

I dropped my books, strode into the kitchen, and slammed a straight left into my foster father’s nose. Blood flowed and from the way he squealed you would’ve thought I was the worst killer since Attila the Hun. And, of course, he refused to fight back. Instead, his wife called the social workers and two days later I was escorted from the home.

Fausto stayed. I remember the look in his eye as I left. Later, Dante taught me the words for it: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

In the next three years I grew six more inches-to six foot four-and at the age of seventeen nobody wanted me around. I cramped too many people’s style. After a brief stint in an orphanage, I dropped out of high school and joined the army. An army that included obstacle courses.

I was halfway up the 2nd Division tower. Perspiration poured from my forehead. My arms were straight out, clinging to the flat, smooth surface of the middle platform. These towers were designed by diabolical minds. No protrusions, no handholds, not so much as the head of a bolt sticking out of the smooth wooden surface. Still, you had to hold on somehow, by the pressure of your limbs on flat surfaces and the occasional grip of an edge. The trick was to shinny up from one smooth platform to the next.

Finally, I stood at the top of the tower.

Below sat the jeep. It was too dark to see if Ernie was still in it. Farther to the west stretched the dark Quonset huts and sporadic firelights of Camp Casey. At the far edge of the compound the twenty-foot-tall MP stood as we’d left him. Silent. Staring mindlessly toward the main gate. Beyond the gate, across the MSR, Tongduchon blazed. Blinking lights, flashing neon, rotating yin and yang symbols promising an endless nirvana of entertainment. Even from this distance I could hear taxi horns and the low murmur of rock music and the occasional shout from a drunken GI. Then, in counterpoint, the startled shriek of a Korean business girl.

A cold wind from the north picked up and chilled the perspiration that swathed my body. I hugged myself, staring down at the obstacle course below. The square platform I stood on was about fifteen feet across. If I stood with my back to one edge and ran full tilt to the other I could probably leap about twenty-five or thirty feet out. Just far enough to reach an obstacle on either side of me. One was a row of elevated logs, the other a sandbagged tunnel. No cement. And yet there’d been cement in Private Druwood’s head wound. I’d touched it myself, felt the dried cement crumble in my hand.

I pulled out my flashlight, knelt down, and studied the platform. Smooth as a baby’s complexion. Designed that way and kept that way by the constant rubbing of GIs in fatigues lying up here, face down, hugging the platform. Resting. Grateful to have made it safely to the top but wondering how in the hell they were going to survive the climb back down.

I clicked off the flashlight and stood. But I wasn’t seeing Camp Casey or Tongduchon or feeling the cold Manchurian wind. I was seeing the pale face of Private Marvin Z. Druwood. His corpse. And then his eyes popped open, staring at me, but although I’d never met the man I knew those eyes didn’t belong to Druwood. I’d seen them before. But where? The wind whipped up and slashed cold fingers across my face. And then I knew. Fausto. The little kid I’d left alone. The little kid I’d abandoned to his fate. Those were his eyes in that corpse.

A shot blasted and something tiny and evil whizzed past me, not ten feet away. I dropped to the platform and flattened myself. Unmoving. Hoping that by stillness I would become just a shadow and not a target. I waited ten minutes. Nothing more happened.

Quickly, I climbed down the tower.

When I reached the jeep there was just enough moonlight for me to see that Ernie was dozing. I shook him awake.

“Did you hear that shot?”

“What shot?” he asked.

“When I was on top of the tower, someone took a potshot at me.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

Ernie started the jeep. “How much did you drink out in the ville, Sueno?”

“Not much.”

Ernie snorted. “I’m going to have to get you into rehab.”

I didn’t answer. I was wondering who had shot at me and where the shot had come from and why they’d shot at me. From the sound of the bullet as it whizzed past, the shooter must’ve been a few hundred yards away. Rifle, almost certainly. He could’ve been firing from the shrubbery surrounding the obstacle course, or from a vehicle back on the main road, or even from one of the guard posts on the hills surrounding Camp Casey’s perimeter. If he was trying to kill me, why hadn’t he fired again? Once he’d gotten the range, the second shot would’ve been more accurate.

Our reception here at Division, so far, had been miserable. First, the atmosphere of hostility at the PMO. Then an avalanche of entrenching tools. And now this. Had the same person been behind both incidents? And if so, what was he trying to tell us?

Ernie admitted that he’d actually heard the shot but hadn’t thought anything of it. Just a late-night combat-training exercise, he presumed. Maybe he was right. Maybe that’s what it was. A bullet gone astray.

But also, maybe not.

The next morning, using the address Brandy had provided, Ernie and I located Jill Matthewson’s hooch in a back alley on the west side of East Bean River. Children ran through narrow lanes and street vendors pushed rickety wooden carts, chanting out the nature of their wares. The area teemed with life, primarily because the economy of TDC was booming. Not only was there a steady flow of U.S. dollars from the local GI village, but also agriculture in the surrounding valleys was more productive than ever. President Pak Chung-hee’s Sei Maul Undong, the New Village Movement, was paying off. Government investment in small family farms had improved life throughout the country. Straw-thatched roofs were disappearing, being replaced by weather-resistant tile. TV antennae were springing up. After two decades of drudgery following the devastation of the Korean War, life was improving in Frozen Chosun. Slowly.