Martin Limon - The Wandering Ghost

The next problem was the death of Warrant Officer Bufford.

Ernie and I simply said that when we arrived at the scene Bufford was already dead. During his attempted assault on Corporal Matthewson, she’d exercised her right of self-defense. Bufford had hit his head against one of the dragon’s teeth, and while we were tending to her, he had apparently died of asphyxiation, facedown in the mud. 8th Army had to accept this story because they had no evidence to contradict it.

Why were Ernie and I so concerned with engineering an unwritten deal not to embarrass 8th Army? Because of Corporal Jill Matthewson.

At first, there’d been talk of charging her with treason.

After all, she’d been instrumental in the occupation-however brief-of a U.S. Army installation by foreign nationals. She’d assisted in the knocking down of the Camp Casey main gate and in the obliteration of the statute of the giant MP, not to mention the demolition of the front half of the 2nd Division Provost Marshal’s Office. In addition, she’d gone AWOL for twenty-nine days. Some of the honchos at 8th Army wanted to slap Jill Matthewson with a dishonorable discharge.

Ernie and I stood our ground. If we hadn’t retained possession of Colonel Alcott’s black market ledger, if it hadn’t been tucked away safely in a business girl’s hooch in Itaewon, we would’ve had no leverage. As it was, 8th Army knew that if they charged Jill Matthewson with treason, we’d fight back and the entire command structure of the 2nd Infantry Division would go down, all the way up to the level of a brigadier general.

We went so far as to demand that Jill be given an honorable discharge. This was a little more difficult to sell. We claimed Jill had been acting as an undercover agent and that she had to gain the confidence of the protestors. This was all nonsense but we said it anyway. The proof of this assertion was that Jill Matthewson attempted to fire on the ROK Army troops who, she thought, were about to encroach on Camp Casey.

It was crazy but it worked. The overriding desire of the 8th Army bosses was to avoid scandal. They didn’t want history to record that the first female MP ever assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division had been driven to armed insurrection.

On the day she left Korea, Ernie and I drove Jill out to the countryside north of Seoul. Madame Chon met us there, amidst hills covered with well-tended lawns and dotted with stone monuments. The two women embraced. Madame Chon led Jill over to one of the tombstones. Chon Un-suk’s name, in Chinese characters. had been freshly carved into granite. The sky glowed a greenish blue, and was veiled with wispy gray clouds. Jill and Madame Chon burned incense, breathed in the sharp odor of jasmine, and bowed to the spirit of the departed girl.

Madame Chon was happy. Now her daughter’s ghost could reside with her ancestors and would no longer have to wander.

I hoped that was true

On the drive back to Seoul, I told Jill that during her tour in the 2nd Infantry Division, she and Marv Druwood had been the only two real MPs the Division had.

From a muddy rice paddy, a white crane flapped its wings, lifted into the sky, and flew lazily off into an endless eternity of blue.