Martin Limon - G. I. Bones

As of yet, there wasn’t an emergency medical service set up in the city of Seoul. And even the phone lines, what there were of them, were constantly overloaded and not much use when you had to get through to an ambulance. So, Moretti grabbed his army-issue first-aid kit and followed the business girls outside into the cold night.

He’d done this before, Cort found out. And when first aid had not been enough, he’d arranged for one of his trucks to transport a sick or injured person to the one functioning Korean hospital about four miles away in downtown Seoul.

On the way to the scene, Moretti was informed by the babbling women that a policeman had beaten the girl for nonpayment of the commission she owed to the Seven Dragons on a particularly large windfall-twenty dollars, they said-which the girl had earned in a secret assignation with some big-shot American. Moretti asked the girls who the American was but they claimed they didn’t know. At the scene, Moretti used his army-issue flashlight and determined that the girl had been beaten badly but the external bleeding was not arterial. He cleaned and stanched the various flows as best he could but whether or not she had internal bleeding, only time would tell. The girl was conscious now and Moretti asked her who’d done this to her. She wouldn’t talk. And then Moretti realized that the girls who’d brought him here had disappeared. The injured girl’s eyes widened as she stared at the village’s one streetlamp casting its amber glow on the main drag. Moretti turned. Approaching him were seven men, all of them wielding clubs.

Words were exchanged. The men told Moretti that the girl was their property and ordered him to stand away from her. Moretti refused. Within seconds, they were at it. Moretti threw his metal first-aid kit at them, kicking, punching, and clawing for his life. Other residents of Itaewon alerted the three G.I. truck drivers and they ran to the scene to join the melee, trying to pull Moretti to safety.

MPs were alerted. After a few minutes they arrived, sirens blaring, along with the Korean National Police. According to the first MP on the scene, seven men, just dark shadows, fled the moment their jeep rounded the corner. The MPs gave chase but lost them in the maze of dark passageways behind the main drag of Itaewon.

The three truck drivers had been hacked and stabbed and pummeled and sawed and beaten until there would’ve been nothing left to save if the MPs hadn’t arrived when they did. They were lucky to be alive. The injured truck drivers were driven back to Yongsan Compound and checked into the emergency room of the 121 Evacuation Hospital.

But Moretti was missing. The seven thugs had taken him with them.

That night, the MPs started kicking doors in.

The KNPs protested. Eighth Army law enforcement had only limited jurisdiction in Itaewon; they could arrest G.I. s only. But by now dozens of MPs had seen how badly the three G.I. truck drivers had been beaten and they were enraged. And they knew who they were looking for: the Itaewon Chil Yong.

The MPs forced their way into all the usual haunts that the Seven Dragons frequented: nightclubs, bars, brothels, the black-market warehouses. But Snake, Horsehead, and Dragon’s Claw Number One, along with their four brethren, were nowhere to be found.

Neither was Moretti.

Judging by the shape they’d found the three truck drivers in, the MPs thought that Moretti was probably dead. The Seven Dragons must have taken his body because they wanted to eliminate all evidence of the crime. Without a body to prove that a murder had been committed, and without weapons to prove how the murder had been perpetrated, the likelihood of the Seven Dragons being indicted- much less convicted-was virtually nil.

The reaction at 8th Army headquarters was outrage. Not at the men who’d perpetrated this crime but at the MPs who’d gone on their midnight rampage in search of Mori Di. The Korean newspapers were flooded with reports of Korean citizens being ripped cruelly from their homes in the middle of the night, of innocent black-market entrepreneurs being interrogated and slapped around by long-nosed foreigners, and of the Korean National Police being shamed in their own precincts by burly American MPs who showed no regard for the sanctity of Korean law.

All of the responding MPs were brought up on charges.

The civil affairs operation that Moretti had run in Itaewon was curtailed. His headquarters building was decommissioned by 8th Army and turned over to the ROK Ministry of the Interior. Construction operations, financed by American money, were no longer run by 8th Army Engineering but shifted to Korean subcontractors approved by the ROK government. This was supposed to help strengthen the Korean economy. But the real reason was to insure that there was not another Itaewon Massacre.

After a hearing conducted by the judge advocate general, the MPs who responded to Moretti’s distress call that night were formally reprimanded though not brought up on court-martial charges, and all of them were shipped back to the States.

When the dust settled, the hunt for Moretti had been forgotten. As was the hunt for the seven men who had assaulted him. Forgotten by everybody, that is, except for an MP investigator named Cort.

The progress report I turned into Staff Sergeant Riley at the 8th Army CID office indicated that our search of Itaewon the previous night for Corporal Paco Bernal had turned up negative results.

“You mean he’s not there?” Riley asked us.

I shrugged. Ernie was busy fixing himself a cup of coffee poured from the big silver urn behind Miss Kim’s desk.

“I can’t tell the first sergeant this shit,” Riley said, “that you didn’t find nothing.”

“Why not? That’s what happened.”

“So you don’t have any leads on the whereabouts of this guy?”

I shrugged again. “We’re working on it,” I said.

“The provost marshal wants positive, measurable progress,” Riley said. “Estimates of when a goal will be attained. Not just ‘we didn’t find nothing.’”

“If they want positive,” I said, “they’ll just have to wait.”

“No, they won’t,” Riley said, grabbing a pencil. He spoke as he wrote. “Ongoing searches of the areas the suspect was known to frequent are expected to turn up results prior to the next reporting period.”

“Bullshit.”

Riley looked up from his work. “What do you think we do here?”

Ernie finished his coffee.

The two of us left the CID office and drove over to the barracks at the 21 T Car motor pool. According to the head houseboy, Paco Bernal had not returned to his room. A couple of the G.I. s who knew him couldn’t provide any new information and, moreover, they didn’t seem concerned about Paco’s fate.

As we walked back to the jeep, Ernie said, “They really watch out for one another in this unit, don’t they?”

As we left 21 T Car and drove out Gate 9, heading toward Itaewon, I surprised Ernie by telling him to turn left on the road leading toward Namsan Tunnel.

He swiveled his head and asked, “We going downtown?”

I nodded.

“What the hell for?”

“You’ll see.”

I’m not sure why I hadn’t told Riley that we had thought we had actually seen Paco Bernal-although only fleetingly. Something told me it wasn’t going to be easy to catch Paco until he wanted to be caught.

At the tollbooth I tossed a hundred won into the tin basket. Ernie gunned the jeep’s engine and slid through the milling field of kimchee cabs. Namsan means literally “South Mountain” and it hovers on the southern edge of Seoul like a sentinel monitoring the life of the entire city. The tunnel that was recently carved through it is the technological pride of the country. It’s open mouth loomed before us.