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Martin Limon: The Ville Rat

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Martin Limon The Ville Rat

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We backed away into the darkness, Austin still swearing. Once safely around the corner of the nearest building, we trotted away. No sense waiting around to see if he called an MP patrol to come after us. He probably wouldn’t though. It would be embarrassing to admit that two unarmed guys from 8th Army had snatched his clipboard away from him. GIs can be relentless in their teasing. Austin probably wouldn’t want to give them the opening. We slowed to a brisk walk.

“You got the name?” Ernie said.

“Yeah. And the name of the Korean gate guard.”

“What is it?”

“Kim.”

“That doesn’t narrow it down much.”

A third of the country was named Kim. Another third was named Park or Lee.

“No,” I said, “but it’s a start.”

After lying low for a while and downing a couple of shots of soju, Korean rice liquor, we set off through the narrow alley Angela had pointed to, heading for the banks of the Sonyu River.

There were no lights down here, and as we walked single file down the muddy lane we kept our hands on the grease-stained bricks on either side of us. Finally, we emerged onto the runway that paralleled the river. Moonlight reflected off the frozen expanse. To our left, about fifty yards away, the glare of floodlights illuminated the flat bridge leading into Camp Pelham.

“The MPs patrol back here?” Ernie asked.

I shrugged. “That’s what the business girls tell me.”

“They should know,” Ernie said.

We wrapped our coats tighter around our shivering bodies and settled back to wait.

– 3-

The MPs emerged from the darkness beneath the bridge.

There were three of them. Black helmets glistened, reflecting rays from the Camp Pelham floodlights.

“No ROK Army,” Ernie whispered.

In Seoul, 8th Army always has a Korean MP and an American MP patrol together, usually accompanied by a representative of the Korean National Police. The idea is that whatever miscreant they might come across-be he Korean military, American military, or civilian-one of the cops would have jurisdiction over him. Apparently, here at Division, they didn’t worry about such niceties.

As the MPs moved down the far edge of the Sonyu River, Ernie and I stepped back into darkness. About fifteen yards from the bridge, the lead MP stepped into what I first thought was running water, but when his lower leg didn’t disappear, I realized that he was following a line of stepping stones. Deftly, the three men lunged and hopped from one stone to another until they were on our side of the waterway. As they approached, they shone their flashlights into the narrow alleys, but having anticipated this, Ernie and I had each stepped into recessed stone doorways on opposite sides of the pathway. Beams of light slithered up the muddy walkway and disappeared as quickly as they’d appeared. Ernie and I emerged from our hiding places and looked out on the banks of the river just in time to see the last MP turn up a lane at the far end of the row of jumbled buildings.

“They’re heading for the main drag,” Ernie told me. “Come on.”

We followed quickly.

I expected them to pause once they reached the bright lights of Sonyu-ri and from there start their patrol of the bars and nightclubs. Instead, they surprised us and continued across the two-lane road. After winding past a few storage sheds, the patrol found a meandering pathway that led through a clump of chestnut trees at the far end of the village. We had less cover here, so Ernie and I proceeded cautiously, letting the MPs gain a lead until they were out of sight. After a steep incline, the pathway emerged onto a plateau. I turned around. Behind us, in the valley below, the neon of Sonyu-ri sparkled. Ahead, scattered across neatly tended lawns, were dozens of egg-shaped hills, each about six feet high.

“Burial mounds,” Ernie said.

We wound through them. Many were adorned with stone carvings of ancient patriarchs, some with bronze tablets embedded into mortar. I would’ve liked to stop and read them, but we didn’t have time. At the far end of the plateau, we heard the rushing, gurgling noise of a huge volume of water. Ernie held out his hand. I stopped. Below us rolled the dark, murky waters of the Imjin River. North of here was the Demilitarized Zone and beyond that, Communist North Korea.

“Where are they?” I asked.

Ernie pointed.

In the distance, the beam of a lone flashlight flickered. One by one, moonlight revealed three helmets.

“That pathway,” Ernie said. “It leads back toward the village, to the rear of the buildings lining the main drag.”

“First they surround Sonyu-ri,” I said, “then they invade it.”

Ernie shrugged. “They’ve probably caught GIs smoking pot up here before. An easy bust.”

With our Olympian view, we decided not to follow the MPs any longer but to sit back and observe their progress. As we’d expected, it was time to start the exciting part of their evening’s activities: patrolling the nightclubs. They started at the RC-4 end of the strip; first a nightclub, then a bar, and after that a teahouse. We knew how it worked. One MP waited out back, cutting off any means of escape, while the other two entered through the front door, checking for drug use or unruly behavior and walking into both the men’s and women’s byonso, the bathrooms, to make sure there was no untoward activity going on in there. Once they were through, they moved on to the next joint.

“Let’s go to the main gate,” Ernie said. “We’ll wait for them there.”

I agreed. We scurried downhill, careful to avoid the MP patrol as we made our way toward the front gate of Camp Pelham. We didn’t want to confront Specialist Austin again, not yet, so we lingered about a hundred yards from the main gate itself, near the rolling carts that had appeared with the night. They were filled with souvenirs and hot snacks and bottles of soju for the off-duty GIs parading out of the pedestrian exit after a hard day’s work in the 2nd Infantry Division.

One old woman wore a wool scarf and three or four heavy sweaters as she stirred a vat of simmering oil heated by a charcoal briquette. “You eat,” she told me as I approached. “Number hana French fry.” Number one.

“How much for onion rings?” Ernie asked.

“Same same French fry,” the old woman said. “Fifty won.”

“Too much,” Ernie replied.

“Big bag,” the woman countered, holding a folded paper container about the size of a splayed hand. There was printing on the paper. numbers and letters in English. Probably printouts salvaged from the compound itself and then recycled for a more practical use. There’d been times when top-secret documents had been retrieved, folded neatly, grease-stained, and used to serve four ounces of deep-fried cuttlefish.

Ernie nodded his okay. The old woman reached beneath her cart and pulled out a generous handful of sliced onion. She plopped them into an earthenware bowl thick with batter, then lifted them again and dropped them dripping into the boiling oil. Steam and burning grease sizzled into the air. A few seconds later, using metal chopsticks, the old woman fished the onion rings out of the hot oil and deposited them into the paper holder. Ernie munched on an onion ring to see if it met his approval. When it did, he handed her the money. He offered me an onion ring. I accepted it and asked the old woman if the young girl in the red chima-jeogori had bought any of her food last night.

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