Martin Limon: The Ville Rat

I tried to be friendly to her. Not pushy. I even occasionally left her a small gift, like hand lotion from the PX or a jar of instant coffee, which I knew her mother liked. I’d never asked her out, and I believed she appreciated that too.

Riley treated Miss Kim with indifference. She was just a working colleague to him. Prim and proper wasn’t his style. He liked ’em raunchy and drunk. Where he found his girlfriends I wasn’t quite sure since he worked long hours, but find them he did. I’d get my first hint of a new Riley girlfriend by seeing her scurrying from the men’s latrine to Riley’s room at about two in the morning. He would hide her there, in the barracks, along with a bottle of Old Overwart. That’s all he needed to attain nirvana. At least temporary nirvana, until morning came and the hangover kicked in.

But he was a workhorse, Staff Sergeant Riley was. He kept the office running, even if he was a constant thorn in Ernie’s-and my-side. He completely identified with the provost marshal and with the United States Army. To him, their pronouncements were the revealed word of God, and 8th Army regulations were holy scripture. Ernie and I, he was certain, were apostates and thereby destined for military hell. To us, 8th Army was self-serving and run by careerists who only wanted to safeguard their own paths to promotion. Of course, we usually didn’t say that to Riley. There was no point. We wouldn’t change his mind, and besides, sometimes we needed him.

Like right now.

“Who’s Lieutenant Phillips?” Riley asked.

Ernie turned the page of the newspaper. “Some asshole from Division,” he said.

“Well,” Riley said, “it looks like this asshole from Division has made a formal complaint. Says you assaulted him in front of witnesses.”

“If I’d ‘assaulted’ him,” Ernie said, “he wouldn’t have been able to make a complaint.”

“He says you headbutted him in front of the main gate of Camp Pelham.”

“He headbutted me,” Ernie said.

Riley glanced at me. “Which was it?”

I strode away from Miss Kim’s desk back toward the coffee urn that had stopped brewing. “Like Ernie says,” I replied, “Lieutenant Phillips headbutted him.”

Riley wrote some notes that I knew would be relayed to Colonel Brace, the 8th Army provost marshal. “You’re gonna have to sign a statement,” he said, “both of you.”

“Write it up,” Ernie said, still studying his paper.

“Second Division pukes,” Riley said, muttering beneath his breath. Then he said, “Zero nine hundred. Mandatory formation in the JAG conference room. Be there.”

“Bite me,” Ernie said.

“Mandatory,” Riley said, glaring at him. His favorite word.

“Attention to orders!”

All the JAG officers and the clerks and the MPs and the Criminal Investigation agents stopped their milling about and snapped to attention. Colonel Walter P. Brace, the 8th Army provost marshal, stood at the front of the judge advocate general’s conference room, and next to him were two of our fellow CID agents, Jake Burrows and Felix Slabem. Margaret Mendelson, a female second lieutenant, read the citation, mimicking perfectly the slow drawl of 8th Army officialese. I’d seen her before, a new JAG officer. She had long, reddish-brown hair that she tied atop her head when she was in uniform. She wore the knee-length skirt and tight green jacket of the US Army female dress-green uniform and most of the men in the room were happy to watch her rather than the Sad Sacks who were being honored.

Burrows and Slabem were brownnosers from the word go. Everybody knew it, but their career strategies seemed to be paying off. What they’d done was spend the last three months auditing 8th Army’s Non-Appropriated Fund activities-NAF, for short-in a comprehensive review required by an act of Congress every ten years. They’d looked at the records covering the post exchange, the commissary, the Central Locker Fund, the Defense Youth Activities center, and both the 8th Army officers’ club and the half-dozen or so NCO and enlisted clubs.

“Mainly they audited the steam and cream,” Ernie whispered to me. He was referring to the on-base massage parlors also run by Non-Appropriated Funds, but he said it loud enough for a few frowning faces to turn and glare at us.

The DPCA, the Director of Personnel and Community Activities, stepped up to present the award: the Meritorious Service Medal. Not bad for a couple of junior enlisted men. Although as CID agents our ranks were technically classified, everyone knew that both Burrows and Slabem were staff sergeants, the same rank as Ernie. But Burrows and Slabem had been slated for promotion to sergeants first class, something that pissed Ernie off royally.

“All they do is shuffle paper,” Ernie’d told me, “and make sure they get the results the honchos want.”

And in their review of what amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of NAF activity, the only anomaly Agents Jake Burrows and Felix Slabem had found was the misappropriation of the football pool by one of the part-time bartenders at the officers’ club. The total dollar value of which was less than seventy-four dollars.

“For this they get an award?” Ernie asked.

I elbowed him to shut up. Reluctantly, he did, scowling around the room as if he wanted to choose somebody to pop in the nose. Lieutenant Mendelson’s voice droned on. When she was done, the DPCA pinned the medals first on Jake Burrows and then on Felix Slabem. Then he shook their hands. When the ceremony was over, most of the attendees stood in line to congratulate the two honorees. We didn’t. I caught Riley outside and told him what I needed.

“A civilian?” he asked.

“I think so.” I described the guy to him. About five-foot-eight or nine, one hundred and thirty-five pounds, reddish hair that he wore in some sort of Afro bouffant.

“How long?”

“How long ago did we see him?”

“No. How long was his hair?”

“Only a couple of inches.”

“But too long for him to be military.”

“Right.”

“So maybe he’s a DAC.” A Department of the Army Civilian.

“Right. Or maybe he’s not affiliated with the military at all.”

“Then what would he be doing up in the Division area?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I want to ask him.”

The few civilians who ventured to South Korea on business stayed mainly in Seoul or the other large cities. They seldom ventured toward the DMZ. Especially since the North Korean Commando raid on the presidential palace a few years ago and the taking of the USS Pueblo crew. And tourism to the Republic of Korea was almost nonexistent. Too many people around the world still remembered the newspaper photos that depicted the death and suffering during the Korean War and the millions of refugees. Nobody thought of the ROK as a fabulous vacation spot.

Riley thought it over. “I’ll check with Smitty over at data processing. And there’s another possibility.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ll get you a list of deserters.”

“We still have deserters at Eighth Army?”

“Not many, but a few.”

The reason there were few deserters, if any, from the 8th United States Army was not because of an excess of loyalty but because of border checks. There was only one international airport, at Kimpo near Seoul, and everyone going out or coming in was checked and rechecked by the paranoid Korean officialdom. You couldn’t just go and buy a ticket to fly back to the States. Before you boarded a plane, you’d have to prove who you were and what you’d been doing in Korea. And the one seaborne international departure port at Pusan was watched just as carefully. Since Korea is a peninsula, you can leave by sea or by air, but leaving by land is even more restricted. If you traveled north, you would run into the Demilitarized Zone bordering Communist North Korea. There were 700,000 Communist soldiers on the northern side, 450,000 ROK Army soldiers on the southern side, and tens of thousands of land mines in between. Try walking across that.