Nightmare Range (2 page)

Lieutenant Pak stomped into the mud.

I stood up and walked with him to the gate. As he stooped to get through the small opening, I looked back at the rows of blemished faces sullenly watching our every move. None of them smiled. None of them said goodbye.

My partner, Ernie Bascom, was in the jeep curled up with a brown-paper-wrapped magazine from somewhere in Scandinavia. He unfolded his six-foot frame as we approached and started up the jeep. Some people said he looked like the perfect soldier: blue eyes behind round-lensed glasses, short-cropped sandy-blond hair, the aquiline nose of the European races. What had blown it for him was Vietnam. Pure horse sold by dirty-faced kids through the wire, women taken on the dusty paths between rice paddies, the terror rocket attacks during innocent hours. His placid exterior hid a soul that had written off the world as a madhouse. Looks were deceiving. Especially in Ernie’s case.

We dropped Lieutenant Pak off in Mantong-ni. A dozen straw-thatched farmhouses huddled around the brick-walled police station as if longing for an extinguishing warmth.

Ernie popped the clutch, our tires spun, and we lurched forward into the misted distance.

The roads were still slick, but all that was left of the early morning rain were ponderous gray clouds rolling like slow-motion whales through the hills surrounding the long valley. We plunged into a damp tunnel, and when we came out, the valley widened before us. Dark clouds in the distance glowered at us like fat dragons lowering on their haunches for a nap.

“Nightmare Range,” Ernie said. “Where generals meet to see how much their boys can take.” He pumped lightly on the brakes
and slid around a sharp curve. The water-filled rice paddies on either side of the road strained impatiently toward our spinning tires. This valley had been the scene of some of the most horrific battles of the Korean War. Americans, Chinese, Koreans, had all died here, and the bones of some probably still embraced each other deep beneath the piled mud. I had looked it up in the military section in the library, how many had died here. All I remember is that there was a number followed by a lot of zeros.

The austere cement-block building of the Firing Range Headquarters was painted in three alternating shades of green. Inside, a brightly colored relief map of Nightmare Range covered a huge plywood table.

A ROK Army sergeant with short, spiky black hair and a crisply pressed khaki uniform thumbed through a handwritten log of the units that had been using the training facility. He came to the correct date and the correct position and pointed to the entry: Charlie Battery, 2nd of the 71st Artillery. They had returned to their base at Camp Pelham.

“Our next stop, Camp Pelham,” Ernie said.

We returned to the jeep.

“Tough duty, pal.” Ernie leaned back in a patio chair at the snack stand just inside the front gate of Camp Pelham, sipping a cold can of PBR. We were dressed the same way: blue jeans, sneakers, and black nylon jackets with brilliantly hand-embroidered dragons on the back. Standard issue for GIs running the ville.

The outfit usually got us over. We were the right age, both in our early twenties, and we both had the clean, fresh-faced look of American GIs. If we played with the girls enough, laughed, horsed around, toked a few joints, no one would suspect that we were conducting a criminal investigation.

Ernie looked like the typical GI from the heartland of America. I looked like his ethnic sidekick, taller than him by about three inches, broader at the shoulders, with the short jet-black hair of my Mexican ancestors. My face often threw people. The
nose was pointed enough, and the skin light enough to make them think that maybe I was just one of them. But I’d grown up on the streets of east LA and I’d heard the racial slurs before. When some GI started in on “wetbacks” somebody usually elbowed him, whispered something in his ear, and looked nervously in my direction. They didn’t have to worry though. That’s part of America, after all. I wouldn’t deny them their fun.

The afternoon was glorious but cold. The crisp, clear blue sky of the DMZ, far away from the ravages of industrialism, seemed to welcome even the likes of us.

Camp Pelham is in the Western Corridor, about twenty miles from the Division Headquarters at Camp Casey and forty miles from Nightmare Range. The Western Corridor was the route the North Korean tanks had taken on their way to Seoul in the spring of 1950. It was expected to be the route they would take again.

The camp was small—you could walk around it in ten minutes—but it still managed to house the battalion’s three batteries of six guns each. The big howitzers of Alpha and Bravo Batteries pointed to the sky, their barrels snugly sheathed in plastic behind protective bunkers. Charlie Battery was out in the field again but scheduled to return that afternoon.

We heard distant thunder and ran to the chain-link fence. Across the narrow river, rows of dilapidated wooden shacks sat jumbled behind a main street lined with nightclubs and tailor shops.

Charlie Battery rumbled down the two hundred yard strip. A small jeep maintained the lead while six big two-and-a-half ton trucks barreled after it as if trying to run it down. A half dozen 105-millimeter howitzers bounced behind the big trucks like baby elephants trotting behind their mothers.

The men of Charlie Battery stood in the beds of the trucks, shouting, their winter headgear flapping wildly in the wind.

An M-60 machine gun crowned the cab of each truck, partially hidden behind bundles of neatly tied camouflage netting.
Rolls of razor-sharp concertina wire, draped over stanchions on either side of the truck bed, swayed lazily with the rattling of the trucks like huge and sinister gypsy earrings.

Some of the villagers of Sonyu-ri waved happily at the unstoppable convoy. Others scurried to get themselves and their children out of the way.

When the Camp Pelham gate guards swung open the big chain-link fence, the men yelled and laughed and the drivers gunned the truck engines. Diesel fumes billowed into the air.

The jeep sped by and headed for the Battery Orderly Room. The truck turned in the other direction to get hosed down at the wash point and topped off with diesel at the fuel point.

We finished our beers and walked down the road. In front of the Orderly Room a disheveled-looking little man rummaged through the back of the jeep trying to locate his gear. I spotted his name tag. Sergeant Pickering, the Chief of the Firing Battery.

“Chief of Smoke,” I said.

He looked up and squinted, a crooked-toothed weasel who hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. “Who are you?”

I showed him my identification. “George Sueño, Criminal Investigation Division. This is my partner, Ernie Bascom.”

He looked at the badge and turned back to his gear. “Why ain’t you wearing a coat and tie?” he asked. “I thought you guys always wore a coat and tie.”

“Not undercover,” Ernie said.

The Chief of Smoke ignored us and continued to rummage through his things, sticking his hand way down into the depths of his dirty green canvas pack.

“Here’s the son of a bitch,” he said. “Kim! Kim! I found it.”

His Korean Army driver came running out of the Orderly Room as the Chief of Smoke wrenched his hand free from the enveloping material. He held up a dirty, unwrapped white bread sandwich and they both beamed. He tore it and handed half to the Korean. They munched contentedly and the driver, smiling, returned to the Orderly Room.

“Kimchi and bologna,” the Chief of Smoke said. “Made it myself.” His mouth was open. The odor of the hot pickled cabbage flushed the diesel fumes from my sinuses. He didn’t offer us any.

“The last field problem you were on,” I said, “you were at Nightmare Range.”

The Chief looked at me, still chewing with his mouth open, but didn’t say anything.

“There was a problem,” I said. “Somebody from your unit went a little too far with one of the girls outside the wire.”

He closed one eye completely. “What do you mean, ‘too far’?”

“He killed her.”

The Chief of Smoke chomped viciously on his sandwich. Cabbage crunched. “Probably deserved it.” He continued to chew, turning his head to squint at the brilliantly outlined hills in the blue-sky distance. “I know my first wife did.”

“Did you notice anything unusual that trip? Anything that might have …”

“Had to be Bogard. Only one mean enough to do it. And he was always messing with those girls out in the field. Didn’t pay ’em, I don’t think. Never had enough money anyway what with all the trouble he’s been in.”

“Trouble?”

“Yeah. Article Fifteens for not making formations, over-purchasing on his ration card, shit like that.”

“Where’s he at now?”

“Don’t know.”

“He’s not in your unit anymore?”

“Well, we’re still carrying him on the books. They say he’s down in the ville.” The Chief of Smoke swallowed the last of his rancid sandwich, turned away from the hills, and looked at me. Bread and bologna still stuck to his teeth. “He’s been AWOL ever since we came back from Nightmare Range.”

She propped her half-naked breasts atop my belt and rubbed her nipples against my stomach. She wore only shorts and a halter
top, and her straight black hair swung back as she looked up at me and smiled through a mask of makeup.

“Where you stationed?” she asked.

“Starlight Club,” I said.

She pulled back and punched me in the stomach with her small fist. “You not stationed Starlight Club. I stationed Starlight Club.” She turned to Ernie. “You buy me drink?”

He pulled his beer back a few inches from his mouth and looked at her as if she were out of her mind. She left.

We were leaning against the bar of the Starlight Club and this was the fifth joint we’d been in. The place was packed with GIs, mostly playing pool, and Korean girls, scantily dressed in outfits designed to inflame the male hormonal system. Some of them gyrated their bodies on the small dance floor, moving to the beat of the overpowering rock music. Various colored lights flashed on and off around the club, stabilized by the steady glare of the fluorescent bulbs above the pool tables.

“Tits and ass,” Ernie said.

“Yeah. It’s not easy being a hunter.”

A group of GIs walked in and one girl shuffled and squealed across the room, throwing herself into the arms of a young man with a wispy mustache and blond hair parted in the middle of his head.

The tallest member of the group stood aside and surveyed the club from the doorway. He was exceedingly thin but energy seemed to emanate from his body. Even though he stood still, some part of his anatomy seemed always to be quivering and about to explode into movement.

His name was Duckworth. The Chief of Smoke had pointed him out to us as he sped by in his deuce-and-a-half, the first driver to finish his chores at the wash point and make it to the motor pool. “They’re all into whacko weed. He’ll know where Bogard is.”

Duckworth and his buddies entered the club, mingled with some of the pool players, and soon he was leaning against the
jukebox, sparring and flirting with one of the girls. His buddy was still enveloped by a feminine bear hug and had to hold his elbows high to tilt back his beer. The group was in constant motion, all with seemingly little adult motive, like children frolicking on a nursery room floor.

Ernie took a sip of his beer. “Shouldn’t we roust him out back?”

“I don’t think there’s any need. As ornery as the Chief of Smoke said Bogard is, these guys probably will be glad to be rid of him.”

We ordered two more beers. One of the girls walked up, and this time Ernie grabbed her. We weren’t in any hurry.

Duckworth and his buddies around the jukebox yelled into one another’s ears. The wall of music between us stopped any sound from getting through. They took some of the girls with them and walked past the men’s latrine and out the back door.

We gulped down our beers, not even giving the suds time to settle in our stomachs. Ernie let go of his sweet and rotund young girl and followed me out the back door.

The group stood in the mud in the dark and narrow alley. They didn’t move when the light from the club followed us outside, just stared at us with hugely dilated cat’s eyes. A joint came toward me and I reached out my hand. The GI hesitated and looked at Duckworth. When he nodded, the small, burning ember was passed to me.

I took a hit and handed it to Ernie. I held the smoke in my lungs while I spoke. “I’m look for Bogard.”

Everybody laughed.

“Usually,” Duckworth said, “people are trying to get away from him.”

“Why?”

Duckworth shrugged. “He’s mean, he’s broke, and he doesn’t take no for an answer—on anything.”

The GIs and the girls sniffled and snorted in their efforts not to lose any of the precious herbal fumes.

“Where can I find him?”

“If you got money, he’ll find you.”

I waited.

Duckworth broke the silence. “Find the River Rat and you’ll find Bogard.”

“The River Rat?”

“Yeah. He lives with her. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“She catches a lot of GIs,” Duckworth said, “but usually just before curfew, when he needs a bunk, Bogard goes over to her hooch. If there’s somebody there, he’s just shit out of luck. Bogard tosses him out into the street.”

The GIs giggled and snorted some more.

“How do I find the River Rat?”

“She lives by the river,” someone said. The rush of air through nostrils increased.

“She walks the streets,” Duckworth said. “And since there’s only one street in the village, you can’t miss her.”

She blocked the way.

A GI stopped and listened to her for a moment and then shook his head. He stepped around her, but she grabbed him by the arm and seemed to be pleading with him. Keeping his hands in his pockets, he roughly pulled his elbow from her grip and continued past.

She smiled and waved her hand a little, as if saying goodbye to an old friend.

It was getting colder. Scattered flakes of snow hit the oil-splattered blacktop and vanished as if they’d never existed. GIs and half-dressed Korean girls scurried from club to club, running away from the small, blustering snow clouds that chased them like restless apparitions.