“Probably picked her up in a jeep, drove up during the day when the road was still passable.”
According to what we’d been told at the Command tent, the signal truck on Hill Number 143 was tasked with relaying communications from Seoul down to 8th Army Headquarters South. They had just made their routine hourly commo check when the radio man in the Command tent heard a woman’s voice in the background. Shortly afterward all communications were cut off. The communication boys down in the valley hadn’t been able to raise them since. What the Provost Marshal was worried about was that the two signal men assigned up there had brought the girl and maybe a few bottles of soju, and figuring everything would be quiet, they were now passed out drunk and not relaying military communications. The Chief of Staff was hopping mad and so Ernie and I had been dispatched to check out the situation.
Other than the rain and the mud, it was nice to have a diversion from the boredom of guard duty. After a five-minute rest, Ernie and I resumed our climb up the hill.
When we came to the last rise, the rain had slowed. I couldn’t see over the edge, so I signaled Ernie to stop. The only sound was the steady plop of rain into mud. No birds. No wildlife scurrying through the brush. I thought I heard some sort of humming background noise and figured that to be the generator. We crossed the rise. The signal truck was still not readily apparent. A few small lights blinked but they seemed to be coming from a bramble of trees.
“Camouflage nets,” Ernie said, pointing at a peaked shadow. At that moment lightning flashed and we crouched low, holding onto our steel pots. The lightning had hit somewhere on the opposite side of the valley, but in that split second of light I could see the boxy truck and the cut brush leaning up against it. Huge nets hung overhead, held up by aluminum poles.
Thunder rumbled across the valley and, as if the lightning had been some sort of key to the locked sky, the rain clouds opened, dumping an angry torrent on the muddy hills.
I leaned toward Ernie. “The main lights inside the truck are off.”
“They must be asleep,” he said, “or passed out.”
“Come on.”
It wasn’t easy reaching the truck because of the brush, and I had to duck under the camouflage netting, holding it aloft for Ernie so he could get through too. Meanwhile, of course, the rain seemed to be doing everything it could to thwart our progress. Drops hit the ground like pellets, splashing mud two or three feet high. Finally we reached the canvas overhang on the side of the truck.
“Just like back home in the trailer park,” Ernie said.
Things weren’t right; it was too quiet. Ernie and I both sensed it, which was why we were being cautious. We had expected to find the lights on, two guys drinking and laughing and maybe a Korean business girl squealing, and we’d barge in on them and slap them sober and call back to the Command tent. Later the two pukes would face either court-martial or at least Article 15 non-judicial punishment. But that wasn’t how things were looking.
Fold-down metal steps led to a door at the back of the truck. I placed myself to the left and reached for the handle. Ernie stepped off to the right, unslung his M-16, checked the safety, and when he was ready, he signaled for me to go ahead. I twisted the door open so as not to make any noise. Inside the truck it was dark except for the low ambient glow of red and yellow lights coming from a communications control panel. Without walking up on the steps, I leaned forward and peeked into the truck. Too dark to see anything. The smell was metallic and burnt, like the smell from a soldering iron. I stepped up on the steps, and as I did so I slid my hand along the inside wall, searching for a light switch. I didn’t find one. Instead, I reached in my pocket and pulled out a flashlight. I didn’t switch it on right away because I didn’t want to make myself a target. I stood inside the doorway, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. I made out shapes. Two rows of electronic equipment, metal stools, supplies piled on the ground.
It was Ernie who saw it first. He tugged on the bottom of my fatigue pants and pointed to the puddle on the floor just in front of the door. Water, I thought, and then I saw it was dripping off the edge of the doorframe too slowly. I inhaled. Blood.
Without thinking, I hopped out of the truck. Ernie snatched the flashlight from me, switched it on, and aimed the beam into the depths of the truck. What I had thought were supplies were two soldiers in fatigues, on the floor, covered in blood, not moving.
Beneath the truck, something splashed. It scrabbled through the mud, then I caught the sound of squelching footsteps on the far side of the truck.
Ernie backed out and slammed the door shut. He darted to his left, I ran to the right. As I did so, I slipped my M-16 off my shoulder and, hands shaking, moved the bolt forward, chambering a round. At the edge of the truck, I crouched again, but only briefly. Whoever had run from under the truck had dashed into thick brush. Rain-laden branches quivered at his passing. I darted forward, Ernie crashing into the brush on my left, scanning ahead with the flashlight, but soon I motioned for him to turn it off because I could hear the footsteps moving across the plateau of Hill 143. We both stood still in the darkness and the rain. The rainfall was just a steady patter now, and footsteps sloshing through mud could be heard clearly, but they had stopped about twenty yards from me, as if whoever was ahead of us realized we were listening. Keeping the flashlight off, Ernie and I moved forward like two hounds stalking their prey.
The footsteps moved away from us, stealthily, as if hoping we wouldn’t hear.
Ahead beyond the brush was a field of boulders. There were at least two dozen of them scattered across a checkerboard pattern. Briefly I wondered about glaciers moving across the Korean peninsula eons ago, pushing up hills, leaving behind massive chunks of granite. We moved forward, crouching at each boulder to wait and listen. When I heard nothing, I’d burst around the huge rock, aiming my M-16 straight ahead.
The first two times I saw nothing but empty air. What if this guy was escaping? If he was moving quietly enough, he might already be on the far side of this field and running downhill toward freedom. To hell with safety, I thought. I started moving forward faster, taking my chances, ready to swivel at the slightest sound and fire a round into the face of whoever this bogeyman was.
Ernie and I had both spontaneously decided to chase the culprit, but what if one of the GIs back in the signal truck was still alive? What if one of them was breathing his last at this very moment? What if a well-placed tourniquet could have saved his life? I didn’t think so. There had been such a huge pool of blood on the floor and the bodies had seemed lifeless. But what if we’d been wrong?
I shoved these doubts out of my mind and pressed on, stepping past the huge rocks quickly, swiveling from side of side. But it was this worry, this self-doubt, that led to my momentary lapse. Lightning struck. It came from behind me, many miles away, but it was enough to make me flinch and turn my head slightly and just as something darted through the rocks off to the left of my field of vision. I swung my rifle, opened my mouth, and shouted “Halt!” But as I did so, the thunderclap struck, rolling across the valley and drowning out any sound a mere human could have made. After the first flash of movement, the lightning had left me blind, but I darted forward anyway, ramming into the side of a rock, and then I saw it, dark and venomous, like a snake flying through the night, heading right at me. I crouched, feeling a whoosh of air from the reptile wing as it passed my face. Something metallic clanged into rock. I turned and fired my M-16 into the darkness. And then footsteps churned, panicked, through the mud.
My eyesight came back as I pulled myself up.
Ernie was tromping through the mud toward me. “What happened?”