“The quantity of C-rations is too much, that’s the problem. Tell him that.”
“Each shop has its own stash, he says. But they aren’t doing house-to-house searches, so others don’t get caught. He was just unlucky, he says, and he shouldn’t be singled out.”
“Ask him about the woman. Tell him if we find the woman fast, he’ll get his money back right away.”
“Tall. Fair skin. Not Vietnamese, but not Western. Came with a Vietnamese driver. He thought she might be an Indian.”
“An Indian?”
“Interesting. This old man’s saying she had a big mole on her forehead. There’re lots of Indian mixed-bloods living in Da Nang.”
“All right. What did he pay?”
“He says six hundred forty dollars. The time before a different store did the buying. But there’s loyalty among the merchants, so he won’t say who it was.”
“What kind of car was it?”
“A three-quarter ton. Vietnamese army truck.”
Yong Kyu paid for the beer. They went back and got in the Land Rover. Toi shooed away the children that had gathered snooping for something to steal. Someone grabbed Yong Kyu by the arm. Upon turning around he found himself face-to-face with a smiling Vietnamese girl, around sixteen years old and frail. Yong Kyu was surprised that she wasn’t wearing any makeup.
“She knew you were a foreigner,” Toi translated as the girl spoke.
Half listening to Toi, Yong Kyu untangled himself from the young girl. The girl turned to a little boy, perhaps her brother, and shrieked at him to go away. The boy had been muttering at them the whole time.
“Do the boom boom. Very good,” the girl yelled.
Toi shouted something back at her, then they left.
“Shit. We missed lunch,” Toi grumbled.
“Good. Let’s go back to the rec center, we can get a free lunch there.”
“Are you really going to find that woman and report her to the captain?” Toi asked.
Yong Kyu paused for a moment to think before he answered. “I’m a soldier. I have a duty to obey the order of a superior. But I want to be tactful in carrying out my orders. I’m no career soldier. It’s up to you to train me.”
“I like you. Very wise. I understand you Koreans very well,” Toi said, patting Yong Kyu on the shoulder. “Your duty is to report faithfully all the details directly related to the war and to the Korean forces.”
“I’ll tell you right now that I don’t make black market deals. I’m not looking to profit from this war. But the captain and I both intend to protect Korean interests.”
Toi took one hand off the steering wheel and grasped Yong Kyu’s hand, then released it.
“I’m your friend. Sergeant Kang was not. As far as the black market is concerned, the Americans don’t trust Koreans.”
“That’s not our concern. They’re the ones who got us into this in the first place. Our recruits from farm villages came here for the sake of progress and industrial development. Their petty dealings in the black market, helping themselves to some gifts to bring back home, are not worth mentioning. It’s a kind of hazardous duty allowance.”
“Better not talk that way at headquarters. Don’t ever argue with the Americans.”
“The captain already warned me.”
“I know what your men are shipping from Da Nang port in those crates. Appliances like refrigerators and televisions. Do you know where they come from?”
“Aren’t they duty-free PX goods?”
“That’s not what I mean. They’re all made in Japan. Hitachi, Sanyo, Sony, Sharp, Akai, National, Asahi, Canon, and who knows how many others. In Vietnam everything is Japanese, from transistor radios to Honda motorbikes to women’s lotions, all of it.”
Yong Kyu wondered what kind of man Toi was. He remained silent. Toi now seemed very different from his first impression. Why had he gone to work as a CID agent? His pay probably would be about twenty dollars a month, thirty at most. In his early forties, what about his family? What had he been doing in the Quartermaster Corps? As a youth? He needed to look him in the eyes.
“Do you wear those ugly glasses all the time?”
“I didn’t use to.”
Yong Kyu tried to take his sunglasses off, but Toi roughly pushed his hand away. Yong Kyu immediately regretted his move. He had let down his guard and revealed an attitude that was too friendly.
“Don’t worry about it. I lost an eye. That’s the only reason. Lost it because of some shrapnel from a rocket.”
The Land Rover was entering the rec center compound. A few minutes earlier they had been surrounded by trash, but now they were at a South Pacific resort. The beach was already swarming with people. The snack stand was selling hot dogs, fried chicken, sandwiches, Coke, Foremost ice cream, Sunkist drinks, Big Boy hamburgers, and fruit stamped with the California seal of approval. There were beach umbrellas everywhere and, as if a section of Tahiti had been shipped in, big high-ceilinged huts stood in a line with conical thatched roofs, bamboo railings and wooden steps, their walls open for the ocean breeze to blow through.
Inside each hall were half-naked American soldiers, civilians, and an occasional white woman drinking and dancing to the music. Fluttering among the customers were Vietnamese bar girls with long hair swaying down their backs and red plastic roses stuck behind their ears. They wore Tahitian-style grass skirts with their breasts wrapped in colorful swaths of cloth. But there were others who did not seem to fit in the scene; who were they and where had they come from? Vietnamese civilians, looking like tourists, were sitting under parasols with their families and sipping beers.
The American soldiers looked carefree. The entire beach was carefree: surfers were focused on riding the waves, others were playing ball or water polo, sailing, barbecuing on the beach, rubbing on suntan oil, practicing archery, frolicking in the water with Vietnamese whores, glued to slot machines in the clubhouse. Others were playing poker in small groups.
It all reminded Yong Kyu of something he had once heard from a Vietnamese. He had said an army that has its drinking water air-freighted in, eats cookies mailed from Mom, uses battery-run flush toilets in the field and air conditioners in jungle barracks, that can even offer hot showers to platoons out on combat operations, that was an army gasping for breath in the swamps of Vietnam.
They parked at the gate and walked down the beach. The far end of the beach was closed off with a barbed wire fence, beyond which the Korean rec center could be seen. The place was unfinished and since no troops had been on leave to use it yet, the whole area was very quiet. They walked into the office tent where they found Sergeant Yun flopped down asleep and the other soldiers absorbed in the same game of Chinese checkers as before. Yong Kyu rapped the sergeant on the feet a few times and the latter awoke with a grimace.
“Again? What is this? It’s like flies to a honey pot.”
“Careful. .”
Sergeant Yun looked sorry for having been irritated but said, “Give me a break, will you? There’s no reason for you guys to give me such a hard time, eh?”
“What’s got you so scared. . must have done something fishy. This time we’re here for a free meal. We missed the lunch hour back at the hotel.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, it’s my big chance to bribe you real good. What’d you like?”
“Anything you’ve got.”
“How about some rice and so on stuffed in seaweed, good old kimbap?”
It was a Korean favorite hard to come by in Vietnam.
“Any hot pepper paste?”
“Sure, last year we made gochujang with Vietnamese red peppers. It’ll scorch your tongue.”