Last night, in talking to Madame Chon, it became apparent to me that one area of Jill Matthewson’s activities that we hadn’t investigated was Jill’s participation in the demonstrations outside the main gate of Camp Casey. Jill had come to apologize to the Chon family for the actions of her compatriots and to say how saddened she was at the untimely death of their daughter. It took a lot of guts for an American MP to do that. And you can bet that the 2nd Division provost marshal didn’t approve of any such apology. The U.S. military is always loathe to take responsibility for mistakes. Jill had done it on her own. When she arrived, some of the demonstration organizers had been there, too. Jill was introduced to them and they began to talk.
“Later,” Madame Chon told me, “Jill left with them.”
I asked how Ernie and I could contact these demonstrators. She took care of everything and this morning our contact, the young woman we were now following through the twisting byways of Tongduchon, had miraculously appeared.
“Maybe,” Madame Chon told me, “she can help you find Jill.”
She also made me promise that, if I found Jill, I would bring her immediately to the Chon family home. “Any time, day or night,” she said. “When you arrive, you are welcome here.” A kut, a seance presided over by the mudang, a female shaman, would be arranged at once.
I just hoped we wouldn’t need a seance to contact Jill.
The young female student turned down one narrow pathway and then another.
“Student activists,” Ernie said.
I nodded in assent. Radicals, most people would call them. But it didn’t seem too radical a thing to want crimes committed in your own country to be tried in your own courts. Yet in Korea, under the current authoritarian regime, such an opinion was enough to get you thrown in the “monkey house.” Jail.
Occasionally, the girl leading us stopped and peered back along the road. When she was sure we weren’t being followed, she turned again and continued. She stayed carefully away from the Tongduchon City Market and far away from the GI bar district. We were in northern Tongduchon now, in alleyways neither Ernie nor I had ever seen before.
“Is she gonna take us all the way to North Korea?” Ernie asked.
Finally, after two quick turns down alleys running perpendicular to one another, the girl stopped in front of a splintered doorway in a brick wall smeared with soot. Ernie and I halted a few yards away and waited. She rang a buzzer. A man’s voice answered and she whispered into the speaker. The door in front of her opened. She waved for us to follow.
We stepped into a weed-infested courtyard strewn with broken bicycle parts and rusted charcoal stoves and metal detritus of all types. Bricks formed a walkway and we stepped up onto an unvarnished porch and then into a dark, wood-floored hallway with sliding oil-papered doors on either side, two of them open. The entire house reeked of mold and tobacco smoke. In the largest room, young people with shaggy black hair stared up at us warily, most of them puffing on cigarettes.
The majority were boys. It was difficult to determine sex since the boys had smooth faces unblemished by whiskers and the girls were rail thin and wore the same type of blue jeans and baggy shirts that the boys wore. No one greeted us, but a few students slid backwards on the floor until a space opened. I sat. Ernie did the same.
The girl who’d led us here disappeared into a back room.
A young man sitting directly across from us started speaking in English. No preamble. He immediately threw questions at us. It was an interrogation. I did most of the talking. Ernie was busy still sorting the students by gender.
The purpose of the interrogation was transparent. They wanted to know if they could trust us. A reasonable question since Ernie and I were criminal investigators working for the very institution they opposed: the United States 8th Army. I fired a few questions back at the young man. Some of the other students answered too, happy for a chance to practice their English.
They assured me that they didn’t hate Americans. In fact, they admired the American political system and they wanted to emulate it in Korea. But first the Status of Forces Agreement had to be abolished so Korean courts could have full jurisdiction in Korea. So GIs who drove recklessly and murdered innocent people wouldn’t be allowed to return to their home country without punishment. They spoke passionately. Whether or not the two GIs in the truck were guilty of negligent manslaughter was beside the point, they told me. The two GIs should’ve been tried in a Korean court. This was a fundamental demand of their movement: sovereignty of the Korean judicial system. And, incidentally, they wanted all American troops out of South Korea.
As an afterthought.
“Our army is strong,” one of the girls told me. “We can defend ourselves.”
From what I’d seen of the ROK Army, I had to agree. Their soldiers were dedicated and fierce, and a lot less beholden to the fleshly pleasures of life than American GIs. I told them that my main goal was to find Corporal Jill Matthewson. Suddenly they grew quiet. After a long pause, the most talkative young man said, “If we help you, we need something in return.”
Did they actually have information that could help us find Jill? Or were they bluffing?
“What?” I asked.
“Jill,” he said, “participated in one of our demonstrations.”
I nodded. I knew that. I didn’t say that if Ernie and I did manage to find Jill Matthewson alive, she could face court-martial proceedings for having participated in that demonstration. We’d worry about that later.
“Tonight,” he said, “after people get off work and before the sun goes down, we are planning another demonstration. A bigger one this time. In front of the Camp Casey main gate.”
I nodded. Understanding. Wondering what he wanted from me.
“You and your friend,” he said, pointing at me and Ernie, “must accompany us this afternoon. You must join our demonstration.”
Ernie stopped making eyes at the cutest of the female students and said, “Are you nuts?”
The students whispered amongst themselves. Not sure of what exactly Ernie meant by “nuts.”
“No,” the leader said finally. “We are not ‘nuts.’ You must join the demonstration and you must speak. You say you agree that Korean courts should try all people accused of crimes on Korean soil. Even GIs. If you say that at the demonstration, we will lead you to Jill Matthewson.”
There must’ve been over five hundred people in front of the Camp Casey main gate. Most of them were students who’d been bussed in just this afternoon from Seoul. But a surprising number were locals. Working people. Cab drivers, young women still wearing bandannas and aprons from their work in kitchens, an occasional vegetable vendor with a cart, even one or two shop owners who, much to my surprise, had closed up their tailor shops or brassware emporiums and walked down the street to join in the protest.
“Chon Un-suk mansei!” one of the protestors shouted through a bullhorn. Chon Un-suk ten thousand years! Which didn’t make much sense since she was already dead.
Some of the students held four-foot-high photographs of the young middle-school student, framed in black.
What must’ve been the entire contingent of Camp Casey MPs stood in front of the main gate, wearing fatigue uniforms and riot helmets, holding their batons at port arms. More MPs stood behind them with short-barreled grenade launchers cradled in their arms, for launching tear gas into the crowd. Finally, as if he was Camp Casey’s last line of defense, the twenty-foot-tall MP stood with his pink-faced grin, staring idiotically at the entire proceedings.