So far, the Korean National Police and the American MPs had shown admirable restraint. They had not fired on the crowd. Only a few ineffective tear gas canisters had been launched, but they’d been haphazardly placed and had been disposed of quickly by the braver students.
Ernie and I ignored the pandemonium of the PMO front desk and trotted down the hallway toward Colonel Alcott’s office.
One of the conceits of field-grade officers and high-ranking NCOs when they’re stationed overseas is to have their own customized living quarters. Their wives and children are back stateside so, naturally, a man who’s had a long and illustrious military career believes that he deserves his own bachelor pad. One of the status symbols is to move your quarters out of the staid old BOQ, Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, and have private quarters within walking distance of your workplace. The more rank and influence you have, the more likely you are to be granted this amenity. As Provost Marshal of the 2nd Infantry Division, Lieutenant Colonel Stanley X. Alcott rated nothing but the best.
A middle-aged Korean woman sat at a desk in the reception area of Colonel Alcott’s office. She wore her raincoat and her galoshes and nervously toyed with her umbrella.
“Wei ankayo?” I asked her in Korean. Why haven’t you left?
“Motka,” she answered without thinking. I can’t go. Then she switched to English. “There are too many demonstrators outside. I can’t go now.”
“Where’s the Colonel?”
“Outside,” she answered. “Somewhere. I’m worried for him.”
“I’m glad,” Ernie said. “Where are his quarters?”
“His what?”
“Chimdei,” I said. His bed.
The woman’s eyes widened at the unintended double entendre.
“Na ottokei allayo?” she replied. How would I know?
I slammed my fist on her desk.
“Odi?” I shouted. Where?
I hate to be rude, but I had no time to tiptoe around this woman’s sense of propriety. She stood up as if she’d been given an electric shock.
“I show,” she said.
We followed her into Colonel Alcott’s office. A mahogany desk, leather chairs, the flags of the Republic of Korea, the United States, and the United Nations hanging from poles behind the desk. The walls were lined with bookshelves packed with bound copies of Army Regulations and volumes concerning the Uniform Code of Military Justice. There was a back door. We walked out into a grassy area behind the PMO complex. The woman followed a cement walk and stopped at a door leading into an unmarked Quonset hut.
“I don’t have the key,” she told us.
Ernie eased her out of the way, took a step back, and then lunged forward with all his strength. The sole of his low quarters hit the front of the door near the knob and the door groaned but didn’t break.
The secretary stepped back farther, holding both hands over her mouth.
I took the next try. A side kick. It landed flush in the center of the door, which crashed open and slammed into the wall behind it. Ernie and I walked in. The secretary scurried back to her office.
When Colonel Alcott stepped through the broken front door of his quarters, he was flanked by two MP escorts. Ernie and I sat in comfortable lounge chairs, our. 45s out, both of them aimed at the colonel and his bodyguards.
“Take your weapons out of their holsters, slow and easy, and place them on the floor in front of you,” Ernie said.
The MPs did as they were told.
“Now,” Ernie said. “Step into that closet over there and close the door behind you.”
Outside, we heard shouting, screaming, and the occasional teargas canister being popped into the air. Apparently, the KNPs had regrouped and charged the protestors who had broken through the main gate. However, there were fewer than a hundred KNPs and only four or five dozen MPs versus maybe two thousand protestors. The battle raged on.
“Over here,” Ernie told Colonel Alcott. He motioned with his. 45. Colonel Alcott, his face red with rage, did as he was told. He stepped past his bed into the lounge area, past a color television set and stereo equipment on specially made shelves and past a stand-up bar with two stools. When he reached the safe, Ernie told him to stop.
Ernie slipped Colonel Alcott’s. 45 from its holster and handed it to me. I took out the magazine, dropped it into my pocket, and placed the weapon atop the safe. I also picked up the weapons of the two MPs and performed the same ritual.
Then Ernie pulled back the slide on his own. 45 and stuck the muzzle into Lieutenant Colonel Stanley X. Alcott’s ear.
“Open it,” Ernie growled.
Colonel Alcott dropped to his knees and started fiddling with the combination.
We weren’t worried about a search warrant.
If we’d gone back to 8th Army and asked for one, the provost marshal would’ve either denied the request immediately or he would’ve passed it to the 8th Army chief of staff and, if the request wasn’t killed there, it would be passed on to the 8th Army JAG, where the entire idea of searching the quarters of a field-grade officer would be endlessly debated. Even if the request was finally approved, there would so much gossip around headquarters that the division commander and members of his staff would hear about it. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say, and Colonel Alcott would have plenty of time to destroy, or hide, any incriminating information he might have in his safe. This is the way the game is played in the military. If you’re a peon, you never hear what headquarters is planning. You’re squashed before you know what hit you. If you’re a field grade officer and a player, someone will spill the information to someone at happy hour at the 8th Army Officers’ Club and the word will get back to you. You’ll have time to take steps to ensure nothing untoward is revealed. Why does the 8th Army commander put up with this? He doesn’t always. Sometime he wants everything kept secret, and he makes damn sure that it stays secret. But other times it’s much less embarrassing to his command if the alleged evildoers are warned in advance. The bad behavior stops, and the command’s reputation remains unsullied.
It was true that anything Ernie and I found in the safe would be unusable in a formal prosecution but we knew there was no way we’d ever be able to obtain anything from that safe that would be so usable. Certainly not by requesting a search warrant.
But we were forcing Colonel Alcott at gunpoint to open his own safe, to protect ourselves, mainly, but also to protect Corporal Jill Matthewson.
If Ernie and I couldn’t prove that we had a good reason for everything we’d done, we’d be court-martialed. And Jill’s fate hardly beared thinking of. So the suspense was killing me. If there was no evidence of black-marketing in that safe, then there’d have been no motive for murder and attemped murder and Ernie and I could say goodbye to freedom.
When the safe popped open, Ernie grabbed Colonel Alcott roughly by the arm and waltzed him over to the bed against the far wall and told him to sit down and not to move. I reached into the safe.
Letters from home. From his wife back at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Photos of his kids in high-school graduation garb. Pornography. Magazines of the raunchiest kind. Personnel files of fellow field-grade officers. Apparently, Alcott fancied himself a later-day J. Edgar Hoover: Collect dirt on everyone; use it to protect yourself. And then I found it. A ledger. Dates, dollar signs, a description of the type of property: television sets, tape recorders, stereo amps, wristwatches, cameras. All prime black market material. And then an amount in won, usually two or three times the original value. And a section for expenditures: hall rental, catered food, musicians, dancers, occasionally even hired transportation. They’d held mafia meetings not only at the WVOW Hall but also at kisaeng houses here in the Eastern Corridor.