Ernie and I stopped when we saw them. They lay between two dragon’s teeth, near a creek in a grass-covered meadow, perhaps twenty yards away. It was clear what was happening.
He was naked. Bony knees, pale flesh, elbows rubbed raw and red. He held Jill’s. 45 in his hand, finger on the trigger, the barrel propped beneath her jaw. Her pants were pulled low but her legs were still locked, and she lay back with her butt pressed against mud. Her eyes were clenched tightly and she was crying. Not tears of helplessness but tears of rage.
Ernie pointed the rifle and fired. A round caromed madly off one of the dragon’s teeth. Bufford looked at us but he didn’t climb off of Jill. He shouted that he’d pull the trigger if we didn’t back off.
“You’re finished, Bufford,” Ernie shouted. “Even if you kill her, there’s no way out.”
“I’ll kill her now!” Bufford said.
As he shouted at Ernie, the barrel of his. 45 shifted, just slight- ly. But it was enough. Enough for Jill Matthewson to know that this was her chance.
She brought a fist up in a looping left cross and at the same time propelled her knee up right between Bufford’s legs. He screamed. The gun went off. Ernie and I sprinted forward. Through the smoke and confusion I couldn’t tell what had happened to Jill. We stumbled and clawed our way through the mud and as the smoke cleared I realized that she was still alive. I’ve never seen anyone in such a rage. By the time Ernie and I approached she was on top of Fred Bufford. His pistol lay uselessly in the mud and Jill Matthewson was pulverizing him and had started to gouge out his eyeballs. It took Ernie and me two minutes to pull her off of him. We handcuffed her because it was the only way we could stop her from killing Bufford with her bare hands. Our mistake was that we handcuffed her with her hands in front rather than behind her back.
Bufford lay unconscious next to the creek. Blood trickled from his eyes, nose, and mouth.
I policed up the. 45 and found Jill Matthewson’s wallet lying next to her torn blue jeans. A couple of photographs had fallen out. I picked them up and held them up to the light. A rape scene. I saw three men: Lieutenant Colonel Alcott; a man I recognized as H.K. Pacquet, the Chief of Staff of the 2nd Division; and Warrant Officer Fred Bufford. All naked. All working on some poor young woman who’d been bound and gagged. The lighting was dim. I studied the woman. I expected her to be the stripper, Jill’s friend, Kim Yong-ai. But then I realized that she wasn’t Kim. She wasn’t even Korean. She was American. And then I realized who she was. The impetus for Jill Matthewson’s rage became clear to me.
Ernie was too busy to look at the photos, what with handcuffing Bufford and helping Jill climb out of the mudhole she was lying in. When the KCIA men appeared at the edge of the clearing, Ernie warned them back with the M16 rifle. They stood and observed, as Jill pulled up her pants and adjusted what was left of her torn shirt and blouse.
Before Ernie could notice, I stuffed the photographs into my pocket. I didn’t want Ernie, or anyone other than Jill, to see them. I handed her the wallet. Automatically, she searched for the photos. When she didn’t find them, she looked up at me. I pulled them out of my pocket and handed them to her. She refused to take them.
“It’s over now,” she told me.
“Okay,” I answered. “What should I do with them?”
“Destroy them.”
“We might need them to get you out of this mess.”
“I don’t care. Destroy them.”
I did. I borrowed a lighter from one of the KCIA men and set them on fire.
While Ernie talked to the KCIA men and the photographs burned, Jill dragged the now conscious Fred Bufford near the creek behind one of the dragon’s teeth. We weren’t paying attention, all of us still in shock. Warrant Officer Fred Bufford didn’t shout for help. Maybe he couldn’t. Jill, her wrists still handcuffed in front of her, shoved Bufford’s head face-first into the mud. She held him there. By the time we realized what she was doing, Warrant Officer Fred Bufford was dead.
16
T here were more student demonstrations. Tons of them. In Seoul, in Pusan, in Kwangju. There was enormous pressure for the regime of President Pak Chung-hee to reduce the number of American troops stationed in Korea. And it almost happened. Contingency plans were written up in the Pentagon, professors at American universities wrote articles about how Korea was ready to be fully self-reliant. But, at the last moment, a new evaluation of the North Korean threat was released. Suddenly, it was discovered that instead of 700,000 troops in their army the North Koreans now had one million. The South Koreans, meanwhile, could only field an army of a paltry 450,000 soldiers. So plans for a U.S. draw down were rescinded.
The incident at Camp Casey never hit the Pacific Stars amp; Stripes. It was reported by Reuters and the international press and, eventually, even AP and UPI. But they played it as just another student demonstration, one that had proven to be a little more violent than others but just a demonstration nevertheless.
Ernie and I kept Colonel Alcott’s ledger in a safe place, at the hooch of Ernie’s latest girlfriend in the red-light district of Itaewon.
When we were debriefed, the ledger was never mentioned. Blackmail is an ugly word anywhere but particularly in the hallowed halls of the 8th United States Imperial Army. Not only did we not want to have to threaten anyone with blackmail, the 8th Army provost marshal didn’t want to admit that he had ever been blackmailed. Therefore, the existence of the ledger, although rumored, was never mentioned in any official file.
Ernie and I were faced with a number of possible charges. The first was being absent without leave and then there was our returning to the 2nd Division area when we weren’t supposed to. That was fixed easily. The 8th Army PMO just pretended that he’d never ordered us withdrawn.
The problem of Colonel Alcott’s black-marketing was fixed by rescinding his ration control plate. Supposedly, there was a reevaluation of the entire policy of ration control plates being open and unaccountable for high-ranking officers in sensitive positions. Alcott was transferred back to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, having promised that as soon as he hit stateside he would put in his retirement paperwork. Staff Sergeant Weatherwax pleaded guilty to assisting Warrant Officer Fred Bufford in transferring the body of Private Marvin Druwood from the actual place of his death to the obstacle course on Camp Casey. He received a thirty-day forfeiture of pay and benefits and a general discharge from the U.S. Army under honorable conditions. The body of Sergeant First Class Otis was shipped back to his wife and children quartered at Fort Hood, Texas with full military honors. Our report never mentioned his antique-smuggling operation with Brandy. We didn’t want to complicate things. Besides, his family didn’t need that kind of grief.
None of this seemed fair, of course. Warrant Officer Fred Bufford, after all, had been guilty of rape. The rape of a fellow soldier. In addition, according to the testimony of the late Sergeant First Class Otis, Mr. Fred Bufford had been guilty of the murder of Private Marvin Druwood. But with Otis dead, we had no proof. And Weatherwax wasn’t talking. Colonel Alcott and Brigadier General H.K. Pacquet were also guilty of rape. Jill told me it had begun when she’d physically tried to intervene in the goings-on in one of the mafia meetings. The honchos had objected to her butting into their affairs and decid- ed to teach her a lesson. What started as a plan to humiliate her by stripping her had turned into out-and-out rape. After that, Jill started on her crusade. She swore Ernie and me to secrecy about the rape. She was too humiliated. We argued with her, told her it wasn’t her fault and she had no reason to be ashamed, but in the end she won out. We kept mum. As far as the KCIA witnesses who’d been standing nearby at the dragon’s teeth, they hadn’t seen much and what they had seen, they weren’t about to talk about.