CHAPTER 13

The sign over the door read HEADQUARTERS COMPANY, YONGSAN GARRISON. There was nothing distinctive about the building. It was just a musty old red-brick barracks built by the Japanese back when the Korean peninsula was a colony they’d collected from the Russo-Japanese War.

The Japanese had not been generous or merciful rulers. In fact, they’d been boneheadedly cruel, plundering Korea’s resources and treating its people like slave laborers. They had even drafted a few thousand young Korean girls and shipped them off to troop brothels all over Asia, where they forced them to perform as sex slaves for the emperor’s warriors. As insults to other cultures go, that’s pretty vile. The Koreans remembered it, too. Vividly, in fact.

I walked through the entrance and asked the first soldier I saw to direct me to the first sergeant’s office. He gave this quick, fleeting look of disbelief and then pointed me to the third door down on the left, where a big green sign that read FIRST SERGEANT stuck out into the hallway.

And you wonder why enlisted troops think officers are such dopes.

When I entered the office, I found myself standing directly in front of a dark-haired specialist four. She was seated behind a gray metal desk and talking on the phone, shamelessly flirting with somebody on the other end. She got my attention right away. She was a bit too fleshy and her features were too big for her to be considered real attractive, but she’d make heads swivel; no doubt about that. One look and you got this instant vision of bedsheets and heavy breathing.

The Army’s got fairly stiff rules against female soldiers making themselves too alluring and seductive. This woman didn’t just violate them, she knocked them miles out of the ballpark with her puffed-up bouffant hairdo, a pair of big, flashy gold hoops that hung from her earlobes, and enough blush, lipstick, and rouge to paint the Berlin Wall. She was ferociously chewing what seemed to be a gigantic wad of gum.

“Hey, wait a moment,” she mumbled, putting a hand over the mouthpiece, then skillfully using her tongue to wedge the gum to the side of her mouth.

I gave her a nice, warm, cheery smile. “I’d like to speak with your first sergeant, please.”

She didn’t reply. Or she did reply. Her shoulders arched back a bit, a gesture I recognized right away as a womanly attempt to get me to notice her uptoppers a bit better. They were big uptoppers, too; so big she really didn’t need to waste any energy to draw attention to them. Even through her baggy battle dress, I could see that right nicely.

Having gotten my attention, she smiled a bit more encouragingly. “And could I know the nature of your business, Major?”

“I’m the attorney for Captain Whitehall.”

“Captain Whitehall?”

“Yeah, Whitehall,” I said, looking around like maybe I’d wandered into the wrong unit. “Isn’t he the guy who used to command this company?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” she said, hanging up the phone without saying good-bye and then standing up. “Well, I’m sorry. The first sergeant’s not in.”

“Uh, okay. Thanks,” I told her, getting ready to depart.

Then I changed my mind.

“Wait a moment, Specialist, uh…” To check her nametag, I had no choice but to gaze once again at that huge chest of hers, an act she made all too easy by very generously pushing it even closer to my face.

“Uh, Specialist Fiori,” I finished.

She seemed to like that a lot. Her gum slipped back into the chewing position and her jaw started chomping again. She coyly asked, “There something I can do for you?”

“Well, maybe. Did you know Captain Whitehall?”

“Yes sir.”

“Did you know him well?”

“I’d guess so. I was his clerk before… you know, everything happened.”

“So, you what? You worked directly for him?”

She nodded and chewed her gum even more vigorously.

“How long?”

“Seven months. I sat right in his outer office. I was, uh, his girl Thursday. That’s what he always called me.”

“Thursday?” I said, scratching my head. “You mean Friday?”

“Uh, yeah. Whatever,” she replied with a ditzy look.

Very foolishly, I said, “See, it’s from this novel called Robinson Crusoe. Maybe you read that when you were young?”

“Nah,” she said, chewing even harder. “Reading wasn’t never my thing.”

No, it probably wasn’t.

I leaned up against her desk and got comfortable. So she leaned up against her desk and got even more comfortable – a little too much so, maybe. She ended up about six inches from me.

I said, “Did you like him?”

Her eyes started searching my face, like maybe she was wondering how to answer that. If she was looking for a clue, I didn’t give her any.

She sucked on her tongue a moment, then said, “Okay, yeah, I liked him. A lot.”

“Why’d you like him?”

“He was just a swell guy. Everybody liked him. At least, everybody respected him.”

Amazing, I thought – almost word for word how Ernie Walters had phrased it.

“Okay,” I said, “could you tell me why everybody liked, or at least respected him?”

“He was a good officer. Y’know, you work in a headquarters company like this, you see scads of officers. I mean, there’s probably two hundred on our roll. No offense or nothin’, but most of them are either jerks or wimps.”

“That bad, huh? And I always thought officers were the creme de la creme.”

“Huh?”

“You know, the pick of the litter,” I said, and she still looked perplexed. “The best of the crop,” I tried again, and her befuddled look only deepened.

Not only did she not read much, but her knowledge of French, hogs, and farming was sorely lacking.

“Yeah, whatever,” she finally mumbled, like, Why was I torturing her with these complex issues? “Anyway, Captain Whitehall was different. He was real smart, y’know.”

I couldn’t escape the thought that this woman considered anybody who could tie their own shoes stratospherically intelligent.

Then after a thoughtful pause, she said, “And fair. He was always real fair.”

“Now, you’re sure you’re not just saying that because you were his clerk?”

“No way. You wanta know the truth? Word’s been put out not to say anything nice about the captain.”

I pulled back and gave her a shocked look. “Really? No kidding? Who’d put out something like that?”

“Well, y’know, nobody ever announced it or anything. I mean, there’s nothing official. It’s what I hear, though. Y’know?”

Yes, I knew.

The Army, like most big organizations, has two channels of communications, and this clearly wasn’t one of those instances where the first sergeant could simply draw all the troops into a formation and scream, “The first one of you jerk-offs who mutters a single nice thing about Whitehall will be cleaning the shitters for the rest of your Army career!” A more subtle method was used. They simply whispered the same message into the right sergeant’s ear, and in seconds flat it was the talk of the latrine.

Anyway, I said, “But you thought he was a pretty good commander?”

“Hey, it isn’t just me saying so,” she insisted, pointing toward a tall trophy rack in the corner.

I looked over and there were some very old, badly corroded antiques neatly positioned on the two top shelves, and six gleaming, brand-spanking-new trophies near the bottom.

In peacetime, you can’t win any battles – there aren’t any – so the Army channels all that dormant martial energy into having units compete against one another for various distinctions. The competitions get pretty fierce and bloodthirsty, since they’re the only way the overambitious can outshine their peers and get noticed doing it.

I was staring at six months’ worth of trophies declaring Headquarters Company, Yongsan Garrison, to be the top unit in all of Korea.