GI Confidential by Martin Limón

Author:Martin Limón
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2019-08-18T19:55:43+00:00

-17-

The group was locked and loaded and ready to move out at zero-eight-hundred hours. I showed everyone a sketch map of the Camp Mercer compound. Using a pointer to indicate the front gate, I told Staff Sergeant Palinki and Corporal Muencher to stay there with a jeep, keeping the gate locked and making sure no one escaped. Two other MPs I assigned to the rear gate, and the rest of us—six MPs plus me and Ernie—would search Headquarters Company barracks, the Refrigeration Repair and Inspection warehouse, and any other associated 19th Support Group functions. We were searching for the GIs we suspected of robbing two banks, assaulting a security guard, killing a teller, and attacking a money changer by the name of Old Hwang in Yongju-gol. Not to mention attacking me and Ernie.

“Brotha’,” said Palinki, who was from Hawaii, “we stopping a crime wave.”

Everyone laughed.

With Ernie leading the way, our convoy of four jeeps took about a half hour to reach Camp Mercer in Bucheon. As instructed, Palinki and Muencher secured the front gate while Ernie and I barged into the Headquarters Company Orderly Room and served the unit commander with the Provost Marshal’s signed order permitting us to search the premises and detain any and all 19th Support Group Personnel we considered to be suspects. While the CO sputtered after reading the order, Ernie led the armed posse to the RR&I warehouse, rounded up all GIs there, then went outside to the associated supply offices and the barracks. Within ten minutes, we had a ragtag formation of GIs standing in the small central parade field, all of them bitching about being away from the comfort of their diesel space heaters, some of them smoking despite the MPs’ barked orders to put ’em out.

“What are you gonna do?” one of the GIs asked. “Shoot me?”

I studied the face of each GI, not seeing the dark-haired man who’d knocked me down in Yongju-gol. Ernie checked with the Motor Pool NCO and determined that a guy named Poulson, Corporal Wilford R., had been the dispatched driver of the vehicle yesterday—and for a number of days before that.

“Where’s Poulson now?” I asked one of the senior NCOs.

“You just missed him. He left right after morning formation, about twenty minutes ago.”

“Alone?”

“No. With the same three guys who usually travel with him. Gottfried, Wells, and Sarkosian.”

“What’s their duty?”

“They’re refrigeration inspectors. Check the ration storage facilities and the mess halls to make sure the refrigeration equipment is maintained and functioning and that perishable foodstuffs, especially meat, are transported and stored at the correct temperatures.”

“Sounds like a get-over,” I said. “On their own, wandering around the countryside from compound to compound?”

The sergeant shrugged. “They have a regular route to follow. And inspection and maintenance check sheets that have to be reviewed and signed off on by the mess sergeants and officers in charge of the storage facilities. If the job’s done right, there’s plenty of work to keep them busy.”

“And if it’s not?”

He shrugged again. “Then we all die from food poisoning.

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