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With An Army CID Man

In one camp-town I run into a soldier who's wearing a leather jacket covered with biker patches and an FTW patch. I make small talk with him, tell him who I am, what I'm doing, and he tells me he's a 29 year old sergeant in the military police, stationed at the nearby base (this was confirmed when he ran into several of his M.P. colleagues who were on duty and addressed him as such). We spend some time talking, going to different bars. After a while he tells me he rides with a 1% (outlaw) motorcycle club back home, which he refers to generically as the Brotherhood. He says he pledged before he joined the military and always lets the club know where he's stationed.

After some more time together he tells me he was CID (the Army's Criminal Investigation Division) and spent 4 years undercover in the States and Europe, with long hair, civilian clothes, and a fake ID card, working drug interdiction. He says he took down about 19 MPs who were dirty, and arrested officers and First Sergeants for dealing and trafficking drugs. He quit when they wanted him to inform on the Brotherhood.

On military crime statistics he says, "They bury so much shit you can't tell what's true," adding that the unit commander can deal with some crimes through non-judicial punishment (issue what is called an Article 15, which can include reduction in rank, forfeiture of pay and confinement to post or barracks), and the incidents wouldn't show up in the crime statistics.

On his post he estimates there's about 3 assaults a day, 1 suicide attempt at least every other week and a sexual assault or rape every 2 weeks. He said at his last duty station in the States, in a typical week they'd confiscate 22 to 25 knives and guns like Tech-9s, Mac-10s and sawed off shotguns, usually from soldiers' cars.

He gave me his name but I agreed not to use it. He said, half-jokingly, that when he gets out he wants to grow his hair long, kick back, get stoned and talk bad about the government.

Camp Casey

Joshua, a retired Sergeant and self-described alcoholic who now delivers for the on-post Popeyes franchise is walking me through a GI camp-town in the city of Tongduchon, a semi-rural city in northern Korea outside of a military based called Camp Casey. He's telling me he knows every dirty thing in this so very dirty town, as he warns me that CID is tailing me (paranoia) and reminisces about what it was like when he was in Korea in '73 and '74, when a 6 oz. jar of Tasters Choice, a pack of Spam and 4 packs of hot dogs could get you anything you wanted.

The landscape in Tongduchon is sometimes as surreal as it is depraved. There's the Rambo Sports store, the Homeboy Shop, the mute woman walking the streets selling flowers who bites Joshua's arm, soldiers being paraded around in dress uniform by MPs in and out of the clubs all night as punishment, the soldier in the train station who says he's been sleeping in the same clothes for days, talking about running through the camp-towns to escape from MPs, bumming the equivalent of 35 cents for train fare. Joshua takes me to a soju (Korean alcohol) house run by another retired American soldier where members of a traveling Morale, Welfare & Recreation show (a version of the USO) are getting drunk. The troupe includes an 18-year-old blonde, packaged as the anachronistic Bombshell Singer, who complains how disgusted she feels being ogled by our boys overseas, and a classically trained mime who resents the white face shtick he has to do for the GI shows.

The cynicism, the antipathy toward the military and the level of dysfunction is pervasive among the American soldiers in Korea. You can literally walk up at random to any soldier on post or in a camp-town and you'll hear some tale of crime, drugs, alcohol, racism, suicide, training accidents, black marketing. The place where this is most in evidence is also the place that is the center of military force in Korea: Camp Casey.

Casey is home to the 2nd Infantry Division, a high security combat arms post, located about 12 miles from the DMZ. It's a 19,000 acre expanse of nondescript brick buildings and Quonset hut-like structures that resembles the grounds of a penitentiary, housing close to 8,000 soldiers. It's been visited by Presidents Bush and Clinton, who referred to it as, "The frontier of freedom." It's where soldiers have kept telling me I should go because that's the real Army, the infantry, hard-core.

Pvt. Willie Holcomb, a black tanker stationed there says, "Camp Casey is like a fucken ghetto. If you treat a person like an animal they're gonna' act like an animal. At Casey what do we have to look at? Tanks and a bunch of hard dick niggers."

(Holcomb's now awaiting discharge - personality disorder, too hostile for the military - for punching a white First Sergeant in the face after he says the First Sergeant pushed him while he was standing at parade rest. He said the First Sergeant told him after the incident "Holcomb, you can leave this army with a chapter 513, personality disorder, honorable and get all your benefits and be a productive person when you get out or I can give you an article 15, give you the worst chapter there is and you can go back selling drugs on the corner.")

Casey is a place that has been involved in a variety of incidents, including the fact that it was the base where Pvt. Markle was stationed when he murdered Kum E. Yoon in Tongduchon. The recent murder of Lee Ki Sun, of which the American soldier Pvt. Eric Munnich hs been accused, also took place in a room near the base. A month before I arrived there was a midnight curfew imposed for the entire base to cut down on problems downtown. A short time afterward, about 400 local merchants scuffled with riot police during a protest outside of the gate to the base. Soldiers have nicknamed a club outside of post the "Stab or Jab."

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