An American Story (18 page)

Your flight was your world because no one else was on your schedule and “dedication to duty” was the motto of that world. I served at “Skivvy Nine” for two years. Most of my first year is a blur of hard work and even harder partying. I'd had five or six girly sloe gin fizzes or tequila sunrises since enlisting. Pepsi was my poison. By the end of my first month in Korea, I was drinking like a sailor.

It was the early eighties and alcohol had yet to be “deglamorized”; liquor flowed at every gathering, official or unofficial. Whenever we weren't working, we were drinking. We even had our own bar in our Squadron Orderly Room with our own credit system, movies, and a band. Condoms were kept in a box under the counter; we women used to ask for them just to watch the First Shirt's (a senior NCO responsible for all the enlisted troops) face turn red, then blow them up and play volleyball with them. When we were downtown drinking, we got them from the town patrol. Our commander conducted our quarterly commander's call drink in hand. We held them in the bar at the NCO club just to save time since every function became happy hour. Our base liquor store provided us with cigarettes and alcohol so cheap it would have been a crime not to imbibe.

Skivvy Niners bred an atmosphere wherein heavy drinkers who could still anchor a busy shift were the standard to meet. Showing up drunk would earn you a court-martial and complete ostracization. Showing up monstrously hungover but twice as productive as the next guy made you a king. Being able to drink all night, not be hungover, and do your job like a wizard made you a god. That's what most of us were aiming for and it took a lot of booze to get there. Nearly every story told at Skivvy Nine began with “I was so drunk that . . .” The deacon's daughter finally off her leash, I thought I was having the time of my life.

Any GI could live like a king in preboom Korea. We were unofficially required to employ the Korean civilians attached to our units as maids and laundresses. Twelve dollars a month. If you tried to fire yours or shop around for a better deal, the Shirt would “urge you to reconsider.” The shops in Song Tan, the town just outside the gates (called “the ville” or “downtown” no matter where in the world we were), catered exclusively to us; Koreans were not allowed in these establishments unless they worked there. Restaurants, gold shops, brass junk, blankets, custom tailoring, sneakers, plaques—and, most of all, bars and prostitutes: whether you were buying dinner for ten, drinks for ten, or whores for ten, nothing cost enough to think twice about and we threw our paychecks around like Monopoly money. The big joke was how you “went broke saving money” in Korea, because everything was so cheap. When bored, we'd “combat shop.” We'd compete to see who could assemble a complete outfit and get back to the rendezvous point first, their old clothes in a bag. When the duty day was over, we “ran the ville.” To alleviate boredom, we organized themed “runs,” e.g., a “punk run” to bars that played punk music, a “disco run” or a “green bean run” for someone new. A “bucket run” was raunchiest of all.

We had a beat-up brass bucket and dipper in the CQ's office that the seniormost person on the run would bang while the rest of us gaggled drunkenly behind bellowing Skivvy Nine's unofficial song. It included lyrics like “We're a bunch of dirty bastards” and “born in a whorehouse. . . .” At each bar, the leader would bang the bucket down on the counter, we'd all toss money in, and the Korean waitresses and bartenders would start pouring stuff into the bucket. Anything and everything.

The first time I saw that, I was disgusted and had a Coke. The second time, I helped pour indiscriminate bottles lying atop the table in as fast as I could. We couldn't leave the bar for the next one on our “frag list” until the bucket was empty. Bucket runs were the stuff of legends. Generals and Viet Nam aces have led them. So have various entertainers while in town through the USO for us. Once, we passed a battered sofa discarded on a Song Tan street. We carried it from bar to bar all night, plopping it down on the stage or the middle of the dance floor, making out on it, tossing hapless passersby onto it and shanghaiing them onto our run.

There were country-western bars, metal-head bars, disco bars, black bars. Eventually everyone developed favorites; my friends and I hung out at either the Stereo or the A-Frame—basic R&B, Top 40 bars. The Stereo was widely popular. It was a straight shot from the main gate: newbies and visitors always ended up there. They couldn't know that the rest rooms at the Stereo were coed: there were “bombsights” (porcelain holes in the floor) in stalls for the women, plastic bins for used toilet paper, and urinals along the wall for men. We'd send the new guy in, then follow him nonchalantly in and chat him up while his eyes bugged out and his urine dried up.

I'd been in Korea about two months when Christmas rolled around. I was riding high. I'd aced my rigorous training and finished operational training at Skivvy Nine in record time. I was an evaluator. As luck would have it, Charlie Flight had Christmas Day off. We began drinking as soon as we woke up and drank off and on all day and night. My poison then was Korean “Oscar”; it came in peach and grape and tasted like melted Popsicles.

As the day wound down, we settled in at our orderly room/night club to drink some more. I was playing liar's dice for drinks. There were lots of Skivvy Niners there whom I'd never seen before, given our incompatible shifts. One of them squeezed into my dice game. Greasy-haired, acned, scrawny, and vibrating with nervous tension, he was the type of sad-sack loser that the military attracts in droves. He kept trying to make witty asides but they came out garbled and pathetic. He advised me grandiosely at the dice game, but only made me lose with plays a child could see were wrongheaded. I was the only woman in the game; the men abused him terribly, laughing at the geek, telling him to shut up, and finally ordering him to go away. It was his baby-puke yellow Sears polyester suit they found most hilarious and which most broke my heart; he'd tried so hard to cut a dashing figure. I defended him.

Pathetically grateful and needy, he dogged my footsteps for the rest of Christmas Day. He waited outside the ladies' room when I ducked in there to escape. He waited even through the taunts of my coworkers, who laughed in his face, made whip-cracking sounds, and called him my little puppy dog. But he kept his vigil by the bathroom door. Obviously no one had been nice to him in a long time and he wasn't going to miss this opportunity to . . . what exactly? I often wonder what he told himself he was planning for me. I felt sorry for him, but by evening's end, I'd had enough of this gum sticking to my shoe.

I gave him obvious hints like, “I'd really like to spend some time with my roommate now if you don't mind.” He just took two small steps backward from us, his eyes pinioned to me like harpoons. My roommate rolled her eyes at him and wandered off. He took two large and undignified steps forward, releasing his breath in a grateful, relieved whoosh.

At about 1:30
A.M.
, I knew I wasn't going to lose him and I just wanted to go to bed. Roommate and her boyfriend wandered over and I saw my last chance to lose this strange, unhappy man. I turned my back on him as pointedly as I could and babbled about nothing. I mouthed to her, “Is he still there?” She giggled and nodded. Desperate for enough time to pass to make even him too uncomfortable to stay, I told my drunk and unsteady roommate I'd leave the door unlocked for her.

Then I gave up. I let him walk me home while he tried to toss off pickup lines that were supposed to be Cary Grantish but were, on his cracked and quivering lips, merely Elmer Fuddish.

A few hours later, I woke up with him on top of me. Inside of me.

But it was just a dream, a very bad dream. It wasn't really happening. It couldn't be because it didn't make any sense. The last thing I wanted was a pathetic little piece of a man like him. Inside of me. I'd gone to bed alone, I reasoned while he held me down and moved atop me, so this could. not. be. happening. So it wasn't. But just to tie up all the loose ends, to make sense of what wasn't happening, I kept asking him who he was.

Mama? That couldn't be right.

Roommate? Probably not.

Boyfriend? But it couldn't be him, the man I'd be happy to have inside of . . . he was on the DMZ.

John, the guy I slept with to hurt my boyfriend? No, not him either, I somehow knew even in the absolute darkness of the blackout curtains.

It seemed terribly important at the time to know exactly who this was on top of me. Inside. To each name, he answered “Yeah,” annoyed. No hesitation, no stuttering. I guess I was distracting him from the one task he felt proficient in. Finally, he said with force, “You know who this is.” It wasn't until then that I got scared, that I began to consider that “this” was actually happening. Mostly, I was afraid because I certainly did not know who this was. Inside of me? Not knowing who was fucking me was very upsetting.

I didn't know who it was until he'd finished repaying my kindness with rape and was rearranging his clothes. His baby-puke yellow polyester Sears suit took on a radioactive light in the slit between the blackout curtains there at ground level. Ten years later when I'd get the official file, I'd learn that he'd stood outside my door, the door he knew to be unlocked, for a long time weighing the pros and cons of raping me. I'd also learn that, annoyed at being semiwakened, I pushed him out of my top bunk. Undaunted, however, he'd climbed back up. On. In. Good old Air Force can-do spirit. Lucky for him, I slept naked back then, a habit he single-handedly broke me of. I sort of bitched at him afterward as he dressed. He was vaguely apologetic, as if he'd used up all the hot water.

I never screamed. I didn't call the cops or wake my neighbors through the also unlocked connecting bathroom door. I went back to sleep.

I woke very early, dressed, curled my bangs, and left. I wandered the base all day. Thinking.

I spent hours convincing myself that it hadn't happened. How could it have? There had to be another explanation.

But there wasn't.

So, I spent the next few hours telling myself that, OK, it had happened, but so what? I'm a big girl. A little unwanted sex wasn't going to kill me, not in a place like Osan where everybody was fucking everybody all the time and nobody was remembering it very well because of all the booze.

But . . .

OK, but he hadn't hit me, he'd had no weapon. I'm my father's daughter, I'm tough. Daddy never went to doctors and I'll never go to lawyers.

That actually worked for about an hour. Then I got mad. So mad, my vision went white around the edges. I saw things very clearly: after ruining my holiday with his boring, pathetic uselessness, that son-of-a-bitching bastard had raped me! He raped me! Those were the only words my mind could hold. He raped me! He raped me! It was as if a door in my mind had been flung open and a complete newsreel of what had happened poured through it. It was maddening. I barricaded the ladies' room door at the NCO club behind me and pounded on the walls, growling.

I wanted blood. I spent hours concocting schemes whereby I could get my brother, my uncles, and some cousins to Korea to beat the spineless worm to a bloody pulp. Angry as I was, if I'd been stateside, I know I would have told my family and not the authorities. But I wasn't stateside. I was on my own.

Running, snarling, snotting, I headed back to Skivvy Nine carrying a big stick I didn't remember picking up. I was going to kill him.

Unfortunately, some senior NCOs saw me brandishing a war club. I informed them that Spineless Worm had raped me in my own bed. On Christmas Day. I was going to kill him if they could please let go of my arms.

The Air Force dispatched two male investigators. The last thing I wanted was the scrutinizing company of men. I was never asked if I wanted a woman present and I was far from making demands in those days; I was forceful with my peers, but not with authority, especially in the state I was in.

In a room full of men—my squadron hierarchy and the OSI agents—I had to tell the story and answer a raft of horrible questions (e.g., “Did he ejaculate? How do you know?”). I was the only woman in the room and, at twenty-two, the only person under forty. I felt like dirt.

The agents took me to the base hospital. The doctor was a bungler. I was required to strip naked and wait while Dr. Kim searched high and low for the “rape kit.” It was actually marked that way. The box was red, blood fucking red. Looking at it made me want to curl up in a fetal position and die.

Then, Dr. Kim stood muttering to himself with the rape kit instructions in one hand, the little comb he dragged through my pubic hair in the other. Then, there was the pelvic exam. It was like being raped by a stranger all over again. Repeatedly, I had to sit naked and pathetic while he searched for supplies or left the room to do God knows what. I was never offered a covering, never offered a counselor or a Kleenex.

A young male airman pushed the exam room door open with his mop and bucket as I sat there, and took long moments to stop staring at me and leave. He wasn't embarrassed, he wasn't turned on, he wasn't curious about the rape girl. He was merely debating whether or not he could mop the room. Dr. Kim said nothing. I draped my arms over my face and stopped paying attention to anything after that. The doctor had to prod me with his stethoscope to get me to respond.

Had I known what the rape exam would be like, I would not have pressed charges.

In any event, I'd never decided to press charges; I had decided to kill the bastard. Once the situation was taken out of my hands, however, it never occurred to me not to see it through. I'd been raped and rape is wrong. I never contemplated what lay ahead for me. Given that both I and my rapist knew he'd raped me, what could I do but press charges? What could he do but go to jail? What could our coworkers do but support me? But as I lay spread-eagled while a strange, silent man prodded me with cold implements, all I wanted to do was go home and pretend it never happened some more.