The Wandering Ghost Read Online Free

imagine. Unfortunately, he must’ve lost his balance. A tragedy. Head first. Cracked his skull on cement.”
    “He was alone?” Ernie asked. “And he climbed to the top of the obstacle course tower in the middle of the night?”
    “That’s what the evidence indicates,” Alcott replied.
    “Was he a boozer or a druggie? Had he received a Dear John letter?”
    “If what you’re implying,” Alcott replied, “is that Private Druwood committed suicide, you’re dead wrong. He was a highly motivated soldier. Dedicated to his mission. Besides,” Alcott added, “there was no note.”
    “Alone in the middle of the night,” Ernie said. “Sounds like suicide to me.”
    Alcott’s face turned red. He’d had enough. Suicide is one of the problems that the army hates to talk about, but every year in every duty station in the United States and around the world, young GIs take their own lives. What are the reasons? Loneliness. Mental illness. Depression from drugs or alcohol. Harassment from other soldiers. The day-to-day pressures of military life. You name it. But whatever the reasons, the honchos hate to classify any GI death as a suicide. Every commander looks bad when his suicide statistics go up and if there’s an excuse to classify a suicide as an accident, they’ll take it.
    Colonel Alcott spread his stubby fingers. A gold wedding band twinkled on his left ring finger. “I think,” he said, slapping his knees, “this concludes our interview.”
    As he rose to his feet, the three of us rose also. Then Alcott waggled his forefinger at my nose. “Stay away from Druwood,” he told me. “Corporal Matthewson will keep you busy enough.”
    The provost marshal of the 2nd Infantry Division swiveled and left the office.
    We were outside of the Provost Marshal’s Office, back in the cold crisp air of the 2nd Division morning, walking across blacktop beneath the shadow of the twenty-foot-tall MP, heading for our jeep. The snow had stopped. Only a few clumps still clung to slumping pine boughs and to the corrugated iron roofs of Quonset huts. Now, in late February, the question everyone kept asking was: Will winter ever end?
    Ernie cleared his throat and spit on ice. “How in the hell did you know all that stuff about Druwood?”
    “Most of it I guessed,” I said.
    “How?”
    “Well, Druwood was clearly on everyone’s mind in the Provost Marshal’s Office. Sergeant Otis figured that’s why we’d come up here from Seoul, and the other folks were whispering his name as we walked down the hallway. So something must’ve happened and happened recently. If it was a routine sort of incident—theft, AWOL, a fight in the ville—there wouldn’t be such a consensus of concern. So it must’ve been serious. Death. Not a vehicular accident, Sergeant Otis never would’ve expected Eighth Army CID to come north to investigate that. So it had to be murder. Or at the very least, suicide. The way everybody seemed sympathetic and concerned led me to believe that Druwood must’ve been the victim and not the perpetrator. Therefore, Druwood was dead.”
    “But you called him ‘Private Druwood’ right off. How’d you know his rank?”
    “If he was an officer, Otis or somebody in the Provost Marshal’s Office would’ve mentioned his rank. The death of an officer is rare in Division and would’ve been remarked upon. So he had to be enlisted. Otis said that Druwood was young.”
    “He did?”
    “Yeah. You weren’t listening. Young means low rank. Corporal, PFC, private. If he somehow got himself killed maybe he was inexperienced. So I guessed the lowest rank: private. Just lucky on that one.”
    Ernie studied me as we walked. “Too bad you didn’t finish high school, Sueño. You might’ve developed some brains.”
    When we reached our jeep, Ernie jumped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. Using a stenciled map attached to the serious incident report, I guided him through the maze of Camp Casey, the