photo by Hal Lum

A FEARFUL SYMMETRY

Min Soo Kang

There are many ghost stories that are told in the army of the Republic of Korea, especially at a base near the Demilitarized Zone. They range from the incidental (the night sentry’s flashlight turning off inexplicably as he passes by a spot where a soldier died after stepping on a mine) to the extremely elaborate (involving violated graves, wood goblins, a mad woman from a local village who disappeared into the hills after murdering her unfaithful husband, and headless spirits of soldiers who had slept during guard duty and were decapitated by North Koreans etc.). My favorite among them is a handed-down story related to me by a corporal of a reconnaissance unit at the front. It is but a trifle of a tale with a predictable mora1, and I suspect it to be a modern version of a traditional legend of local origin. Yet I am drawn to the modest fable for what I might call its quality of symmetry, simple and neat.

Less than a month after I was promoted to private first class, I spent some time as a patient at a military hospital situated only a few miles south of the corps headquarters responsible for coordinating the defense of the so-called 'central corridor' in eastern Gyungi and western Gangwon provinces. The bed next to mine was occupied by Corporal Ha, a former professional baseball player who was suffering from a severe case of stomach ulcer. On a particularly hot July night, after lights-out, we found ourselves unable to fal1 asleep, so we tried to forget our pains and homesickness by exchanging scary stories in the dark like a pair of children. Since I was the junior soldier, I went first by telling him the plot of a rather good horror movie I once saw on late night television, back in Los Angeles, California, the United States of America; back in my old life as a carefree graduate student spending leisurely days on Santa Monica beach reading Darkbloom novels and dreaming up stories instead of working on my dissertation - ancient, Edenic days devoid of mad soldiers, madder officers and, if you can believe it, even madder North Koreans. After I managed to give Ha a good scare with a vivid narration, it was his turn to play the storyteller. He took a moment to gather his thoughts before telling me about a defunct guard post back at his base.

After Ha completed basic training at Nonsan, he was sent up to the recon unit at the front, which was one of the tougher posts in the army. Two hectic weeks there had passed when one night, his 'father' (in army lingo, a corporal assigned to a newly arrived private for orientation) woke him up with a harsh slap to the forehead and told him to get ready for sentry duty. It was about twenty minutes to two o'clock when they set out in the cold January night, shivering and struggling against the merciless wind that pushed against their bodies and lashed at their exposed faces. As the post they were assigned to for the night was one of the farthest from the barracks, they had to walk clear across the base, to an isolated corner at the southern end of the place where Ha had never be n to before. The bunker itself was set below a low hill that looked down on a small village just outside the barbed wires. When they arrived, they relieved the guards before them, entered the post and took up their positions behind the sandbags. After standing still for a while, Ha was looking around the area drenched in the frigid darkness when he noticed a rectangular structure nearby that looked like another guard post. Although he wondered why there was another one so close by, he knew better than to speak to the Corporal before being spoken to.

Junior soldiers fear the hours of guard duty at night as their seniors often take advantage of the darkness and isolation to discipline them for infractions they might have committed earlier, or harass them just to relieve boredom. A great deal of physical abuse occurred in those hours. As Ha was a junior private, he expected to be punished for having gotten into trouble that day with the company commander for failing to clean his rifle properly. Yet the Corporal, a former night-club bouncer and a foul-mouthed bully given to pinching and twisting both ears until they burned, remained strangely still and silent, as if he were preoccupied with some thought.

Time crawled in a maddeningly slow pace as the cold seeped through Ha's coat and fatigues before biting into his skin. He tried to forget the icy numbness spreading across his body by concentrating on the sound of the wind wailing through the trees. The quiet but piercing noise soon grated on his tired mind, but better this tedium, he told himself, then doing push-ups while being kicked in the head by his ‘father.’

It was well into the second hour when he suddenly felt the Corporal stiffen and take up his rifle before looking around with a startled expression Ha himself tensed and searched for movement in the darkness but found nothing. Only the invisible wind howled in the night.

The howling of the wind.

It took Ha a moment to suddenly realized that within the sound of the wind was another noise—the unmistakable weeping of a woman, coming from the other guard post.

"What is that?" he asked, his stomach tightening with the sudden grip of fear.

"Be quiet," the Corporal hissed in a quivering voice. It unnerved Ha even more to see that the tough Corporal was obviously frightened as well. They stood stock still and listened to the uncanny lament for what seemed an eternity, until it gradually faded into the ordinary scream of the wind.

"What was that noise?" Private Ha asked again.

"I said shut up, you son of a bitch!" the Corporal spat out angrily; perhaps embarrassed at having shown his fear.

The rest of the hour passed in tense, fearful silence, until they were finally relieved by the next guards. They quickly made their way back to Operations where they reported to the officer on duty and returned to the barracks. After they put away their gear, the Corporal motioned for Ha to follow him into the bathroom. There they sat down against a radiator and smoked in silence; warming their bodies and settling down their nerves The story the Corporal then told him had supposedly taken place several years before when he himself had been a newly arrived private, he had heard it from a sergeant who had claimed to have known the people involved and had sworn that the tale was true.

At the base, there once was a Sergeant Hong who befriended a young girl who worked as a waitress in the nearby village. As Hong had less than two months of service left and had little to do, he took a pass every other week end and spent time with Miss Han at the cafe where she worked. Although he had no intention of seeing her after he was discharged, it amused him to flirt with the naive country girl who was flattered to receive the attention of the college boy from Seoul.

One evening, they met after she got off from work and went to a bar together. Later that night, Hong got a bit drink and asked her to accompany him to a motel. When Han refused he became annoyed with what he took to be her coyness and pretended to walk off in a huff. The girl went after him, pleading for him to stop and let her explain. She told him that although she liked him very much she could not do as he had asked because of a promise she had made to he now deceased father.

When the old widower had found out that he was dying of lung cancer, he had feared that his pretty daughter, whom he was leaving a teenage orphan would become a prostitute like many poor and unprotected girls in the village near army bases. So on his deathbed, he had made her swear on her life that she would remain a virgin until she was married. As Sergeant Hong still seemed upset, Miss Han told him that she could make it up to him in another way. There was an older girl she knew who had also dated a soldier at the base. Whenever her boyfriend was assigned guard duty at a certain post below a low hill near the village, he would give her a phone call a few hours before and she would sneak over to him at the appointed hour with some rice wine and soundae sausages. As she had told Miss Han how to get into the place, she would do the same for Hong.

Toward the end of the following week, when Hong found out that he was assigned to the post, he called up Miss Han who promised to come. Later that night, as he had a Corporal named Huh headed for the place, Hong told him about the girl. As he was in a bad mood from having been harassed all day by the platoon commander, he found himself getting upset all over again at her refusal to sleep with him. He told the Corporal what teasing little bitch she was and the conversation drifted to how the two of them would teach her a lesson that night.

Not long after they relieved the guards before them and occupied the post, Miss Han arrived with rice wine and snacks. They spoke little as she served them and they quickly drank down the liquor. When the two of them were sufficiently drunk they suddenly fell upon her and took turns beating and raping her for the better part of an hour. When they were done, they sent the sobbing, bleeding girl away, threatening that if she told anyone about what they had done they would find her and kill her. She went back to the village, to the tiny room at the back of a decrepit farm house where she lived. There she cleaned herself thoroughly with ice cold water, put on her best dress and then hanged herself on a bare tree outside the house.

After three days had passed, soldiers standing guard at the post suddenly heard the crying of a woman in the night. One of them called out for her to identify herself but the lament continued. They then searched the area carefully but found nothing. They remained at the post for half an hour more, listening to the invisible weeper, before they finally lost their nerve and ran all the way back to Operations where they reported the incident. In the following days the same thing occurred almost every night. It got so bad that every soldier at the base was in dread of going to the place as even the most skeptical ones came back terrorized.

Colonel Hwang, the regiment Commander, was visiting the base one day when he heard about the haunted guard post from a master sergeant of the unit. As the Colonel had a great aunt who was a shaman of some renown in Jula Province, he was quite open-minded about such stories and resolved to get to the bottom of it. That night; he and a captain accompanied the soldiers assigned to the place at the hour the crying was said to usually begin. After they arrived, they did not have to wait long before hearing the uncanny mourning.

The Colonel, who had been instructed as a child on how to approach a ghost, walked alone into the night In a calm but serious voice he asked whose spirit was there and why it wept so sadly. A moment later, the image of a young girl with a pale face and disheveled hair appeared before him, her eyes flowing with tears that streamed down to a ring of purple bruises around her neck. As he beheld the slight figure with her head bowed down and her hands folded before her in a modest manner, his fear of the apparition was replaced by pity for the restless soul. The ghost cried for a while longer before speaking in a quiet, trembling voice without raising her head. She told him of who she had been in life, of the promise she had made to her dying father, of Sergeant Hong who had befriended her, and finally of how he and Corporal Huh had violated her, making it impossible for her to continue with her life. When the tale was done and the spirit of Miss Han fell silent, Colonel Hwang asked if bringing the wrongdoers to justice would satisfy her. She answered that that would allay her anger but not her sorrow, before dissolving back into the darkness; leaving only the sound of her sobbing in the night.

When the new day dawned, Colonel Hwang ordered an immediate investigation. It did not take long for Sergeant Ho and CorporaI Huh to be identified and put under arrest. Although Hong had only two weeks of service left, the stress from keeping the terrible secret had taken its toll on him and he confessed readily. The two of them were sent to the stockade where after three days they were found hanging in their cells. End of the story.

But not quite.

When Corporal Ha finished the tale I was impressed by the neatness of the narrative but felt disturbed by what I initially perceived as a flaw in its otherwise perfect symmetry. A wrong committed was made right; a dark secret was brought to light; the victim's suicide by hanging led to the deaths of the perpetrators in the same manner; through supernatural means justice triumphed and balance was restored. The story should have ended there but it apparently did not.

Soldiers continued to hear the ululation in the night, though Corporal Ha assured me that it was a rare occurrence now. But they still had to close down the guard post and build a new one nearby—the place where Ha himself heard the crying. The ghost was still not completely at peace, returning every once in a while to the place of her violation to grieve over what had happened there.

As I thought more about the story, I was reminded of what she had told Colonel Hwang, that bringing the wrongdoers to justice would allay her anger but not her sorrow. It occurred to me that the sorrow that she still felt must be not only from her terrible end but also for the life she was deprived of when she killed herself. I thought then that perhaps what she may ultimately want, what it would take for her spirit to finally rest was for her story to be told and written down, so that she may take on a new life, if only as a character in a modest story, like this one.

I am forced then to come to the disturbing conclusion that she was in truth crying for me, with Corporal Ha acting as her messenger. So, on this deep but luminous night filled with the spirit of remembrance, I find myself trying to relieve her sorrow by giving her an existence in a world of words.

Thus I become a part, the final equation in the fearful symmetry of her tale—and you as well, as I imagine the ghost of Miss Han becoming silent at last as she is reborn in your memory.

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