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identification at a frowning MP. Then we walked past a line of waiting kimchee cabs, across the MSR, and entered the bar district of the fabled city known as Tongduchon.
    HUANYONG ! a sign said, in the indigenous Korean hangul script. Welcome!
    It was followed by three Chinese characters: tong for east, du for bean, and chon for river. Tongduchon. East Bean River. Welcome to Tongduchon. Or TDC as the GIs loved to call it.
    For a young American GI, the bar district in Tongduchon is the French Riviera, Las Vegas, and Disneyland all rolled into one. It’s brightly lit and there’s bar after bar and nightclub after nightclub and hundreds of young women parading around in various stages of undress. A bottle of Oriental Brewery Beer costs 200 won , about forty cents, and a shot of black-market bourbon costs 250 won . An “overnight,” an evening with a beauteous lady, costs anywhere from ten to twenty-five dollars, depending on a few variables: her pulchritude, your willingness to spend, and how close it is to the end-of-month military payday.
    Night had fallen. Therefore, Ernie and I had changed out of our coats and ties and were now wearing our “running-the-ville” outfits: nylon jackets with fire-breathing dragons embroidered on the back, blue jeans, sneakers, and broad, mindless grins on our smoothly shaven faces. We may have looked like a couple of idiots wasting our money in a GI village that’s designed to do nothing else but separate a GI from his pay, but actually we were conserving the twelve bucks a day in travel per diem 8th Army authorized. We were tailing an armed military police patrol.
    The patrol was composed of three men: a U.S. Army military policeman; a honbyong , an ROK Army military policeman; and a KNP, an officer of the Korean National Police. The reason for its odd composition was that the mayor of Tongduchon and the commander of the 2nd Infantry Division wanted to ensure that all jurisdictions were covered. Whether any given miscreant was an American GI, a Korean soldier, or a Korean civilian, one of the triumvirate of law enforcement officers would have the authority to arrest him. Or her.
    The patrol wound through a vast labyrinth of narrow alleys filled with flashing neon and jostling crowds and rock music blaring from vibrating speakers. They entered bar after bar, checking out the American GIs and shoving through small seas of scantily clad Korean business girls. Usually, they were greeted and bowed to by an elderly female hostess. More often than not, she wore a brightly colored chima-chogori , the traditional Korean skirt and blouse. These women were the mama-sans , the older sisters to the business girls, the moms to the American GIs, the managers of all operations in the nightclubs for the absentee bar owners. These women wore their black hair formally, knotted high atop their heads and held together with jade pins, and often they wore earplugs, so they wouldn’t go deaf listening to the obnoxious American rock music pulsating out of enormous stereo speakers.
    The ville patrol paraded into each nightclub like a pack of young kings. They searched not only the environs of the nightclub but also the areas behind the bar and the back storerooms and particularly the bathrooms, both women’s and men’s. If everything seemed to be in order—there were no fights, no drugs being dealt, nobody passed out—they departed and marched to the next bar. Ville patrol was the job Jill Matthewson had done. For years— probably since the Korean War ended in 1953—the ville patrol had consisted of three policemen. Adding Jill was an innovation. She became the fourth member of the team. Since American women had first been assigned up here to Division, a few of them complained about Korean cops barging into ladies’ rooms and checking the stalls, with them in it! So the Division provost marshal assigned Jill Matthewson to the ville patrol with the understanding that it was her duty to check the female