Vasquez turned out to be my favorite kind of soldier: the hair-trigger obedient type. He spun back around, downshifted into neutral, jammed the gas pedal to the floor, then shifted into gear. The car nearly leaped off the ground. The tires screamed as they got traction, and Vasquez wisely shoved down hard on the horn, adding to the racket.

All of a sudden the mob focused on the big, noisy black sedan bearing down on them. That look of the maddened crowd evaporated. I guess they realized there’s a fundamental difference between chasing a group of outnumbered, scared MPs and eating the front bumper of a speeding car.

Rioters dove all over the place. We raced through the narrow gate, then Vasquez took a hard right turn, with more squealing tires, and drove madly through a bunch of skinny twisted streets with tightly packed shops on both sides. It took about three minutes before we cleared the village of Osan and made it to a country road that led to the Seoul-Pusan highway.

Captain Wilson’s fingers had a death grip on the back of Vasquez’s seat. His face was chalky white. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he moaned. “That was a real bad idea.”

“How come?” I asked.

He shook his head and gave me an exasperated look. “ ’Cause we’re gonna get an official complaint. No doubt about it. You coulda hurt some of those people.”

“Hey Chucky, you got things backward. They wanted to hurt us. Besides, Osan Air Base is military territory. We have an agreement with the South Koreans. Those people were trespassers. If we’d hit one, it would’ve been perfectly legal. Trust me.”

He gave me a dubious look. “What makes you so damn sure of yourself?”

“I ought to be,” I told him. “I’m a lawyer.”

“A lawyer?” he asked, like he’d just discovered a big gob of smelly dog doo on the sole of his shoe.

“Yeah, you know. A JAG officer. One of those guys with a license to practice law.”

His face got this very pained expression. “You mean… you mean, I went through this shit to get a JAG officer?”