Honor and Duty (35 page)

He took math. “Sir,” he said, “I can also teach Mr. Spanner how to spit-shine.”

“Thank you, Mr. Zerl.” My spit-shine AI had failed. I asked Mr. Caleb to tutor Mr. Spanner in English, and told him to stay behind with Mr. Spanner. I would impart what I’d learned with Joey Rensler, Clint, and Captain Mac. I would tutor the boxing goats. Mr. McFee, who was doggedly combative in all he did, would help me tutor the Rock Squaders in survival swimming.

“Mr. Spanner, if Mr. Parthes suspects you of abusing the sink, I will require you to memorize a MacArthur speech. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Spanner.

“If, however, you respect the sink, I will escort you to ES&GS to keep the First Regiment from quilling you to death. Okay?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, his voice cracking.

Clint and I looked away from him. “Long after you’ve forgotten your grade in some course,” I said, “you’ll remember that you helped someone else, or that someone helped you.”

“Mr. Ting helped me pass Plebe English,” said Clint.

“And Mr. Bestier helped me pass Beast,” I said. “And taught me Zoology 101. For which I have never forgiven him.”

Murphy, author of the famous law, was alive and well, routinely fed, steadily pampered, and in command of human affairs. I wanted to avoid Colonel Smits, and had now received an invitation to enter his country once again.

Major Schwarzhedd had developed a new reputation. It was added, like rings in a sequoia, to his many existing ones: he invited goats to his quarters for academic counseling. He was said to be a great reader of books. I went with trepidation and excitement, still wondering if he knew that my father had been friends with his. I did not sense that he was being secretive, for the major was as covert as a Fourth of July parade.

I looked up from rereading the note in time to render a salute to the chief recreation officer and grab-ass commander of the West Point Saturday Night Poker Society.

“Here to see me?” Colonel Smits asked, his tunic smelling of cigarettes, his breath sour. He did not return my salute.

“No, sir,” I said.

He spec’ed me with his cold, reptile eyes. For an instant I had a sense of what it would be like to be a woman in his presence. “Then screw off,” he said in his rockslide voice, smiling omnivorously as he stepped away on metal-tapped heels.

The distaste remained. I watched him walk away, not willing to present him with my back. Birds quarreled in the trees. Of all the many people on the sphere, I have to run into him: Murphy’s Law.

Major Schwarzhedd’s BOQ door was open and I heard music. I thought it was classical because it lacked lyrics and exhibited the pace of something that would last longer than three minutes.

From the door I saw the major in gray sweats, writing at his desk, left handed. He was built to the ideal specifications for
cadets, career officers, professional football players, and permanent brick structures. On the desk were neat piles of papers, reports and manuals, and a double-photo-frame set of what I presumed were his parents—Na-men and his wife. I was surprised by the smallness and the simplicity of his poorly lit room. It was not only that his size dwarfed his quarters; the place was small—less than half of what Smits occupied next door. Here, in the relative dark, a neighbor’s loud music could approach auditory persecution, where one would consider changing religions and admitting mythical mortal sins for a reduction in volume.

I hadn’t made a sound. “Thanks for coming, Mr. Ting. Have a seat,” he said over his shoulder, motioning with his head toward a metal folding chair near the old, whitewashed, paint-peeling door with the number 39. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”

The room was lined with bookcases, filled from floor to ceiling with books of all sizes and titles, ages and colors. Books lay in organized stacks on the hardwood floor. In the far corner, books, notebooks, and papers were in piles arrayed in a mazelike radial pattern. I could trace his reading from the inner circle to the outer, with a gap in the pattern to allow passage. The books were scholarly—Latin American, European, Middle Eastern, Asian, ancient—the kind that collect dust on the shelves of lesser men.

A robust rotating fan hummed busily as it riffled the many papers on his desk, on his bed, and on his bulletin boards, creating a small, cyclic pattern of fluttering. Differently colored sheets with personal notes lay inside them, and they sang like an orchestra of small birds with each sweep of the fan, beating occasionally in harmony with the music. To the right was a small cot and a nightstand with a radio, an old brass lamp, and Hendrik Van Loon’s
Tolerance.
To the left was a kitchen area that would have been small in Lilliput.

He closed a binder, placed it on a shelf above the small desk, and reached down to an old icebox about as attractive as a brown, beaten Lister bag on an abandoned battlefield. He pulled out two bottles of Tab and offered me one.

“Thanks, sir,” I said, reminded of Tony Barraza’s dank YMCA hotel room in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, with the neon sign out the window, the streets owned by hookers and winos. The soda was very cold; the major had a million books and played sophisticated music. The room was all his, and it
was next to a majestic river, with birds and trees and sunlight. I liked it. If I lived here, I would keep the books and the icebox, and play Brenda Lee, Skeeter Davis, the Everly Brothers, Lenny Welch, and Marianne Faithfull, and their songs of perpetual tragedy and lonely, romantic woe.

“I hope we can talk about tactics, homework, cabbages and kings. Let’s start with your father. Tell me about him,” he said.

So he knows. But my father, like engineering, was not one of my areas of expertise. I reviewed my gleanings from sixteen years of Uncle Shim’s calculated sayings and Edna’s offhanded remarks.

The music stopped. A radio announcer whispered, as if he were afraid that someone would hear him, as if he were doing the KDET reveille radio show in a soft, noninvasive voice, trying not to disturb the
ho
, the harmony, of the Corps as it fell out of bunks for the cannon, the buzzer, and the band.

“Sir, my father was the second of two sons, born in Yangzhou, at the confluence of the Grand Canal and the Yangtze River in northern China.” I looked at the tracks of my fingers on the bottle’s condensation. “His grandfather was a wealthy magistrate who had his own army. My father was born in the same year and same month as Henry P’u-yi, the last emperor of China. My father grew up, and lived through, revolution, the warlords, invasion, world war, civil war.

“Later, the family moved to Shanghai, where my father completed a classical Chinese education and attended St. John’s University, an American school for rich Chinese sons. He got an engineering degree. Later, he joined the Nationalist Army, which was a radical thing for an aristocrat’s son. He flew an old Vought biplane against the Communists and the Japanese. He was detailed to the Infantry School and took IOBC and Jump School at Benning. He later joined Stilwell’s headquarters, and was in the field with a number of American officers.”

One of whom was your father, Na-men. Schwarzhedd looked at me attentively. Maybe he didn’t know. What should I do? I saw the face of Uncle Shim, and knew the answer. Remember the
Wu-lun
, the Five Personal Relationships. Elders raise issues, not subordinates.

His linear, finely engineered mouth was now on the edge of a grin.
“Ni hau ma?”
he asked. His Chinese was strong and confident.

“Hau, syesyenin, nin hau ma?”
I said. Fine, and you?

“Hau,”
he said.
“Yi shwo jung-gwo hwa ma?”
Do you speak Chinese?

“
Bu-shr
,” I said. No.

“A shame,” he said.

“Sir, I think that every time I’m in a Chinese restaurant. Where did you learn Chinese?”

“My father taught me,” he said. “His Dad was a China missionary in Anhwei province. Your parents speak Shanghainese and Mandarin?”

“Yes, sir.”

He nodded. “I’d find that deficiency painful.”

“Sir, a correction. My mother doesn’t speak it. She and I are the ones who don’t speak Chinese, although I used to as a kid.”

“She was born here?” he asked.

“Philadelphia, sir.”

“How’d your siblings speak it if she didn’t?”

“Sir, she’s actually my stepmother, a
chimu.
She’s Caucasian. I promised her a long time ago that I’d always refer to her as my mother. You know, I’ve been tying up on this relationship between my biological mother and my
chimu
for years.”

“Understandable,” he said softly. “A matter of loyalty. She’d want a chance to be accepted by her new children.” He sipped his soda. “My family’s from Germany. As a visitor there, I was glad I had learned it. Dad was a connoisseur of languages. It’s helped me all my life. Wherever you’re assigned, it’s a good idea to learn the tongue.” He emptied his bottle and tossed it deftly into a garbage can. “Want popcorn? Or a hot dog?”

“You bet, sir!” I said enthusiastically.

He laughed. “Study this,” he said as he handed me a hand-drawn map with a blue, rectangular, friendly unit marker for an airborne infantry company. Its TAOR, tactical area of responsibility, was thick jungle with three-hundred-meter north-south ridges and a river that ran on a SW-NE axis. It covered two ten-thousand-meter grids, an immense amount of real estate for a company of 155 men. West and parallel of the ridge was the FEBA, forward edge of the battle area. West of the FEBA was an infantry battalion unit marker, in enemy red, four times the strength of the blue infantry company.

“An enemy battalion,” he said, “has established a thin defense along the FEBA. Through it, the enemy pushes supplies and night strikes, killing your people. After hitting you, the enemy
recrosses the FEBA. Under the rules, that’s sanctuary for them. Want the works—relish, mustard, ketchup?”

I nodded. Sanctuary. This looked like the Iadrang. The major pulled out franks and condiments from his icebox. He looked like a bear drawing nuts from a sapling. The franks were big, the kind that squirt juice on uniforms like
kuotieh
, pot-stickers, and represent a meal in themselves for boys with smaller tummies than mine. He put the franks into a tiny portable electric oven on a small counter next to his desk, and began to dress the buns with the works. He had a small window which overlooked the river. Through it came the calls of sparrows, warbling as background to the classical music, which was now powerful and emphatic.

“The river’s the Iadrang; the FEBA is the Cambodian border. You can’t cross it. To stop the enemy raids, you set a good series of A- and U-shaped ambushes in depth on your side of the border. The enemy battalion walks into them. You have them in cross fire, forcing them to retrograde back into Cambodia, giving up terrific losses as they run. You chase on planned pursuit lanes.” His face was animated. This was no theoretical problem; he had been there.

“You got ’em in a three-prong pincer and now they’re coming into your preregistered artillery. You’re about to give the call for the final fire mission when the first sergeant informs you that you’ve crossed the border. You’ve got the enemy in your hands, but you’re in Cambodia.” He crossed his arms. “What do you do?”

I knew the answer. You have to follow orders. That’s what we had been trained so well to do. That’s an international border. I can’t cross it. Don’t break a rule or bust an order.

“Order disengagement, sir,” I said. “Can’t cross the line.”

He flexed his jaw slowly, looking at me as if he were able to see my viscera, my ganglia, my veinous system. He shook his head.

“I don’t think so. Your duty’s to your men. They’re not safe with the enemy cutting them in the night, hiding later in a safety zone. I’d risk my career for my men, every time. Heck, what the hell does one little officer’s career matter, anywhere?

“You pick up your handset,” he said, imitating the motion, “give your call signs, and say, ‘Fire for effect!’ Then you order your platoons to close on the remains of the enemy,
wherever
he is, and destroy him. In your after-action report, you tell your
battalion CO that you crossed the border. Then Honor is served twice—by your doing the right thing, and by being honest about busting the rule. Forget your career. You protected your men.”

He pulled his rolling chair closer to me. “Your duty’s to them and their families. Your country expects you to do that duty. Honor means doing it right. Tactics is destroying the enemy with superior information and judgment.” He leaned forward. “Use your brains, earn your pay by
thinking.
Destroy the enemy. But protect your men. A careerist wouldn’t—he’d cover his own tail—instead of his men’s.” He slapped his knee. “Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I stared at the map, so rich with lessons.

“You always been a chowhound?” he asked.

“Sir, can I just sort of sit here for a moment? I want to let what you said sink in.”

He nodded. Honor in action, honor in speech. Forget your career; think of your men. Subdue the self, honor the rituals, cross the border, break the rule if necessary and report clearly, but serve your men.

The dogs were cooking. He returned to his tiny kitchen and pulled out a one-ring burner, an old, battered pot, and a jar of popcorn. He was authorized a popcorn popper, and didn’t have one. We weren’t supposed to have one, and did. “I do not miss the TD and the system,” he said. “Hated getting quill.” He stood there, looking at his old pot. “Mind if I don’t make popcorn?” I didn’t mind. Rumor had it that Schwarzhedd had never walked an hour on the Area. I had walked ten. “How many dogs you want?”

“How many you willing to requisition, sir?”

“Eight each,” he said. “Then I’m out and we call for pizza.”

“Eight’s a good number, sir.”

“Big appetite,” he said.

“Sir, I’ve been a chowhound since I was seven. Sir, you ever walk the Area?” I was getting very personal.