One to Count Cadence (11 page)

He took the pass box from the 1st Sgt’s desk and placed it in his desk which he always kept locked. Then he called the Criminal Investigation Division.

The CID officer who came was a heavy Negro captain in a baggy suit and 1930s snap-brim hat which shouted “Copper!” He nodded his head when Lt. Dottlinger explained the situation and showed him the evidence, but said nothing. The CID man dusted part of one case of bottles at Lt. Dottlinger’s insistence. There were over two hundred partial, smudged and clear prints on them. When Lt. Dottlinger demanded that he run a check on the prints, the CID officer shook his head and said, “Lieutenant, they are Coke bottles. For treason, perhaps even for a murder, I might be able to run the ten thousand or so prints on those bottles, but for Coke bottles… sorry about that.” He shrugged and left. Tetrick heard Lt. Dottlinger mumble, “Damned nigger cops. Can’t expect them to understand the value of property.”

Shortly before noon a notice was posted on the bulletin board. There would be no passes pending confession of the bottle-breaker.

In theory mass punishment is against the Uniform Code of Military Justice but since a pass is a privilege rather than a right, it can be denied at any time for no reason.

Most of the men were extremely annoyed at first, but they quickly settled down, thinking, as did Lt. Dottlinger, that the guilty party would confess. During those first few days they found it almost refreshing not to be able to go to Town. They had the Airman’s Club and the Silver Wing Service Club to pass the nights, or they could bowl or go to the gym or the library. A new, exciting kind of party evolved in the large storm ditches on the edge of the Company Area, called Champagne Ditch Parties. Mumm’s was cheap at the Club and did not count on the liquor ration. The ditches were concrete lined, about five feet deep and shaped like an inverted trapezoid. A man could sit in the bottom, lean back and drink Mumm’s from a crystal glass, and hope it didn’t rain if he passed out. A kid from Trick One broke both arms trying to broad jump a ditch one night, but took little of the fun out of the parties.

So they did these things for one, two, then three weeks, but no one ever came forward. I noticed that Morning who had been the loudest and longest griper at first seemed to be resigned to the lack of Town. By the end of the fourth week the only hope was the return of Capt. Saunders. Tetrick had given up trying to persuade Lt. Dottlinger, and had taken to playing golf three afternoons a week, drunk before the tenth tee. The men were quiet, but uneasily so. They, like Morning, had stopped talking about it. They gathered shamelessly around the older dependent girls at the pool; they who had vowed to a man at one drunken time or another never to sully their hands on a leech. Even Novotny shouted from the high diving board, strutted his brown body before them and let them pity his scarred leg. He had taken an eighteen-year-old one to the movie one night, but Trick Two was waiting in ambush and hooted him out of the theater. “There are some things a man just doesn’t do,” Cagle snorted when Novotny complained to him.

Every room had its personal copies of
Playboy,
and they were closely guarded. Closed doors were respected with a warning knock, and men took alternate cubicles in the latrine out of deference to the
Playboy
readers. All the seed which heretofore had been cast into the bellies of whores, now flushed down larger, wetter holes, until it was a wonder that the sewage system didn’t clog or give birth.

I kept busy during this time, helping the sergeant from the Agency outfit who was going to coach the football team draw up plays and practice routines. He had asked me to coach the line as well as play. Tetrick and I had tried to go to Town twice. Both times we ended up at old movies and felt guilty for two days afterward. Oddly enough I had the best run of luck I had ever seen during this month. I won over seven hundred fifty dollars in four nights at the NCO Club playing poker, then went to Manila with Tetrick and took out three thousand pesos shooting craps at the Key Club while a quiet, fat Filipino dropped ten thousand on the back line against my string of thirteen straight passes. He looked as if he wanted to kill me when I quit after thirteen. But still I didn’t have enough money to get passes for the men.

Then word came that Capt. Saunders was going to take a month’s leave after the school. That meant another six weeks without Town, and that was unbearable for the men. It is one thing to be a soldier, to live in a world of close order drill, of Physical Training each morning, equipment maintenance, maneuvers, training lectures, and another thing to be a clerk, a changer of typewriter ribbons, a cleaner of keys. Being a soldier gives you the feeling of accomplishment no matter how stupid you think the whole idea is: you survive in spite of everything they can do to you. Being a clerk has all the stupidities, all the same injustices as being a soldier, but none of the pride: anyone can survive being a clerk. It is the same problem which attacks men on assembly lines and in paper-shuffling office jobs when they discover that their life is as senseless as their work. They take to the bottle, join lodges, coach little league teams, have an affair — anything to forget what they are. The men in the 721st had Town to cover all these areas of memory-killing. Oh, sure, some of them made their tours in the Philippines on library books, camera trips and butterfly collections, but most needed Town. That is why it was there. And Lt. Dottlinger had taken it away. So what happened had to happen. (Or at least I like to tell myself that it did.)

If Morning had come to me with his idea in the beginning, I would have, as he so aptly noted, stopped him, but he came near the end, when it was ready for enactment, and it was too late to stop him.

He came in my room the night before the mass confession, grinning and excited, popping his fingers and pushing his glasses back up on his nose. “We got him,” he said, opening my door without knocking.

“Who?”

“Slutfuckingfinger, man. Lt. Big Butt Dottlinger. Pinned to the wall by his mangy cock. Betrayed by his own words.”

“What? Who?…”

“I got every one of them, man, every last swinging dick.” He danced around my room as if he needed to pee.

“Wait a minute. Slow down. Sit down and let me know who has got whom where.”

He swung a chair in front of the bunk, straddled it, and said, “The man said, ‘No passes until the guilty one confesses.’ Right? Right! Tomorrow he is going to confess.”

“You know who it is?”

“No, but it doesn’t make any difference.”

“You elected a savior to sacrifice?” I laughed. I wondered who.

“No.” He smiled and rubbed his thighs as if he had a magnificent secret. “Tomorrow morning at 0700, beginning with the day-trick before it goes to work and ending with the mid-trick, every enlisted man in the Operations section will go see the commanding officer and confess…”

“Don’t tell me. Not another word.”

“What do you mean? We got that son of a motherfucker dead. Dropped him down, man.”

“Don’t tell me. Jesus, Morning,” I said, getting off the bunk. “This kind of crap is… damnit, it’s mutiny or inciting to mutiny or conspiring to mutiny or something. I don’t know the name, but I do know it is Leavenworth talk. Don’t you know that? Goddamn don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I can’t know. Get the hell out of here. Now!”

“What’s with you? He can’t touch a hair on our heads. He hasn’t got the guts to court martial the whole outfit, and he can’t get me unless somebody breaks.”

“Morning, don’t you understand, somebody will shit out. Somebody will! Somebody always does. Even a single trick couldn’t pull this off, much less forty men. They’re going to send you to jail, babe, forever.”

“Somebody shits, they get busted!” He popped his fingers loudly, and I knew it would happen. There was no doubt in his voice. “Besides, it will never get that far. Dottlinger will blow his stack, hit an enlisted man or have a heart attack or something. I go in first, and you know how he hates me, and he hasn’t got the brains to think that I’ve got the guts to organize this and still go in first. He thinks I’m crazy.”

“What if he takes just you.”

“So fucking what? I only have one stripe to lose for my country.”

“But what about…” I moaned, waving my arm in the general direction of heaven and hell. “Do any of the other trick chiefs know?”

“You’re not even supposed to know. But I thought you’d want to.”

“How sweet. I don’t know! I don’t know you! Get your ass out of here!” I took the cigarette he offered. “At Leavenworth, kid, they got even a literary magazine, but no women, no beer, but lots of walls. You won’t like it there.”

“It’ll work. What are you afraid of? It will work.”

“Don’t tell me. I don’t want it to work. I hope you guys never get your passes back. Never. You’re all crazy. I hope they lock you up forever. Jesus, what a mess. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.”

“What!” he shouted. “And let that half-assed Arkansas farmer do this to us. Man, we have to fight back, and now! What kind of men are we if we let him do this to us and we don’t fight back.”

“Write your congressman. Consult the chaplain. Shit in the air. But don’t try to fight the Army. Don’t.”

“We tried that. A guy whose godfather is a senator wrote him. You know what he answered? ‘Part of being a man, son, is learning that we all have to suffer for the misdeeds of a few misguided individuals. Why, I was in the Army,
the Old Army,
for two years before I even heard about passes, and then I didn’t get one for another six months. Buck up, son, it will make you a better man.’ How about that, huh? Great. And the chaplain told me to pray for strength. Me! Fuck they don’t care. They’re on the other side. They always will be.” He stood up and started pacing around the room as I was. “You’re not some old rummy sergeant who thinks the Army is his mother. You can see we have to do this. Cagle’s shaving the palm of his hand, Novotny’s screaming about Dear Johns in his sleep, and Franklin is sneaking out the gate with a pass and ID card he bought from an airman. We have to do something. You don’t want to know…” — he shrugged — “… then you don’t want to know. Okay. But don’t tell me not to do it.”

“Don’t do it.”

“Ah, shit, Krummel, there’s more than just passes involved here. Damnit, there’s principles, and dignity too. We’re not animals. We have some rights. We’re human beings, living, breathing, thinking people, and that dickhead needs to learn he can’t get away with that nineteenth century Capt. Bligh shit. Who the hell does he think he is? And where’s he going to stop? Gas chambers or…”

“Joe, sit down again,” I interrupted. “Joe, you don’t have any civil rights. None. Not a single one. So settle down. It’s your pass he’s pulled, not your pecker. You’re going to make too much out of this — like that senator said, twenty years ago you wouldn’t be worried about a pass ‘cause you’d only see one twice a year — and the whole works is going to explode right in your face. There’s no dignity: privates aren’t allowed any. There aren’t any principles involved. You’re in the Army, and you’re wrong on top of that. You joined, you swore, you made a contract to remove yourself from the human race for three years, and just because it’s getting uncomfortable doesn’t mean you have any right to break the contract. If you want dignity, there’s dignity in being responsible, in not taking oaths lightly. As long as you stay straight, Lt. Dottlinger is wrong. Do this tomorrow, and you’re wrong. You’re in the Army, and they have your permission to do anything except cut your balls off. They can demand your life for no other reason than the fact that some dumb bastard wants it. You don’t have to like it, don’t have to believe in it, or even try to understand that armies are this way because they have to be, but you have to do what they say. Or pay for it.” I sighed. His face had closed against me almost before I started.

“It’s cheap at the price. I’ll pay. They may take my life someday, but I’m sure as hell not going to give it to them, nor my dignity. You think I’m going to fight if they send troops to Vietnam? Fuck no. Maybe you can kiss that bastard’s ass, but not me.” He stood up again.

“Okay. You know what you’re going to do — then get the hell out of here. You don’t want my advice — then shove off.” I had been afraid he wouldn’t listen, but this was not just a case of not hearing. He believed, which I admired, but which was sad too. He came too late in time to be part of any of the great, violent revolutions, and now had to waste himself on a foolishness.

“I came because I thought you would understand, not to ask advice.”

“And maybe brag a little bit? But I do understand. That’s why I’m afraid. There’s a good chance nothing will happen to anyone except you. I’d be sorry to see that, but it might as well happen now as later. You’ll end up in jail or dead someday, anyway. Might as well be now. But what if other men who don’t know what they really want, or are doing, follow you into the shit.”

“You afraid of losing your stripes?” He looked for a moment as if he had found the answer, but then thought not.

“Maybe a little. I didn’t come back to lose them over anything like this. Right now they’re heavy on my arm, but I like the money, the things they buy. And they are on
my
arm.” I sat in the chair he had vacated.

“What are you — for sale?” He flopped on the bunk.

“Until I get a better offer. I fight for the best price.”

“Bullshit.” He grinned. “You just think that.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“Okay,” he said, standing up. “Maybe they’ll make me editor of the magazine in Leavenworth, and I can get my shitty poetry published.”

“Bullshit. Not even you have such bad taste.” It was my turn to smile.

“Wish me luck,” he said, lazily strolling toward the door.

“Aren’t you going to ask if I’m going to turn you in?”

“Of course not. You’re a revolutionary too. I just haven’t convinced you yet,” he said, then smiled and left. His confidence in my silence, his trust, was quite a compliment, and no one’s head can be turned any easier than mine, but it was also a burden I would just as soon not have.