One to Count Cadence (35 page)

The major read the charges and specifications in a halting voice, then asked Morning how he pleaded. Morning paused for a moment — I know this because I, like an idiot, was listening with a water glass against the office wall from the Day Room — then, in the voice he seemed to reserve for such occasions, blissfully, peacefully, arrogantly, innocently said, “Oh, not guilty, sir. Not guilty at all.”

(I could barely contain my laughter, sure that he had discovered what I had about our arrest.)

The major went on, somehow, placing the damning evidence before Morning and his cocky smile.

“What are you grinning about, soldier?” the major asked. “What’s so funny?”

“Isn’t smiling permitted when at ease, sir?”

“Attention,” the major hissed.

When he finished his presentation, the major then asked Morning what evidence he had of his innocence.

“Oh, no evidence, sir. I’m just not guilty, not guilty at all.”

(I swear, I swear I heard the major’s jaw hit the desk.)

“You don’t… have… any evidence?” he asked, his words muffled as if his hands covered his face.

“Innocent men need no evidence, sir, none at all.”

After a long silent minute, the major went on as if he hadn’t heard, reading very quickly what he had already written on the back of the charge sheet: guilty, etc.; reduced in rank to private E-l; fined fifty dollars; and to be confined at hard labor for fifteen days; to be confined to quarters immediately pending approval of sentencing by approving authority.

Morning said, in a wonderfully bored way, “Oh, thank you, sir, very much.”

As Morning left the Orderly Room, I came in from the Day Room. The major still sat at the desk. I asked to speak to him, and before he could say no, told him that I possessed evidence concerning Pfc Morning’s court-martial, legal evidence, really, a statement from the Dartmouth lawyer suggesting that evidence against Pfc Morning had been obtained by illegal methods.

“Get out of here, Sgt. whoever you are,” he said, dazed as if he had been sentenced, “Just get away from me.”

“It’s pertinent, sir,” I said. “The approving authority will…”

But he cut me off. “Get out!”

I left, but I put the statement in the same mail to Okinawa, where it did prove to be pertinent. I dug the bird colonel’s reply out of the files later. The findings of the summary court were, as I already knew, reversed. A handwritten personal note had been added at the bottom, addressed directly to the major, stating in effect that the bird colonel didn’t know what the hell was going on down there, but if another screwed up court-martial like this one came through, he would fly down to find out. The major took a month’s leave, for reasons of health, immediately afterward.

(Ah, Joe Morning, Joe Morning, what a team we were, what a team we could have been. I could have saved you from yourself, with a little help from you, but you never gave an inch. When the reversal came down you had to roar into my room, screaming about me getting off your back, then ran drunkenly back to your bed for another big sleep. I gave you two days, then a bucket of water in your face, and ran you all that day, till your tongue hung down like a dog’s and you didn’t have another word to say, ran you till blood dripped into your boots from scraped knees where you’d fallen rather than quit. I told you, “My name is Sgt. Krummel. My great-great grandfather was half Comanch’, and they buried him with a blond scalp in his hands, and trooper I’m gonna have yours. You think I been on your back, son, well this child is gonna show what that means. I’m gonna give you something to cry about.” But he, of course, wouldn’t. He was like that. But I did make him sweat.)

* * *

We began to get ready. It wasn’t bad. I found out why, in spite of my trouble in Manila, I had been promoted. Tetrick had made me Training NCOIC, which meant that I would also be in charge of perimeter defense when we set up the new Det. When asked why, he said, “I can trust you to fight. They didn’t educate the guts out of you yet. Sometimes you’re stupid, but you’ll fight.” How do you know? “Because I been there,” he said. Will we have to fight? “You know how secret this move is. The girls at the Keyhole are talking about putting in 1040s for Saigon. If they know here, they’ll know there. The Vietcong are good. They’ll make these kids look like old ladies the first time. All we can hope is to out firepower them the first time, or there won’t be a second time. Make them understand. They don’t listen to me any more. Make them get ready. Make them. For my sake.” He seemed already in mourning; he looked old for the first time I could remember, I believed him; I tried to get them ready.

The same sort of sadness, which had tinted Tetrick’s voice, appeared in the troops. Morning called me Sgt. Krummel now, and was surly every chance he had, but his heart wasn’t in the game. Novotny reenlisted, saying, one night drunk in the Keyhole, “Can’t let the little fart go over by himself,” and Cagle cried where no one could see him, whispering, “Dumb fucking cowboy.” Collins and Levenson climbed on their flight home with sadness pinching their faces as if they would never forgive themselves for missing their war, but we were sad too and forgave them and sent our hopes home with them.

(Southern Wyoming in the spring, green hills rolling away, and the smell of the new grass as sharp as the winter cold still hiding in the wind, and new colts awkward as teen-age girls under a cobalt sky. Rain on the summer bricks in Brooklyn and thirty-five cent shots of raw whiskey in a sad old bar across from the Navy yard and Jersey girls smelling of Juicy Fruit and Johnson’s baby powder. Pale blond faces and hands catching blond hair, girls whose faces glowed with politics equated with love, their breath laced by ripe beer and stale cigarettes, their eyes smiling at the sound of his guitar. Live oak trees gnarled along the Nueces bottoms, and my mother’s cherry cobbler, my crazy brothers as innocent as puppies. Levi’s, white cowboy shirts, handmade boots, and forty-dollar Stetsons jammed in the pickup, off for a VFW dance on Saturday night, Lone Star beer, long-legged girls named Regan Bell, Marybeth, and Jackie… all our hopes flying home on a silver C-124. There was mourning.)

But with the sadness came a wild elation, too. It may have been only the physical conditioning, or the release from the tedium of rotating trick, or merely the idea of a change of scenery, but there were nearly one hundred brown, happy faces looking up at me each morning at 0600 as I climbed on the platform to lead the exercises.

PT, then a five-mile run, and the rest of the morning whiled away learning about new ways to die. Tetrick lectured and lectured about booby traps, tried to teach us to make our own in the hope that we might understand the psychology behind Malayan Gates, Punji spikes, foot traps, and the ever-mined corpses. Two Special Forces sergeants came down from Okinawa to teach us a bit of the combination karate, judo, and barroom brawling they had learned. It wouldn’t, as a few of the troops quickly learned, make a superman out of the average guy, but it did serve to remind us, John Wayne aside, that elbows, knees, feet, and teeth are more formidable weapons than the right cross.

A new shipment of M-14s had to be cleaned and fired again, since our usual armory consisted of old M-1s and .30 carbines, and even a few old grease guns. For sentimental reasons, Tetrick would not part with his grease gun, and a few of the officers preferred to keep the light carbine. We also picked up four M-60 machine guns, a supply of Claymore mines, five 81mm and two 60mm mortars, but we weren’t able to find even one of the new M-79 grenade launchers. Someone in Okinawa kept promising them, but they never came. With the new equipment came new men to flesh out the tricks to fifteen men each, kids whose names I barely learned. Novotny had my old Trick now, and I was left with clichés about the loneliness of command. You can’t have everything, Krummel.

At the range one afternoon, my old Trick was firing the M-14 on semi-automatic at pop-up silhouette targets at thirty to seventy yards. The targets stayed up for two seconds or less. Morning was on the line, and I was at the control panel, letting him fire until he missed. He had hit thirteen in a row when Tetrick came up. Morning hit five more in a row; like a cocky young gunfighter out of a bad western his movements were consciously slow and arrogant until the targets came up, and then arms and feet and rifle were slick and smooth and snake-quick. Tetrick told me to give him two at once, one thirty yards to the right, the other fifty to the left. Morning didn’t even jump, but took the right one first, then hit in front of the second, but the ricochet took it down.

“Pretty good,” Tetrick shouted to him. “But when it’s for real, take the close one first.”

Morning said sure, but with such sarcasm that I knew he would get killed, now, rather than do as Tetrick asked.

Tetrick took off his fatigue cap, then rubbed the fringe of hair, mumbling, “Kids like that took all my hair, Krummel. Now I’m bald. Shit, I’m getting old.” He said that we had received a shipment of the new AR-15s that the Special Forces had been using in Vietnam and half a dozen shotguns. “Which do you want?” he asked as Morning walked up.

“Get one for each foot, Sgt. Krummel,” Morning said. “Shit, that little old AR-15 bullet is better than a dum-dum. Shit, when it comes out of a man, it takes about fifty percent of the blood, bone, and flesh — no, that’s semi-liquid gelatin I believe the Army calls it — right out the other side. And you know what shotguns do at twenty yards, don’t you, Sarge? Shit, one for each hand.”

“Morning, Morning, Morning,” I said. “What am I going to do with you.” I called him to attention. “What am I going to do with you.”

“Push ups?” Tetrick inquired with a professional interest.

“He’s already done about two hundred today,” I said.

“Run him?”

“Another five miles?”

Tetrick laughed. “He is sure gonna be in some shape by the time we get over there. Well, do something with him. You do something; I don’t want to see him.” He shuffled away.

I turned back to Morning’s face, which showed as little as did mine. “Pfc Morning, I want a hole, six feet long, six feet wide, and most of all six feet deep. You’ll find an entrenching tool in the three-quarter and lots of dirt right where you’re standing. Move.” He moved with clean hate like a halo around him.

I went back out to the range at 2200. Morning sat on the pile of dirt, smoking a cigarette, looking up at the stars as if he were on a cruise ship.

“Lovely night, Sgt. Krummel,” he said, but his body sagged in the harsh light from my jeep headlights.

“Did you dig me a beautiful hole, trooper?”

“Aw, cut that role-playing shit out, Krummel, you’re driving me nuts.” Sudden anger curled up with the smoke from the cigarette, and there was almost a plea in his fatigued voice.

“Fill it up.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fill it up. Right now.”

“You’re not going to break me. You can’t even bend me.” He waved the small shovel like a club. “You can’t touch me.”

“I already know that. Either fill up the hole, or get ready for a year in the stockade.”

“You’re joking.”

“Try me, boy. I’ll bust you wide open. Fill it up.”

He hesitated, then began flinging dirt into the hole. I stood over him the whole time.

“There,” he sighed, throwing a last shovelful onto the pile of loose dirt.

“There what?”

“There, sergeant.”

“Fine. Would you like a ride back to the barracks, Pfc?”

“Not with you, sergeant. Not with you.”

I double-timed him back to the barracks. He kept his mouth shut this time, but he couldn’t close his face.

“You can hate me all you want to, trooper, but keep your mouth shut. You’re going to die for being stupidly stubborn, but I don’t want you rubbing off on anyone else. As long as you keep your mouth shut, only you are hurt. But what about Franklin and Peterson and those new kids? You want them dead because they won’t obey orders on principle? Answer me, trooper.”

“I’m sure I don’t know, sergeant.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you don’t. Dismissed.”

What could I do with him? Would he have been different if we exchanged places? Does power corrupt, not just morally, but mentally too? Not just the powerful, but the weak also? I didn’t feel corruption creeping in my soul. All I could feel was responsibility, fatigue, and hopeless desire to fight for money and let the governments go to hell.

* * *

But then it was time to go.

We flew to Saigon at night, then were hustled into an empty hangar with all our equipment, including the four vans. For twenty-four hours we lounged in our cheap civilian suits provided by the government, ate cold C-rations, slept on piles of barracks bags, and used five-gallon buckets for latrines while Saunders tried to find the trucks which were to carry us to the new Det. Our tribulations were just beginning.

When the trucks came, they were driven in one end of the hangar, loaded, then driven out the other end. The vans were to go next, but two of them wouldn’t start, so we spent another six hours without barracks bags to lie on, without cold C-rations to gag on, but we still had the clammy cans to shit in, and one Lister bag of tepid water which seemed to have absorbed the stink from our bodies and the bitterness of the constant bitching from the men.

But then it was time to go, again.

We were loaded in trucks whose beds were covered with sandbags, then laced tightly shut, locked in our own stink. I assigned myself to my old Trick’s truck, since I was in charge of assigning NCOs to keep the men from getting out of the trucks. While doing this, I noticed that the lead truck in the convoy pushed a heavy trailer arrangement in front of it like a cowcatcher in front of a train. A mine-catcher, I supposed, but I kept my suppositions to myself. The sandbagged floors and the company of ARVN troops riding shotgun in armored personnel carriers had already started talk, thought about death. But, as usual, dying was going to seem the easy part.

Sixteen men secured in the course, heavy heat, the constant sift of the sand, and the stench of each other and the tarstink of the canvas isn’t a Sunday afternoon drive. Piss calls were infrequent, and we ate more cold C-rations and drank more water tasting of tin and dirt and last week’s wash. Uncomfortable trip but uneventful, we drove through the first night, the next day, and that evening. Men slept, but a rough, fitful sleep as they tried to rest on the sandbags, or lean against the ribs, or each other. When the feeble light creeping through the canvas belied the raging sun above, some of them tried to play cards, but sandy dust and sweaty fingers chewed all the spots from the deck. Others tried to read, but raw-rimmed eyes couldn’t follow the leaping, bounding words. Most sat silent in the grime of their bodies and in the blackness of their thoughts, wondering about the sandbags and wishing for the heft of a weapon in their hands. We all cursed — bitterly, without jokes — at everything, until the curses became as much a sound of the trip as the random rattling of the truck. Even asleep, each bump, each rut, each chuck hole drew forth epithets from sleepy mouths which never noted words passing.