My Detachment My Detachment

by Tracy Kidder

  “Excuse me. Where can I find Lieutenant Pease?”

  “I don’t know. He’s probably in his hootch.”

  The soldier didn’t even call me sir.

  He pointed left, downhill, at another little metal-roofed house, set apart from all the others, in a patch of weeds, the quarters of the commander of the detachment, soon to be mine. I found Lieutenant Pease inside taking a nap. He was a burly, handsome black man in his early twenties. I woke him up, but he didn’t seem to mind. One was bound to feel glad at the sight of one’s replacement. He told me to look around the detachment. He said I should meet the detachment’s sergeant, Sergeant Spikes. But first I should take off that flak jacket.

  I took off my fatigue shirt as well. I was wearing just a T-shirt when I went looking for Sergeant Spikes, so he had no way of knowing my rank. I heard voices from one of the hootches. I knocked. Through the screen door, I saw a bunch of men playing cards. One of them came to the door, beer can in hand.

  “Is Sergeant Spikes around?” I asked.

  “Yup,” he said. “What the fuck do you want?”

  “I’m the new lieutenant,” I said.

  He stood a little straighter and smiled—wryly, I thought, and this worried me. “Sorry about that, sir,” he said.

  LIEUTENANT PEASE KNEW HOW TO LOOK ELEGANT IN UNIFORM, AN ENVIABLE knack to me. At the briefing the next morning, when Pease stood up, Colonel Mahoney, the brigade commander, the local eminence, smiled and said, “Good morning, Stan.” Making just the slightest bow, Lieutenant Pease brought his heels together. He could have been a West Point cadet in his pegged fatigue pants and lustrous boots. After Pease introduced us, Colonel Mahoney said, “Sorry to see you go, Stan,” and then said hello to me. The colonel didn’t ask for my first name. You could see why he liked Pease. But that military bearing of his was all a front.

  Pease said he already had a place in business school. I think he couldn’t wait to leave the Army. Once, I began to repeat to him some of the company commander’s complaints about him. His expression didn’t change at all. He said something like “Let’s get some of that Officers Club,” as if he hadn’t heard. I could imagine our company commander chewing him out, saying, “Dammit, Pease, you get those men cleaned up.” Pease would have said, “Yes, sir. Outstanding,” and then done nothing at all. From him, I felt polite wariness. When I confided my views about the war, he readily agreed. Oh, yeah, it was wrong. It was a bad war. But his mind seemed to be elsewhere. He didn’t talk much to the men either. And as far as I could see, he didn’t do anything except deliver the colonel’s morning briefing. Afterward he’d go to his hootch and relax.

  A rumpled, intellectual specialist fifth class, a spec. 5 named Rosenthal, prepared the briefing for him. Spikes minded the men, more or less. The day after I arrived, Lieutenant Pease said sternly, “Sergeant Spikes, let’s get this trash cleaned up.” Spikes looked startled. I got the feeling that he hadn’t heard an order from Pease in months. You could say my predecessor was adept at delegating authority, the only difficulty being that in departments such as group hygiene and appearance, no one at the detachment felt like accepting it, and Sergeant Spikes, I imagined, didn’t see much point in enforcing policies that his lieutenant didn’t care about. I don’t think Pease cared about anything by now except getting out of there.

  He showed me around the base camp, introduced me to my men and to Colonel Mahoney’s staff, took me out drinking at a nearby fighter pilots’ club—where he stayed unobtrusively sober—and then, after five days, turned the detachment over to me. However, he didn’t leave. He still had a week and a half in country, and that company commander back in chu Lai, the one who had told me I needed only to ask for his help, decided to have Pease spend his last days in country with me. I began to think the commander hated Pease, maybe because he was black. All the men in the detachment were Caucasian, but they clearly liked their old lieutenant. He didn’t mind if they went without haircuts or grew long, drooping Fu Manchu–style extensions to their mustaches. I didn’t mind either, in theory. Why should I care if some of the men didn’t shave some mornings or the jeep needed paint? I hadn’t come here to harass troops. I opposed this war. But I wanted to do a good job. I didn’t want to feel that I hated being a soldier only because I couldn’t be a good one.

  Besides, almost from the moment I took over, my superiors back at Chu Lai began making demands on me that they’d never managed to make effectively on Pease. And it didn’t help having Pease languish at my detachment, a constant reminder to my men of how easygoing a lieutenant could be.

  I was working in the operations hootch when I heard commotion outside. Pease had retired a few days ago—literally retired, to the hootch that we shared (“Gonna get some of that sleep”) and to the pilots’ bar most evenings. I came outside. A first lieutenant from company headquarters stood by the porch in front of the building. One of my men stood at attention before him, with his heels locked. “Look at your uniform, soldier! You haven’t shined your boots! You haven’t even shaved! When the hell did you last get a haircut?” Out in the parking area, the second lieutenant who ran the company’s motor pool was snarling at Sergeant Spikes. “Look at this garbage! Look at the dirt on these vehicles! You better get your defecation together!”

  I couldn’t let them do this. I pretended to a stronger passion than I felt as I called the first lieutenant aside and said, holding my hands up and shaking them, as if they wanted a neck to choke, that I was in charge here, that I would have no authority over my men if he didn’t leave these problems to me, and that I couldn’t do anything about those problems until he got Lieutenant Pease out of there. “You’ve got to get him out of here!”

  “All right,” the first lieutenant said. “Just trying to help you out.” He and the motor pool lieutenant rode away, back to Chu Lai.

  I regretted those remarks I’d made about Lieutenant Pease. One of my men had been standing nearby and overheard, and I knew he told the others, and I knew they liked their old lieutenant’s style of command too much not to tell him. And anyway, what I’d said didn’t do any good. The company commander just didn’t want Pease around his headquarters, I guessed, and Pease stayed on, right up until a few days before his date of estimated return from overseas, his DEROS. I pretended to be glad he was around, and he pretended to believe me. When at last I watched him swing his duffel bag into the jeep, then wave goodbye to a couple of drowsy-looking men who’d gotten up to see him off, my spirits drooped. They always did thereafter when someone departed for home and left me there. But this time I also felt nervous. Suddenly, I knew I shouldn’t have been in a hurry to be alone with my men.

  Rosenthal was teaching me my technical job, and I knew he liked me. But some of the others didn’t like him. Maybe he was as lonely as I was. We had some long bull sessions late at night after preparing the colonel’s briefing. Large and rather slovenly, belly folded over his belt, Rosenthal would stroke his mustache and begin, “But by the same token.… ”I pretended to listen attentively when he told me once again about dropping his Army-issue sunglasses several stories onto pavement and finding them unbroken. “You can criticize these Army glasses, Lieutenant, but I’ll tell you a little story.… ” He seemed older than I somehow, though he wasn’t. But almost all my men seemed older, they’d all been in country so much longer.

  I seemed to be hitting it off all right with Sergeant Spikes, too, in a more distant way. “We have to make some changes,” I told him. “I’m not saying anything against Lieutenant Pease. I know you liked him and all.”

  “Some did,” Spikes said.

  I realized I’d suspected that my sergeant disliked Pease, maybe from little movements in his face when Pease had spoken to him. I was glad.

  I told Spikes I wanted him to draw up duty rosters, for trash and latrines and for vehicle maintenance.

  “Yessir,” he said. He added, “It’s a good idea.”

  But, I went on, he should leave Rosenthal off half the rosters.r />
  Rosenthal himself may have suggested this. It seemed like a good idea, to give him more time to work on our primary mission.

  Spikes said, “Yessir.” But later on I would realize he had stared at me a moment too long when I gave this order.

  That night I decided to join the rest of my men in the hootch where they did their drinking. They were laughing when I came in, and they didn’t stop right away, but laughter gradually petered out. I was surrounded by bare-chested teenagers, faces reddened with sun and liquor, the sheen of sweat on everyone gleaming under a few bare lightbulbs. A couple of them were staggering drunk. I sidled up to Spikes and chatted with him for a time. I could feel the others eyeing me.

  I left their hootch smiling and went down the hill to my own private hootch, in order to think. Eventually, we’d get to know one another. Tomorrow would be better. But I was having a hard time acting naturally. Everywhere I went around the detachment, I felt as if I was being studied.

  There was a man the others called Pancho, and he stared at me openly, with his head cocked to one side, as if I were a curious variation of the species lieutenant. He was short and smooth-skinned and slightly round in the middle, not fat at all but round in the belly like a baby. He had jet-black hair, always longer than anyone else’s. I noticed that right away, but something had kept me from mentioning haircuts to him during those first days of my command. I couldn’t see his eyes because he wore sunglasses, day and night, it seemed. He’d look me over, then amble away, dragging his heels, a compact, graceful package, brushing his sleek hair off his forehead. Sometimes I’d hear him laughing softly to himself.

  On a day during that first week after Pease had left, I woke up feeling tired and ornery, and then, on the way back from briefing the colonel, I noticed that the jeep was almost out of gas. The men seemed to use the thing whenever they wanted, heading off to a place they called “the ville,” and it seemed to me they ought to be grateful that I let them use it, or at least considerate enough to fill up the tank. The time had come to draw some lines. When I got back to the detachment, some of them still hadn’t gotten up, and a couple were wandering back from the shitter in their underwear and Ho Chi Minh sandals.

  “I want some men to come with me and fuel up this jeep, goddammit,” I said through the screen door of one of their hootches. Eventually, a couple of them came out and climbed aboard. They seemed sullen to me, though they may have just been sleepy. I hadn’t been to the fuel depot before, but when we got there, I assumed command. The brigade’s fuel was stored in huge black plastic bladders, as big around as backyard swimming pools. I saw a hose connected to one, and I grabbed it and stuck the nozzle in the jeep’s fuel tank, turning back to glare at the men.

  They both looked startled.

  I thought, That’s good. I’ve made my point.

  “Lieutenant,” one of them said. “I think you got the wrong hose. That’s diesel fuel.”

  He got out and found the proper hose. I stood aside. “God, I hope I didn’t wreck it.”

  The jeep sputtered a little on the way back to the detachment. A week in command and already I had wrecked the jeep. “What do you guys think? Think it’ll be all right?”

  “Yeah, no biggie, Lieutenant.”

  “Jesus,” I said, when we’d dismounted. “You really think it’ll be all right?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Lieutenant,” one of them said. As he turned away I saw the flash of his teeth, a piece of a grin he hadn’t meant me to see. When I passed by their hootch that night, I heard what seemed like more laughter than usual from inside.

  IN IVORY FIELDS, LIEUTENANT DEMPSEY GETS OFF TO A BAD START, TOO. SOON after he arrives at LZ Old Smokey, he meets his platoon. The next day his company commander says to him, “Did you give your men a speech? Don’t do it again, Ace. They don’t need to be told what they’re fighting for, Dempsey.” The commander goes on, expressing sentiments I’d heard from a veteran infantry officer at Fort Benning: “Joe Bazatz came off the streets. With the lowest fucking IQ in the world. And he’ll shit all over you. You know what he’ll do, Dempsey? He’ll shoot you in the back. You know who I’m talking about? Your men, Ace.” Then the captain says that he’s sending Dempsey and his platoon of Joe Bazatzes out on a combat patrol the next day.

  The platoon hikes away from the base camp into the boonies. Dempsey gets lost, through the connivance of his platoon sergeant, the short and stocky Sergeant Fisher. Finally, the platoon bivouacs on a ridge, and the sergeant takes Dempsey aside and gives him some remarkably bad advice: “Lieutenant, I seen disciplined men go all to hell and damnation without the necessary leadership. Are you gonna kick some ass, sir?” He puts his face close to Dempsey’s. “Care about this platoon until she hurts. Then you’re doing a job.” The sergeant salutes him and says, “You’re gonna be a fine one, sir.”

  The men are lounging on the ridge. The sergeant walks among them, making congenial remarks. Then Dempsey visits them, too. But Dempsey, “because he was ashamed of his map work,” issues unnecessary orders. “Soldier? Get off your back. This is a perimeter. Soldier, start cleaning that rifle now.” Dempsey moves away. While he sits alone eating his lunch of C-rations, the men mock him behind his back. “And so when Dempsey looked behind he found no eyes on him, but he did not see them working on their rifles either. And while he sat, the sun strode over the top of the sky and took the morning away.” Dempsey thinks to himself, “Everyone gets lost once, but this platoon would never get lost again. And the personnel, the men, they would come to see him the way the Sergeant had. He was just getting his feet upon the ground. When the time came, the men would come to him and thank him for making them clean their weapons. ‘Saved our lives,’ they’d say. He conjured up his homecoming. Walking down Anstice Street in his uniform, he could see it now. Though that was many days away, it seemed quite close, and he would not wear the medal, but …”

  Of course, my sergeant, Sergeant Spikes, wasn’t disingenuous, although he didn’t always tell me everything. And among second lieutenants, getting lost in the field was a much more serious and probably more common error than putting diesel fuel in a jeep. But while our jeep ran fine the following day, that incident brought an end to the first period of my command. The men were done with waiting and watching to see what their new lieutenant was like. They’d seen enough. I found this out a couple of nights later, from Rosenthal.

  We were finishing up my briefing, he and I alone, in the front room of the operations hootch. He cleared his throat. “I don’t believe in talking about a fellow behind his back,” he said. “There was a meeting about you last night, Lieutenant.”

  “About me?” I said. I shrugged. “So what did they say?”

  “Pancho did most of the talking. He doesn’t like the fact that I’m not on some of the duty rosters. Pancho does a lot of talking, Lieutenant. It’s just big talk.”

  “Oh, well, let ’em talk.”

  I went down to my hootch, got into my cot, and tried to read. I saw myself telling Spikes to leave Rosenthal off those rosters. I sat right up, to drive that image away. I lay back with my book. An old mosquito net hung from a rafter, surrounding my cot. I stared up into its folds. Things had gone so badly already there was no point in trying to fix them now. I thought of Lieutenant Pease bitterly. He hadn’t had these problems, because he hadn’t even tried to do this job. A faint, dry smell, like fine dust in the nose, came from the netting. The nightly artillery barrage had begun, American mortars firing nearby at regular intervals. It sounded as if the shells flew right over the roof of my hootch. In Heart of Darkness, which I’d recently reread, a European ship sits off an African coast and fires its cannons randomly into the jungle. I, too, was surrounded by violent absurdity, and I was part of it. Those mortars might well be firing at targets I’d supplied to the colonel today. I didn’t want to be associated with that noise, with this place, with these men who talked behind their commander’s back, with this dusty hootch, the rats skittering around beneath t
he floor.

  A mortar round went overhead. In the silence that followed, I heard a banging at my screen door. I looked up and saw Pancho saunter in. I was in my underwear. He was fully dressed, still wearing his sunglasses. “Hi,” I said, brushing away the mosquito net. I swung my legs over the side of the cot. “Can I help you?”

  He sat down on my footlocker and said, very calmly, “Lieutenant, you know what a lifer is? You know what a lifing, begging puke is, Lieutenant?”

  “What?”

  He went right on. “It’s a flatdick who lifes and begs and pukes all over EM scum, Lieutenant. Ain’t like a man, Lieutenant.”

  The Army had films and pamphlets to instruct a soldier in all the activities of daily living, and I had gone to training camps for over a year and learned to avoid venereal disease and march and make my bed and fire weapons, but I had never received a single instruction in how to handle troops. I remembered how, during her first year of teaching high school, my mother would come home almost every day in tears. The Army should have sent me to an inner-city high school for six months and let me try to keep order in the cafeteria. As it was, I had an idea that being an officer, I would be obeyed. I didn’t know exactly what this short kid in dark glasses was talking about, but I could tell it was impertinent and I shouldn’t put up with it. I said, “Now wait a minute, Specialist.”

  Pancho said, “We don’t like some of the things you’re doing around here, Lieutenant.”

  “Well, that’s too bad,” I said.

  “We can shoot you any time we want, Lieutenant,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah, Lieutenant. We can.”