by Tracy Kidder
He gave me a sly grin. “I’m Chicken Little and the sky is falling.”
If someone had told me I could leave for Fort Home tomorrow, I would have packed at once. But I realized I was as close to happy as I’d ever been in uniform. My job was like all jobs; succeeding at it made it a better job. I still wasn’t sure how I ought to feel about what I was doing here, or whether I ought, ought morally, to be here at all. But my shaving water was warm in the mornings, and the prospect of seeing the stuttering colonel each day made me feel less responsible for whatever might be wrong about the job I was doing. Schulzie never mentioned the whore from Singapore again. He had a resilience that I should have envied.
SOME MONTHS BACK, WHEN I STILL WENT ON SWIMMING TRIPS, MY MEN AND I had arrived at the beach and found a bunch of GIS already on the shore, in the midst of strange work. They had driven half a dozen Army trucks onto the hard-packed sand, right up to the lapping waves, and were washing the trucks in salt water, shirts off and whooping.
The scene had stuck with me. I remembered Spikes saying those guys were morons. But American boys aren’t usually stupid about trucks. More likely, it now seemed to me, they had a commander who cared at least as much about appearances as about functionality, the kind of commander who would threaten to punish his men for driving dirty trucks and ignore the fact that to drive a truck ten feet around a place like LZ Bayonet was to cover it with a fine orange dust. I imagined, that is, that those men had a commander like our Colonel Riddle, and that they had said to one another as they’d headed for the beach, “He wants the vehicles washed again? We’ll fuckin’ wash his vehicles.”
Our own three-quarter-ton truck had broken down, and the lieutenant who ran our company’s motor pool in Chu Lai had sent us another. I didn’t trust that lieutenant. He had red hair and a choleric-looking, perpetually sunburned face, and I thought he enjoyed haranguing EM. I suspected that he disliked me, and I wasn’t very surprised when I saw the replacement truck he sent us. It ran well enough, but it was battered.
I made an inventory of all its dents and rust spots, a list two pages long, then typed the list in a memo, which I sent to my captain in Chu Lai. I kept the carbon copy for myself. Cover-your-ass memos were the kinds of things that small-minded lifers spent their best energies writing. But I had a feeling the dented truck might become a problem for me. I suppose an infantry platoon leader, a survivor of that much harder test, would also have refined premonitions into instincts.
A week or two later, some of my men drove our homely truck to Chu Lai on the very day when Colonel Riddle happened to be visiting the company headquarters. The colonel was being given a tour by the motor pool lieutenant, the one who had sent us the battered-looking truck. According to my men, the lieutenant spotted our deuce and a half and brought the colonel over to have a look, telling him that this disgraceful vehicle came from my detachment. Maybe the colonel was giving him a hard time and he was trying to deflect the criticism. Who knew? Who cared?
I had recently begun a fitness program, with Schulzie as my trainer. He didn’t work out himself—he just shouted encouragement. I wanted to be looking strong and fit a few months from now, when I’d go home and choose not to see Mary Anne. The landline phone rang in the midst of my push-ups. It was Colonel Riddle himself.
“Lieutenant Kidder, you busy right now?” His voice sounded friendly, too friendly.
“No, sir, I’m just getting some exercise.” One recent directive from Saigon stressed the importance of getting exercise, so this seemed like a safe thing to say.
“Well, you get some exercise on this truck of yours!” he shouted. I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. “You get yo’self here to Chu Lai right now!”
“Yes, sir!”
I was turning in at the division’s main gate, with my memo in a folder on the seat beside me, when a jeep coming the other way pulled up. It was my captain, the company commander, that reasonable man. He looked harried. “Go back,” he said. “I have your memo. I’ve taken care of it.”
There seemed to be no end of ways to get in trouble. For instance, the story I’d heard about some colonel who, faced with a big inspection, discovered he had one more tank than authorized and in desperation drove it himself into a lake. He was found out, of course, and was spending the rest of his life paying for the tank. I heard that story twice from different people. Perhaps it was apocryphal. But it sounded plausible to me. A couple of months before, I myself had realized we possessed far more ammunition than we were supposed to. I’d imagined some field grade officer coming to inspect us and toting up our armaments. So I had buried the excess ammo here and there on the little wooded hill beside operations. Then the officer in charge of security on LZ Bayonet had come around to tell me that they were going to burn all wooded areas inside the perimeter and our hill was on his list. I imagined the buried ammo and hand grenades exploding and killing the soldiers who were setting fire to the brush. I warned the officer that the old-timers in my detachment remembered people burying ammo on that hill before I took command. The officer looked hard at me. I shrugged. But I’d passed the responsibility for accidents to him. I knew he wouldn’t burn the hill.
Inspections still worried me. But they were like those dangerous intersections where people rarely get in accidents because they are forewarned. I’d learned a way to keep commanders happy and my men from losing faith in me. Once every month or two, Chu Lai would let me know that a field grade officer from some higher headquarters of Radio Research planned to visit us. I’d stand at the bar in our lounge and give the men the news. We had to do some cleaning up, I’d say. Pancho would usually protest. “What are they gonna do to us, Lieutenant? Send us to Vietnam?” Another man might say, “We’re fuckin’ at war and these lifers want our fuckin’ boots spit-fucking-shined?”
But I had some real authority with them now, even, it seemed, with Pancho, and in the end they would surrender to my logic, the same I’d long used, with mixed success, to inveigle Pancho to the barber. If a colonel or general came out here and didn’t like what he saw, there’d be no end of inspections by captains and majors. All we had to do to avoid that was to disrupt our routines for a day at most and prepare for the lifer’s visit. We would clean up the vehicles, sweep the dust out of the operations hootch, maybe oil its plywood floor, and make sure that, when the brass arrived, everyone was in full uniform and hard at work. The lifer would take a quick look around, I’d brief him at the big map about the local tactical situation, maybe take him up to the TOC and introduce him to the S-2 and S-3, and he would depart, congratulating himself on having such a fine detachment within his command. In my mind, we were washing trucks in salt water. It had worked so far.
IT WAS MARCH. COLONEL CHAMBERLAIN’S TURN AT COMMANDING THE brigade had ended less than a week before. There hadn’t been time or occasion yet for me to get to know the new colonel or his staff. I didn’t care if I never did. I could look at my calendar now and see big X’s covering two-thirds of my allotted days, consigning them to memories, including some, from the time of the stuttering colonel, that I thought I’d be happy to repossess. Looking back, these many years later, at the letters I had been writing home for a month or so, I notice the same old references to drinking heavily and Vietnamese girlfriends and children I was befriending in the ville and imaginary threats of enemy offensives. The Jazz Age diction remained. I was going to sail around the world. But the tone is different in all of them. I actually wrote in one letter, “I’ve had a good two months.”
I wasn’t very worried when my captain called from Chu Lai to say we should expect a visitor from Nha Trang, one Major Great. Odd name, I thought. An ASA general was coming to visit Chu Lai in a couple of weeks. This Major Great would look us over first, in order to make sure that Colonel Riddle would look good in the event the general chose to visit my detachment.
We made the usual preparations. The major came at a civilized hour, around ten in the morning. When he arrived, in a jeep—stirring up
dust that would, of course, settle on the freshly oiled floors of our operations hootch—we had the scenery arranged. Even the men off duty were filling new sandbags. I came out to the parking area. He was just another field grade officer, with an oak leaf on his collar, about my height, wearing a helmet, always faintly ridiculous-looking when combined with starched combat fatigues. I thought I saw hints of gray in the close-cropped sidewalls around his ears. Maybe a little old for his rank, I thought.
I snapped up a salute, which he returned. He offered his hand. I shook it firmly. He smiled. He smiled as I took him through the gate in the barbed-wire enclosure surrounding the operations hootch, as I showed him the comsec man busy monitoring brigade frequencies and the commo op at the Teletype and our burn bag in place for destroying classified information. I described the system that my intemperate message back to Chu Lai months ago had inspired. “And, Major Great, sir, we now get most of our fixes by radio, directly from the planes, which means we can get the information to Brigade much more quickly.” I didn’t mention that there were days when we couldn’t get the radio to work.
“Looks good, Lieutenant,” he said, still smiling. “Now let’s take a look at your men’s quarters.”
The men’s quarters? No one ever had inspected those hootches before. I was trying to think. “Could you come back in a few hours, sir?” Did I say that aloud? Could he read my thoughts? “Yes, sir,” I said.
I’d spent parts of every evening before bed in our lounge, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been inside the men’s hootches. In the first one we inspected, clotheslines were strung from the ceiling, T-shirts drying on them. A few jungle boots and Ho Chi Minh sandals were out of place. Footlockers stood open with clothes and toilet gear all jumbled inside. That morning most of my men hadn’t made their beds—hadn’t pulled the poncho liners that served as sheets neatly over their cots, maybe because they’d been busy getting operations ready.
It didn’t look half as messy as I’d feared, but a face was pushing itself close to my face. The major did not raise his voice. It sounded all the more vehement for that. “This is a disgrace, Lieutenant.”
The next hootch looked about the same. He stared at the area Pancho had partitioned off and now shared with Harris. I held my breath. Where was the green gun? The blowtorch? The other unauthorized treasure that he’d collected and that I didn’t know about? But there was nothing in sight, just an unmade cot and slight disarray. The hootches didn’t look like stateside barracks, every soap dish and toothbrush in the same place in every footlocker, every bed made up so tightly you could bounce a quarter off the blankets, but they weren’t nearly as messy as most normal people’s bedrooms. No messier than my own hootch, I realized, and then I thought: Oh, God.
I followed Major Great outside. “Your men are living like pigs, Lieutenant Kidder. How do you explain this?” He wasn’t barking at me. He sounded sincerely surprised. This didn’t sound like a question. I didn’t think I should answer.
“Well, Lieutenant?”
“No explanation, sir.”
“All right. I want all of your men out here, except for the ones doing essential work.”
“Yes, sir.” I turned to Spikes, who had been following us at a little distance. “Sergeant Spikes, get the men out here. Now.”
“Yessir.”
Spikes snarled at the men. I knew he was trying to help me. He got them in a line in front of the enlisted hootches, all except for the comsec man and commo op on duty. Five men and a sergeant standing at attention in a line on the path of bare ground that ran between the hootches and the small wooded hill with our antennas on top and the buried ammo. The path led to the bunkers and the men’s shitter. At least Major Great hadn’t inspected the shitter.
The major walked slowly down the line, examining each man. With me at his side. He didn’t talk to them. He talked to me about them. “This man needs a haircut.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your sergeant’s boots are unacceptable, Lieutenant.”
I looked down at Spikes’s boots. They weren’t very well shined. But at least he wasn’t wearing his completely unshined ones.
Major Great stopped in front of Pancho. “Look at this man’s uniform, Lieutenant.”
I had been worrying about Pancho’s hair, which once again looked a little long. Now I was worrying about Pancho. He was looking squarely at the major, but with his head cocked slightly to one side. The other men looked frightened. Pancho looked both curious and irritated.
“There are holes in this man’s uniform, Lieutenant,” Major Great said.
“That’s right, sir,” said Pancho. “That’s because the zips who do our laundry rub them on rocks in the river.”
Major Great didn’t look at Pancho’s face. It was a tactic, I realized in the functioning part of my mind. A field grade officer could pretend he didn’t even notice certain soldiers. The major spoke only to me. “Tell that man to get a new uniform,” he said and moved on down the line.
He told me to dismiss the men. Then he said he wanted to talk to people I worked with on the brigade staff. So I drove him up to the TOC in our jeep, driving very carefully, while Major Great spoke to me in that same calm voice, saying, “I’m really amazed at the way you run your detachment, Lieutenant. I’m trying to think what I should do.”
I introduced Major Great to the major in charge of brigade intelligence, the S-2, seated at his desk inside the big bunker. While I stood beside him, Major Great said, in a calm but now ingratiating voice, “I want to check on Lieutenant Kidder’s performance.”
The S-2 shrugged. “I’ve only been here a few days, Major. I really can’t say.”
If only Colonel Chamberlain were still here, I thought. He and his staff would have put in a good word for me.
I drove Major Great back to my detachment. He got out. I stood beside him. He was gazing down the hill at my hootch. “Are those your quarters?”
“Yes, sir.”
He began to step forward, then stopped. A hand went to his chin. “No, that isn’t necessary,” he said. He turned to me. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do, Lieutenant Kidder. When do you give your briefing tomorrow?”
“Zero six hundred, sir.”
He brought his face closer to mine, too close, crossing with impunity the boundary of respect. Getting in your face—I felt as if his was trying to get inside mine. Looking back at his, I saw a picture that generalized itself: the pores in the skin, the stubs of whiskers closely shaved but beginning to grow, a pair of eyes to size me up, a mouth to chew me out. It was the face of this system in which a person only two ranks above me had ineffable power—to make trouble over trivia, to make me feel weak, even to wreck my delicate relations with my men. The lieutenant of my letters would have handled this situation with supreme indifference. I had thought I was catching up to him. I had thought that any day now I really might be him. But I could feel us parting ways. It was as if I looked around and couldn’t find him.
Staring at the face that was staring at me, I recoiled inwardly, but I didn’t move.
“I have to think about what I should do, Lieutenant Kidder,” Major Great was saying calmly. “I’ll be back out here at zero eight hundred tomorrow. I expect to see a vast improvement by then.”
“Yes, sir.” He was waiting, I realized. I saluted.
He returned the salute. I stood there watching him drive off. The men started gathering around me.
“Fuckin’ puke!”
“Kiss my ass, motherfucker!”
“Hey, Lieutenant, do you believe that shit?”
Pancho was scowling. “Flatdick.”
Down in my hootch some days later, I made notes for a new story:
There was a Major Great who used to come in a helicopter, raising dust, spreading it through the screen walls, and climb on things, saying, “This hootch is dusty,” who found a spiderweb in the barrel of Melvin Harris’s rifle. Then Pancho, dark glasses, black hair on the forehead, comes ou
t with his illegal captured weapon, green, insectlike gun. He saunters up to the openmouthed Major Great and says, “Hee hee hee.” “You begged your last beg, sir,” I say. Pancho sticks the Swedish K in Major Great’s open mouth and blasts him. We cut him up in little pieces, put them in cement we have ready, make small blocks, then take them in the truck to the South China Sea and drown them.
What I actually said to the gathered men was: “Look, we’ve got to clean up this place. We’ve got to hurry. He’s coming back tomorrow morning.”
I took Spikes aside. “Can you help me? Please.” His jaw muscles flexed. He wouldn’t quite look at me. But what did I care at that moment?
“Okay, Lieutenant.”
Major Great wasn’t going to inspect my hootch. I could work with the men on theirs. I helped one arrange his footlocker, I helped another take down the laundry lines. The men went along with the cleanup, even Pancho, though he didn’t speak to me. He was straightening up his footlocker, muttering to himself, as I passed through his area, and I realized I shouldn’t feel panicked, but the thought only made me feel more panicked. In one of the men’s hootches, I spotted a pair of unpolished boots on the floor beside a cot. I grabbed them, took them down to my hootch, and polished them, along with my own. I hurried back to the men’s hootches with a broom. Spikes was rolling up the canvas flaps that covered the hootches’ screen walls and tying them neatly in place, so that they looked almost like curtains. Nice touch, I thought as I hurried by.
We finished around midnight. I drank four or five beers in the lounge and went down to my hootch. I climbed into my cot and suddenly, to my surprise, I was weeping. I’m just exhausted, I thought. Could anyone hear me? I went on crying quietly, and then little by little I gave myself to it. Aware that the sounds might be wafting out of my hootch but not caring, almost enjoying myself—oh, in a way, this feels good—I cried myself, quite literally, to sleep.
