MATT HELM: The War Years

by Keith Wease

  "Just keep in mind that we are serving an important role. Don't hate the enemy - it clouds your judgment and it is a waste of time and energy. It is only necessary to kill him."

  Chapter 7

  The next day we started in earnest. There were no more secrets, no pretenses. We were being trained to kill, efficiently and by any means available. Every other part of the training was a means to an end. We had to learn how to stay alive, of course, to survive long enough to make the touch - that was the word used in our outfit, why I don't know - and we had to learn how to disengage and make it back home. Along the way we might have to indulge in some secret-agent stuff, including interrogation, but most of that was handled in the classroom. In the field, we concentrated on killing.

  I was surprised that no one defected. There wasn't much talking that first day and you could sense the mental wheels spinning, but each of us seemed to have come to terms with the implications of Mac's little speech the night before. I suppose that was the purpose of the speech. I never again heard him talk at that length on any non-job-related subject.

  Except for special night training, our days were regulated in a typical military fashion, with one major exception. No more PT - physical training for you non-military types. I halfway expected to fall out in the morning for jumping jacks, push-ups, mile runs and all the other nonsense designed to make an otherwise healthy human being ache and hurt and wish he'd picked another profession. Not that we didn't get plenty of exercise, but it was specific exercise, as in hand-to-hand combat, fencing and jumping for cover when a grenade landed too close for comfort.

  We also didn't have a lot of nonsense about our personal habits. If you had a hand free and wanted a cigarette, you just lit up. There were times I could have used one myself - or my old pipe - but I had given up the habit when it got to be a nuisance around the darkroom. In that youthful, pre-war period of my life, I'd carried a big 4x5 Speed Graphic camera like a shining sword and worn a press pass in my hat like reporters do in the movies - at least I did until I was laughed out of it by the reporters on the paper. They'd called me Flashbulb Helm, thanks to an instant christening by Frank McKenna. He was one of those ageless, pink, chubby, baby-f aced characters who remember everybody they've ever met and are always glad to see them. I don't know why. Personally, I've met a lot of people I'd just as soon forget. Nobody had ever called him Frank. He'd been universally known as Buddy and had been one of the people who'd laughed me out of my pretentious stage and set me on the path to becoming a reasonably competent journalist.

  Anyway, I'd found that you simply couldn't get a clear, crisp print in a darkroom filled with smoke and had gradually quit smoking altogether. But I still liked a drink occasionally, and was pleased to discover that even hard liquor was available after the evening meal, although consumed in limited quantities - you didn't want to be nursing a hangover when Vance worked you over with his version of Karate. Mac, if it was his idea, took care of his people and those who didn't particularly like beer - I was in that category - found their favorite tipple well stocked. That's what I call a thorough background check.

  Most of the field training was designed not just to refine our physical skills, but to teach us the concepts that distinguish the highly competent amateur from the true professional. For example, we had drilled into us the simple fact that a man aiming a gun at you was a hostile act demanding instant and violent retaliation whenever possible. A man who aims a gun at you is a man who can kill you, and you don't want to leave people like that standing around. A gun is a gun and a threat is a threat, and we were trained to react first and do our heavy thinking later. Like savage dogs, we were taught to go for the throat when threatened.

  I remember the way Vance put it. "A gun is serious business. Once you point a gun at somebody you're a murderer; whether or not you get around to pulling the trigger is irrelevant. So you'd damn well better decide if that's what you want before you start waving the piece around. It's only in the movies that a pistol, or whatever, is a magic wand that bends people peacefully to your will. The cops have to try it because they're supposed to bring 'em back alive if they can. We don't. I don't point guns at people I'm not prepared to kill; and if anybody points a gun at me, I figure he means it, and I think about nothing but killing him until I have him totally dead. Or he has me; but somehow that hasn't happened yet. Forget that idiot drop-your-gun-and-put-your-hands-up nonsense. The moment you aim a gun at somebody, you've moved into the killing zone and you'd better be ready to finish the job and do them in fast before they do you."

  As I've indicated, I'd grown up with guns, knowing perfectly well that a firearm is simply a tool for drilling a small round hole in an object, inanimate or animate. If that's what you want, fine; but don't expect a little .22 or even a roaring, thundering .45 to turn you into some kind of omnipotent deity with absolute control of the world around you. You might end up dying in a spreading puddle of blood and urine, staring up at your killer reproachfully, wondering why he hadn't got the word that a gun was all it would take to make you a big man giving orders to everybody. I think that's the reason Mac liked hunters, people like me. The hardest thing to teach someone who hasn't grown up with guns is not how to shoot but when to shoot.

  Vance also had something to say on that subject. "If you're facing someone who knows guns, he's not going to just fold up and become a meek little prisoner, like in the movies. There's only one answer to the old empty-gun gambit. It's that same as for the look-out-there's-somebody-behind-you routine. You just pull the damn trigger. You may wind up with a dead man on the floor, but there's a better chance of its not being you.

  "The same thing holds true when you're faced with more than one professional. The standard procedure is to start moving slowly apart, shuffling their feet, not really enough to be threatening, just enough to finally make their move when you can no longer adequately cover all of them. If you hesitate, you're dead. Don't waste your breath on useless threats - they'll know you don't mean it. Just shoot the first one who moves and the others will behave themselves. Usually," he added with a wolfish grin.

  Most of us learned quickly, if we hadn't already known most of it. But Stella - the only girl in the group - apparently hadn't had the same gun-orientated background as the rest of us. Well, maybe Mac had chosen her using different criteria. She listened, but you could tell it was a foreign language to her and while she learned to shoot, she had a hard time even with the basics. You always check a gun after it's handed to you - or received through other, less peaceful means - even if you think you know it's loaded. Or unloaded. Vance used the standard trick of range instructors, appearing to be loading a weapon while actually palming the cartridges, and handed it to Stella. She took it, aimed at the target, and attempted to fire the unloaded weapon in full view of the rest of us. I don't think she ever really forgave Vance and was cool to him from then on, but that was the last time she forgot to check a weapon - at least on the range. In the field, a lot of otherwise intelligent agents died by forgetting this principle and I always wondered if that was what happened to her a few months later. She was the first of our little group to die in the field, but not the last.

  When it came time for rifle training, not to be outdone, I had my share of things to teach the rest of the group. Whether you're hunting animals or people with a telescope-mounted rifle, the principle is the same. My lecture went like this:

  "The best way to fluff a difficult shot is to think too much about it. Oh, advance planning and preparation are necessary, of course: The gun must be properly tuned and sighted, and the ammunition must be carefully loaded unless you're willing to settle for the lesser accuracy of the factory product - perfectly reliable, of course, but in the nature of things it can never be tailored to the characteristics of your particular rifle. The target area must be inspected to make certain that no twigs or branches will intervene to deflect the bullet. The firing point must be selected with care, and a steady rest provided. The probable wind conditio
ns must be studied; and a table of allowances must be prepared for various wind velocities. The range must, of course, be determined with care, although, with a powerful, flat-shooting weapon you do have some leeway. If you're shooting on a slant, the range must, of course, be the horizontal distance to your target, not the slant distance. Gravity does not operate in a slanting direction; bullet drop does not depend upon the slant distance to the target but only upon the horizontal component thereof; so on long shots you have to hold under to allow for this.

  "But once all this has been done, the thinking must stop. In particular, all clever last-minute brainstorms, adjustments, inspirations, and corrective impulses must be strangled at birth.

  "I still remember, very clearly, my first shot at an antelope. I was a boy, hunting with my father; and there was the dream buck we'd been looking for. But he looked so small compared to the mule deer I'd already hunted successfully! The mental computer went into action unbidden: Looking so small, he must be very far away, best to hold over a bit to allow for the drop of the bullet at that great range. So I shot high, and missed high; and it was another two years before I finally bagged an antelope, not nearly as spectacular as that one. Actually, the target had looked small simply because the pronghorn is a small animal. A dead-center hold such as Dad had carefully instructed me to use would have got me that trophy - the first one lost to me by excessive cerebration, but not the last."

  I don't know how much they learned that was new to them, but they listened attentively enough, with those too-polite expressions that said I wasn't really an instructor, just one of them, even if I did know about rifles. That was okay with me, I hadn't asked for the job anyway. At least they didn't laugh, and Vance, standing at the back, gave me the "OK" sign with his thumb and forefinger. To be honest, I kind of enjoyed the experience.

  As near as I could determine, all the instructors were hell-on-wheels in all aspects of the business - if business was the right word to describe what we were doing - but each had his own specialty or specialties. When not teaching these specialties to the group, they were as likely as not to show up at one of the other classes and most of them attended mine. It gave me a lot of respect for Mac's ability to choose people. I think we all learned more because of the example set by the instructors, not to mention making my debut easier - if the instructors were interested in what I had to say, then perhaps my classmates should give me a chance. . . .

  Often I found myself wondering where the instructors had acquired their experience. I mean, I understand the mechanical skills with firearms and edged weapons, and I suppose that the hand-to-hand stuff has a certain peacetime following. But some of the more exotic skills and especially the depth of knowledge going beyond the physical to the mental expertise, I couldn't figure. We'd been at peace for a relatively long time, so where did Mac find some of these people?

  Take Frank for instance. I'd seen him twice before taking his interrogation class. The second time he'd been fairly friendly, but he'd been in a car and I'd only really noticed him in profile, so to speak. Sitting in his class was a different experience. He looked quite ordinary. They usually do. Very few of them have werewolf fangs and pointed, tufted ears. He was dressed in a faded, flowery sports shirt, frayed jeans, and tennis shoes. But I didn't like his eyes. Well, hell, maybe he didn't like mine. We all have our little specialties. I was in no position to criticize, even though I was just a little uncomfortable - it's one thing to kill a man; it's quite another to torture him. Frank had just explained the concept of the I-Team - "I" being short for interrogation, of course - that was being formed in London to handle certain prisoners who had vital information we needed. My conscience - what was left of it - told me that if I had to get information by such means the least I could do was to get my own hands bloody. Using an I-team would make me like the kind of hypocritical creep who loves steak but wouldn't dream of going out and murdering a poor little steer - or deer - himself. Or herself.

  Apparently with that same thought in mind, Frank was explaining the basic principle behind interrogation techniques. "Dignity," he said. "Remember that dignity is the key to any man's resistance, or any woman's. As long as your subject is allowed to feel that he's still a human being with rights and privileges and self-respect, he can usually hold out indefinitely. Take, for instance, a soldier in a clean uniform, lead him politely to a desk, seat him decorously on a chair, request him to place his hands before him, stick splinters under his fingernails, and set fire to them … and you'll be surprised how often he'll watch his fingertips cooking and laugh in your face. But if you take the same man, first, and work him over to show that you don't mind bruising your knuckles and don't have a bit of respect for his integrity as a man - you don't have to hurt him much, just mess him up until he can no longer cling to a romanticized picture of himself as a noble and handsome embodiment of stubborn courage."

  Like I said, I wondered where Frank got his training. Or Mac himself. We had lots of fun discussing Mac. One school of thought had it that although he was great at picking, and setting up training programs for, dangerous men, Mac himself couldn't fight his way out of a lightweight airmail envelope. I didn't buy it. Nobody got that look sitting behind a desk, and I've often thought about his possible background. He wasn't really old enough to have gotten that much experience in the first war - what up to now had always been called The Great War. I had in mind a certain little-known arm of British intelligence, not that Mac was even remotely British, but they were known to hire Americans upon occasion. Or perhaps he'd been one of those soldiers-of-fortune so popular in the movies. Hell, he could have been an enforcer for Al Capone or one of the New York Families, recruited out of prison just for this purpose, but that didn't wash. I'm not sure why, but I had the impression that this idea was his own little baby from start to finish and he'd had to work like hell to sell the idea to someone.

  Mac kind of appeared and disappeared at random. I assumed he had other duties involving the first group to graduate from the Ranch. When he was in residence, so to speak, he taught an occasional class himself. One of the more interesting ones had to do with escape. He covered a lot of ground on basic techniques, but the part that stuck in my mind, and saved my life a time or two, was his lecture on escape theory.

  He didn't pull any punches or dress it up in fancy language. And, to me at least, it sounded like he was speaking from experience, not just theory. "In the movies," he explained, "you see the heroes - and heroines - carefully plotting their escape, planning a way to break out, overpower their captors, tie them up nice and neat, and summon help, preferably with a minimum of bloodshed, being the nice movie heroes they are. That's dream stuff. The basic principle of escaping is that there is no problem in escaping, none whatever, if everyone who's in a position to prevent you from escaping has been killed. To turn a phrase, you go for the throats, not the boats. Never mind that Gustav's been reasonably polite, to date. Never mind that Max's attitude is understandable or that Heinrich may have something to be said in his favor also. You just forget all that. If you get a chance to use a knife, it must go in all the way, low, edge up, and rip upward until it hits bone. Then you step back fast and let the guts spill out, filling the air with that nasty stench you get when you dress out a deer or an elk carelessly and damage the intestines, letting the contents of the digestive tract spill out. If you get chance to swing some kind of blunt instrument, there should be brains on it when you stop swinging. Forget all about trying to escape. Escape will take care of itself, later. As long as there's one of them standing, moving, even twitching slightly, you keep after him and to hell with escape. Too damned many people, thinking about getting away instead of concentrating on the job at hand, have been killed at the last moment by somebody they chivalrously refrained from finishing off when they had the chance, movie fashion. You don't want to die because you were too sensitive to give somebody who was still wiggling another bash on the head, and he managed to reach a gun before he died."

  To
me, that is the sound of experience. In college, most of my professors had only been teachers, not doers. When they taught a class it was with a certain amount of abstraction; theory, not practice, if you know what I mean. But my photojournalism professor had spent twenty-five years on the job before retiring to teach. His class came alive and when he explained how to frame a subject you knew he had done it, and not just once. This training had the same flavor. Every one of our instructors had been there and done it. I think because of that, I listened with just a little more attention than I might have otherwise - which is probably why I survived the war.

  Take this example from Rassmussen. I think we caught him in an off moment, because he left a definite impression of prior experience and a wider knowledge of his fellow instructors than we had. I'm not even sure how the discussion got started. I think someone asked him about getting out after a job was finished. He looked at the recruit - I believe it was Karl, a dark-haired, wiry man of German descent, who spoke flawless German and, as I remember, gave me a run for my money with the sabers - and hesitated for an instant before answering. "It comes down to learning to play the odds, assuming you have a choice. For example, if you're being chased in a car by a guy behind who is definitely trying to kill you, and there's probably some other guys at a roadblock not too far ahead who'd also like to kill you, you've got to get away fast. You can't be bothered with the minor statistical possibility of meeting a stranger on a blind curve with you on the wrong side of the road. It's one of the lesser risks, let's say.