William Christie 03 - The Blood We Shed

by William Christie

  The job wasn't as dramatic as the pistol made it out to be. Answer the phone and deal with any problems. Fill out the papers if a Marine had to go on emergency leave. Tour the area. Make sure the food in the regimental chow hall was up to snuff. The Marines restricted to the area as a result of company punishment had to come by on a schedule and sign in to prove they were still there.

  It was boring, really boring. My staff duty was Staff Sergeant Lornell, the S-2 (Intelligence) chief. Old for a staff sergeant—promotions came slow in some occupational specialties. In the Corps a Staff NCO who was burned out and had lost his motivation was called "tired." Staff Sergeant Lornell might have been tired, but he could still talk the bark off a tree. After a while it felt like being married. Making a tour was an excuse to get out of the house.

  The troops lived in three-story motel style brick barracks arrayed behind the headquarters. Three-man rooms with their own bath, each one facing out onto an open air roofed walkway on each floor. Every company had a duty NCO in an office inside the barracks. And an enlisted firewatch patrolling the walkways and perimeter of the building.

  An OD didn't have to exercise a lot of judgment, because the typical battalion commander prohibited just about everything. That way no matter what happened he could tell the commanding general he had a standing order against it. So far all I'd had to do was tell a couple of Marines to turn their stereos down.

  At 0200 in the morning I was asleep in the lower rack of the bunk bed in the office. Privilege of rank, but it also meant I had to roll out and answer the phone.

  I picked it up and gave the required greeting: "Officer of the Day, Lieutenant Galway speaking, may I help you sir?"

  An excited voice blurted out, "Sir, this is the Fox Company duty. We've got a Marine threatening to kill his roommates with a knife."

  "Where's he now?" I said, grabbing for my blouse.

  "Still in his room, sir."

  "I'll be right there," I said, fumbling for my cammies. I told Staff Sergeant Lornell what was going on while I pulled on my boots and pistol belt.

  "I'll call the MP's," he said.

  "You know the building number for Fox Company's barracks?" Right then I couldn't have remembered it for a million dollars.

  "I've got it," he said. "Be careful, sir."

  I went out the door at a dead run. It wasn't hard to find the right room. The duty, the firewatch, and two Marines in their skivvies were standing out in front of it. It was a steaming summer night, but they were both shivering

  Incoherent screaming inside. Someone was literally bouncing off the walls. "Is he in there alone?" I asked.

  "Yes, sir," said the duty NCO.

  Unfastening the holster flap and keeping my right hand free to draw my pistol, I opened the door a crack and took a peek. The Marine was now on one of the racks, totally naked, still screaming, and slashing at his abdomen with a knife. I saw blood. Great, just great.

  I quietly shut the door and considered my options. In the movie the OD would swagger into the room and disarm the nut case with a fancy Kung Fu move. But there could be only two actual outcomes. Either I'd get stabbed or he'd get shot.

  I didn't think Lieutenant Colonel Sweatman, our battalion commander, would have too much heartburn over me getting stabbed. But I knew he'd be royally pissed if I shot a Marine, no matter the circumstances.

  So I reasoned in a very cold-bloodedly practical Marine way that even if the wacko managed to disembowel himself, it would take him at least 15 minutes to die. And the MP's would show up before then.

  But he threw a monkey wrench into my plans by deciding that he wanted out of his room.

  I couldn't lock him in from the outside. All I could do was grab the doorknob with both hands and brace one foot against the brick wall. He was yanking away with all his might from the inside and I was holding firm on the other.

  By now we'd attracted a crowd of rubberneckers. If he got out among them with that knife I'd have to shoot him.

  But the MP's finally showed up, three of them. I described the situation while holding onto the doorknob for dear life. In other circumstances it would have been comical.

  On a silent count of three I let go of the knob. The door flew open, and the sudden lack of resistance sent the Marine flying back into the room. The MP's piled in with me right behind them.

  They blinded him with a flashlight beam for the crucial second it took to pin the knife arm with a baton and knock the blade loose. The Marine went crazy, and the sweat and blood on naked skin made him as slippery as a greased pig.

  All four of us were on him. Every time we got a grip on an arm we'd lose it. The MP's were cracking him with their batons in between using them to try and pin him down; I was wrapped around his legs so he couldn't get up, and at the same time doing my best to twist his feet off his ankles. And for all the effect it was having we might as well have been giving him a massage. We damn near died of exhaustion in the eternity it took to get the cuffs on him. Even then he was so wild I had to scrounge a web belt to tie his ankles together.

  The next time I see a video of four cops whaling the piss out of some suspect, I'll feel sorry for the cops.

  Even after all that, we had to physically sit on him to keep him from thrashing around. The slashes on his chest and stomach were superficial but they bled like hell. He kept screaming a bunch of gibberish, mostly along the lines of Satan making him do it. I was about to go looking for a sock to stuff in his mouth when the ambulance arrived.

  They had to strap him onto a cervical backboard before they could get some pressure bandages on him. Since he had no cervical injuries they didn't bother to strap his head down. And pretty soon all you could hear was the clomping sound of him banging his head against the wooden backboard.

  "Next time I won't fail!" he yelled as they put him on the gurney.

  "Next time do it when I'm not on duty," I muttered as they rolled him by me.

  After a well-deserved breather, we all had to sit down and put the whole thing together.

  The Marine in question was Private Dove, a peaceful name in ironic contrast with a non-peaceful nature. He'd been reduced to his current rank after a string of offenses. He was also in alcohol rehab. In the Marine Corps an alcoholic either accepted treatment or got discharged. The treatment was the same as in the civilian world, no whips or dungeons involved. Except the alcoholic was required to take Antabuse. Antabuse was a drug that made you sick as a dog when you ingested even the slightest amount of alcohol.

  During the day a Marine reported to sickbay where he took the pill under observation. After hours the OD did the job. Just tons of fun. You had to watch him swallow it and then confirm by checking inside his mouth with a flashlight.

  But Private Dove hadn't shown up to get his medication from me, and I'd logged him in accordingly. He'd actually gone out drinking. And by that time he didn't have enough Antabuse in his system to make him sick, or he didn't care. Whether the Antabuse made him psychotic or whether he was psychotic to begin with would be answered above my pay grade.

  From the way the media loves reporting, "Former Marine shoots...," or "Ex-Marine attacks...," you'd think that Boot Camp turned young men into psychotic killers. Take my word for it, it doesn't. But if you happened to be a psycho before you joined up, it doesn't make you normal. I don't have any statistics to back me up, but my guess is that psychotics are far more likely to join the Marine Corps than the Peace Corps.

  Dove's two long-suffering roommates were awakened from their slumber to find him standing naked atop one of their racks, brandishing the knife and announcing, "I'm going to kill you."

  They'd immediately and sensibly un-assed the room and notified the duty NCO, setting the chain of events in motion.

  "JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!!" Staff Sergeant Lornell exclaimed when I came trudging back to the office covered with blood.

  I told him the story before throwing my cammies into a garbage bag and taking a shower. It paid to keep a couple of spare unifo
rms in your locker.

  Then I called the Naval hospital and asked them to give Dove an HIV test. It was negative. Marines had to have one every year anyway.

  I'd written term papers shorter than my logbook entry. The entries for a typical tour ran two pages. Basically along the lines of: 1500 hours, OD toured the area, all secure. 1800 hours, OD to chow hall, chow was sufficient in quality and quantity.

  But recording this particular incident took me ten pages. It all had to be perfect, since the log was a legal document that would be figuring prominently in Dove's impending adventures with the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

  Major Thom, the battalion XO, had given me an excruciatingly detailed duty brief on Friday, keeping me at parade rest in front of his desk the whole time. He'd finished up by saying, "Galway, when you're on duty you represent the command. Don't fuck the command. Because if you fuck the command, you fuck me. And if you fuck me, I'll fuck you 'til you're pregnant."

  It was just like Officer Candidate School, where the sheer theatrical quality of the ranting and raving always tickled my funny bone. But the consequences of even cracking a grin were terrible. So I faithfully followed Major Thom's orders to call him at home if anything out of the ordinary happened. After all, it was only 0500 on Sunday morning.

  At first he was pissed that I'd called him, then halfway through the story he blurted out, "What?" I kept going; he listened quietly then asked where Dove was. I told him, there was a moment of silence, then he said, "All right," and hung up, leaving me no idea where I stood with him.

  By the time everything quieted down it was too late, or rather too early, for me to get any sleep.

  I had to ask the Staff Sergeant: "Does this kind of shit happen very often?"

  He had a good laugh over that. "Sir, I've been in seventeen years and nothing like this ever happened to me before. You really got your cherry busted tonight."

  Great, I thought. What was my second duty going to be like?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sunday morning was a couple of loads of laundry and a much-needed nap, unfortunately interrupted by a phone summons from Jack O'Brien that put me on the road. A Marine Corps infantry battalion is a very insular little world. Lieutenants worked together, and lieutenants socialized together.

  We usually met at O'Brien's quarters on base. Company grade housing was streets of absolutely identical small homes. They were painted different colors, though. As you went up in rank and accumulated more children and possessions the houses got bigger, though still identical.

  I lugged a load of beer and ice from my pickup truck. No gun rack, if that's what you were thinking, but all my worldly goods did fit inside it. Since married second lieutenants with children could afford less than single corporals, everyone always brought something to a get-together. The bachelors usually contributed the alcohol.

  At O'Brien's front door I was met by the two dachshunds. One was really smart, and the other…well, she had a great personality. One was being protective and barking at me, and the other was wagging her tail happily to let me know she'd lead me to the valuables if I scratched behind her ears.

  I dumped my load in the plastic trashcan and gave Jack O'Brien's wife Lynn a big hug. Their year and a half-old daughter Bonnie was clinging tightly to her mother's leg in the presence of so many strangers.

  When I rubbed her head she smiled shyly and looked up at me with heartbreakingly big eyes. Then I gave hugs to Mary Federico and Tracy Nichols, and they gave me a massive tray of marinated chicken to lug out to the back yard.

  The men were gathered around the fire for the burning of the meat. O'Brien in front of the grill with his apron on, and the rest of the hunting party arrayed about him in a semicircle. Jack was big but not tall. A powerlifter, built like a refrigerator. And while I resemble a Spanish seaman shipwrecked from the Armada, he was what the world thinks an Irishman ought to look like.

  Frank Milburn might have stepped off a recruiting poster. His body was shaped like a perfect V from the broad shoulders to the narrow waist. Even his face was the All-American quarterback type the Corps favored for the recruiting ads. Of course I was jealous.

  Jim Nichols was about the same height as O'Brien but not as burly. The kind of guy who, immediately after you'd met, found a way to let you know that he'd been first in his class in The Basic Officer Course, always called The Basic School. And of course everyone found a way to break his balls about it. Nichols would start talking about being a corporal in Desert Storm, and Milburn would always say, "Jim, a supply clerk with the Air Wing wasn't in Desert Storm. You were in Saudi Arabia." Nichols was prior-enlisted, what the Corps calls a Mustang. He was now an infantryman, everyone suspected, because the Commandant of the Marine Corps was always an infantryman.

  Jim's wife Tracy had just had a baby, the third of three girls. The gossip was that this would continue until she had a boy. O'Brien liked to say that Jimmy needed to get his X and Y sperm formed up into a column of twos.

  Those were the Echo Company lieutenants who'd made it through the grenade accident. O'Brien had 1st platoon, I had 2nd, Milburn 3rd, and Nichols weapons platoon.

  But we always socialized with the lieutenants of Fox Company. Paul Federico lived a few doors down from O'Brien in base housing. Mary was his wife.

  Lee Harvey Oberdorff's first and middle names were neither Lee nor Harvey. Shortly after he reported to the battalion he ran into Lieutenant Tex, the anti-armor platoon commander. Tex took one look at him and shouted, "Lee Harvey Oswald!" And that was all it took.

  Ian Campbell was tall and quiet, and took a lot of pride in his Scottish ancestry.

  As I came up Federico threw his arms around me, nearly upsetting my beverage. "Here he is!" he announced. "My hero."

  "How so?" I asked, the embrace having pinned my beer can against my ear.

  "Private Dove," said Federico. "I've been trying to get rid of that worthless piece of shit for months, and now he's gone. The only way you could have done me a bigger favor was if you'd shot him."

  "Anything for a pal," I said.

  Federico released me. "Here's your reward," he said, offering me an angry looking green pepper. It was no gag; he ate those jalapenos like gumdrops.

  "No thanks," I said, plunging my non-beer hand into the box of pretzels Lee Harvey was holding. "I prefer not to cry like a little girl during my morning bowel movement."

  "The dreaded red eye," said Milburn.

  "What the hell happened last night?" Nichols demanded. "I heard you had to go hand-to-hand with the guy."

  In an infantry battalion, gossip moved literally at the speed of light. And Jim always made sure he was the first one to know everything.

  So I had to tell the tale of my duty.

  "Good sea story," Milburn said after I finished.

  "Read the logbook," I retorted. They say the difference between a fairy tale and a sea story is that a fairy tale begins with, "Once upon a time....," while a sea story starts off with, "Now this is no shit...."

  "Did you call the XO?" O'Brien asked me.

  "Yes, Dad."

  "What did he say?"

  "He said, "all right," and hung up."

  "That means you did good," said Federico. "If he thought you'd fucked up, he'd have melted your earwax over the phone. Then he'd probably get dressed, come down to the CP, and do it again in person."

  O'Brien said, "You know, I can't decide whether you're an unlucky son of a bitch for all the shit that's gone down on your watch, or the luckiest son of a bitch in the Corps because Dudley's gone before he could toast you on your fitness report."

  Captain Dudley had seriously disliked me. The man was a total careerist who ran his company according to the zero-defect system.

  I should explain. The senior officers in the military were like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. If anything upset them they screamed, "Off with their heads!" Except that careers were chopped off instead of heads. So a certain percentage of officers felt that the best w
ay to make general was to never make a mistake. It was called zero-defects, and it was the way the military really worked as opposed to its popular image. And there were two, and only two, guaranteed ways to never make a mistake. The first was to do absolutely nothing. The second was to arrange for someone else to take the blame when the inevitable happened.

  Dudley practiced both, but mainly the first. We'd had an adverse chemical reaction from the moment we first met, and after that he'd done nothing but throw fastballs at my head.

  It really started when, on my second week in the company, he had me command a detachment to the rifle range. The first thing I did was ask O'Brien where the rife range was. During practice shooting Captain Dudley told me his rifle wasn't any good. Following the Company Gunnery Sergeant's advice I'd brought a number of spare M-16's in case someone had a breakage. So I got the Captain a new one. The sights weren't right. He kept it up; it was total neurosis. He didn't need an armorer, he needed a sport's psychologist. Finally I had to tell him he'd exhausted all the spares; we'd have to pick a Marine and take his rifle away. I'm afraid I didn't word it much more diplomatically than that.

  Then the games began. He had me sign out classified material so he could take it home and read it, and if the dog ate it I'd go to jail. Totally illegal, but your career was just as over if you reported it.

  I hadn't given him an excuse to relieve me, but it was no mystery what my first fitness report would have looked like. And now he was gone.

  "That's what happens when you get commissioned on a Friday the 13th," I said.

  "No shit?" said Federico.

  "No shit," I replied. My Irish mother had been horrified, but it was last day of OCS and they didn't change the training schedule for things like that.