William Christie 03 - The Blood We Shed

by William Christie

  I turned the platoon back to the Staff Sergeant and walked away. To cool down I went to get the weekly haircut. On my way back I ran into O'Brien returning from supply.

  Going down the hallway of the battalion CP I heard Jim Nichols's voice say, quite distinctly, "That never happened when I was in command." Then Captain Zimmerman going up the other stairway and Nichols outside the office door.

  O'Brien stalked by him without a word or a look. I got right up in Nichols's face and said, "Listen, Jim, next time you better strap on your kneepads, crawl into the Captain's office, and shut the door behind you, 'cause if I ever hear anything like that again I'll take you out back and kick your little punk ass."

  I pushed the door open so hard it crashed against the opposite wall. On the other side of the office the Gunny exclaimed, "Jesus, sir." Nichols didn't follow me in.

  Since I didn't inherit the genes of the Fraternal Order of Hibernian Wall Punchers, I didn't put my fist through a locker. That's not my way. Instead I started calling Nichols "Jimmy," and pretty soon so did every officer in the battalion. At the right moments I'd throw out a remark like, "Better sit with your back to the wall around Jimmy." Or, "Careful what you say, you don't know where Jimmy'll be taking it." Usually when he was in the room, and of course he didn't do anything about it. Pretty soon that was the image of him in the battalion. He shouldn't have started it. He was an ambitious and malicious child, playing his little games, but I was the one with the instinct for the jugular.

  After lunch Staff Sergeant Frederick and I were waiting around for Office Hours to begin when Corporal Turner came to see us.

  "Sir," he said. "I got to the bottom of missing reveille out in the field. Lance Corporal Moeller fell asleep on radio watch. Since he didn't wake his relief, no reveille."

  "Okay, I'm listening," I said.

  "If he fell asleep in combat he could have gotten us all killed," Corporal Turner said.

  "I'm still listening," I told them.

  The Staff Sergeant said, "Let's not go for another charge sheet, sir. Moeller can stand duty all weekend."

  I could tell Corporal Turner disagreed, but he didn't contradict the Platoon Sergeant.

  "Fine with me," I said.

  After lunch a dazed Lance Corporal Dean and Lance Corporal Hampton were marched into the Captain's office. And they marched out under 14 days restriction, 14 days extra duty, and forfeiture of 7 days pay.

  Staff Sergeant Frederick and I regarded the proceedings with some satisfaction. "It'll take about a heartbeat for the word of this to get around," he predicted.

  ""To encourage the others,"" I quoted.

  "Sir?"

  "In 1756 a British admiral named Sir John Byng got his ass kicked by a French fleet off Minorca in the Mediterranean, and the Brits lost control of the island. The government of the day made him the scapegoat. The next year he was court-martialed and shot by firing squad."

  "That's some harsh shit, sir," said the Staff Sergeant.

  "The French writer Voltaire wrote, "In England it is thought a good thing to shoot an admiral, from time to time, to encourage the others.""

  The Staff Sergeant liked that so much he had me say it again so he could write it down in his notebook.

  It worked. The next couple of weeks went just as Staff Sergeant Frederick predicted. The platoon quickly got sick and tired of doing all the shitty jobs for the whole company. And out in the field every single time something was done wrong we stopped, taught the right way, and did it again. Over and over and over again. And if it was done wrong because someone was too lazy to do it right we did platoon PT. Say what you will about collective punishment, it swung the peer pressure from in favor of the screw-ups to against them as everyone got tired of doing pushups.

  It paid off when, after the usual long hump into the training area, Captain Zimmerman had us issue MILES gear.

  Which stood for Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System, the military's version of laser tag. A laser transmitter box that snapped onto a weapon, and receiver buttons on a harness and helmet band. When a blank round was fired the box sent a pulse of eye-safe laser light downrange. The receiver unit chirped at a near miss, while a hit was an annoying continuous squeal.

  With MILES playing war was almost real. No more arguments about who killed whom, and if you were lazy or careless and exposed yourself you got shot.

  Captain Zimmerman didn't offer any instruction. He picked a spot among the pines and had a machine-gun crew dig their gun in. "Each squad attacks the gun," he ordered. "Any way the squad leader wants. The other squad leaders and team leaders can watch."

  My platoon must have made a real impression on him during the platoon MCCRES. I could see what he was doing, and it was brilliant. Marine squad leaders didn't like to look stupid. They liked it even less if it happened in front of other squad leaders.

  Milburn's platoon went first. The first squad fired and moved pretty well, but when they got close to the gun they stood up and assaulted. A few short bursts and the air was filled with squealing MILES receivers. The whole squad died. Every one of them.

  After the second squad got massacred the others began to slip away to do a little practicing before their turn.

  Ordinarily we'd only have enough blank ammo for each squad to do one attack, and any lessons learned would have to remain theoretical.

  But the new fiscal quarter began next week, and since Captain Dudley hadn't done much training we had a lot of ammo left. It had to be used up, since any left over at the end of a quarter didn't roll over to the next. It just vanished.

  The squads kept getting better but were still taking heavy losses. I pulled my squad leaders aside. "Look, you can't maneuver in front of machine-guns without fire superiority. Try using two teams as a base of fire to keep their heads down while you maneuver around and assault their flank with only one. And don't be in such a goddamned hurry to jump up in the open and get your head blown off. Use cover and crawl up on your belly if you have to."

  Sergeant Harlin decided to do it his way, by the book. He was picked off by the first burst and got to be a bystander to his squad's destruction.

  Then Corporal Turner took my advice and made the first successful attack with only one casualty. Captain Zimmerman exclaimed, "Now that's the way to do it!"

  The new Lieutenant Galway decided that if looking stupid in front of the whole company didn't teach Sergeant Harlin anything, nothing I could say would. And I knew Corporal Turner would be rubbing it in anyway. He was junior in rank but senior in time in service and experience. But rank was what counted, and it was a constant source of friction between them—and their squads.

  As we watched the action, O'Brien remarked, "Did you ever see such a bunch of low-crawling, fire-and-moving sons of bitches in your life?"

  "Un-fucking-believable," said Milburn.

  "I tried to pound the same thing into their heads over three whole days," I said. "It was like pissing into the wind. And the Captain's got them all snapped in over a period of, what, one morning?"

  "For these fucking idiots, it's a miracle," said Milburn.

  O'Brien and I both checked to see if he was serious. Contempt for my Marines? No way, not even when they were driving me crazy. I'd just had to realize that in so many ways they were still kids. Or maybe men-children was a better word for them.

  It showed in their instinctive hostility toward authority, that of course went hand-in-hand with a tireless search for some authority to submit themselves to—the schizophrenia that was like the badge of their immaturity. Or their behavior: acting up, doing stupid things, bickering with each other, constantly pushing at the boundaries, but also secretly hungry for praise and attention. It was why I couldn't let them get away with anything.

  O'Brien glanced at me and I could see we were on the same frequency. But he changed the subject, saying, "They don't want to sit and listen to a class—they shut right down. They want to do." He paused. "Gents, I'm starting to think we got ourselves a compa
ny commander." Then, almost as an afterthought, "Captain Z's going to work out just fine."

  I don't know if Captain Zimmerman ever had any idea where or when he got his nickname.

  More humping took us to the western side of Camp Lejeune, which was actually split in two by the New River Inlet. We crossed the underpass beneath Interstate 17 to reach the Great Sandy Run area, and at the platoon fire and movement range we did the same squad attacks again, but with live ammunition and practice M-203 grenades that gave off a little puff of colored powder instead of blowing up.

  When my squads took the range I felt like Vincent during the grenade accident. All I could do was stand there and watch for the two fire teams suppressing the objective to cease fire just as the third team attacked from the flank and swept right across their front. One second of inattention, one careless twitch of a trigger finger, one mindless piece of jacketed lead screaming downrange, and we'd be zipping some mother's son up in a body bag. But it didn't happen. And the point was that we had to risk zipping them up in body bags, over and over again, so we wouldn't be bagging up even more of them in real combat.

  I'd never seen the troops so fired up. But of course shooting weapons and making things go bang was why they'd joined the Corps. That such a pathetically small part of their time was spent doing that made a fine case for deceptive advertising. Especially when two days of good training involved shooting off nearly four months worth of ammunition.

  Gunny Harris dropped by right after we finished. "Sir, we've got some soldiers from Antigua training on base."

  "Antigua?" I said. "I didn't even know they had an army."

  "You and me both, sir. But they just showed up with a public affairs weenie who wants us to give their officers a quick class on the SAW and let them shoot a belt. The Captain tapped 2nd platoon for the dog and pony show." Which was the resentful term for any public relations demonstration.

  "Nobody ever pre-plans anything around here, do they?" I said. "We always have to pull something out of our ass."

  "You wouldn't be the first one to say that, sir."

  I told the Staff Sergeant to keep everyone working, borrowed a squad automatic weapon from Lance Corporal Conahey, and went off to do it myself.

  The Antiguans had a lot of fun shooting the SAW. And I thought nothing more of it.

  Later the platoon and I were sitting in the shade cleaning our weapons. This was great, because after a little while the Marines forgot I was there. It was like hanging out with my college rugby team at age 19. If there's no women around, it's everyone razzing each other to see who can take it, who shows weakness, and who's going to be the top dog in the pack. Sexual boasting, whether or not you're really getting any, is the order of the day. And the homoerotic banter. All the "bitch," and "taking it up the ass." The sphincter-tightening fear of faggotry that's at the heart of all macho banter, I guess the same way the alpha wolf bluff-mounts the other males to demonstrate his dominance. Make no mistake, we're not that far from the wild. There's also an element of: we're so not gay that we can make jokes about being gay all the time. Not so surprising when you consider that most young men join the Marine Corps to prove to themselves that they really are a real man.

  I discovered that my bottle of CLP, or Cleaner, Lubricant, and Preservative, was almost empty. "Corporal Turner, can I borrow some CLP?"

  For some unknown reason this request caused my normally self-possessed Corporal to start stuttering. "Oh, ah, Reilly, give the Lieutenant some CLP."

  "It's okay," I said, reaching over Corporal Turner's leg and grabbing his bottle. "I've got it."

  I'd already poured some on my bolt before I noticed what was wrong. The liquid in the plastic squeeze bottle was much lighter in color than CLP. I cautiously sniffed it. "What is this? Sulfuric acid?"

  Corporal Turner laughed nervously. "Ah, no sir."

  "Well, what is it? Do I have to send it to the lab?"

  Trapped, Corporal Turner sighed and said, "Half WD-40, sir. And half Hoppe's #9."

  Only CLP was authorized for use on the M-16. It was made of high speed light alloys, so light and high-speed that if you detail-cleaned it every day for a year, never firing it once, at the end of that time it would be worn out, unserviceable. As it was, most of the bluing around the barrels and magazine wells of our rifles was gone.

  The platoon's normal chatter ceased. They were trying not to give me the E.F. Hutton stare, but I had their full attention. Would I explode and chew ass, or even write Corporal Turner up?

  I wiped the bolt with my rag, and the carbon literally slid right off. Hmmm. WD-40 and Hoppe's #9 solvent. I made a show of examining the tips of my fingers very closely.

  "Something wrong, sir?" Corporal Turner asked finally.

  "No," I replied. "Just checking to see if my fingerprints are still there."

  That got a laugh. Then Lance Corporal Asuego, one of the team leaders and my choice to make corporal next, said, "Can I have a word with you, sir?"

  I reassembled my rifle and we walked farther into the woods. He looked very nervous, so I said, "Sit down, Asuego, and tell me what's on your mind."

  "I think I'll stand, sir."

  "Okay, in that case I better sit down." Which I did, cross-legged in the sand, waiting for him to come out with it.

  "Sir, Conahey should have done the class and the shoot with the Antiguans, instead of you taking his SAW."

  I'm embarrassed to say that my first reaction was a quick flash of anger. The insecurity that comes with any kind of serious authority— how dare you question me? Thankfully I didn't say anything before I engaged my brain and realized what an incredible thing it was for a Lance Corporal fire team leader to be sticking up for his Marine and having the balls to come to me instead of bitching about it privately with the troops. It said even more about his expectations of me.

  Lance Corporal Conahey was a Native American who was most emphatically not called "Chief." A really good Marine and a damn fine SAW gunner, but so introverted I couldn't immediately recall ever hearing him say anything other than, "Yes, sir."

  I said, "Sit down, Asuego." He did. "When I grabbed Conahey's SAW, all I was thinking was that it was a pain in the ass job, and rather than jam anyone in the platoon with it I'd take care of it myself. But you see how we've got a major misunderstanding? I think I'm doing Conahey a favor, and he thinks I don't have any confidence in him—or I'm trying to grab some glory."

  Asuego nodded.

  "This was my fault," I said. "I was wrong and it won't happen again. I appreciate you coming to talk to me like this—I know how hard it was to do. Okay, anything else?"

  "No, sir." And even though Marines never salute in the field, he came to attention and threw me one that I stood up and returned.

  He went back, and I walked over to the company CP to give them time to talk it over. I felt lighter than air, because the platoon and I had really turned the corner this time.

  At the CP Captain Zimmerman had a question for me. "Mike, where did you get the idea to suppress with two teams and attack with only one?"

  "Rommel, sir."

  He broke into a big smile. "Good old Infantry Attacks. Everyone reads it, few get anything out of it."

  Impulsively, I decided to strike while the iron was hot. "Sir, what about promoting Corporal Turner to sergeant?"

  A frown followed by a long pause. "I've heard about his record."

  I knew from whom. The First Sergeant didn't like Corporal Turner; didn't like anyone who'd been a drill instructor and fallen from grace. The First Sergeant hadn't just been a drill instructor. He'd been the one drill instructor in the Marine Corps picked for an exchange tour with the British Royal Marine Commandos. "If we judge him for fucking up, sir, we should give him extra credit for getting back on track. He deserves it, sir."

  "I'll think about it."

  "Thank you, sir."

  I thought he'd moved on then, but from behind I received a clout in the back that nearly sent my glasses flying off. I gues
s I did good. An unfamiliar sensation.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Jenny took it well, but weekend duty was a little hard to explain to a civilian. Only a Marine would understand going out to the field from Monday to Friday, working effectively a 100-hour week, and then coming back in on Saturday and pulling a straight 24-hour shift.

  I was relieving First Lieutenant Ske, the XO of Golf Company. As I rolled into headquarters on Saturday morning he greeted me with his usual, "Hey, motherfucker."

  What would have been an invitation to single combat from anyone else was just a warm comradely salutation from Ske. He was another Mustang, and probably would have become the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps if some stupid officer hadn't made him an officer. I say this for no other reason than old Ske was both a genuine Marine Corps idealist and an honest man. If things were fucked up he said they were fucked up. An officer had to be much more politic. And the only thing polished about Ske were his boots and his brass. He was Marine Corps crude, which was like having a black belt in crude. Pretty close to the perfect formula for rubbing your superiors the wrong way.

  Ske was wearing the OD's pistol in a shoulder holster. Instead of handing it over he reached into the wall locker and gave me the OD warbelt, pistol included. Then he unloaded and cleared what turned out to be his own Beretta, securing it, the shoulder holster, and his own ammo in a Pelican hard case. He bade me farewell with a hearty, "Good luck, motherfucker."

  "You too, motherfucker," I replied.

  My Staff Duty was Staff Sergeant Cruz, the S-l (Personnel) Chief.

  "I don't get it," I said to him. "Does he think that if he caps someone and turns in a clean pistol and all his rounds, no one's going to figure out that he did it?"