Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “Yessir. I’ve got a copy.”

  “For the next two weeks, I want you to do some quiet sniffing around. I want to know about this kid, Hand. I want to know who his friends were, who his enemies were, who his squad leaders were, who he came into regular contact with in extracurricular activities, if any. I want you to run a thorough check on this kid. I want it in writing. Take two weeks. When you figure you’ve got the kid nailed down, I want details. Names. Dates. 2-1’s. Roommates. Trips away from the academy. Cadet aptitude reports. Anything you can get from the academic side of the street. I want Cadet David Hand in this office, like he was standing in front of me with his heels locked and his chin in. I want his life, Terry, every last breath the bastard took. I want to smell him, Terry. You got me?”

  “General, sir, you know you can depend on me.”

  “Okay. But keep this on the QT. If you start a thing where the cadets think ‘the word is coming down’ on Hand, all hell will break loose. So be careful and take your time. Get back to me as soon as you’re ready.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Now, I’ve got to get over to the supe’s office before he loses his lunch. Keep in touch. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  Colonel Phineas Terrance King stood up and saluted, Hedges didn’t even notice. He was studying the toes of his shoes, which were highly polished but in need of a final buffing before making the trip across the street to the supe’s office. It was a short walk, but Hedges had a lot of thinking to do and a short time in which to do it. He felt good. Time was beginning to compress, to shrink, and though he acted quickly, he felt as if he were moving in slow motion. It was a feeling he knew well, as if he were moving in motor oil instead of air … the compression of mental time, psychological time, while “real time” raced ahead … it was what had made him a good combat commander. He created time for himself when situations refused to yield it. Hedges felt the thin smile on his lips again. Pressure. He smelled it. He breathed tension the way other men breathed a woman’s perfume. It was like being a little drunk … high … your hands tingled and your mind felt supercharged, above it all. Charles Sherrill Hedges reached in his pocket and felt the gray wool of the cadet’s epaulet. He walked across Thayer Road. He had been born to be a general. He thrived on the army, ate it and drank it and breathed it and slept with it….

  Walking through the sally port into the courtyard inside the Academic Headquarters Building, Hedges remembered an old sergeant he’d had as a squad leader when he was a lieutenant. It had been his first command. They were in the field on maneuvers somewhere in the red clay of Georgia, and the sergeant was drunk. Lieutenant Hedges was momentarily perplexed. He didn’t know whether to punish him, indulge him, scold him like a child, put him to bed … he didn’t know what the hell to do. He wished he was older. He was green. He knew it. The old sergeant, a buck sergeant who had been busted up and down the stripes three or four times in the twenty-some years he’d been in the army … the old sergeant wrapped his arm around the young lieutenant’s shoulder and whispered to him:

  This army’s like a woman, sir. A cunt. You can smell her. Just remember: If you’re not fucking her, she’s fucking you.

  4

  “Heeeeaauh! Slaight!” The sound was a nasal bark, like a seal’s. Slaight heard it as he walked down the long, wide hall of second floor, New South Barracks, heading for Room 226, in the corner, overlooking the hospital.

  “Heeeeaauh! Fuckin’ Slaight!” It was his roommate, Leroy Buck. The sound was their signal, a ridiculous noise one of them had started back when they were plebes. They weren’t allowed to talk with one another when they passed in the area of barracks, which meant anywhere outside their own rooms, so they barked: a low, nasal directionless sound. Nobody could figure out where it was coming from, or what it meant. It didn’t mean a thing. And three years later, they were still doing it.

  “Heeeeaauh!” barked Slaight. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, I’m tired from that area. My feet feel like hamburger patties. My goddamn shoulder feels like somebody’s been pounding on it all day with a telephone pole. Goddamn fuckin’ area.”

  “You’re not going to believe what’s come down from fuckin’ dingo Grimshaw, Slaight,” said Buck, his thick southern drawl dragging his words from his mouth like the blade of a plow through bottomland. Buck was from Burning Tree, Indiana, a town of about forty near the south end of the state on the Wabash River. He was born so far out in the dirt farm boonies, he considered even Slaight came from a city. Slaight was from Leaven-worth, Kansas, a metropolis of about twenty thousand.

  Buck’s father worked a piece of land near Burning Tree as a tenant farmer, the modern term for sharecropper. His father planted and harvested another man’s land with his own equipment, realizing three fifths of the crops’ profits. His people were of the land, of the dirt, and they were dirt poor. It was 1957 before Leroy Buck knew that houses were heated with anything besides potbelly stoves. All his life he had slept under a pile of his mother’s hand-stitched quilts. When he arrived at West Point in 1965, the distinctive cadet black, gray, and gold wool blanket became his most treasured possession. He still took the blanket home with him on leaves.

  “Yeah, Buck, well, you’re not gonna believe what I heard out on the fuckin’ area. You’re just not gonna believe it.”

  “Well, goddamn-goddamn,” said Buck. When he was hard-pressed for words, which was often, for he spoke slowly and his voice could not keep pace with his mind, he repeated the word “goddamn.”

  “You remember that plebe from Beast last year? That real smart son of a bitch from New Orleans?”

  “Well, goddamn-goddamn. You mean beanhead Hand. That … goddamn smack we fuckin’ nailed the last week of first Beast? Now…. how in hell you think I’d ever forget the memorable smack Hand?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “So c’mon. What about the little creep? He leading a beanhead revolution over there in the … goddamn … Fourth Regiment?”

  “No. He’s dead…. They found him this morning up in Popolopen. Floating. Drowned two days ago. Somebody out in the area said they found him stark naked. Grim scene, they say. It was all over the area. Beanhead Hand, our star plebe. Fini.”

  “Goddamn-goddamn.” Leroy Buck leaned back on his bunk, surrounded by pages from the New York Times. He had been reading the financial section all afternoon. The stereo was playing a Merle Haggard tune. Leroy Buck’s accent, his pigeon-toed half-stumble way of walking, his penchant for cowboy boots off-duty, and the little sprout of blond hair that stuck up like a feather at the back of his head … the whole scene, him sitting there in the middle of a roomful of newspapers and magazines and dirty laundry, all of it spelled one word: hick. He was anything but.

  Glancing around the room, Slaight figured immediately what Buck was up to. He was getting ready to hit the computer center down in the basement of Thayer Hall, the main academic building, where he would throw in a complex program he had written for the IBM 360, which accomplished a rudimentary projection of stock trends for the few issues he held, based on their thirty-day performance. Slaight had noticed the year before that Buck rarely bothered to write programs before he sat down at the key punch and started banging out the cards, which fed into the maw of the computer, would spew answers to work/study problems they had in thermodynamics, mechanics of solids, mechanics of fluids, nuclear engineering, electrical engineering, all the applied sciences they took as cows. Leroy Buck was the only person Slaight had ever met who had a grasp for both higher math and the English language. He consumed books, magazines, newspapers, and other printed matter like a data disposal. He was a plowshares-to-swords genius.

  “What else you hear about Hand?” asked Buck, obviously stunned. He had stopped his compulsive consumption of the stock market data in the Times. Slaight stood in the door, pulling off his white cotton gloves, his M-14 clamped between his knees. Sweat was dripping off his chin, hitting the rear sight assembly, and dribbling down the stock of the rifle.


  “Nothing. They say it was an accident. All the Fourth Regiment guys were talking about it, down at their end of the area in their little group. There was so much bullshitting going on out there, the area sergeant had to come down and warn them about Two-Dash Hedges. He was doing his fuckin’ number up there in his office. You know. Watching us with his binocs.”

  “Fuckin’ Hedges. That dimbo couldn’t squint and spit at the same time. Hear anything else?”

  “Nope. Hey, help me out of these goddamn shoes, will you, you worthless, lazy, no-good-for-nothing dufus rack hound. I can’t even bend fuckin’ over.”

  The two cadets talked to one another like a couple of sergeant. It was a habit they’d picked up during summer training, out in the field, when there was nothing better to do than stand around with the sergeants and listen to them tell lies. After a couple of summers spent training with “the real army,” what had passed for slang among cadets seemed limp. Pale. So they picked up the jargon of sergeants, a cut, jab, and hammerlock way of talking with all the earmarks of the American outsider. It was a blue-collar tongue, sprinkled with acid put-downs and a strangely backhand authoritarianism. Sergeant talk was fueled by cigar smoke and mess hall coffee, greasy fatigues and scuffed boots, afternoons spent ghosting at the motor pool, and an instinctive, almost magical feel for the manipulation of subordinates whom “the real world,” society, might class as smarter, or better than the sergeants themselves. It was underdog lingo, full of aphorisms and clichés discarded by others, which took on new life and meaning in the coarse texture of a sergeant’s timing and delivery.

  The way army sergeants talked reminded Buck of the men his father hired to help with the harvest, workers who drifted in and out of the Indiana bottomland around Burning Tree with the seasons. Sergeants reminded Slaight of the guys he’d known in downtown Leaven-worth, the old man who ran Snooker Poolhall, the night manager at the Apco service station, where Slaight hung out in junior high, and a black dude in Slaight’s high school class who was the generally acknowledged leader of a gang down near the Missouri River on the east side of town. For both cadets, there was a romance to the way sergeants talked. Cadets were supposed to be gentlemen. Sergeants talked dirty. It was sexy.

  “C’mon, man, help me with my fuckin’ feet.” Slaight was lying on his bunk with his feet propped up on his Brown Boy, the tan cotton quilt every cadet slept with like a Linus blanket, a postadolescent teddy bear. Buck untied Slaight’s shoes. His feet had swollen an inch. The laces on his shoes would barely tie. Slaight groaned as Buck pulled each shoe off. He wiggled his toes. They were numb. Buck peeled the cotton socks from Slaight’s feet. They were caked with blood, like somebody had taken an electric belt sander to them, bloody and raw. Blisters had turned into open sores and oozed a mixture of blood and clear fluid. Three hours a day walking concrete, five days in a row, had taken an ugly toll. Slaight studied his feet with mild disgust. He’d seen them in worse shape, the year before, when a similar stint on the area had almost hospitalized him. The thing that pissed him off was the fact that his tactical officer, Major Nathan E. Grimshaw, had decreed that no one in his company could be medically excused from walking the area. He had threatened that anyone with a medical excuse from the area would walk an extra day of punishment tours for every day he had been excused.

  Thus did Rysam Parker Slaight III find himself in Room 226 of New South Barracks, studying a pair of feet which indeed resembled hamburger. Later, he would go on emergency sick call over to the dispensary and get the duty doctor to work on his feet, put them in a salt bath, patch them with moleskin, maybe give him some Darvons and a handful of codeine pills for the pain. Pills were necessary for serious area walking, and everyone in Grimshaw’s company kept a neat stockpile of painkillers in case they were sentenced to pounding the concrete.

  Buck was poking fun at Slaight, remarking that his feet were evidence of what happens to a “city boy” when he’s got to do some walking. Slaight said he’d like to see Buck spitshine his bare feet with black polish and try to pass the area inspection.

  “Only way you’d make it through three fuckin’ hours out there, Buck. Barefoot. I wanna see that plowboy gait of yours out there someday, you fuckin’ cracker thwacker.” Buck laughed and wet a towel in the sink to wipe the blood off Slaight’s feet.

  “So … whatdaya figure is up with fuckin’ Hand gettin’ himself dead, Slaight? Suicide? You figure the little bastard just decided to cash his check? That’d be his style. Dramatic-like. A fuckin’ floater. Beanhead Hand. Jesus.”

  “Man, I just don’t know. Can’t figure it. But something big was happening over at Brigade Headquarters this afternoon, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “Yeah? What?”

  “Fuckin’-A, Buck. Wished you’d have been there. Just as they were forming us up to dismiss the area formation, just before this little dipshit firstie sergeant says, “Aaaeeeereeeaa Squuaaaaaad, Diiiismissed!” just before he squeaked it out, up drives this blue Chevy, and out jumps our fuckin’ number one favorite colonel, Third Regimental Commander Phineas T. King. Old Phineas T. had a big folder in his hand, and he was humpin’ and galumpin’ and limpin’—close as he could come to running—into the building. His shoes were all dusty and cruddy, his cap was on crooked, and he was unshaven. You could see his whiskers all the way across the fuckin’ area. I bet he’s been on that Hand thing all day.”

  “Why King?” asked Buck, genuinely perplexed. “He’s not Hand’s Regimental C.O. Hand ended up in the Fourth Regiment, right?”

  “Yeah. Fourth. But you know the story on old Phineas T. He’s fuckin’ Two-Dash Hedges’ fuckin’ A-number-one hit man. Does everything but wipe his goddamn ass for him.”

  “Yeah … they were Big Red One buddies, right? Over in Nam?”

  “You got it. Well, I checked out old Phineas T. humping his ass into the H.Q., and I figured something’s up. So I bopped into the Guard Room acting like I was checking out the area schedule for Monday. Then I walked through the rear exit, the one that leads to Brewerton Road, right there where the ramp leads to New South. As I scooted through the main entrance to the H.Q., this secretary comes down the stairs. I’ve seen her around there before—works in the S-1 office. So I stopped her, asked her if Colonel King had found the general’s office okay—you know, teasing her, like King had never been in the building before. She laughed. She said, yeah, he’s up there with the general right now.”

  “So fuckin’ Hedges has got his best buddy, Phineas T., on the Hand thing, huh?” Leroy Buck was sitting upright now, straightening the Times and a sheaf of notes he had taken off the stock pages.

  “We can’t be sure about that. I don’t know what he had in that folder. Maybe he was delivering Hedges’ copy of Playboy. Who knows? But you know what I think we’ve got here? I think we got a scene just like what happened with the infamous Magnificent Seven last year. You remember.”

  “Yeah … the Mag-7. Jeez, I almost forgot about them.”

  “Phineas T. was up to his fuckin’ skinny neck in the Mag-7 thing. They caught that yearling smoking dope up at Camp Buckner last summer, so they discharged him on medical or something. Covered it up. But old Phineas T. wasn’t satisfied. He swoops down on the seven guys who shared the squad bay with the dope smoker, and inside of a week, they got their leave time pulled, and they were restricted to barracks for the whole year.”

  “I remember now. That one kid who was one of the Mag-7, used to be in our company, he came and told us about it. They didn’t even know the fucker was smoking. The guy they caught even admitted to Phineas T. he had been going up behind the mess hall at Buckner and doing the stuff by himself, in that little clump of three trees back here, at night. So Phineas T. holds a little ‘court-martial,’ with himself as prosecutor, judge, and jury. He didn’t have a shred of evidence those guys even knew about the dope smoker. Next thing they know, their shit is packaged up, their leave time is yanked, and they’re confined to barracks. Christ … those guys g
ot bottled up so fast, they didn’t even feel the lid coming down.” Buck finished shuffling his stock market notes and whistled softly to himself.

  “Hey, Buck. You know the Mag-7 were never even written up. There wasn’t a single piece of paperwork on the whole business.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “C’mon, Buck. Your memory’s fading on you. Remember that day we talked to Sergeant Major Eldridge up in Building 720, the Regimental H.Q., don’t you?”

  “Oh, yeah. The crusty old critter was stomping around the halls like a caged opossum. I got you.”

  “Well, he said the book was closed on the Mag-7. Hell, he said the damn book was never open. Said the supe didn’t know what in hell had gone on out there at Buckner, didn’t know fuckall. Sergeant Major said Hedges was behind the whole thing. He said Hedges used King to bring down the hammer on those guys the same way he used to bring it down in Vietnam. One day a guy would be there, the next day he wouldn’t. Nobody’d know a fuckin’ thing about what happened, and nobody asked questions. Sergeant Major was in a state of shock. Hedges was pulling the same shit at West Point he was pulling in Nam.”

  “Yeah,” said Buck. “I recall that day now. Old Sergeant Major Eldridge was really shook up about the whole thing.”

  “Damn straight. He was really loyal to Hedges. He served as Hedges’ sergeant major the whole year they were together in Nam back in ’66–’67. Then Hedges brought him up here to Woo Poo when they made him commandant. Hedges put the sergeant major over here in the Third Regiment, so he could keep an eye on his friend, Phineas T., I’d guess. That’s all over with now.”

  “What … do you mean by that … Slaight?” asked Buck.

  “You know what the story is on old Eldridge, don’t you?”

  “Negative. Give me the poop.”