Heart of War

by Lucian K. Truscott

  She shook her head, trying physically to clear from her mind a conviction that refused to leave on its own: He knows. He knows about Mace, because he knows about me.

  It was the summer of her firstie year at West Point.

  She was a platoon leader, training the yearling class during the two-month summer camp out at Camp Buckner. Beckwith had just arrived at West Point. He was living in the BOQ that overlooked the Hudson on the north side of Cullum Hall. They gave him one of the Camp Buckner training companies to prepare him for being a company tactical officer when the academic year began after Labor Day. She saw him early in the morning that summer, running alongside his company on their reveille run. He was tanned, athletic, handsome, and he looked younger than his thirty-five years. She saw him out at the training sites—supervising artillery instruction as the yearlings learned to fire 105mm cannons, or perched on the side of a cliff in a rope sling, shouting encouragement to young men and women just beginning their first rappel. Several nights a week she saw him eating supper with his company in the screened mess hall on the wooded shore of Lake Popolopen, the picturesque fingerling lake on which Camp Buckner was located. More than once she had heard yearling girls in her platoon talking in the showers about how sexy he was, but that was not a conversation she had ever had with a firstie. She found herself part of a conspiracy of female silence among her classmates regarding the handsome new major who roamed among them. The rules against fraternization between the ranks made him untouchable, of course, but everyone at West Point knew the first rule of them all, that rules were made to be broken.

  During the final week of combat training, she put her platoon through five tough days of Recondo School, run by the 101st Airborne Division at a temporary camp another ten miles out in the boonies. Hand-to-hand combat, night patrolling, helicopter assaults, night attacks through a swamp—Recondo School was a grueling course that stretched the yearlings tight as guitar strings. When it was over, they were force-marched back to Camp Buckner, where the yearlings threw off their combat gear and dove into the lake, and the firsties changed into civvies and jumped in their cars and headed for someplace, anyplace, where you could get away from West Point and all things military, drink a beer and listen to some live music, maybe dance a little.

  That was the plan anyway. She headed for her favorite bar, out past Central Valley on a two-lane blacktop in dairy farm country, the Ideal Spot, an old farmhouse that had been transformed into a country and western nightclub with a BUD sign flickering over the front door. The place was packed with farm couples and young girls with big hair giggling at goofy, grinning boys who worked under the grease rack down at the local Chevron. She liked the cheap drink smoky feel of the place, and she especially liked the fact that it wasn’t full of cadets or officers from West Point, who were much more likely to be found in yuppie watering holes like Bennigans over in Poughkeepsie than in a down-at-the-heels roadhouse on a dusty road out in the country.

  So it surprised her when she walked in and saw him at the bar. There was a moment when she actually thought about turning around and getting in her car and driving away. Seeing him sitting alone in an obscure country bar was a risk she shouldn’t be taking . . . he might flirt with her, or she with him . . . something might happen. She stood there in the open door, then she shrugged, like so what, and walked in. She had been a cadet for three long years, walked right down the center of the straight and narrow every moment of every day, and it was about time she did something utterly and completely random.

  At first she thought he didn’t recognize her. Their companies were located across Camp Buckner from each other, and there were maybe a hundred firsties in the cadre, a thousand yearlings in training, and he’d been at the academy only a couple of months, so why should he recognize her? But when she walked up to the bar, he turned and smiled and said hello. She called for a beer and grabbed a pool cue and dropped a couple of quarters in the table, and listened with satisfaction as the balls dropped. She racked them, broke the rack, saw him turn around on his bar stool. She knew exactly what he was going to do. Men were like pieces of heavy equipment. They’d see something off in the distance, and they’d shove aside earth and grass and tall trees, they’d plow a road, bridge a river, do whatever it took to get there. This man, the handsome major, he was no different. He was going to plow straight through the smoky bar and put down a couple of quarters for the next game.

  And that’s what he did. They played a couple of games of eight ball and drank a few beers, and she knew he’d ask her to dance, and he did, and they danced to the country and western band in the backroom. She knew they wouldn’t talk about Buckner or summer training or West Point or the Army, and they didn’t. Talking didn’t matter. What mattered was the fact that she knew they were going to end up together, but he had no way of knowing this because that intoxicating decision was hers, which must have been why she felt drunk but she wasn’t drunk, and neither was he. She could still remember when they danced—she held him tightly and rested her forehead against the stubble of his cheek. She knew he didn’t know how to two-step, so she taught him, and the country band put out a deafening wail, and they drifted through the noise doing the glide she had learned in Cajun bars outside Lafayette, Louisiana.

  She knew all about men, but she didn’t know how she’d feel in his arms. It was like they were the only two people in the world, a trancelike state where you close out reason and logic and let the music and the motion carry you away, and the trance didn’t break until the next morning when she woke up and heard him turn on the shower in the motel room they had taken down the road sometime after midnight. He took a long shower, for which she was deeply grateful, because she still didn’t know how she felt. She stayed in bed wondering what would happen now. She knew they couldn’t go on. There was too much danger, too much at stake. Then in a moment of panic it occurred to her that she didn’t know this man at all. There was a rumor he was divorced, or maybe separated, and he didn’t wear a wedding ring, but she didn’t know his marital status for sure. As a superior officer, especially in the context of the academy, he could profoundly affect the rest of her life as a cadet, make it miserable or delightful or simply do nothing at all. The panic passed as quickly as it had come, and with absolute clarity she knew what would happen: They were going back to West Point in their separate cars to lead separate lives. For a few hours each of them had dropped the masks they were wearing—cadet, officer—and they had behaved as man and woman, and now they had to pick up the masks and put them on again, and play the roles that West Point demanded of them. But she could always hope . . .

  Tap-tap-tap . . . he was marching down the barracks hallway at night, a sharp knock at the door . . . Room! A-ten-shun! He walked through the door like he owned everything and everyone in sight, and the thing was, he did. He would stand in the middle of the room looking at you. Here he was, your tactical officer, and there you were, ready to receive and obey his orders. If he said every cadet room in the company would display a black alarm clock with a white face and black numerals, bingo! You looked high and low until you found one. You got it done. If he issued an order that shoes were to be tied with shoelace loops no longer than one and a half inches the next morning you pulled a ruler from your desk, and you sat down and measured your shoelace loops. His control was absolute. He’d walk over to the dresser and open the top drawer and run the tip of his finger down a perfect pile of your underwear, push his hand slowly under your hose, rolled into tidy little sausages, lift a stack of your meticulously folded bras . . . inspecting . . . inspecting . . . looking for any tiny imperfection. A wry smile cracked the corner of his mouth when he found an item out of place, eleven pairs of hose displayed where there were supposed to be twelve, a bra strap wrapped counterclockwise instead of clockwise. He was sharing a secret with you, a whisper only the two of you could hear. You existed at his discretion. The feeling you got was, by the rules and regulations of West Point, the way they forced you together into a clo
seness of body and soul unique to a military unit, you belonged to him.

  And you did. He knew it and you knew it, and it was a secret between you that each of you would carry to the grave.

  Looking back, it surprised her how gently the scales had dropped from her eyes, how calmly she had accepted the knowledge that had come her way. A man could spend a night with a woman and walk away and think nothing of it, and a woman could not, and men knew this. Women might be in control of their own bodies, but their emotions were something else entirely, subject to wistful dreams and frantic intuitions and the tall surf of pure chance. Being a woman at West Point, surrounded by men—there were ten times as many men as women in the corps of cadets—she had learned a grim and disheartening lesson, that sex was doomed to a space between them, not of them, and gentleness was a flower in men that bloomed only at night, if at all.

  Tap-tap-tap . . . the sound of his heels on the tiled floor grew faint and stopped. He turned and, smiling, gave her a little wave. “Good to see you!” He walked around the corner and was gone.

  “Supertac,” she said out loud to herself. That’s what they’d called him in Company D-3. That’s what she’d called him too. They had never spent another night together, and after she graduated, she had never seen him again, not until this very moment. She had watched the steep and rapid ascent of his career, of course. She had read the stories in the Army Times; she had seen him interviewed on Nightline after the Gulf War; one of her classmates had faxed her a New York Times op-ed piece he wrote opposing gays in the military. She knew from reading a recent article in the Army Times that he was on the short list to become the next chief of staff. And now she had seen him, and talked to him, and the feeling she’d had after all these years was a soul-numbing creepiness, like he could see right through her.

  “Kara? You ready to go?” It was Hollaway, walking down the corridor toward her.

  She slipped the blanket from her shoulders and stood up. “Sure. Anytime you are.”

  Outside, he popped an umbrella and they ran through the driving rain to an MP car parked across the street. They were headed out Patton Drive, toward the main gate. An MP stepped out of the guardhouse and waved them through. Hollaway drove a couple of blocks and slowed.

  “You don’t mind if we stop here at the Camelia Apartments for a moment, do you? I’ve got to inform Worthy’s roommate about her death.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “You can wait in the car, if you’d like. I won’t be long.” He pulled into a parking spot and squinted through the windshield. Lights were starting to blink on throughout the World War II vintage brick complex. Reveille was about an hour away. Young officers sharing furnished apartments were breaking starch and blousing trousers and lacing up jump boots. He cut the engine.

  “Just a minute. I’ll come with you.” She opened her door, and driving rain blew into the car.

  Hollaway reached into the backseat. “Here. Use my overcoat.”

  She pulled the overcoat over her head, and they ran up the stairs to a door marked A-5. Hollaway knocked. The outside light came on, and they heard a woman’s voice on the other side of the door.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Lieutenant Carrington, it’s Major Hollaway and Major Guidry. Open up, please.”

  The door opened. A young woman with short red hair was standing in the dark hallway, clutching her robe at her throat. “It’s about Sheila, isn’t it?”

  “May we come in, Lieutenant?”

  She stepped back. Hollaway and Kara walked inside. Kara pulled the door closed behind her.

  “I’ll make coffee . . .”

  “That won’t be necessary, Lieutenant,” Hollaway said. “Is there someplace we can sit down?”

  She led them into a small, sparsely furnished living room and pointed soundlessly at a sofa that had seen better days.

  “Lieutenant, I’m afraid I have some bad news. Your roommate, Lieutenant Worthy, has been killed in a tragic accident.”

  She sat on a slip-covered armchair. Tears were streaming down her face. “Sheila . . . oh, my God . . . can you tell me how it happened?”

  “She was trying to drive through a flooded road, and her car was swamped in a flash flood, and she drowned.”

  “We’re very sorry, Lieutenant,” said Kara, kneeling next to the young woman. “I know how difficult this must be for you. If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  The young woman wiped her face with the sleeve of her robe. She looked red-eyed at Kara. “I knew. I just knew something would happen to her.”

  “Do you have any idea what your roommate was doing out on the South Gate Road last night?”

  “I told her not to go. She had met him out there before, and I told her it was stupid. If she was going to have this stupid affair with this stupid guy, the least he could do was get them a motel room, but she said I didn’t understand, it wasn’t like that. She was driving out there to meet him somewhere near the firing range. It wasn’t the first time. She’s been going out there for over a month now.” She turned to Kara. “Would you have done something as stupid as that? I mean, it’s a cliché! She’s this incredible girl, just starting out on her career, and she falls in love with this married asshole!”

  Kara interrupted her. “How do you know he was married?”

  “I thought the whole thing was so stupid, and I told her so, because like, he’d never go anywhere in public with her, even like, down to Florida or anything. He had to be married, because he knew if they got caught it would end his career.”

  Kara was looking out the window at a couple of young lieutenants in battle dress uniform getting into a Camaro. “Not to mention hers. Do you know his name?”

  “No, ma’am. She would never tell me. But I kept telling her, I don’t care how wonderful he was, I don’t care how great the sex was, it wasn’t worth it, and she just kept telling me I didn’t understand, it wasn’t like that.”

  Hollaway leaned forward. “What time did she leave the apartment?”

  “About 2100, sir.”

  “Are you sure about the time?”

  “Yes, sir. I had just gotten home from working late, and she was on her way out.”

  Kara touched her hand comfortingly. “What do you think Sheila meant when she told you it wasn’t like that?”

  “She kept telling me I didn’t understand, and I guess I didn’t. It was like, to me, the whole thing seemed so unbelievably ridiculous, and to her it was like this great adventure, and she just kept telling me how she was like, learning things they never taught you in ROTC, things you couldn’t read about in books. She really felt like he was some kind of guide through a part of life she never knew existed. I told her I knew a professor in college just like him, he was like, my mentor, and he was so generous, and I learned so much from him, there’s just like, no way I could ever thank him enough. And she said, he’s my lover, not my mentor, like there was this big difference that I was too stupid to see.”

  She took a deep breath, looked at Kara expectantly. “I don’t know. Maybe she was right. Maybe I was stupid. Maybe I was jealous. She was so happy when she came back from seeing him. It was like, she was high or something. That was when I knew it wasn’t just the sex, because sex couldn’t be that good. She had this dreamy look in her eyes, and I knew it was way, way more than that.”

  Hollaway looked over at Kara and stood up. “Her dad’s on his way down here from North Carolina. If you want to take the next couple of days off, I’ll call your boss and arrange it.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’d really appreciate that.”

  Kara stood up. “I’m over at the Staff Judge Advocate. If I can help you in any way, I’ll be more than glad to.”

  Lieutenant Carrington followed them to the door. The rain was still coming down outside. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without her. I can’t even afford the rent by myself . . .”

  Kara turned, her eyes flashing. “I’ll talk to the complex manager this afternoon, L
ieutenant. That will be taken care of.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  In the car, Hollaway had a quizzical expression as he switched on the wipers and backed out of the parking space. They drove out of the parking lot and were stopped at a light, ready to turn onto Victory Boulevard, when Kara pointed out the window. “I stayed there for six months on TDY one time. We must have gone through a case of roach spray the first week.”

  “I didn’t know you spent time here at Benning,” Hollaway said.

  “Airborne School. Right after I graduated from West Point. I lived in the apartment on the end, the one with the blinds pulled down. They charged us fifty bucks more because we had a side patio and air conditioning, which worked about half the time.”

  Hollaway laughed. The light changed, and he pulled into traffic. “You got any thoughts? I mean, this thing is turning out to be more complicated than I thought.”

  Kara wiped condensation from the inside of her window, turning to get a last look at the Camelia Apartments. “The thing that gets me is, nothing ever changes.”

  “You mean the Camelia Apartments? They’re like a time capsule, a rite of passage—”

  “I mean, between men and women,” said Kara.

  Hollaway drove in silence for a moment. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at, Kara.”

  “We’ve had years of memos on sexual harassment from Department of the Army, years of raising consciousness in the ranks, years of awareness lectures every six months. Just when you think you’re getting somewhere, you come up against this.”

  “This isn’t a case of sexual harassment. We’ve got an accidental death here, not somebody grabbing ass down in the motor pool.”

  “What are you? Blind, Frank? You’ve got a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant having an affair with a superior officer. He could have been the guy who wrote her OER . . . her goddamned job could have depended on whether or not she slept with him. We don’t know what kind of pressures he may have been exerting on her.”