The Berets

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Just wear the hat, Craig, and don’t argue with me,” Hanrahan said angrily, and then softened. “But you are. You’ve commanded foreign troops in combat. You’re as entitled as Felter and me.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lowell said. He looked thoughtful a moment, then shrugged.

  He looked over at Mac MacMillan.

  “You don’t eat the red part, Mac,” he said. “Open it up and eat what’s inside.”

  “Fuck you, Lowell,” Lieutenant Colonel MacMillan said.

  Colonel Paul T. Hanrahan was on the curb outside Bookbinder’s, about to enter the maroon limousine, before he thought of the check.

  “We didn’t pay the bill,” he said, looking at Lowell.

  “The bill has been taken care of, Colonel,” Lowell said.

  He remembered that during the flap about Ellis’s beer, the headwaiter had called Lowell by name.

  “You fixed it with the headwaiter,” Hanrahan accused.

  “Would the colonel enter the vehicle, please?” Lowell said. “The colonel is blocking the sidewalk.”

  “Damn you, Craig,” Hanrahan said, and got in the limousine.

  (Four)

  Company “C,” First Battalion

  Eleventh Infantry Regiment

  U.S. Army Basic Training Center

  Fort Jackson, South Carolina

  2105 Hours, 29 November 1961

  Company “C” occupied four two-story wooden barracks built in 1941 to last five years. Two barracks faced the other two across an open area, itself about as long as a barrack. To one side were two one-story frame buildings. One housed the orderly room, the mailroom, and the arms room, the other the supply room.

  Company “C” consisted of four platoons, each of forty men. Each platoon had a barracks, the Third Platoon occupying one of the barracks closest to the orderly room and supply-room buildings. Each platoon consisted of four squads, each of ten men. The third and fourth squads of the Third Platoon occupied the second floor of the Third Platoon’s barracks. At the top of the stairway were two private rooms. These were occupied by the acting squad leaders of the two platoons. The other basic trainees’ bunks and equipment were in the squad bay, nine trainees on each side.

  The interior of the barracks was open frame work. To the two-by-four stud beside each bed, a shelf had been nailed. The shelf supported the trainee’s helmets, protective, steel; their liners, helmet; and their caps, service, brimmed. The shelf support studs had been drilled, and lengths of pipe had been inserted in the holes. The trainees hung their uniforms from the pipes: overcoat; raincoat; field jacket; tunic # 1 (with trousers inside); tunic # 2; shirts khaki, # 1 through # 3, fatigue jacket # 1 (with fatigue trousers inside); fatigue jacket # 2. Beside fatigue jacket # 2 was hung bath towel # 1 (on a wire hanger) with facecloth # 1 on top of bath towel # 1, centered. Each trainee kept beneath the left side of his bed near the aisle his two pairs of Boots, combat, his pair of Shoes, Low Quarter, and his shower clogs, the toes lined up so as to be directly below the left frame of the bunk. His laundry bag was tied to the end of his bunk, immediately to the left of the name plate hanging from the center of the bunk’s frame.

  Bath towel #2, facecloth #2, and other items (undershirts, men’s, cotton, w/sleeves; underdrawers, men’s, cotton, w/snap fasteners; socks, men’s, wool, cushion-sole; and so on) were kept in a prescribed order in the locker at the foot of each bunk.

  The arrangement of clothing and footlockers was subject to inspection at any time, and in the seven and one half weeks the men of “C-One-Eleven” had been in basic training, they had learned to store their gear neatly and according to regulation.

  Regulation forbade the use of bunks between the hours of 0355 (when first call was sounded, via a phonograph record played over the PA system) and 2055 hours, when Lights Out was sounded. On this particular night, for some reason, Lights Out had not been sounded, although it was ten minutes after the schedule called for it. Because the trainees had been taught to do nothing unless expressly ordered to, they had not felt free to remove the blanket placed in the prescribed manner over the pillows and get into their bunks.

  Some of them lay on the floor beside the bunks; some of them sat on their foot lockers; and others were gathered around the red-painted # 10 cans, the “butt cans” nailed to pillars along the aisle between the two rows of bunks.

  To a man, they were wondering whether Staff Sergeant Douglas B. Foster, their platoon sergeant, was actually going to do what he threatened to do. What he had threatened to do was knock some of the smart-ass out of Recruit (E-1) Geoffrey Craig II.

  Like most other men in his family (his father being the notable exception), Geoffrey Craig II was tall, blond, lithe like a tennis player, pleasant-faced, and blue-eyed. Like forty percent of the other trainees, he was a draftee, involuntarily summoned by his friends and neighbors to military service for two years’ active duty, to be followed by either three years in the active reserve or National Guard, or five years in the inactive reserve.

  Like twenty-five percent of the other draftees, Recruit Craig had two or more years of college, in his case Princeton. He was the first Craig in six generations who had not attended Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the opinion of Porter Craig (’38), his father, Harvard had been devoured by the Jews and the Communists. He had expressed his displeasure with the takeover by no longer responding to the semiannual plea for funds and by enrolling his two sons in Princeton, to which he now sent the not unsubstantial financial contribution he had formerly sent to Harvard.

  Porter Craig, Sr., had not yet made up his mind what to do about St. Mark’s School, from which he, his father, and his grandfather had graduated. St. Marks had fallen into something like the same crap at Harvard, encouraging kids who had no real business at St. Mark’s to enroll. But the difference, Porter Craig, Sr., had been informed, was that the “recruited” students were recruited on the basis of test scores alone, and not because they belonged to some racial or ethnic minority. That was one thing. What Harvard was doing was something else: scouring the slums and the South for “disadvantaged” people to bring to Cambridge.

  Recruit Geoffrey Craig had been summoned to military service following the completion of his junior year at Princeton, after the university had informed his draft board that he had failed to maintain a satisfactory academic average. His father was less concerned than he pretended to be about Geoff’s grades, having graduated with a C minus average himself. Thus, after appropriate huffing and puffing, he had sent Geoff to Europe for the summer with instructions to give serious thought to his future. At the time, both had hoped that even though Geoff lost his “academic deferment,” he would not be called up. They weren’t taking everybody for the draft.

  But his faceless friends and neighbors, after due consideration of the pool of young men available to them, had decided that the defense of the country required the military service of Geoffrey Craig II, and Geoff had had to come home from Salzburg and report to the Armed Forces Induction Center in Lower Manhattan for a preinduction physical.

  What private hopes both of them had that the doctors would discover some disqualifying physical condition were not realized. Geoff was pronounced to be in perfect physical condition and was informed that he should settle his personal affairs and await the actual call to service.

  On the appointed day and at the appointed hour, Geoffrey Craig II, more than a little hung over, had taken a cab to the Armed Forces Induction Center, had toyed with and discarded the notion that he should tell the army shrink that he was a closet faggot, and shortly after noon on a crisp afternoon in early September had taken one step forward, raised his hand, and solemnly sworn that he would defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and that he would obey the orders of the officers and noncommissioned officers appointed over him.

  He and sixty-six other young men, most of them draftees, had been taken by bus to Fort Dix, New Jersey, where they were given a series of i
noculations designed to protect them from disease; had the Articles of War read to them by a commissioned officer; were given short haircuts; uniforms; and were subjected to a battery of tests to determine their suitability for various military occupational specialties and training.

  Recruit Craig was summoned to an interview with a sergeant representing the Army Security Agency. His education, the sergeant told him, together with the really fine scores he had made on the Army General Classification Test (AGCT), qualified him for the Army Security Agency. After basic training, if he so chose, he would be given classified special training and assigned to duties having to do with the security of army communications.

  Geoff had heard all about the Army Security Agency from a guy he had known at Princeton. Stripped of the bullshit, what they taught you was Morse code, and what you did for eight hours a day was sit at a typewriter and transcribe intercepted radio messages. The former ASA man Geoff had met at Princeton had told him that it was probably the worst fucking job in the fucking army.

  Geoff told the sergeant he didn’t think he’d be interested in that, and remained immune to the blandishments and threats that followed. The sergeant, who was having trouble making his quota, made good his threat concerning what would happen to Recruit Craig if he refused the golden opportunity offered him. He would be handed a fucking rifle and spend his two years running up and down hills and sleeping on the ground.

  Recruit Craig was ordered from Fort Dix, New Jersey, to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for basic training and for individual training leading to the award of Military Occupational Specialty 745, “Light Weapons Infantryman.”

  Recruit Craig met Staff Sergeant Douglas B. Foster the moment he stepped off the bus at Fort Jackson. Foster was thirty, a well-built, rather short man who had been in the army thirteen years. He had enlisted in the army after failing his junior year at Westwego High School in Louisiana. He had been a private in Germany when the Korean War broke out. Two years later he had been sent to Korea, where he served with the Forty-fifth Infantry Division, which was part of the Oklahoma National Guard.

  Although he ultimately rose to sergeant with the Forty-fifth Division, his assignment there had not been a happy one. Fully eighty percent of the officers and men were either national guardsmen or reservists, who held the regular army in varying degrees of scorn. Foster reacted by regarding everyone not a member of the regular army with equal scorn. He still disliked draftees and Yankees, and held in even greater contempt Yankee draftees who had gone to college and thought their shit didn’t stink.

  On his return from Korea, Sergeant Foster had served with the First Infantry Division (“The Big Red One”) at Fort Riley, Kansas, as a squad leader in Company “F’ of the Eighteenth Infantry Regiment. There he had met and married a Manhattan, Kansas, girl six months before their first child, a girl, was born. And a month after he had been promoted to staff sergeant, in 1960, a second girl was born to them. It was difficult to make it on a staff sergeant’s pay. If there was anything Staff Sergeant Foster disliked more than a draftee Yankee college boy, it was a rich draftee Yankee college boy.

  Because he had heard that promotions came quick there, Staff Sergeant Foster had applied and been accepted for duty as a basic training instructor shortly after Lisbeth Marie was born. His hopes proved to be unfounded up till now. Foster had been at Fort Jackson for twenty months and had not been promoted. He had run ten cycles of trainees through the program without a nice nod in his direction from his superiors.

  The very first time they had met, Recruit Craig and Staff Sergeant Foster had not liked each other. Craig had looked Foster in the eye, directly, as he learned that men did.

  “I’ll look at you, soldier,” Staff Sergeant Foster had said to Recruit Craig, “but when I want you to look at me, I’ll tell you!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You don’t say ‘sir’ to sergeants, soldier!”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “You look like a wise-ass to me, soldier,” Foster said. “Are you a wise-ass?”

  “I try not to be, Sergeant, in my present circumstances.”

  The only thing that Recruit Craig managed to do in basic training that met the standards of Staff Sergeant Foster was superior firing with the U.S. rifle, M 1. That was judged by the number of holes in or near the bull’s-eye and was not a matter of opinion.

  On the other hand, Recruit Craig was unable to meet Staff Sergeant Foster’s standards of a clean rifle, and it was necessary for him to clean his weapon an average of four times each day of the live-fire training program. Neither could he seem to give his boots and shoes a luster that met the sergeant’s approval. Nor draw the blankets of his bunk tight enough so that a quarter bounced on it would rise high enough to satisfy the sergeant. The sergeant, to express his displeasure, would then overturn the bunk.

  When Staff Sergeant Foster was alone with his platoon, he referred to Recruit Craig as “Recruit Asshole” or simply “Asshole.”

  Recruit Asshole came to the conclusion that Staff Sergeant Foster was trying to provoke him into doing something foolish, like belting him in the mouth, and vowed that he would control himself. Basic training would eventually be over and he would leave. It couldn’t possibly be as bad as this elsewhere in the army.

  If he had correctly understood the mumbling second lieutenant who had read the Articles of War aloud to them, doing violence to a noncommissioned officer in the execution of his office was “punishable by death or such other punishment as a court-martial shall decide.” Recruit Asshole didn’t think they would actually punish him by death, but he probably would find himself in the stockade. And time spent in the stockade would not count against the one year, nine months, and however many days it was he had remaining to serve.

  That morning, the press of his other duties had kept the platoon leader, a second lieutenant three months out of Officer Candidate School, from personally conducting the daily inspection of the barracks. Staff Sergeant Foster had conducted the inspection.

  Recruit Asshole’s bunk was sloppily made, and the bunk was turned over. Recruit Asshole’s facecloth was hung crookedly on his bath towel and was thrown to the floor.

  And then Staff Sergeant Foster found the buttonhole on Recruit Asshole’s left hip pocket to be frayed. He ripped the button off and then faced Recruit Asshole.

  “You think it would help you remember that buttons are to be sewed on good if you ate it, Asshole?”

  “I doubt it, Sergeant.”

  “Eat it, Asshole!”

  “I respectfully decline, Sergeant.”

  “That’s an order, Asshole!”

  “I believe it to be an unlawful order, Sergeant.”

  “You’re refusing to obey an order?”

  “I am respectfully declining to obey an order I believe to be unlawful, Sergeant.”

  “You don’t like me, do you, Asshole?”

  Recruit Asshole said nothing.

  “I ast you a question, Asshole!”

  “No, Sergeant, I don’t like you,” Recruit Asshole said.

  “Just what do you think of me, Asshole?”

  When Recruit Asshole said nothing, Staff Sergeant Foster repeated: “I ast you a question, Asshole!”

  “I think you’re a semiliterate cretin with psychological problems,” Recruit Asshole replied.

  Staff Sergeant Foster knew what semiliterate meant, and what psychological problems meant, but he was goddamned if he’d ask Asshole what cretin meant.

  “Then why don’t you do something about it, Asshole? You a fairy, or what?”

  “I’m not a fool, Sergeant,” Recruit Asshole said, saying more than he knew he should be saying, but unable to stop himself. “I would like to knock you on your ass, but I’m not going to pay for the privilege by going to the stockade for it.”

  “Is that all that’s stopping you, Asshole?” Staff Sergeant Foster rose eagerly to the challenge. “Then I’ll tell you what: Tonight, you and me will just step outside the barrack
s, and I’ll take my jacket off, and then it’ll between us. Man-to-Asshole. You want to try that?”

  “I can think of nothing I would like better,” Recruit Asshole heard himself say.

  He regretted it during the balance of the day. It was a no-win situation.

  At 2107 hours Staff Sergeant Foster appeared at the head of the stairs.

  “Attention in the squad bay!” one of the trainees called, and every one jumped to attention.

  “Recruit Craig,” Staff Sergeant Foster called out cordially, “could I see you outside a moment?”

  Recruit Craig walked down the aisle between the bunks to the staircase.

  When he was at the head of the staircase, Staff Sergeant Foster snapped off the lights in the squad bay.

  “Hit the sack, the rest of you,” he said.

  The trainees did as they were ordered, but no one slept. They knew what was about to happen.

  There was some talk of going to the adjacent company and calling the platoon leader at his quarters. It was generally agreed that Staff Sergeant Foster was going to do more than knock the shit out of Craig; he was liable to hurt him really bad. Everyone agreed that somebody should call the lieutenant and tell him, but no one was willing to volunteer to do it themselves.

  Ten minutes later it sounded like someone was falling up the steps. One brave soul got out of his bunk, took his flashlight, and went quickly down the aisle.

  It was Recruit Asshole. He looked awful. He was bleeding from the mouth; his nose was bleeding and crooked, as if broken; and he was holding his right wrist in his left hand.

  “I think I broke it,” he said as he was helped to his bunk.

  “You hit him, huh?”

  “Hit him? I hope I killed the sonofabitch!”

  Ten minutes later there was the sound of a siren, soon followed by flashing red lights. A brave trainee went to the window and reported that there was an ambulance outside.

  Five minutes after that, the lieutenant came into the squad bay and turned on the lights and told Recruit Craig that he was under arrest.