Full Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

  When the call came that a cadet had dropped dead on parade, Kerry grabbed his black bag of crime-scene tools. The death of a female cadet meant it would be only a matter of hours before he felt the breath of the Pentagon on his neck.

  He arrived at the Plain to find that the MPs had set up a neat perimeter around the incident site. The girl was on her back, right where she fell, according to the medics who had administered CPR. The doctor on the scene, a captain out of the University of Maryland whom Kerry had encountered once or twice around the hospital, told him that she had been turned over in order to administer CPR, and her full dress coat had been opened and her head tilted back to enable mouth-to-mouth. No one had touched her rifle or the rest of her uniform. Her full dress hat had apparently come off in her fall.

  Kerry knelt down next to her. She was ashen, already turning blue. “How did she appear when you got here?” he asked the medics.

  The one with the mustache spoke up. “She looked like she was in shock,” he said in a squeaky, high-pitched voice.

  “What’s your name, soldier?”

  “Singer, sir.”

  “Was her face flushed?”

  “No sir. White as a sheet.”

  “How do you figure that, Captain Miles?” he asked the doctor.

  Miles paused for a moment before he spoke. “I’m an emergency specialist. I haven’t been in the Army long, but I’ve treated more cases of heat prostration than I’d care to think about. I’ve seen them as red as beets. I’ve seen them the color of blue denim. I’ve seen them so damp with sweat you’d think they just stepped out of a pool. I’ve seen them dry as a piece of sun-baked concrete. But I’ve never seen one like this. She was cold, and clammy.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “I’m not even going to hazard a guess. We’re going to have to wait for a full pathological workup.”

  “Anybody talk to the cadets who were standing nearby?”

  “They’re already back in the barracks,” said a deep voice. Kerry turned to find a major standing over him. “I’m Major O’Donnell, her company Tactical Officer.”

  Kerry stood up and shook hands. “I’m going to want to talk to those cadets, sir,” he said.

  “I’ll see to it they remain in the barracks today until you’ve interviewed everyone you need to.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He stooped down and lifted one of her hands. It was cold. He nodded to Captain Miles. “You can have your people move the body to the hospital, doc.”

  “Do you want me to notify Major Vernon?” he asked, referring to the pathologist assigned to the West Point hospital.

  “I already gave her a call. She’ll be waiting when you get there.”

  “Right,” said Miles. The medics picked up the body of Dorothy Hamner, moved her to a stretcher, and carried her to the awaiting ambulance. Its siren shrieked as the ambulance pulled away, leaving Kerry standing in the middle of the circle of MPs on the Plain.

  GENERAL SLAIGHT hung up the phone and reached for the insulated pitcher of ice water he kept on the corner of his desk. He poured a glassful and drained it quickly. His call to the father of the dead cadet had been painful, as those kinds of things usually are. What’s the right way to tell a parent long distance that his child has died? He had made the same kind of call before, more times than he cared to remember. And of course he had written the requisite letters from Vietnam. It seemed as if it got harder every time.

  The staff car would pick up the parents in Oneonta in the morning. They would proceed directly to the Supe’s office, and from there to the hospital to make the formal identification. He had told his aide to call the hospital and speak to Major Vernon to make sure that the body could be released to the parents within forty-eight hours. They would spend tomorrow night in the Hotel Thayer and accompany the body back upstate the following day.

  “Melissa, get me the Chief of Staff, will you?” Slaight called through the open door leading to his secretary’s office. “I think he’s probably still airborne on his way back to Washington. Call his office at the Pentagon. They’ll patch you through to the plane.”

  “Will do,” said Melissa.

  Slaight heard the muffled sounds of her voice, talking to the Pentagon on the phone. Her name was Melissa Grant, and she was a retired master sergeant he had brought with him from his last assignment, commanding an infantry division out at Fort Riley, Kansas. Her husband was the motor sergeant down at the post motor pool and they had three kids, all of them under ten. She was a model of order and calm amid the chaos of everyday Army life.

  He walked over to the window. Across Thayer Road cadets were flooding out of the barracks and into the mess hall for the noon meal. An announcement would be made from the Poop Deck that Cadet Dorothy Hamner had passed away on the Plain at parade that morning. The Corps of Cadets would bow their heads in a moment of silence, then the waiters would push carts full of trays out of the kitchen and the din of the cadet mess would return. For the Corps of Cadets, life would return to what passed for normal.

  The Supe, however, had a creepy, tingly sensation at the back of his neck that told him things were going to be anything but normal at West Point until the cause of her death was established. In the thirty years it had taken him to become a lieutenant general, he had developed a finely tuned sense for which incidents would turn into a crisis, and which ones would not. He knew the incident on the Plain would test him, and moreover, it would test the Academy itself.

  He wondered aloud, “I wonder if the old place is up to it?” He truly didn’t know the answer to his own question. He had just begun his five-year term as Supe. Along with getting acquainted with the senior officers who ran the academic departments at the Academy, he had inspected the barracks and interviewed the new Cadet First Captain and his brigade staff. One night, in civilian clothes, he drove to Highland Falls and talked to a few off-duty firsties who were having a beer in one of the bars downtown. They didn’t recognize him, so he heard what he assumed was something of the unvarnished truth from the cadets, and he had been relieved to make the discovery that their gripes mirrored fairly accurately his own when he was a cadet.

  Even though West Point had gone through the revolution of admitting women in the mid-seventies, it was an institution that had changed very little over the years. Its mission had remained the same: Knowledge of power and the way it was exercised in the United States Army was passed from one generation to the next. Slaight had experienced unit commands at company, battalion, brigade, and finally division levels, and he had watched West Point disgorge successive classes of brand new second lieutenants into the ranks of the officer corps. It comforted him to know that over the last thirty years, West Point had continued to provide the Army with reliable, dedicated, even inspired leaders.

  Despite the changes it had gone through, West Point had remained true to its past. It was an institution of higher learning, and it conveyed bachelor degrees upon its graduates, but it was not a college in the ordinary sense of the word. When he was a plebe, the upperclassmen had told him over and over again that West Point was a way of life, and during his four years as a cadet, he had learned that the upperclassmen’s assessment was true as far as it went.

  But he had learned something else about West Point during the time he had struggled to discover who killed David Hand, and he had never forgotten it. West Point was a place of many, many questions and relatively few answers.

  He came by this realization during his yearling year, when he spent nearly every night staying up late, sitting around the barracks room occupied by two disgruntled firsties, Mayer and Holman, cadet buck sergeants who introduced him to the phrase “believing the bullshit.” This was cadet slang for blindly accepting what West Point called the “approved solution,” whether to an engineering problem, or a military field exercise, or the confounding puzzles of everyday Army life. Slaight came to accept the premise that the questions that he confronted each day were many and profound, while the answers
provided by the Academy were few and simplistic and sometimes just plain wrong—in other words, “bullshit.”

  So it was as a cadet that he had come to see West Point as a kind of separate reality. Within the walls there was a way of life that could be depicted accurately only in cadet slang. Plebes were “beanheads.” Yearlings were “indifferent.” Cows were “hard-asses.” Firsties were “over it.” You were “slugged” with demerits for misbehavior. Anything that was unexpectedly positive and without visible strings attached was “a good deal.” Girls were “hens.” To ramble with one’s buddies and have a good time was to “motley.” An attractive girl who didn’t give you much grief was “a motley hen.”

  The stifling, confining nature of the Academy produced a glue holding cadets close together that went way beyond the conventional notions of bonding. To be a cadet was to be apart from the “real world” outside West Point’s gates. This was a reality that would mark each and every graduate differently, but only slightly so, for they all had the shared experience of life behind the walls, where the world they knew had only one color, gray.

  Slaight sat down at his desk and propped his feet on the edge of an open drawer. The notion that at age nineteen or so he had actually sat in a barracks room and talked for hours about the mysteries surrounding two entirely separate realities—the real world outside the gates and the false, hermetically sealed world within—seemed bizarre to him now that he was the man in charge of the cadet rooms in which he had no doubt that such discussions still took place. There was a phrase back in the sixties. It was a hippie saying, but inevitably it had filtered through the gates and into cadet consciousness: What goes around, comes around.

  “Sir, I’ve got the Chief for you on line one.” Melissa’s voice boomed through the door, jarring him from his thoughts. He picked up the phone.

  “General Meuller, this is General Slaight.” He addressed the Chief of Staff formally, because protocol demanded it. Meuller was a four-star, and Slaight was a three-star. In the Army, rank ruled. “I thought you’d want to be informed as soon as possible that there was a serious incident today at the pass in review. The cadet who dropped on the Plain directly in front of the reviewing stand? It was a young woman, and she has died, sir.”

  The Chief of Staff asked him a couple of quick questions and he told him that the parents had been notified and the CID investigation was already under way. Then the Chief said something Slaight found extraordinary.

  “I recommended you to the President as Supe for a reason, Ry. I’ve watched you navigate rocky roads before. I told the President you’ve got a solid chassis and a good set of shock absorbers on you. Now’s the time to prove me right. We’ve got some problems with the Congress, Ry. This guy Thrunstone over at the House National Security Committee has been rattling his saber all over town, talking about cutting Army manpower, moving defense-budget money around so he and his pals can spend less on warm bodies and more on the weapons systems they like so much in the Congress. He has even been floating the idea of closing down the service academies or consolidating them. The last thing we need is for this incident to get blown out of shape and start whetting Thrunstone’s appetite for wreaking havoc on our forces, or on the Academy. Are you getting my drift?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You’re going to have to handle this thing just right. I don’t want it blowing up in our faces.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Very well. Keep me informed.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Slaight heard a click as the Chief of Staff hung up.

  So that’s it, he thought to himself. On his first official day as Supe, a female cadet dies at parade and the Chief of Staff informs him that a very powerful congressman is talking about shutting down West Point.

  Welcome home.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  MAJOR ELIZABETH VERNON was a slightly built woman of thirty-seven years with dark brown hair and piercing blue eyes. She was an Army brat who had been born in Japan, graduated in one of the early classes of women at West Point, and served a couple of years in the Transportation Corps before earning a slot to attend New York University Medical School. She had done her first year of residency at Harlem Hospital before transferring to an Army hospital in Arizona. Her first specialty had been emergency medicine, and experience at patching up accident victims and nineteen-year-old corporals with stab wounds had led her naturally into pathology.

  An assignment to the West Point hospital was the first time in her career that she had been put in charge of her own department. It wasn’t much, actually—just three small rooms in the basement of the hospital. Her tiny office had a window to an outside alley near the top of the wall behind her desk, which afforded an excellent view of the underside of delivery trucks. Her staff consisted of a single nurse, Lieutenant Stephani Duffy, and a specialist clerk about as functional as the generation-old computer they’d been issued.

  But she made do. Her lab room was a testament to what could be done with small spaces, a skill she had developed when she lived for a time in a travel trailer as a lieutenant. The autopsy room had a four-drawer refrigeration unit, and a single stainless steel pathology table was positioned beneath an operating room light she had scavenged when an influx of federal dollars had updated the operating rooms the year before.

  West Point was a pretty quiet place for an Army pathologist. In over a year of duty at the hospital, her sleep had been disturbed only once by an emergency call. To be sure, there had been a few automobile-accident deaths, and over the winter, an outbreak of diarrhea at the post grade school had confounded parents and teachers alike, until Major Vernon traced its cause to a ditch behind one of the housing areas on post where children played after school. The ditch was contaminated with raw sewage, an accidental overflow from the post sewage-disposal plant that had occurred during heavy rains. They had cleaned up and fenced off the ditch, and the grade-school kids’ bowels returned to their normal digestive rhythms.

  When Major Vernon received the call from Chief Warrant Officer Kerry that a female cadet had been stricken at parade and was dead, she had been flooded with memories of her days as a cadet. The cause was probably heatstroke, she quickly surmised. She remembered those incredibly hot parades during the summer and fall months, when the Hudson Valley would seem like a gigantic reflector oven. She had never dropped at a parade herself, but she had seen quite a few cadets crumple around her, male and female alike. While no one had ever died at parade, heat prostration was common enough that cadets even joked about it. If you dropped at parade, you were a “dropper.” She prepared the autopsy room and awaited what she felt should be a rapid, uncomplicated examination.

  The ambulance pulled up to the emergency-room entrance almost exactly an hour after the young woman had collapsed. Major Vernon knew this because she knew when the parade had been scheduled, and parades at West Point always went off on time. The body of the young woman was on the table five minutes later. The first thing they did was strip her and insert a rectal thermometer to get an immediate reading of her body temperature. If she had died about sixty minutes before, and if the cause had been respiratory arrest and heart stoppage due to heatstroke, she figured the body temperature would still be well above normal—103 or 104, down from a peak temperature that might have exceeded 107.

  She removed the rectal thermometer. The young woman’s temperature was two degrees below normal. There was not the slightest indication of heatstroke.

  “Stephani, we’ve got a problem here,” Major Vernon said to the nurse standing next to her. “Let’s begin by reserving at least a unit of her blood. I have a feeling we’re going to be using the lab quite a bit on this one.”

  “Yes ma’am,” said Lieutenant Duffy, rolling the implement cart to the side of the table.

  CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER Kerry drove the staff car up the ramp from Thayer Road and parked next to Sherman Barracks. There was a broad expanse of immaculate concrete between matching sets of b
arracks that had been built in 1960, when the Corps had begun an expansion from about three thousand cadets to its present strength of four thousand.

  Kerry was directed by the Company H-3 Charge of Quarters, a yearling with negligible authority but plenty of chutzpah, to a room on the second floor. He knocked on the door, and the young woman he knew to be the Supe’s daughter answered.

  “I’m Jacey Slaight, the Company Commander. Please come in,” she said. “This is my roommate, Belle Carruthers.”

  It wasn’t often that Kerry had had occasion to visit a cadet room on official business. Disciplinary matters concerning the Corps of Cadets were either handled by the cadet chain of command or bumped up to the Tactical Department, where they came under the purview of the Commandant of Cadets. Only once in Kerry’s experience had a cadet been arrested on post, and that was for speeding.

  The room was a soberly decorated place, if decor could be said to have played a role at all. Recent changes to the cadet rule book had allowed the presence of a rug in the rooms of first-class cadets, but there wasn’t one in this room. Uniforms were hung neatly in the wood closets at one end of the room, and matching metal desks faced the door at the far end. Single bunks were arranged on either side of the room, and they were expertly made up in the prescribed cadet fashion, which is to say, they looked as if no one had ever slept in them.

  Jacey pointed to one of the bunks. “Please sit down, Chief Warrant Officer,” she said formally.

  Kerry looked down at the rigid surface of the blanket.

  “It’s okay,” said Jacey. “Inspection’s over.”

  He sat down and pulled a notebook from his pocket. “It’s my job to run the investigation of the circumstances surrounding the death of Cadet Hamner. I want you to understand that even though I am an officer of the Criminal Investigation Division, this is not a criminal matter at the present time. However, a death on active duty is presumed to be a matter for law enforcement unless and until it is proven otherwise.” He paused, looking directly at both of them. “Am I making myself understood?”