The Lieutenant looked Testor in the eye.
“No, sir.”
“I'm ordering you to change this report, Lieutenant. Now do you get me?”
“I understand your order, sir. But what happened happened. Nothing will change that fact, sir, and because nothing will change the way Corporal Strosher was killed, I see no reason to withdraw or change my casualty report, sir. It is required by regulations, every time a man is killed or wounded by friendly fire. I was taught at West Point that a casualty report due to friendly fire is one of the most important reports one can make, sir. The intent of my report, and the intent of any casualty report due to friendly fire is the same: to avoid such an occurrence again. I cannot withdraw my report, sir. Most especially I cannot withdraw it if doubt is cast on its accuracy.”
“Who the fuck do you think you are, Lieutenant?”
“Sir?”
“I said, who the fuck do you think you are?”
“Lieutenant Blue, sir.”
“Don't crack wise with me, Lieutenant.”
The Lieutenant said nothing. He looked at Colonel Testor unflinchingly.
“You're not getting it, are you, son?”
“Getting what, sir?”
“That I want that fucking report changed, and I want it done right here and now, that's what.”
“Yes, sir, I understand that.”
“Would it help if I told you that changing your report will help the war effort?”
“I understand, sir.”
“I'm ordering you to change the report, Lieutenant. It's for the good of the brigade, son.”
“Sir, my job is to file the report, and I've done my job, sir. What you do with the report after I have filed it is your business. You can accept my report, sir. You can reject it, sir. But my business is finished. My report has been truthfully written and filed according to regulations. My man was killed in a firefight with approximately fifteen American civilians. I've had some pretty crazy things happen to me and happen to my men since I've been over here, sir, but last night takes the cake. I couldn't have made up what's in my casualty report if I tried. It is as accurate and detailed as I could make it. My report stands as I wrote it, sir.”
“Listen, you little shit—” It was Lieutenant Colonel Halleck.
Testor held up his hand and silenced him.
“All you've got to do is change the report, son, and this will all be behind you. You must understand that. It will all be forgotten and this whole business will be over.”
The Lieutenant looked at Testor and started to say something. He checked himself and looked down at the table, at his report. Then he began to speak hurriedly, as if he weren't really in control of the words flowing from him in a torrent of pent-up anger and exasperation.
“What about Strosher, sir?” said the Lieutenant, expressing his bewilderment and anger for the first time since he'd been in the bunker. He checked himself and looked at Testor imploringly. Maybe he could make him understand. Maybe he could make them understand how guilty he felt for what he had done. He stepped out of the woodline and called out to those men and they turned and fired and Strosher went down and a moment later he was dead. It was all his fault.
“What about Strosher, sir? Do you want me to forget him, too?”
“You don't understand, do you, Lieutenant?”
“I don't guess I do, sir.”
“I don't give a damn about your man and if he died or how he died. What I give a damn about is that report and getting it changed. You change it like I've ordered you to, and we'll forget this whole thing.”
The Lieutenant didn't stop this time.
“Sir, I can't change the report. If I change that report about how Corporal Strosher got killed, it will be like forgetting he ever existed. It will deny that he died, and deny how he died, and deny what he died for. And that's not going to happen. Strosher is not going to be forgotten. Not while I'm still here to do the remembering, he won't, sir.”
Colonel Testor stuck the cigar back in his mouth. He had a half-smile on his face, and he shook his head slowly from side to side.
“That is all, Lieutenant Blue,” he said levelly.
The Lieutenant picked up his M-79 and saluted. Colonel Testor returned the salute and the Lieutenant executed a crude about-face on the dirt floor of the bunker. He zigzagged out the entrance and walked up the dirt ramp from the underground bunker.
The sun had begun to set, and the sky in the west was ablaze with riotous color. He shouldered the grenade launcher's strap and started looking for a ride back to the weapons platoon's night logger. He was going by air again, he knew. Nobody would send a vehicle outside the wire this close to dark.
He took a deep breath of hot air and squinted into the red sunset, a sky the color of a rose blossom in the morning, an embarrassingly deep, rich, blushing crimson soaked with heat and passion.
A gust of wind passed through his sweat-soaked fatigues and he shuddered. Suddenly he was cold, and he stood there at the entrance of the bunker and he shivered with hate and fear and disgust.
I lost him, Dad. I stood up and I yelled at those men and they started firing and Strosher was dead. Do you know how I feel right now? Do you know how empty I feel? I wish I could blow away, just like this dust, Dad. Just blow away and I'd be gone.
He walked toward the chopper pad, heading for his platoon, heading for home. Later he would remember what he was thinking as his boots kicked the dust and he tried to forget what had just happened in the bunker, what had happened last night. He was trying to forget Strosher, that was what he was doing. It wasn't working and he knew it wouldn't work, ever. He'd never forget Strosher, and he'd never forget what he had done that had caused his death. Never.
Laos is one hell of a beautiful spot for a war, he mused entirely inappropriately as he strode toward the setting sun, looking forward to a new day, trying to forget the last one.
Jesus. One hundred twenty-seven more days to go.
13
* * *
* * *
They were somewhere over the Pacific, east of Hawaii, when his friend Bruce Pelton turned to say something to the General and found him slumped in his seat, chin on chest, barely breathing. Lieutenant General Pelton grabbed his wrist and felt for a pulse. He wasn't good at it, and he moved his fingers from one side of the General's wrist to the other three times before he detected a heartbeat. The pulse was completely normal, sixty beats per minute. He studied the General's face, moved his ear close to the General's mouth. His breathing was shallow but regular, with a slight wheeze on the intake and a rasping rattle when he exhaled. But you had to get your ear right next to his mouth to hear him breathing at all. It was the first time Lieutenant General Pelton had looked at his friend and been startled by the thought that he wasn't going to goddamn his way through another decade, leveling everything in his path with the brute force of his energy and his home-grown but finely honed intelligence. He had seemed invincible for so long, Lieutenant General Pelton couldn't remember when he was ever frightened for him. Even when the General had had a heart attack back in ‘47, which had occasioned both the end of his thirty-year Army career and the abrupt end of a forty-year love affair with Camel cigarettes, he had come through it growling and spitting and chewing on the necks of doctors and nurses alike, threatening their goddamned careers if he didn't get a goddamned drink pretty soon, and charming them into childlike blushes and giggles as they went looking for the booze. Lieutenant General Pelton relaxed in his seat across from him. The General was heavier than the man he had followed ashore at Anzio, and he was grayer. His skin seemed to sag from his face and jowls like curtains drawn across a life. He wasn't just getting old anymore. He was old, and he would probably die soon.
The General never felt the ministrations of his old friend Bruce Pelton. He was somewhere else at the time.
He was sitting on the front porch of his quarters at Fort Leavenworth, the house he had occupied for the duration of the Depression, f
rom 1932 to 1939, before he had departed the United States for Great Britain, in command of the First Ranger Battalion, on its way to the British Commando School in Largs, Scotland.
The year was 1935, and he was sitting on the front porch with his wife, Carey, and they were drinking gin and tonics a few minutes after retreat on one of those summer nights that were all too rare along the banks of the Missouri River. Someone had worked a miracle on Kansas. It wasn't hot. It wasn't even humid. It was cool and crystal clear, and a pale sliver of early moon was visible above them in the darkening sky. If there had been a brass plaque on the outside wall of the front of the house, it would have identified the structure as the first building erected by white men west of the Missouri River. The house sat just a hundred yards off the intersection of the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails. You could walk across the street and down the hill toward the river and find the tracks of wagon wheels cut deep in the rock of the old trail coming up from the flats. The house was the cornerstone of the walled fortress that had been Fort Leavenworth in 1820, just after the Louisiana Purchase, when the Army was pushing America west by pushing American Indians farther west in front of them. Quarters Number Two (the commanding general's house, which had come much later, had the distinction of being Quarters Number One) had stone walls three and a half feet thick, and hardwood floors that had come from trees felled just across the river in what was to become the state of Missouri. By 1935, of course, the house had indoor plumbing and electricity, but neither of those modern creature comforts did much to dispel the feeling that you were living in an old stone fort. The windows were small, and the walls were so thick that each window was set deep enough to be cushioned as a window seat. Interior doorways were narrow and low, in the manner of a building that made few concessions to its occupants but many to its antagonists, the Plains Indians, whom Quarters Number Two had displaced.
From the kitchen porch you could see the river, and across the river the State of Missouri, green and hilly all the way to the horizon. The front porch looked over the parade ground, a meticulously groomed central greensward edged on three sides by newer sets of quarters and on the fourth by a stretch of the fort's original stone wall, complete with battlements and firing slits facing south and west.
The General (who was then a captain) and his wife would sit out on the front porch every night and watch the sun go down across the wooded ridge to the west. He would have been finished with his late-afternoon polo game, and she would have completed most of the preparation of dinner. Captains in those days had a number of servants, including a married couple who functioned as cook/ housekeeper and footman, called a “striker” in the Army, and they would have been in the kitchen, getting ready to serve a formal dinner in the candlelit dining room.
As usual, the General was wearing a coat and tie, required attire for all males on the post after 6:00 P.M. unless one was in uniform, which at that hour was Army Blue, a formal uniform worn to formal occasions at the colonel's house, to dinner at the officers’ club, to a battalion dining-in, to weddings, and to funerals. Army Blue was a stunning uniform that dated to the 1800s: sky-blue trousers with wide gold-thread stripes down the sides; a dark royal blue jacket with brass buttons and gold-thread stripes at the cuffs and gold epaulets with gold inserts indicating the Cavalry and silver-thread captain's bars embroidered into the epaulets; a stiffly starched white shirt and a black tie. His wife wore the long, pale pastel cotton dress of an officer's lady. His son, Matt the third, had just served the drinks and disappeared inside to listen to the radio, which was allowed only before supper, the hours after supper having been decreed study hours by the Army captain who would become a four-star general who had never completed the eighth grade.
He was on the porch at Leavenworth in 1935, and it was as real as if it had happened yesterday, except for the fact that his wife was talking to him about the present day, 1969, and about the past and about the future.
“You know you'll have to go back there, don't you, Ma-a-a-atthew?” she asked, drawing out his name in thrushlike quavering tones and broad vowels, the way Virginia ladies did back then.
“Where?” he asked, at first annoyed that his cocktail hour reverie was being interrupted at all.
“Vietnam,” she said. “You'll have to go back to put things right with your son, Ma-a-a-atthew. It's the only way you can help the boy.”
“What do you mean?” he growled, looking at her sideways through squinting eyes. He found it almost impossible to look straight at her, and he had never been able to argue with her the way he could argue with virtually anyone else in the world, including Churchill and De Gaulle and Montgomery and even Ike, both during the war and after, when he served the President as Deputy Director of the CIA. He had fought with other generals and he had fought with heads of state, but he had never won a fight with her, because he couldn't fight with her.
She would look at him with her sad, drooping eyes and she would purse her lips and words would come out of her mouth and bounce around his head like a flurry of soft fists. Then her voice would flow over him like warm, soapy water over a baby, soothing and gentle and easy, and when she was through he would feel cleansed and free of anger but not free of her. He had never been free of her, not while she was alive, not now that she was dead. In his dreams he still sat with her on the porch at Leavenworth, listening to her soothing talk and watching her warily, at once entranced with and afraid of the second woman who had given birth to him, his mother having birthed a baby and his wife having birthed a gentleman.
“I know you were never able to love him as you should have,” she said, ever so slowly, sipping her gin and tonic, gazing across the parade at the sunset. “You couldn't love him as he needed to be loved. What you never understood, Ma-a-a-atthew, was that it was all right to feel as you did toward him. You're his fa-a-a-ather. Fathers and their first sons fall out of love so soon for a reason, you know.”
“And what might that be?” he growled. He looked over his shoulder for his son and took a final slug of his gin and tonic. He wanted another.
“Because we were so young. It was the only way you could continue to love me as your wife.”
The General pretended he didn't hear her, and turned his head and called to his son.
“Boy! Bring me another goddamned drink out here!”
“Leave him alone, Ma-a-a-atthew,” she drawled. “He was only here for a moment. I sent him back to Vietnam. I just wanted you to see him as he was. I wanted you to remember him the way I do, as a towheaded boy full of dreams and promise and wild ideas. I wanted you to see how much your son is like your grandson, Ma-a-a-atthew. You love him, don't you?”
“Sure, I love the boy,” he said, staring into the bottom of his empty glass.
“Which boy, Ma-a-a-atthew?”
“That one,” he said, pointing back into the house.
A face appeared in the door and was gone.
“That boy, Ma-a-a-atthew?”
“Yes, that one.”
“That was your son, Ma-a-a-atthew. Your grandson brought your drink.”
“You're confusing me, goddammit,” he said, slapping the arms of his wicker chair with his thick hands.
“Of course I am, da-a-a-arling,” she said. “I always confused you. Why should things be any different today than they were yesterday?”
“Because you're dead now.”
“Of course I am, Ma-a-a-atthew. But my death didn't change anything.”
“I lost you, didn't I, goddammit?”
“You'll always have me with you, my deah. Always. You know where I am now. I am where you found me tonight, on the porch at Leavenworth. This was our favorite set of quarters, remember?”
“Why don't you go away? You're dead, for crying out loud.”
“You still need me, Ma-a-a-atthew.”
“I know,” said the General, looking down at his hands, which were clasped together as in prayer on his lap.
His wife stood up and walked over to his chair and s
tood behind him, hugging his huge head to her tiny frame with arms that didn't look as if they could pick up a salad fork, much less do the daily work of taking care of a house and children.
“Watch, darling,” she whispered in his ear.
A boy walked out the door of the house dressed in a dark suit, carrying a corsage. The General heard something and turned to see what it was.
There he was, a young captain standing in the door with a cigarette in his mouth, calling to the boy.
“Boy! You be home by midnight, goddammit, and don't you take that girl downtown, you hear me?”
The boy turned. It was his son, Matt. He was leaving to pick up his date, the daughter of another captain who lived just across the parade.
“I'll be home on time, Dad,” his son called.
“You come in one minute after midnight, and you'll wish you hadn't come home at all, boy!”
“I know, Dad,” said the boy. He sniffed the corsage and headed across the parade field at a gallop.
“What are you doing to me?” the General asked.
“Sssh. Just watch, Ma-a-a-atthew. There is nothing you can do now but watch.”
The boy walking across the field disappeared into the misty gray dusk. A moment later he emerged from the dusk, walking back toward the house. He climbed the front steps and knocked on the door. It was answered by someone the General had never seen before, a tall man with gray hair wearing a sweater and tan slacks and loafers.
“Come in, Matt. Wendy will be down in a moment,” said the man. He was smoking a pipe, and the General could smell its sweet aroma. The door to the house was ajar, and inside were furnishings the General had never seen before. The glow from a television colored the sitting room, and an overcoat with a full colonel's insignia was hung on the hook by the door.
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