by Gus Lee
“I’m glad you know how to light a fire.”
I turned to face Major Schwarzhedd. Next to him was Major Maher. They were both in uniform, in full fig.
“Tomorrow’s your last day at West Point,” said Major Schwarzhedd. “Let’s drink one for Benny Havens, and to the Army, where there’s sobriety, and promotion’s very slow.” Benny was the legendary nineteenth-century tavern master who helped many cadets greet the bottom side of a beer mug, again and again. It was an Irish army and everyone was a friend of the grape and the hops.
Major Schwarzhedd gave me a cold, iceboxed can of Tab. “Can’t toast without spirits. Absent comrades,” he said, and we drank.
Major Maher gave me a cigar. “Has quinine, cures malaria, which, no doubt, you’ll contract over there. God knows I did,” he said in his clearly enunciated tones. “I don’t want to brag.”
“Chase got malaria,” said Schwarzhedd, “because he swore so abundantly he bugged the mosquitoes.” He also accepted a cigar. “I’ll smoke it ’cause we’re outdoors, and someone’s already turned the night sky black with hydrocarbons.”
“Norm, you’re right,” said Maher. “I should follow your example. You have a clean mouth, hardly swore, and you got amoebic dysentery, double malaria, blown up in a minefield, machine-gunned, cut off and starved in triple-canopy jungle for a week, and shot down in a chopper. Inspiring as hell.” Maher crouched and lit the cigar on the flames of my Juice text, and Schwarzhedd and I followed. The flames warmed my cheeks, and I saw pages of curling, browning circuit diagrams smoking and burning. I would never know the difference between a Norton and a Thevenin circuit. I straightened when I smelled my hair burning.
“Great Tab, sir,” I said, drinking it to kill the bite of the cigar. Cans were relatively new; soda used to come in bottles.
“Yes, it was a damn good year for Tab,” said Maher. “Test the heady bouquet, savor the insouciant body. Don’t guzzle like it was sugared water. Take a vintner chevalier’s little sip and mull it. Ahhhh! C’est bien. We figured,” he added, “you’d be feeling lower than shark shit on the bottom of the sea.”
“Or beneath the belly button of a lowly Irish reptile,” suggested Schwarzhedd. “And lonelier than Lot’s wife. So, you might as well be with a bookish bachelor and a man who can curse when things are good. Incidentally, that’s him.”
“Murphy, the Irish mystic, knows,” said Maher, “when things are bad, ta take comfort, knowin’ they can only get worse. My sainted father used ta say, ‘When things are bad, don’t make ’em worse, for they will be quite bad enough without your help.’ ”
I laughed. “You know, sir, my stepmother was part Irish. The Irish sayings are easier to remember than the Chinese ones.”
“That, laddie,” said Maher, “is because they’ve been translated into English.”
I took a deep breath, enjoying the cool night air, the conviviality of the campfire built on the ruins of my engineering career. I looked at them, memorizing their strong faces illuminated by fire, their reflecting metal decorations, their interest in me.
“I’m going to miss you,” I said thinly, looking at them both. I could not imagine a world without them.
“We’re just passing through,” said Maher. “That’s all life is. Transition between Large Engineering Unknowns. Both of us are returning to Vietnam. We’ll request your assignment to our unit. We’ll help you go OCS so we can discuss Juice late into the night.”
“Oh, good, Chase,” said the Bear. “That’ll encourage the man to stay in the Army.”
The fire sputtered on the hard spine of Hammond’s text.
“Go, Army,” said Chase Maher in his clear, articulating voice, putting his hand out, palm down. Norman Schwarzhedd placed his hand on top of Maher’s, and I put mine on top of his.
“Go, Army,” I said.
“Godspeed, Kai,” said Schwarzhedd. He was smiling.
I stood next to the dying flames for a full hour after they left. I felt magical, because in a blink of an eye, I could reproduce their images in the Area, remembering their exact gait, relative position, azimuth and bearing, as they had walked away. I can still see them, today, the Bear and Byron, casting long shadows into a night rich with ruin and smoke.
My last true outprocessing station was Regiment, in Building 720. After I spoke to Major Noll about an unspecific future, he wished me well, gave me his home address, and asked me to answer his correspondence. He promised to write, and he did. I didn’t. It was the beginning of the numbnuts syndrome.
“Kai, the sergeant major will discuss your duty assignment,” the major told me.
Sergeant Major Klazewski had not been Zeus at West Point. That was the Superintendent’s job, or the Commandant’s. But Klazewski was like Apollo, the god of sunlight, of music, and of prophecy. When I had offered my life to the gods the night before, commending the sparks from Hammond’s text to the heavens, they had wafted through the night air to land on the sergeant major’s desk.
“Ach, come in, come in,” he said, polishing his desk with an old OD towel. “Dis for you, from wife and daughter.” He gave me a tinfoil package of cookies. “Yeah, yeah, it’s okay. So stop thanking me.” He rubbed the thin, pale scar on the side of his cheek with his big, hairy fist.
“Sit. Talk.” He adjusted a pen on his meticulous desk, which he also polished. He had been an outdoors man, a rugged infantryman, and the broad expanse of old wood was a symbol of accomplishment, of the executive powers of which he was master.
“Major Noll vill miss you,” he said.
“And I him.”
“Vant to go to the college?” he asked.
“Someday, Sergeant Major,” I said.
“And do vot?” he asked.
“I like history, and political science, and English, and psychology, and I’d probably like sociology. Philosophy. Languages. I want to study China. Why, Sergeant Major?”
“Jost asking. Nosy old man. You remember, ve talk in field at Buckner, and vhen you vas Beast cadre.” The sergeant major was a fiend for the field, taking any excuse to escape garrison and be with the troops, watching us from defilade in the woods as we performed field exercises. He had said I looked good. I had been happy to be eating so much in the absence of math.
He had two envelopes on his desk. “Vere you vant to go?”
“Jump School, Ranger School, 82nd Airborne, Sergeant Major. I want all the training I can get.” I preferred the 82nd to the 101st Airborne; its nickname was “all-American.” That was what I had always wanted to be.
He frowned, shaking his head. “Na, na, Kai Ting. No Jomp, no Ranger. Eyes,” he said, “vorse zan blind grandmosser. Hospital test you take yesterday. X ray, urine, bones—goot. Hearing, not so goot. Back, old man’s back. Eyes, twenty ofer eight hundred! Too blind to see red flag for Buckner Slide for Life. No parachute for bad-back blind man. Ranger School is night jomp. Plus, you have ass-ma! You locky get dis far. You 4-F.”
I blinked. Did this mean I couldn’t even be in the Army? Suddenly, I was back at Letterman Hospital at the Presidio, with the Army doctor telling me that West Point wasn’t a school for the blind. There was no escaping ji hui; last night I had made plans about Vietnam, asking openly for favors, bartering my wounds for concessions from uncaring gods. I shouldn’t have said anything. I would have to deal with being out of the Academy; I couldn’t also lose the Army. What would I do with my life?
“Sergeant Major, I have waivers. Get me in!”
He looked at me hard enough to take my breath away. “Ohh,” he said in a low, gravelly voice, rich with the dark, old soils of Eastern Europe, “now you tell der Sergeant Major vot he must do?”
“I’m sorry, Sergeant Major. I’m begging. You can do anything. It’s the only way I can try to make good. It’s just my bod.”
He shook his head. “Now you are wrong. Bod is Uncle Sam’s bod. Too much. Better you ask Gott for new eyes.”
“Sergeant Major, I ask Gott, through you, for new eyes.”
>
He roared in laughter. “Gott through me!” His chest jumped with his roaring, and as he slowed down he opened a drawer, pulled out a tissue, and honked into it. “Come back two hours. Orders ready.” He put the two waiting envelopes inside his burn bag.
“Maybe you no like zem too much. I vish you all luck in der vorld, Kai Ting.”
He took a deep breath. “You come here like me—foreigner. In der old country, you and me, ve vould be hanging from trees. So don’ forget, never—is great to be young, and alive, in America!”
At the Hotel Thayer, Jean was just coming on duty in the brightly lit dining room, and I told her the news. She hugged me and cried a little. She had dyed her hair blond.
“I had no idea you had school troubles,” she said. “I’ll miss you and your beautiful girlfriend.” She introduced me to a boy, a candidate of the Class of 1971, whose parents had dropped him at the hotel a full week before R-Day. He was worried about his future. I told him all I knew. He looked at me with awe and pity.
I boarded the bus for New York at the Thayer, wearing khakis, carrying my orders and an overnight bag. My books, sealed in gun-box crates, would be shipped with my uniforms to my next station.
I left my cadet uniforms for the guys in the company to divvy up. I thought of saving my tar bucket helmet and my full-dress tunic, and the glorious all-white India uniform, but they were too painful to keep. It would be like saving pictures of the dead. I kept Marco’s tar bucket, for reasons I could not explain to myself.
This was all just and right, I thought. Yeh. I had hurt others—none of whom could be discussed again. In a way, I felt like them, orphaned by West Point, the parent I would always love, and always miss.
I watched the Academy disappear. The last image I possessed was of Thayer Gate, and the white-gloved, iron-backed MPs saluting officers as they drove onto post. I had the sensation in my guts of a rapidly descending elevator, heading for a basement experience.
Of course, in that moment I did not know that I would reunite with Company A-3 and my classmates—rejoining my brothers, laughing on playing fields and in section rooms, playing hallway touch football, horsing at hearts tables, eating fourths in the mess hall, packing my weekly ration of roast beef sandwiches on Sunday nights, exulting in my reinstatement as a class-ringed Firstie, full of life and promise, running with Mike, Sonny, Big Bus Bob, Arch Astaire, Deke, Tree, Moon, Spoon, Meatball, Curve Wrecker, Moose, Pensive, Hawk, Buns, Handsome, Rocket Scientist, and Clint and a hundred others … only to awaken again and again, often with tearing eyes and cries at my weaknesses, my inability to stop the images, realizing that for me, for the rest of my life, reunion would occur only in dreams.
38
SERGEANT
Fort Ord, Monterey County, California, May 1968
Fort Ord is an Army installation on the central California coast that combines Fort Zinderneuf, the lonely, austere Foreign Legion post in the desert of old French Algeria, with flat stretches of the coast of western France. It is endless thick sand and ice plant on a cold and windy sea.
I had come here as penance for my failure. The sergeant major’s orders had been a boxer’s mojo juke. I had not gone to Vietnam to fight, but to California to train troops to enter the ring. Nor had I been sent to Jump or Ranger school, missing both distinction and risk. I had been assigned to Drill Sergeant School, which was like an Academy refresher, teaching things I already knew without the use of calculus. I got an Army campaign “Smokey the Bear” hat, a whistle on a chain, and a Drill Sergeant badge that was worn on the lower half of the left breast pocket. I was a DI, a tireless, iron-voiced, cadence-calling driver of men with a penchant for sweet parades, jocular troops, a prohibition on hazing, ample push-ups, and allowance for heavy eating.
I had thirty days’ leave. Before DI Academy, I had flown to Benning. Near the towers and the cinder-block buildings of TIS, The Infantry School, I met the deputy commandant of the Airborne School. Jump School trainees ran their miles with the Black Hats, chanting jodies full of hopeful pride and tired air.
“You just flunked out of the Point? You got Surgeon General waivers on a bad body, you have no orders to be here, and you want to be Airborne? Forget it, Sergeant!”
I hung around, the cat after the canary, until he relented. He would grant my wish and let the Black Hat cadre kill me.
The first jump was the worst. As stick leader, I stood in the windblown open door of a C-130 to confront my raging acrophobia. The aircraft shook as seven cabin lights turned from red to green, the jump master shouted, “GO!” and, against all my refined judgment and my inflated fears, I leaped from the Hercules into the harsh, gyrating prop wash. I was blown horizontally, jerked by the canopy, floated, fell like a rock, and landed like a sack of wet crap, shaken, rattled, and rolled, but breathing in great bellowing hoots. After six jumps, the Black Hats congratulated us, punching shiny Airborne wings through our fatigue blouses into the skin of our chests. After the fear of falling, it didn’t hurt.
“Blood wings,” said Sergeant Malo Gomez. “Wear ’em proud.”
Jump School was three tough weeks. Ranger School is nine very hard weeks. I debussed with my duffel bag outside Benning at the old barracks of Harmony Church, HQ, Ranger School, my heart slugging as if I were about to jump again.
The deputy commandant told me to go fly a kite. “Heard what you did in Jump School. You and your lousy vision don’t belong here. Should be in Finance. You lose your glasses in the glade, you’ll drown your patrol. You’re a blind man lookin’ for a place to crash. You’re a year of paperwork, waiting for a date. Ever hear of orders? Unass my AO, Sergeant. Dismissed.”
I returned to New York for unfinished business, arriving, with impeccable timing, in an August heat wave. The street vendors cursed, stockbrokers elbowed, the taxis played tag with death and fares while the concrete perspired and the heat arrived in wet, angry droves. I entered the cool Waldorf and sat on the green sofa where I had met Cathy Pearl Yee. I was reading C. S. Forester’s The Happy Return.
Someone lighter than a cadet sat down. She wore a short sheath dress that was the same color as her name and no doubt the equivalent of half a year of sergeant’s pay. The long hair wrapped above her head, and the matching heels made her seem even taller. I stood and took both of her hands, her fingers warm and alive.
“What do I do with them?” I asked, and she laughed. I happily studied her large, bright, knowing eyes, and elegant eyebrow raised for me, her strong nose, her perfect mouth, her strong, able jaw. I brought her right hand up and kissed it. Her skin was cool and smooth. The tip of her tongue came out and ran the perimeter of her fine, even teeth. She withdrew her hand and sat, patting the sofa.
“I love you in civilian clothing,” she said in her clear voice. “It makes you look free and independent.” She sighed. “I missed you. Ding Kai, where did you go?”
“Fort Benning,” I said. As I told her, her eyes traveled over my face, as if she were trying to memorize me. “I’ve never seen your hair so short. What are your plans?”
“I’m going to Ord, as ordered.”
“What about us?” she asked.
“Can’t beat your father,” I said.
“Why not?”
I looked down. “Pearl. I—flunked out.”
“So? He knows. He was surprised, but he prefers men without outside allegiances. Kai, it’s not a big deal. It means nothing,” she said, angling her head. It was a lovely head.
“It means everything,” I said.
“It doesn’t have to. I know more about you than you think. I know about your eyesight and your bad back. Arch told me. You don’t even have to be in the Army—that, really, you shouldn’t be in the Army. Remember Pearl’s First Rule: Follow only orders you must. Get out of the Army, Ding Kai. Do you know how lucky you are? You’re alive and you’re not going to Vietnam, where you would kill others and see others die and maybe get killed yourself.” She squirmed on the sofa.
“Stay here, with me.
Enroll in Columbia or audit classes. Find a career. Find two of them. Money’s no problem.” She raised the eyebrow again, smiling. “We’d have each other, and all the Chinese restaurants in New York and the Lims’ cooking. You’ve worked very hard, Ding Kai. This is your deserved rest.”
I looked at her, aching. “Not good enough,” I said.
“Okay, what would make it good enough?” she asked.
“I’m not good enough.” I was rubbing my ring finger. She had done that on this sofa. Janie had rubbed her ring. I stopped.
“You mean you’re not good enough for me?” she asked. I nodded. “Screwed up so bad.” I shook my head. “I don’t deserve. I have bad yeh.” I had to redeem myself. I had to serve my exile. I had to do something worthy. I had no idea what that would be. It had been so clear and bright as I had walked up the river road with my bag three years, and a lifetime, ago.
“I don’t believe in Buddhist karma,” she said.
“I do,” I said. There was a logic to my life.
“Kai, is there someone else?”
“You mean, like, another girl?”
She nodded, frowning, her lips parted.
“No,” I said. “No girl. Just my worthless life.”
She sighed. “I have a room here,” she said softly. “How long are you staying?”
“I’m manifested on a 2300-hours flight from McGuire.”
Silence.
“Can you change the flight?” she asked.
I had four days to kill. For a moment I considered lying by saying no. I wasn’t a member of the Corps. I wasn’t subject to the Code. I had daydreamed about being with Pearl in the Waldorf, before I had been separated from the Academy. I knew there was nothing wrong with her, or with the Code, or with the Waldorf. Only me.
“Yes, but I don’t want to.”
She closed her eyes. “Are you breaking up with me?” she asked, her voice different.
