A Man Called Milo Morai

by Robert Adams

  When once he had heard the reports of Saxon and Milo, the commanding officer sighed deeply and shook his head slowly. "John, Milo, it's the same, sad fucking story from division on down, I'm here to attest to that much. The Powers That Be really broke it off in this division, and the general is so fucking mad that he's chewing up twenty-penny nails and spitting out carpet tacks. It seems that we got every fucking goldbrick and fuck-off and miscreant and mother's mistake that any other outfit wanted to unload somewhere."

  "Howsomever"—he smiled lazily and tilted back his head to gaze at the resinous rafters above him—"I just may have helped the overall situation a bit. I made a few telephone calls and sent a few wires from division, earlier this morning, called in some markers and cadged a few favors here and there. If it all jells, I think that I can safely assure you that from now on, this battalion will be at the very tiptop of the general's most-favored list."

  "In that case, colonel," began Milo, only to be stopped.

  "Milo, John, when we're alone together, it's no 'colonel' and 'sergeant,' hear me? This rank of mine is only a wartime expediency, every Regular knows that, and I feel one hell of a lot more at home and properly placed among you and men like you than I do among most of the officers, anyway."

  "Now, that matter aside, you have a problem, Milo?"

  "We have a problem, Jethro, two of them, in Head and Head. Supply sergeants are always out for the main chance, everybody knows that, but this precious pair we've got here—Moffa of battalion supply and Crockett of Headquarters Company supply—take the fucking shit-cake. Somehow, between the two of them, they've managed to convert a shipment of two thousand brand-spanking-new GI blankets that arrived just last week into less than half that number of ragged, motheaten, thread-bare pieces of shit that it would be a fucking crime to issue to a fucking dog. And that's just their most recent sleight-of-hand with our supplies."

  Without a word to Milo, Stiles picked up the receiver of the desk telephone and, after about fifteen minutes, was talking to his party. "James? Jethro, here. Can I have just one more? Gabe Potter, that's who. Well, isn't there any way you can get those charges dropped? I really need the fellow, James. Yes, yes, thank you, James, that's yet another one I owe you. Take care, you old bastard."

  "Master Sergeant Gabe Potter?" Milo yelped, "Jesus, Jethro, he's the crookedest man at Fort Benning! He's the last thing we need up here. Moffa and Crockett are bad enough."

  Stiles raised his eyebrows for a moment, then said, "That's right, Milo, you've been away for a while. Well, it's Captain Potter, now, and since he made captain he's kept the whole place humming with courts-martial hearings and reductions in rank, with sentences to Leavenworth and stockade time. He was a master crook himself, so he knows every fucking dodge there is, and he's ferreted out every racketeer in the whole damn training command. Of course, he's garnered a whole pisspot full of enemies at it, so he just might be glad to get up here into a new unit where he won't have every other fucker gunning for his ass… well, at least not for a while yet."

  When they all finally straggled in and he got a look at them and their files, Colonel Stiles forced a captaincy back on Master Sergeant John Saxon, ignoring his loud and profanely voiced objections and opinions of officers in general. Then the old soldier was made the battalion adjutant.

  Affairs in both battalions and the higher echelons were well on the way to normalcy when Milo was called to battalion headquarters one day. He found Stiles waiting for him outside the building, beside a jeep.

  When he had returned the salute, he said, "Get in and drive, Milo. They raise pure fucking hell if I drive myself anymore, even in my own car. Drive somewhere out in the boondocks. We two need to talk, and I don't want half the fucking division hearing us."

  When once they were off the built-up portions of the post and rolling along a dusty dirt road between brushy shoulders backed by stands of pine and scrub cedar, Stiles spoke again.

  "Milo, there's something godawful fishy going on. I've twice tried to get you a commission, now, and each time the forms have been returned, rejected by higher authority, nor have I been able to wangle or worm out any explanation for any of this. I've run into a brick wall every time, and that's not my usual batting average in dealing with the Army. They won't even accept an application in your name for OCS, for God's sake, man. Have you got any ideas why?"

  Milo was nonplussed and said so, whereupon Stiles continued his monologue. "Well, maybe we'll get to the bottom of it all in time. At last, we'll have a bit more of that commodity. Inside information I've acquired— and this is strictly not for repetition, Milo—has it that, what with all the fuckups we've had to put up with, we've been replaced by a more combat-ready division for the Italian business. They're going to give us more time to shake down and form up, see, save us for the big invasion, probably early next year. Somewhere in France, obviously, the Mediterranean coast, I'd guess, considering how well fortified the Krauts have made the Atlantic coasts and how assuredly costly an assault on those coasts would be certain to be."

  "I own a villa in Nice, you know. Of course, I've not been there in almost twenty years, but until the war started I still received regular rents on it. It would be good to see it again, if we wind up anywhere near it."

  "But that's all in the future and a bit speculative, at best. Look, Milo, I'm going up to Washington for a week or so next month on some business for the general. I'd intended to spend a bit of time out at the farm, and Martine wants me to bring you, too. Can you get away from the company that long, do you think?"

  The slow, unhurried and quiet pace of life in the Virginia countryside was very restful, soothing, after the frenetic months of trying to whip nearly nine hundred strangers into a tight-knit unit, with every new disaster and shortfall landing squarely atop the last.

  Jethro left early each morning for Washington and sometimes did not return until well after dark, usually too tired to do much other than eat lightly, have a few drinks, bathe and go to sleep in preparation for the next day. During his absences, Milo and Martine spent the days riding or walking the length and breadth of the thousand-plus acres of the farm, joining the children in playing with a litter of puppies, talking about anything and nothing in a half-dozen languages and otherwise lazing away the long days in trivialities.

  Melusine Stiles had been just over six weeks old upon Milo's arrival with her father. Having no milk this time, and not caring to try the bottle method, Martine had sought out and hired a wet nurse for her newest child. However, she still spent time with the baby as well as with her two older children, and during these times, Milo, ever voracious for knowledge, always hoping against hope that some passage read somewhere would trigger his dormant memories of the past, made use of the well-selected array of books in the library of the house.

  The week stretched into two weeks, then a third, but Jethro assured Milo that he was keeping in regular touch with the battalion as well as regiment and division and that their presence was not crucial to anyone's well-being. Milo never asked what Jethro was doing in Washington, and Jethro himself seldom volunteered much information, only advising that Milo make the most of his current period of relaxation as there would be no time or opportunity for such soon.

  It had been Martine who had steered Milo, early on, to a set of treatises on varying aspects of military science— tactics, strategy, management of military units in the attack, in the defense, on the march, proper utilization of intelligence and a plethora of other subjects; most of these were written in French, but a couple were in German, as well.

  "Milo Moray, I am terribly worried for our Jethro," she had confided to him. "At times, he seems foolishly overconfident in his abilities to command successfully so large numbers of the soldiers, lacking but the barest of training and educations in such matters. Milo Moray, my father is a graduate of Saint-Cyr, as too was his father and my late elder brother, and so I know—even if my husband will not admit to knowledge—just what is required to make a compet
ent commander of a man. With the sole exceptions of the excessively rare military geniuses, years of education, training and experience are necessary."

  "Now, my husband is well educated, but it was not a military education he enjoyed, nor is his a true military mind, for even I can consistently best him at chess. He means well, he is very conscientious, as we both know, but in a life-or-death situation that often is not enough, and I have a strong, terrible feeling that he may not come alive back to me from out of this war."

  "But I have another deep feeling, too, Milo Moray. That is that you are very possibly one of these near-genius military minds still unsuspected and in hiding. The little Austrian naval officer has known you for long, yes? He has told me that he is of the firm opinion that before you lost your memory, you were at some time a military man, possibly a European cavalry officer, and if true this could account for my intuitions regarding you."

  "So, please to read these books, Milo Moray. Even if they do not help you to recall your past, perhaps they will give to you knowledge with which you may help my husband to succeed in his chosen position and return safely to me and to his children."

  Milo never was to know just what Jethro did or said during his three weeks in Washington, but whatever it was, it worked with a vengeance. Upon their return to South Carolina and the unit, things began to move. The slow, sporadic trickles of supplies and equipment became a steady stream and then a veritable flood. Empty slots were quickly filled as missing and badly needed specialists — commissioned, warranted and enlisted — were transferred in from other units, not a few of them from nearly the width of a continent away. Enough men soon were on hand to allow them the freedom to start weeding out the misfits and troublemakers with which they had initially been cursed.

  An episode that was to haunt Milo for many years to come occurred on the day that the former battalion supply sergeant, Luigi Moffa, was brought up from the post stockade for sentencing on the multitude of charges of which he stood convicted.

  With a clanking of his sets of manacles, the man in the faded, baggy, blue-denim fatigues (with a prominent bull's-eye painted in white on the back of the shirt) dropped down from the back of the weapons carrier and shuffled awkwardly up the steps into one of the buildings housing battalion headquarters. Milo's glimpse of the prisoner and his two beefy, well-armed. grim-faced guards showed him a drastic change from the Moffa he first had met. It was not simply the lack of tailored uniforms and patent-leather field shoes, nor was it the loss of at least thirty pounds. It was not even the face that showed still-pinkish scars, fresh bruises and a barely closed cut above one eye. It was the eyes themselves and the general demeanor of the once-arrogant and abusive man—they contained no spark of life or any vitality. Moffa resembled nothing so much as an ambulatory corpse.

  Milo sighed and went back to his work. He hated to think of any man being so thoroughly broken, but then reflected that if any man deserved it for his many misdeeds, it was certainly Moffa; that much had come to light during Captain Potter's very thorough investigations.

  He had been back at work for a good quarter hour when the entire building reverberated to a booming pistol shot, followed rapidly by four more, then, after a pause, a man's scream ended by a fifth shot.

  Suddenly, a wild-eyed major in a class-A uniform caked with dirty snow, his face and hands bleeding from a profusion of cuts and gashes, stumbled through the entry of the building.

  "The prisoner!" he gasped to no one and everyone. "That Guinea bastard! He heard his sentence, then got a gun away from one of the guards and shot the other one. Then he started after us; I jumped through the window."

  Just then, a soldier came pounding down the long central corridor and was narrowly missed by the pistol ball that tore its splintery way through the closed door of the room in which the board had sat for Moffa's sentencing.

  "Goddam!" swore Milo, then turned to one of the clerks. "Turner, go outside to the other end of the building and tell those fuckers not to try to use the corridor until we can get this fuckin' mess sorted out." To another, he said, "Dubois, you and my driver get the major here up to the regimental surgeon on the double. Those cuts look bad, and he's bleeding like a stuck pig."

  Before the adjutant, Captain John Saxon, and a bevy of men and officers had tramped through the snow around the safe side of the long building, Milo and a few of his men had conducted a cautious reconnaissance of the distinctly unsafe side to find two officers safe, though gashed and shivering in the bitter cold, each crouched low under one of the two smashed-out windows. A third officer lay in the snow on his face, his head at such an impossible angle to the body that he could not possibly have been alive. A fourth officer hung backward out of one of the windows; he had a big blue-black mark on his forehead, and that head no longer possessed a back to it.

  Working along the sides of the building, as much as possible out of the murderous prisoner's sight and line of fire, Milo got up to first one, then the other of the two living officers and dragged them back to where other men could take charge of them. He saw no point in risking anyone's life to retrieve the two dead men, officers or no.

  Back in the environs of his office, he rendered John Saxon a report through still-chattering teeth. The old soldier nodded brusquely, then gripped his shoulder. "You done good, Milo, but then, you a Reg'lar."

  "Sargint majer!" he then roared. "Take you some bodies and git ovuh to the arms room and tell Jacoby I said to issue you three Thompsons, a hunnert rounds of ball for each one, a half a dozen smoke grenades and a coupla Mark Two pineapples. Git!"

  Milo grasped Saxon's arm, hard. "John, you can't just pitch hand grenades into that room. Moffa may not have killed all of them—some could be lying wounded in there still."

  "You got a better ideer, Milo?" demanded the grizzled officer. "Besides just leavin' the fucker in there till he grows him a long gray beard?"

  Milo cudgeled his brain frantically. "John… how about tear gas? That ought to get him out."

  "Where we gonna get any quick, Milo, huh? It ain't none in the arms room, I can tell you that."

  "Then how about letting me try to talk him out, John?" Milo was shocked to hear himself say the words.

  "Moray, you off your fuckin' gourd, man. That fuckin' Moffa he's sure to be plumb mad-dog crazy to've done all he's done. You think he won't kill you too, you just as loony as he is," Saxon snapped.

  Moffa used his jaw teeth—he no longer had any front ones adequate to the job—to draw the cork of the bottle of bourbon, all the while keeping his eyes and the muzzle of the automatic pistol locked unwaveringly upon Milo. After a long, gulping swallow of the alcohol, he lowered the bottle and spoke sadly.

  "You shouldn' of come in here, top. You know I'm gonna have to kill you, too, now. You know that, don' you? And you dint never do nuthin' to me, but I gotta kill you enyhow."

  He took another pull at the bottle then, impatiently waggling the pistol when Milo started to speak.

  "See, top, them fuckers over there."—he jerked his head at the overturned table and the bodies that lay behind it—"they was gonna send me to break rocks in Leavenworth for the nex' thirty years. Top, ain' no fucker gonna send me to Leavenworth, and not back to that fuckin' stockade, neither, you hear me. The fuckin' bastids in that stockade, they done beat me and starved me and made me crawl for the lastes' time. Naw, I'm gon' make some fucker kill me, top, that's what I'm gon' do. I druther be dead and burnin' in hell than in Leavenworth or back in that fuckin' shithole stockade, top. So, like I done said a'ready, I'm sorry."

  There was a half-heard roar, a dimly seen flash of fire-streak from the muzzle of the heavy pistol, and, with unbearable pain, some irresistible force flung Milo backward to bounce off a wall and land, face down, in a heap beside the gory body of one of the dead military police-men.

  He knew that he was dead. He knew that it would only be a matter of a very short amount of time before all sensation, all pain ceased. But he wished that before his mind stopped fun
ctioning forever, he could remember just who and what he had been before his awakening in Chicago, years ago.

  But the pain did not stop. It got worse, if anything. He heard shouts from outside the room, heard them clearly. He even heard the wet gurglings as Moffa worked at the bottle of whiskey. Those wet gurglings it was that awakened in him a sudden, raging thirst for- whiskey, water, anything wet; his entire body was insistently clamoring for fluids.

  Slowly, more than a little surprised that his arms and legs still would function, Milo gained first to hands and knees, then to his feet, swaying like a tree in a gale, groaning and biting his lips and tongue against the fire-ball of superheated pain lodged in his chest and back.

  He did not see Moffa, who just stared at the blood-soaked apparition, wide-eyed, the pistol dangling from one hand and the near-emptied whiskey bottle from the other.

  "Goddam you, top," he finally gasped, "lay down! You dead, you fucker you! I put that slug clean th'ough your fuckin' heart!"

  Milo heard the words, though he did not see the speaker, not clearly. Later he was to remember those words. Nor did he see the fragmentation grenade that sailed through one of the shattered windows and bounced twice before it came to lie spinning in the middle of the floor.

  But Moffa saw it. Dropping both pistol and bottle, he dived upon it, clasping it, his instrument of salvation, close against his chest and sobbing his relief, even while he used one foot to kick the nearest of Milo's wobbly legs from under him.

  Immediately in the wake of the searing explosion, the door came crashing inward and a burst of submachine-gun fire stuttered through the opening until a voice shouted and brought silence in place of the deadly noises.

  In his second fall to the blood-slimed floor of the room, Milo had thumped his head hard enough to briefly take away his consciousness.

  Captain John Saxon moved warily into the room, the still-smoking muzzle of his Ml Thompson at waist level, his horny forefinger on the trigger. One of the two men behind him took but a single look at what was left of Moffa, dropped his own Thompson with a clattering thud and was noisily sick.