Honor and Duty (63 page)

God, you didn’t do such a hot job watching over me in engineering, so watch over me in war. Damn! Vietnam, just like the French, the Japanese, and the Chinese. They don’t give up. Why’d I join the Army when we’re in a war against Asian freedom fighters? Why can’t the White House see that communism is an accident for them? What they’re all about is killing foreigners who mess with their country. What happened to freeing all the people behind the Iron Curtain? Enough. What the hell do I know? I don’t know crap. Okay, God, kill me, but don’t maim me. Please. I don’t want to be maimed. I was a gimp as a kid. Not in the eyes. Not my nuts. I’m still a virgin—wouldn’t be fair. Don’t do this to me again as an adult. I’m twenty! Let me do one goddamned thing right in my life! Don’t let me embarrass West Point again. Make people say, “Yeah, he’s good. He went to West Point.” Right, I thought. Who the hell do I think I’m talking to? Chu-i or the tooth fairy? The gods do not favor you, you idiot.

Sergeant Ting, Infantry. I’d get the burnished silver Airborne wings of Jump School and the bright yellow Ranger tab. In Vietnam, I’d win the Combat Infantryman’s Badge. That was
more than enough for a guy who had flirted with failure and then kissed it in broad daylight under the clock tower. I could live with that. I might never be happy, but happiness wasn’t everything. I would have three squares a day … if I didn’t get killed or shot in the mouth.

I took a deep breath, rich with smoke, my shadow flickering on the grounds of Central Area. I presented arms, saluting my absent class and the gods above, remembering Mike Benjamin talking about losing at the edge of winning. I didn’t deserve to win, but did I deserve to lose like this? Yes, Monsieur Dickhead, you must have.

“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

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.