Scareforce (9 page)

You have to get used to work. Your family has work to do also. They have to find the grocery store and the best way to get
to the Exchange. They have to track down stores and schools and banks and telephone offices and gas stations. But during all
the running around and searching and hunting, the process of turning this house into a home is taking place.

After the second week the house is starting to become your home. A neighbor stops by to welcome you and your wife.

“See by your license that you were stationed at Base X. We were too. Seems like a thousand years ago. This place is just as
good. Better, in some ways.”

Then, in what seems like a more cautious tone, “How do you like the house?” It doesn’t seem to be just a polite question.
She is very interested in the answer.

Your wife, somewhat bewildered by the way the question is asked, nevertheless can’t help but exclaim about the wonderful house
and your good fortune in getting it.

“Yeah, well, I hope you stay longer than the last bunch. They decided real sudden to move downtown.”

“Why? Is there something wrong with this house?” She is curious about the attitude of her new neighbor.

“No, no, nothing wrong. Nothing that I know of. Wish we had a single.”

There is something a little too emphatic in the neighbor’s denial but your wife decides to let it pass.

In the days and nights to come she thinks back to this conversation.

Things start slowly. It seems that the shock of moving has infected every member of the Simms family with a case of forgetfulness.
Everyone starts to lose things. Nothing big, just irritating. If Mrs. Simms is sure the car keys are on the desk, they aren’t
found until she looks on the bedroom dresser. And if you are sure that you left the checkbook in your coat, it turns up in
the kitchen cabinet. Even your little girl, Sherry, complains that her dolls are playing hide-and-seek when she wants to play
school.

It doesn’t seem anything but annoying until things start to turn up in the most unlikely places. What had prompted you to
leave your ring in the flour canister? And why did Mrs. Simms ever put her silver napkin holder out in the garage in the lawn
mower basket? It is as if some little imp is pressing the limits of possibility to see how far he can go before someone gets
suspicious.

When your wife finds the dog staring stupidly at the doll’s head in his food dish, things finally get to be too much. She
can’t wait to tell her husband about the rash of lost-and-founds.

That night, after listening to your wife recite a list of improbabilities, you consider the strange occurrences as you drive
down to the base minimart. You recognize a neighbor in the line with you. He introduces himself.

“Oh, you must be the one who moved into that strange house on the corner.”

You register surprise at this description of your new house.

“Why do you call it strange?”

“No reason really. It just seems to be empty more than it’s occupied. And there must be something wrong with the electricity
because the lights keep going on and off even when nobody’s living there. You notice anything strange?“

You consider the question. You decide that the rash of missing items doesn’t really qualify as strange.

“Nope. Nothing out of the ordinary. It’s a real nice house.”

“You’re probably right. What do I know? Nice to meet you anyway.”

During the next couple of days you think more and more about your “strange” house. You finally stop by the housing office
to see if you can find out anything about it.

When the clerk comes to the window, you suddenly think this whole thing is pretty dumb. What are you doing here? The clerk
recognizes you from the day the house was assigned.

“What can I do for you, Sergeant Simms?”

“Ah… I just wondered. Is there anything unusual about that house you gave me?” you finally manage to stammer. Your question
sounds foolish even before you finish asking it.

“Is there something wrong with the house?” The woman seems almost defensive.

“No, well, no nothing really.”

“Do you want to lodge a complaint about the house?”

“No, no complaint.” You’re really confused by her attitude.

“Then I guess we can be of no further help to you, Sergeant Simms. Good day.”

You say good day to her as she is already turning away and leave more disturbed than when you came in.

A few days later the house finally becomes a comfortable place to relax in and sleep in. You hope it will just keep getting
more homey.

Mrs. Simms wakes, confused. It’s only 3:00 A.M. but something disturbs her. “What is it?” she thinks. “Oh, the baby. The baby
is crying.” Not too loudly but mothers have well-tuned hearing.

“Whose turn is it for the night patrol?” She still laughs at her husband’s term for the late-night baby comforting chores.

Confusion. That joke is at least three years old. It came from back when they had a baby. Sherry is a grown-up five-year-old
who has no residual baby in her. She has been sleeping through the night for years now.

Must be the neighbors’ child. These triplexes might save the government money but they sure don’t make for quiet nights. She
tries to avoid it but she learns more than she wants to about her neighbors though the walls. Must be Jenney’s girl. She had
hard times with every little illness that infants were prone to.

Memory intrudes. Jenney was one of the committee who fared her well. Mrs. Simms doesn’t live in the triplex with Jenney and
her baby anymore. She doesn’t live in a triplex anymore. That can’t be a baby in the house or the building. The Simms family
is the only family in this house.

She stiffens and grabs her husband’s hand reflexively.

“I know,” you answer her unasked question. “I hear it too.”

“Who is it? What is it?”

You listen together as the baby cries. Sad and lonely sound. So helpless. So lost.

It’s as if you’ve turned a corner or opened another door in the house. Suddenly everyone is treated to all manner of strange
sounds.

At night there are footsteps. Slow, pacing steps always ending in the unused bedroom between your room and Sherry’s. Cupboards
open and close as if someone is looking for something. Looking but not too intent on finding. Just searching for something
to do. Suddenly the beautiful house that had started becoming a home is just a building again. You try to overlook and disregard
the unusual but it’s impossible. Sleep becomes a commodity in short supply for all. Tempers flare and cool and flare again
much too often.

A feeling of sadness begins to pervade. But it seems to be a borrowed sadness. Nothing in your lives would account for the
degree or flavor of sadness you feel.

Late one night in April, two months after you moved in and one month after you found the house owned by another entity, the
two of you lie in the darkness. There are no sounds except those of the living. In a way that is worse. You wait. And you
wonder. What next?

You wake surprised that you dozed off. There’s your wife, standing at the window in the dark. You watch her without speaking.
Even turned from you you can see the sadness in her. You long to take it away, to start over. This has not been a good move.

As if sensing your empathy, she turns slowly from the window. You see that she is sad, very sad indeed, but she is not your
wife.

You wait again at the same desk in the housing office, but this time you know why you are here.

“I’m sorry, but I have to ask,” you explain to the same clerk. “I need another house. If I can get one on base, great. But
I have to move my family. I can’t explain it, but I have to get out of that house.”

“No need to explain, Sergeant.” She sighs as if this is something she expected. “Just sign here and we’ll get you in a new
place tomorrow. Won’t be a single; probably have to be a quad, but that’s the best we can do.”

“No, no, a quad’ll be fine.”

You sign the document quickly, then turn to leave. You hesitate.

“What is it? What’s wrong with that house?”

“I don’t know that anything is officially wrong with that dwelling.” She looks hard into your eyes.

“If you have some time, take a look at some old newspapers at the library. Especially the one for the fourteenth of February,
ten years ago.”

Later that afternoon, you sit back from the microfilm viewer. You think what it must have been like. To be a young mother,
a thousand miles from home, on a strange base, when the letter arrived in the hand of the base chaplain. When the words finally
found meaning that night, that her husband really wouldn’t be coming back, back to the same house that you live in now.

They found her in the baby’s bedroom by the tiny form of her child. Both were still and composed. Both were cold. The paper
had printed her picture, from her wedding. The expression was worlds apart, but it was the same girl that had looked out of
your window.

We always lose something when we move. But sometime.; we find something. Something that someone else left behind. Or someone.

W
AR is the strangest way of life. At first you are petrified with fright. So many ways to die. So many chances to take. But
then you live through a few of them and realize it’s not so bad. And then you start to lose friends to stupid mistakes and
fatal illnesses that have nothing to do with war. And then it becomes really frightening: all these new ways to die and all
the old ones, too. And then out of nowhere you become convinced that there is something else beyond all this death. Strange
things happen in war.

When Harry Lordon met the F-4 for the first time, he was struck by one singular impression: the jet was huge! Walking around
the McDonnell Douglas Phantom II on the blazing concrete ramp, Harry was amazed that a warship this big had been constructed
to carry just two fliers. But then again it had actually been designed to carry something much different from the two aviators
who controlled the beast. It was built to carry weapons, lots of weapons.

The F-4D could carry the war to the enemy. The Phantom was a flying war store. It could carry anything from light harassing
antipersonnel munitions to the the big ones that can end a war or a world. The exhaust ports of the twin GE afterburning turbojets
were as big as caves and when the JP-4 poured in and was ignited by the afterburners, they looked like twin entrances to the
heart of hell.

Harry had been trained to feed the monsters of aerial combat. He had already been in-country for almost a year, fitting other
aircraft with weapons. This would be his first experience with the 4. He looked forward to the challenge.

The F-4 had been developed for the Navy as a carrier-based, multirole attack aircraft. At first the Navy was not impressed.
Even the men who fly it know that the Phantom is not just another pretty face. But when it started beating the snot out of
the Navy’s best fighters, the brass started to take note. When the Air Force got a look at the Navy’s new toy, they just had
to have some. In fact, the Tactical Air Command immediately replaced over half of its fighter force with F-4s.

It was called the most versatile combat jet in the American arsenal. And now Harry was going to get to work on the best.

It wasn’t going to be easy. In these hectic days of the buildup in Southeast Asia, things were changing almost too rapidly
to keep up. The brass kept throwing more and more tasks at the F-4s and their drivers. New weapons were hitting the ramp still
wet from the drawing board. New roles for airborne platforms like the Phantom were being dreamed up almost daily by the half-mad
planners in the dark world business. The crews didn’t know what to expect next.

Harry had heard a couple of pilots discussing weapons on the bus back from the flight line. They were incredulous.

“I mean it. When I looked under the wing, somebody had stuck a big green thing with a four-foot daisy cutter on my bomb rack.
It had candy stripes all around the ass end. And the crew chief didn’t know what it was either. He just told me I better stay
away from it because he heard it growl. I didn’t know whether to drop it or take it out for a walk.”

Harry had chuckled but he knew that it was even more of a problem for the munitions maintenance types. They sometime got tech
data for the strange new weapons that were stamped “experimental.” It didn’t give you a warm fuzzy feeling about handling
the bombs.

Harry quickly settled into the normal routine of the new base and new aircraft. It was easy because there was nothing normal
about it. They seemed to be making it up as they went along. Everyone got to know everything about all the jobs in his shop.
They were called upon to do things that they had never imagined. They never got bored. Every day brought some new job, some
new challenge, or some new problems. They put in hours that would have been back-breaking if they’d had the time to notice.
But they didn’t. They worked through their shifts and into the next.

They were doing vital, exciting work in the middle of a war. They were inventing, doing things that had never been done before.
The adrenaline rush kept them from noticing how overworked they really were. It was like the ancient Chinese curse. “May you
live in interesting times.” These were certainly interesting times.

It was a time of heavy hardships. War always is. The youngest, the best, the smartest could suddenly be ripped from the scene.
Death was a constant reminder of the seriousness of the game. But it was also a period of unequaled camaraderie. Shared adversity
can do that to a group of people. Everyone was working hard and everyone knew the importance of the others’ jobs. In such
times of critical peril generated by war, you learned to respect the people who helped you. What it came down to was that
your butt was constantly and literally on the line. Everyone had to pull together so that everyone could go home in one piece.

The long hours that Harry and his coworkers were putting in and the ingenuity that they used every day was being recognized
by more people than just his supervisors. The crews who flew the F-4s that they loaded and the people who commanded those
crews knew what a great job their weapon types were doing. That was it exactly. They started to think of the hardworking weaponeers
as “their weapons guys.” The brass took a real sense of pride in their accomplishments. The flyers saw evidence of the great
job the weaponeers were doing in the most critical situations. The bombs came off the racks and exploded on impact with the
pilot-killing SAM sites. The missiles came off the rails in the most violent, last-ditch maneuvers and sped off to home in
on the bad guys and bring them to justice. And the racks did not jam and the rails did not lock to endanger the warrior and
his bird when they limped back home from the fray.