He nodded. “Not any longer, but yeah. Now it’s all grown overseas or Hawaii or some damn place. We raise sugar beets, though.”
“Huh! I’d have never figured on that. I guess I learned something new, too. Makes sense, though, both crops are labor intensive, and sugar is certainly high value. Anyway, like I said, I don’t think my family ever owned any slaves, but I can’t honestly say it’s because we’re so morally superior. More like it just didn’t make any sense.” I just gave a wry shrug.
“There are times I can’t believe you,” exclaimed Marilyn. “How can you be so, so, normal about this?”
I just shrugged. “I never said I approved of it. These are just historical facts, honey. Just like the fact that I had a relative on the southern side of the Civil War, as well as one on the northern side. It wasn’t like all the southerners in the war owned slaves. I’d be willing to bet that the majority didn’t.” I held my hands up in a helpless gesture. “It is what it is. It’s our generation that has to make it right.”
Anna Lee nodded. “It’s getting better already. Ten years ago, we probably couldn’t have been in the same restaurant with you. Certainly not back home in Mississippi!”
“Wait and see,” I told my fiancée. “In my father’s time that was normal. In our generation we know better. Our children and our grandchildren simply won’t understand what the fuss was all about.” I grinned at them. “They’ll have found some other reason to hate people by then!”
That earned me a few rolled eyes and groans, but nobody disagreed with me either.
“Your family happy to see you in the army?” I asked.
Harlan shrugged. “They’re okay with it. What they’re happy with is that I went to college, even if I do have to go into the army because of it. I’m the first Buckminster to ever go to college, let alone graduate. The idea of becoming an officer is almost like a fairy tale to them.”
“Farmers?” It almost sounded like my father’s story.
He shrugged again. “Used to be, but there’s a new mill outside of Buckminster and Daddy works there.”
“The town is named after you?”
Harlan grinned at that. “Not precisely. Buckminster is the county seat of Buckminster County.”
I stared at him. “The county is named after you?”
“The county is named after Colonel Rufus J. Buckminster, who was the richest man in that part of Mississippi about 150 years ago or so. One of the reasons the Colonel was so wealthy was the large number of slaves he owned.”
It took me a second to figure out what Harlan was saying, and he laughed at the shock on my face. “Don’t tell me…”
“You got it, cracker! The Colonel was known to like the dark meat at Thanksgiving.”
“Holy shit!” I thought about it for a second. I’d heard of that sort of thing happening, slaves taking the last names of their masters and/or parents. “Does it ever make you feel funny, knowing you’re named after this guy?”
“They’re long, long gone. I never give it no nevermind. Give us another hundred years and we’ll be owning them.”
“Holy shit!”
We got off the topic, which had certainly made Marilyn think, and started discussing wedding plans. That was much safer, although incredibly boring to both Harlan and me.
It was Anna Lee who solved my biggest problem. Harlan asked Marilyn, “How are you getting home? We both drove, but Carl said you only had his car.”
“I don’t know yet. I have to find an airport. Is there one here?” she asked.
I looked at her blankly. “Probably the nearest is Oklahoma City. I think I’ll have to drive you there tomorrow after class, but I don’t know when. You may have to stay the night there and get a cab to the airport.”
Harlan answered, “Lawton has one, with service to Dallas, supposed to be pretty good, too. At least that’s what I was told back at school.”
Anna Lee piped up. “Why don’t I take you there, tomorrow? I’m leaving anyway. I’ll just drive home from there.”
I looked at Marilyn and nodded to her. “I can call there after dinner and see about getting you a flight home.”
“If it isn’t any trouble…” said Marilyn.
Anna Lee waved it off. “We’ll spend the time talking about our jerk boyfriends and the Army. Christ, we’ll probably spend another two days doing that!”
Harlan looked at me and said, “We’re in trouble now!”
I gave him a wry smile in return and said, “No shit!” I leaned forward and said to him conspiratorially, “Speaking of civil rights, our mistake wasn’t giving women the vote. It was teaching them to speak!” Harlan laughed while Marilyn and Anna Lee squawked and pelted me with rolls.
After dinner I spent some time showing Marilyn just how much I’d be missing her. Then, the next morning, I rolled out of bed, put on the uniform of the day (starched and pressed fatigues), and packed my remaining stuff into my B4. I kissed Marilyn goodbye and took off. I paid the bill but told the clerk Marilyn was leaving later in the morning. Harlan showed up at the desk just as I was leaving, so I waited for him and then we took our two car convoy over to the base. It was time to become an artilleryman.
Artillery school was interesting, and it really meshed with my love for math. Artillery is killing by the numbers, in so many ways. Artillery is called the King of Battle; about 60+% of all casualties come from the big guns throwing the big shells. It’s very demoralizing, too. You can shoot back at tanks and infantry and airplanes, but when you’re being shelled, you just dig in and pray.
It’s all numbers in the way it operates. You are shooting at targets you never see, being called on the radio by people you never know, and doing it all with maps and trigonometry. Do it right and the bad guys die. Do it wrong, screw up the math, fuck up the numbers, and the good guys die. Very, very bad. Even the actual process is by the numbers. You set up the gun, and then it’s an intricate dance, a ballet of death, to load the gun, fire the gun, and clean out the gun. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, all done to a metronome of destruction. You do this until the bad guys die, and then you get a new target, change the settings, and it’s back to one, two, three.
The shells we fired did all sorts of things. Some were just big steel tubs full of explosives that blew up when they got somewhere. Some shells laid out smoke or started fires. There was something called a canister shell, which was very much like a shotgun shell, in case the bad guys were coming over the hill towards you and you needed a really big shotgun blast. (After that, pull your pistol and run away — you’re fucked!) They had chemical shells (we didn’t use them, but they exist) that put out nerve gas and equally awful things. There were even nuclear shells for the biggest guns, which fired an atomic bomb! (I do not want to be around when they start firing those things off, because you will be on the receiving end of something similar before you ever get a chance to unass the position and move out.) We learned about different levels of fire and different types of fuses and how it all worked.
Nobody calls on the artillery to do happy things. We don’t do reconnaissance, we don’t patrol, we don’t spy, we don’t hand out presents and food. If somebody calls for us, it means somebody else is about to die very messily, generally by our throwing something very big and very nasty a very long way at them.
At Artillery Officer School, junior officers like myself learn the math involved, learn the techniques to call in arty strikes, shoot the cannons, and act as forward observers. We have medium-size guns like 105s, big guns like 155s, and monstrously big guns like 8 inchers. You don’t want me pissed at you! I will fuck up your whole damn day! We also learned about trucks, which surprised me until I thought about it. You have to haul the suckers around, along with all the gear and ammo and gun bunnies running them. The motor pool in a typical battery is larger than the gun section. Some of the guns come mounted on tracks, as armored versions. We were reminded of the importance of the care and feeding of our guns, though, even when they were motorized, with the admonition, “If the gun don’t work, gentlemen, all you’ll have is a 53 ton portable radio.”