“Guess so,” I offered. “Mean, if he’s in the field with his company, he can hardly wander off to Qui Nhon at will.”
“Exactly!” Cooper responded. “Especially the area his company was then working, up there in the mountains west of Happy Valley. I mean it was Indian country, Charlie’s playground, the fucking jungle miles from nobody and nothing!”
Again he paused briefly, much as a comedian might just before the punch line, and noting the smirks on the faces of my fellow officers, I sensed we were nearing that point in the sergeant major’s tale.
“So,” he said, starting to laugh, “young Romeo goes back to the boonies on the evening log bird out of LZ English. Goes back to his platoon and the lieutenant puts him in a two-man fighting position for the night—you know, one up, one down” (meaning one man awake while the other sleeps).
“Well, when the company stands to at first light, Romeo’s gone! Weapon, rucksack, and Romeo—gone!”
This still is not the punch line. They’re laughing, but with restraint.
There’s more to come.
“Now Romeo’s commander has no choice but to report him as an MIA,”
Cooper continued. “You know, give the guy and his family the benefit of the doubt, ‘cause he’s probably dead now, and if he ain’t, at best, he’ll turn up as a returned POW when this thing’s finally over.”
After a brief pause, he smiled and said, “Next night the MPs stumble across Romeo at his girlfriend’s hutch in Qui Nhon! ‘Course they pick him up and return him to An Khe for a fourth and final time.”
Punch line!
After the laughter died down, the sergeant major wrapped up his saga of Romeo in a quasi-serious tone.
“So like I say, last I heard Romeo was at LBJ pending court-martial. By now he’s probably making little ones out of big ones at Leavenworth. But you know, the Army shouldn’t have sent young Romeo off to jail. Should have sent him back to the States and had him set up an escape-and-evasion course—teach pilots and other high-risk wieners how to evade Charlie should they get caught in the ‘badlands.” I mean, can you even imagine somebody just walking out of a company perimeter like that, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the jungle, and working his way through forty or fifty miles of Indian country to Qui Nhon! Shit, true love knows no bounds!”
“I don’t know, Top,” a somewhat aged but trim and deeply tanned first lieutenant from Bravo Company remarked. “I mean all a guy’s gotta do is make it down to Highway Nineteen, go east to Highway One, and follow it on in to Qui Nhon. Hell, your Romeo probably hitched a ride with the first deuce-and-a-half traveling Nineteen the morning after he left the company, knowing the snuffie driving it ain’t gonna say a word ‘bout picking him up.”
“Okay, Lieutenant Russell,” Cooper responded, “if you think it’s nothing more than a fucking walk in the woods, why don’t you just try it next time Bravo’s working Happy Valley? I’ll clear it with the old man, see to it that you get your picture in Stars and Stripes, and then we’ll send you back to Benning to teach E&E!”
Russell just smiled in return, apparently satisfied that he had, to some small degree, dampened the grandeur of the sergeant major’s tale. I later learned there was nothing vindictive in this; Cooper and Russell, himself a senior NCO before acquiring a commission, had known each other
“since Christ was a corporal” and merely enjoyed being in near-constant verbal discord. I was also told that if Cooper appeared to be winning one of their frequent altercations, Russell delighted in taking that opportunity to remind him, regardless of what they might have been arguing about, that first lieutenants out rank sergeant majors which is something I couldn’t conceive any lieutenant suggesting to any sergeant major! However, still later that evening, after the conversation had turned from the exploits of Romeo to the prerogatives of rank, and cocktailing had gone from social grace to competitive sport, I witnessed Lieutenant Russell do just that.
“Now don’t get me wrong, Top,” he said in a somewhat slurred yet subtly antagonizing voice. “Mean, you’ve done pretty good for yourself. Hell, battalion sergeant major’s a pretty weighty position, pretty weighty indeed. Still, you ain’t no officer and never will be, and ‘course that means every officer in the battalion—whole fucking Army, matter of fact—outranks you. But… uh… you being a professional NCO and all, I’m sure you understand that.”
The sergeant major, sitting across the table from Russell, was steaming.
First of all, he obviously didn’t like being referred to as “Top,” a pseudonym normally reserved for a company’s first sergeant, not the battalion’s command sergeant major—and of course Russell knew that.
Secondly, he wasn’t too excited about the gist of Russell’s comments concerning the Army’s rank structure.
“Listen, asshole.”
“That’s Lieutenant Asshole, sir, to you, Top,” Russell interjected, smiling antagonistically, drunkenly.
“As you wish, Lieutenant Asshole, sir!” Cooper defiantly replied while getting, a bit uncertainly, to his feet. “I know goddamn well you’re playing with my mind, sir, but the simple fucking truth is you couldn’t make eight!” (Russell had been a sergeant first class E-7 before being commissioned. If he had remained in the ranks, his next promotion would have been to the grade of E-8.) “Couldn’t hack it as a first sergeant of a line company, so you decided to play candidate at Benning’s school for boys and by some miracle or administrative error got a ‘butter bar’ out of it.”
“And butter bars also outrank sergeant majors, Top,” Russell said, trying with little success to stand so as to be on an even keel with Cooper.
“Well, Lieutenant, sir! I’ll let you in on a little secret. I could’ve done the same thing; any NCO worth his goddamn salt could’ve. But you see, we prefer soldiering for a living! We like to think our next promotion is gonna be based on our ability to soldier, not how long and how brown our fucking noses are! Still, if I had wanted to, I could’ve been twice the officer you’ll ever be!”
“Oh, yeah! Well, let me just challenge you then, Top. If you really think you’d make twice the officer I am, well, why don’t you just put yourself in for a direct commission… hummmm?” Lieutenant Russell pushed himself from the sergeant major’s table, at which he and several of us were sitting, in a final valiant attempt to get to his feet. He failed and fell backwards in his chair, his head striking the hutch’s concrete floor with a dull thud.
Somewhat unsteadily but still firmly on his feet, Cooper worked his way around the table, looked down at Russell—who had apparently decided the floor was as good a place as any to spend the rest of the night—and said, “Well, Russ, I may do just that. Yes, sir, I may just do that very thing.”
And he did.
It was not so very long after the sergeant major’s cocktail party, while Bravo Company was on perimeter security at LZ English, that First Lieutenant Russell got a message ordering him to report to Captain Cooper at battalion headquarters forthwith. Allegedly, Russell’s only comment was, “Oh, shit. And I’m gonna have to salute him, too.”
Captain Cooper, of course, did not long remain with the Fifth Cavalry.
For reasons I’ve never been quite able to discern, the Army takes a dim view of its former NCO’s serving as officers in the same unit from which they were commissioned. Soon after becoming a captain, ex-Sergeant Major Cooper was transferred to the division’s only mechanized battalion, there to assume command of a mechanized rifle company.
And one bright and sunny day shortly thereafter, while Captain Cooper was standing in the turret atop his M-113 armored personnel carrier, a north Vietnamese sniper got lucky and put an AK-47 round right through the center of our ex-sergeant major’s chest.