1/Sgt. Tetrick, ex-marauder, twenty-two years service – the last twelve as a first-shirt – was of medium height, but because of his heavy, sloping shoulders and long arms, seemed much shorter. A little hair adorned his head, a gratuitous bit of sun-bleached fuzz circling from ear to ear and no more. This too was another small reminder of Burma, but he wore his baldness as if it were dictated by military expediency. A golf tan, his single vice, didn't cover the rich ocher-yellow malaria stain on his skin.
"But they're a good bunch, damnit," he said quickly, out of his reverie as if the distant bugle he heard had stopped. "And it's our job to keep them out of the stockade – damned Air Force calls it the Confinement Facility – and the hospital so they can do their work." He glanced back at the rain and shook his shining head again. "You just can't run an Army outfit on an air base anyway. Damned airmen don't blouse their boots and wear baseball caps and bus-driver uniforms. Shit." He shuffled behind his desk. "You were in an infantry outfit on your last hitch?" he asked, already knowing the answer.
"Six years ago."
"Long time to stay out. How come you came back in?"
"Like you said: it's a long time."
He dropped it. "Don't expect this to be like a line outfit. Not at all."
"I didn't."
"I don't know what it is," he said, "but it ain't soldiering."
Tetrick continued explaining the 721st Com Sec Det as he deftly handled my paperwork. His voice was roughly concerned, even irritated, but still tender as he spoke of the outfit; like a Nebraska farmer whose four grown sons had left the land for the cement and money of the city, leaving only his swollen hands to toil in the land of his father: he could not understand, but his dust-thickened voice kept whispering, "God love 'em. God love 'em." The Army had not issued Tetrick a wife, as the saying goes, but it had these sons. And me too, for that matter. Everything I needed from the supply room – bunk, mattress, field gear – had already been carried to my quarters on the second floor. Tetrick apologized for not having any regular NCO quarters, then added that he liked for his trick chiefs to bunk with the men. I was pleasantly surprised when I was assigned a houseboy, a young Filipino who, for five pesos a week, would clean my quarters, take care of my laundry and shine my boots, etc. Enlisted men also were allowed houseboys and even the KP was pulled by Filipino workers. It all seemed very British, darkly faithful Indian batman and all that, but the houseboys were all hard-core finger-popping black-marketeers, already more Western than Oriental. Tetrick then took me in to meet the company commander, Capt. Harry Saunders, and the executive officer, Lt. Dottlinger. The lieutenant merely grunted and squeezed my hand, giving me the impression that he didn't care for me before he met me. It took longer to meet Capt. Saunders.
Capt. Harry, as he liked to be called, came from Brunswick, Georgia, and his lifetime ambition was to win a medal of some, of any, sort, then retire to home and become a Republican. All this, and the additional "u" in his name, was to prove that he was more than a redneck kid who had gone to college on a football scholarship, arriving with only a single pair of shoes, tennis shoes at that. In spite of all his posturing, he was a happy, shambling bear of a man whose only real fault lay in the unsophisticated nature of his dreams. He had a tendency to say "men" in all capital letters, but he had an easy, open-armed way and a smile which said he truly loved everyone in the world. Except his wife. And Lt. Dottlinger. Capt. Harry seemed pleased with me, mainly because I was both a Southerner and a "collegeman."
"A master's degree, huh?" he said several times. "How about that, Sgt. Tetrick? How about that? We damn well need more NCOs with a college background in this outfit. They seem to get along better with the men. What's it in?"
"Sir?"
"Your degree."
"Soviet Studies, sir."
"Well, how about that? I'll bet you're the only sergeant in the whole Army with a master's degree in Russian… what was that? History?
"Yes, sir."
Capt. Harry went on and on about the degree until I wished that I had not listed the thing on my 201 file. There was a painful irony in being faced with my own vanity, in being asked why, with the degree, I had reenlisted. "A man's wife leaves him for the civil-rights movement, for an ideal not another man, then it is certainly no wonder whatever he does," I often told myself. But no one else. No, nor Capt. Harry when he asked that day.
I accepted their good luck wishes, and left, again asking "Why?" as I had for the two months of basic and the six months at Fort Carlton. But I had no answer, and perhaps wanted no answer. I had the rain and the random barracks noise and time… time clicking past like a pale young whore popping her gum behind too bright lips, endlessly unconcerned and unsatisfying, hopelessly desirable.
The 721st resided in a single two-story concrete building. The mess hall, the day room, orderly and supply rooms, and quarters for the First, Supply and Mess Sergeants filled the first floor. The second contained fifty two-man rooms divided by a long hallway. Each room had an outside wall of adjustable aluminum louvers and an inside wall of wooden ones. The rooms were quite large and, except for the usual bareness, were not too military in effect. No metal foot- or wall-lockers knifed the space. Instead there were two large closets, a gray metal table with two office chairs, and a three-quarter-bed-size bunk.
My cot sat next to the adjustable louvers, lengthwise to catch any breeze. I had never seen one of the new, larger bunks before. Ordinarily only the Air Force used them. I dropped my gear on the floor, kicked off my shoes, stripped out of the heavy green wool uniform I had been shrouded in for two miserable days on the MATS flight from California, and then stretched out on the bunk. None of those thin, cotton-lumpy racks the Army called a mattress, but a thick, foam rubber one to hold my weary bones. Yep, Sgt. Tetrick, I thought, scratching one foot with the other, This is a strange outfit. All I need now is a swimming pool and a spot of sunshine to be a real recruiting-poster ground pounder. Hoping for some sign of the sun (it had been raining since my flight arrived), I cranked open one set of louvers. The rain still fell heavily, but across the street a small building was visible. I hadn't noticed it when I ran from the jeep to the barracks, but there it was, my swimming pool. Not exactly mine, but right across the street, and I could use it anytime. Okay, I thought, If the sun comes out, I'll just take a goddamned swim. It didn't, so I unpacked my gear, showered, then slept through evening chow.
I awoke after sundown. The rain had disappeared into a mist which gathered in fuzzy balls around the street Lights. My watch had stopped. Across the hall I heard the whirr and click of a record changer and very faintly the opening bars of Bolero, The hall was empty, quiet and solemn, as if everyone had gone away. I knocked and entered when a voice said, "Come in."
A very tan young man in his shorts sat on one of the cots, resting his back against the wall and a writing pad on his knees. He had one of those clean muscular bodies in hope of which ten million little boys eat Wheaties, skin the color of butterscotch pudding, crystal-white teeth flashing in his quick grin, and one left leg entirely masked in scar tissue. A burn, obviously, puckered and crisp-bacon brown scrambled with rotten off-white. (A bucket of roofing tar had been dumped on his leg from atop a new supermarket in Laramie, Wyoming one summer.) A magnetic deformity which drew a curious eye, a lingering look, perhaps even a poke with an inquiring finger to see if, Like a burnt marshmallow, the outside would crumble and reveal a soft, sticky white core. The rest of his body seemed so perfect as if to compensate for that leg.