Hector was a proud man; as proud of himself as he was of his lineage. He could not weep for his mother here in public. Had he done so, and had she been there to see, she would have been first with a none-too-gentle slap and an admonition that “men do not cry.” It had been that way since he was a little, a very little, boy.
Once, his mother had caught him crying over some little-boy tragedy; he couldn’t for the life of him recall just what it was. She had slapped him then, saying, “Boys don’t cry. Girls are for crying.”
Shocked at the slap, he had asked, sniffling, “Then what are boys for, Mama?”
His mother had answered, in all seriousness, “Boys are for fighting.”
He had learned then to weep only on the inside.
So, dry-eyed, he paced, hands clasped behind his back and head slightly bowed. People in hospital greens and whites passed by. He thought some of them were gringos. Hector paid little attention to the passersby, but continued his pacing. Ordinarily, even at his age, he would have at least looked at the pretty, young nurses. He knew he looked young enough, perhaps thirty years less than his true age of eighty-seven, with a full head of hair and bright hazel eyes, that the girls often enough looked back.
One girl did catch his eye though. A lovely little thing she was, not over four feet ten inches, her shape perfection in miniature, and with bright blue eyes and flaming red hair. It was the hair that captured Hector’s attention; that and the bold, forthright way she looked at him. He had no clue what it was about him that caused the pretty redhead to walk over and stand directly in front of him.
She stood there, quietly staring up into his eyes, with the tiniest of enigmatic smiles crossing her lips. This lasted for a long minute.
Something… something… what is it about this one? Hector thought. Then his eyes flew wide in shock.
“Mama?”
Sergeant Major McIntosh sneered, showing white teeth against black lips. The place was a shambles, disgusting to a soldier’s eye. Never mind that the golf course was overgrown, riotous with secondary growth jungle. The sergeant major thought golf was for pussies anyway. But the barracks? They were a soldier’s shrine and that shrine had been desecrated! Windows were broken in places, missing where they were not broken. Wiring had been ripped out, unskillfully and wholesale. The paradeground had gone the way of the golf course, and that did matter in a way that a silly pursuit like golf did not. Trash was everywhere. The only buildings still in half-assed decent shape were the post housing areas that had been sold to government functionaries, their families and cronies. And even those needed a paint job.
The sergeant major stopped and stared at what had once been a wall mural of an American soldier in an old fashioned Vietnam-era steel pot, weighed down under a shoulder-borne machine gun, symbolically crossing the Isthmus of Panama. The mural was a ruin, only the artist’s name, Cordoba, remaining clear enough to distinguish for anyone who had never seen the mural when it was fresh and new.
“Muddafuckas,” the sergeant major announced in a cold voice with a melodious Virgin Islands accent. “Dis post used to be a fucking paradise, and look what’s left.”
James Preiss, former commander of 4th Battalion, 10th Infantry and future commander of the entire, rebuilt, regiment, ignored the sergeant major’s ranting as the two of them turned left to head east along the old PX complex, just south of the overgrown parade field. Preiss looked to right and left — assessing damage, prioritizing work to be done. This was as it should be; he to set the task, the sergeant major to tongue-lash the workers until the task was completed to standard. Preiss knew that the sergeant major was just getting himself in the proper frame of mind for when the troops began to show up.
I almost feel bad for the poor shits after the sergeant major has had a couple of weeks to brood. This was his favorite place even after thirty-five years in the Regular Army. Preiss smiled a little smile — half mean, half sympathetic — in anticipation.
Ahead was the post gym; built by the troops of the 10th Infantry Regiment early in the twentieth century, a bronze plaque to the left of the main entrance so proclaimed. “I wonder why nobody stole dat?” wondered the sergeant major aloud.
“Be thankful for small favors, Sergeant Major McIntosh. Though I admit I’d have been disappointed if even that had been gone.”
Kobbe was composed of little more than thirteen red-tiled and white-stuccoed barracks and one smallish headquarters building, plus a half dozen old coastal artillery and ammunition bunkers and a couple of sold-off housing areas. Whereas Davis was a complete post, intended to be sufficient unto itself, Kobbe was a mere annex to what had once been Howard Air Force Base. It had no PX, no real chapel, no pool, no NCO club, no officers’ club. In short, it was just a place for troops to live; happiness they would have to find elsewhere.
Worse, if Fort Davis was a mess, Fort Kobbe was more nearly a ruin. Everything was missing. If Davis was missing toilets, Kobbe had seen its plumbing cannibalized. If Davis had had its wiring removed, on Kobbe the street lights had gone on an extended journey. If Davis was covered with graffiti, Kobbe’s buildings had seen the stucco rot in patches from its walls.
This was natural, since there were so many more people, hence so many more thieves on an equal per capita basis, in Panama Province than in Colon. About all that could be said for the place was that the thirteen barracks and one headquarters were still standing, though building #806 was plainly sagging in the middle.
“That fucking idiot, Reeder,” commented Colonel Carter, in memory of a born-again moron who, in 1983, had just had to knock out a central load-bearing wall to build an unneeded chapel for an ineffective chaplain. “Why, oh why, didn’t somebody poison that stupid son of a bitch for the good of the breed like Curl said we should?”
Short, squat and with an air of solid determination, Carter glared at the collapsing building with a disgust and loathing for its destroyer undimmed after nearly two decades.
The Panamanian contractor standing next to Carter and surveying the same damage had no clue what Carter was speaking of. He assumed it was simple anger at the damage. He could not know that Carter was reliving, in the form of the falling Building 806, all his experiences with one of the more stupidly destructive and useless officers he had ever met in a life where such were by no means uncommon.
Carter shook his head to clear soiled memories. “Never mind, señor, I was just remembering… old times.”
“You were here, with the battalion?”
“Yes, I was with B Company as a lieutenant. I was a ‘Bandido.’ ”
“Was?” the Panamanian asked, with respect, then corrected, “Un Bandido siempre es un Bandido.”
“So we were,” agreed Carter. “So we are. Señor, have you seen enough to make an estimate of the repairs?”
“I have, Coronel, and the bill will not be small.”
“The bill never is, señor.”
They came in old and fat and gray, or — some of them — old and skinny and cancerous and bald. Still others — the more recently retired — were fit but worn. One poor old duffer grabbed his chest and keeled over while standing in line. The slovenly looking medics merely dragged out a stretcher, put the heart attack victim on it, and carried him to the head of the line.