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They poured out behind us, two hundred fifty strong. I picked up the beat to the usual 120, and the dirge became a roar, anger, mirth, carnival, death. My men sang, their grief gone:
We are Krummel's raiders.
We're rapers of the night.
We're dirty sons a bitches.
An' we'd rather fuck than fight.
And the ASA was singing, to the tune of the old Western, "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon":
Behind the door her father kept a shotgun,
He kept it in the summer and the merry month of May.
And when I asked her father why the shotgun,
He said, "It's for her lover, who's in the ASA.
ASA! – Suck! suck!
ASA! – Suck! suck!
He said, "It's for her lover,
Who's in the ASA!"
Suck! Suck!
As you might remember, about fifty thousand Filipinos also called Town their home, though we often forgot. On Saturday night they would have expected it; on an ordinary night they would have been unhappy, but not too angry; on Good Friday, man, they went insane. The police switchboard, the Town switchboard, and the Base switchboard all jammed at once with irate calls and threats of international incidents and war. With the telephones down, the Air Police, using radios and intelligence, formed up with the Town fuzz, and came to do harm to us, racing toward the market with about forty jeeps, and six hundred sirens. It came to me that I was slightly out of place at the head of this mob, but it also came to me that I belonged here more than with the law, I was more my Trick's man than the Army's. So I gave the only order, they tell one in basic, which will stop a marching company in less than two steps: GAS!
The troops dispersed, rats down holes of darkness, and when the law arrived, they found only i
Morning fared as well as any of us. The APs woke him in the coffin, asked him what the hell he was doing in a coffin, to which Morning answered, "I'm dead, you dumb fuck." They wrote him up for conduct unbecoming a member of the armed forces. "For being dead and kidnapped by vandals, they give me an IR?" Morning said to a harried Dottlinger the next day. (Capt. Saunders had gone back to the States again.) Dottlinger took his pass for seven days, saying, "Lord, I don't know what's happening in this world. I just don't know." For the seven days without pass, Morning became a national hero. All over Base: "Hey, that guy there. He was the one in the coffin!"
No one else was caught or co
Okay, so we desecrated a holy day, insulted the people's religion, tore up the American image abroad, but what the hell; everyone already hated us when we got there. We ran with pimps and whores because nice Filipino families and their daughters spat at us on the street. Since we were not officers, we were scum, so we said to the world in general: suck. Suck to the good folks of Fayetteville, North Carolina, Kileen, Texas, Ayer, Massachusetts, Columbus, Georgia, Columbia, South Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia, etc. You name it, baby, I've been there, and it ain't good. Maybe soldiers in general, and Americans abroad, deserve the treatment they get. Maybe they've earned it. But soldiers in general, and Americans abroad, aren't any worse than the people they have to deal with, and most of the time they have to deal with bastards. Morning, Novotny, Cagle, none of my guys, not even Qui
And, too, what we had done that night – and I say this without apology – affirmed, said, shouted that men, even the most ordinary of men, will sometimes, in whatever way they can, refuse to be part of the system. In the defiance of that night, we bought back a bit of our individuality; shouted, as Qui
But relief is never a moment away.
It was all downhill after Easter, we said, not knowing quite how we meant it. I grew fat, fatter, slimy and oily in the heat, sucking beer after beer, crying, it didn't matter. And the money, too, down, down. In desperation I gathered a week's leave to spend with Teresita in Dagupan on the beach, but we both caught colds the second day and squandered most of my leave in fever sweats, sneezes, halfhearted love, and stale, gamy sheets. To recover, we fled back to Manila on an air-conditioned train to spend two days and nights in a luxury hotel. That helped, but on the second afternoon I refused to give any of my quickly vanishing money to a ragged beggarboy. Terri and I stupidly fought, and the whole leave was lost in anger.
Back to work. Air conditioning goes blink; major goes mad; repairman short circuits the whole Det, leaving the Head Moles to rage in sticky darkness, rage at me until I actually beat my head against a wall. At 1645 I left it in the hands of the next unfortunate, Sgt. Reid. He'd shucked his wife but hadn't found happiness, and his face killed me each time he relieved me. Then evening chow was ham. We had ham, frozen ham just this side of rotten, eighteen times a week. That could be endured. But the nineteenth time busted it. "You must have miscounted," the mess sergeant says. "Don't make mistakes," say I, handing him my plate. I sat in my quarters, the buttons on my khaki shirt straining to hold back the flood of beer gut jammed behind them. Sweat covered me, not ru