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(Ah, Joe Morning, Joe Morning, what a team we were, what a team we could have been. I could have saved you from yourself, with a little help from you, but you never gave an inch. When the reversal came down you had to roar into my room, screaming about me getting off your back, then ran drunkenly back to your bed for another big sleep. I gave you two days, then a bucket of water in your face, and ran you all that day, till your tongue hung down like a dog's and you didn't have another word to say, ran you till blood dripped into your boots from scraped knees where you'd fallen rather than quit. I told you, "My name is Sgt. Krummel. My great-great grandfather was half Comanch', and they buried him with a blond scalp in his hands, and trooper I'm go
We began to get ready. It wasn't bad. I found out why, in spite of my trouble in Manila, I had been promoted. Tetrick had made me Training NCOIC, which meant that I would also be in charge of perimeter defense when we set up the new Det. When asked why, he said, "I can trust you to fight. They didn't educate the guts out of you yet. Sometimes you're stupid, but you'll fight." How do you know? "Because I been there," he said. Will we have to fight? "You know how secret this move is. The girls at the Keyhole are talking about putting in 1040s for Saigon. If they know here, they'll know there. The Vietcong are good. They'll make these kids look like old ladies the first time. All we can hope is to out firepower them the first time, or there won't be a second time. Make them understand. They don't listen to me any more. Make them get ready. Make them. For my sake." He seemed already in mourning; he looked old for the first time I could remember, I believed him; I tried to get them ready.
The same sort of sadness, which had tinted Tetrick's voice, appeared in the troops. Morning called me Sgt. Krummel now, and was surly every chance he had, but his heart wasn't in the game. Novotny reenlisted, saying, one night drunk in the Keyhole, "Can't let the little fart go over by himself," and Cagle cried where no one could see him, whispering, "Dumb fucking cowboy." Collins and Levenson climbed on their flight home with sadness pinching their faces as if they would never forgive themselves for missing their war, but we were sad too and forgave them and sent our hopes home with them.
(Southern Wyoming in the spring, green hills rolling away, and the smell of the new grass as sharp as the winter cold still hiding in the wind, and new colts awkward as teen-age girls under a cobalt sky. Rain on the summer bricks in Brooklyn and thirty-five cent shots of raw whiskey in a sad old bar across from the Navy yard and Jersey girls smelling of Juicy Fruit and Johnson's baby powder. Pale blond faces and hands catching blond hair, girls whose faces glowed with politics equated with love, their breath laced by ripe beer and stale cigarettes, their eyes smiling at the sound of his guitar. Live oak trees gnarled along the Nueces bottoms, and my mother's cherry cobbler, my crazy brothers as i
But with the sadness came a wild elation, too. It may have been only the physical conditioning, or the release from the tedium of rotating trick, or merely the idea of a change of scenery, but there were nearly one hundred brown, happy faces looking up at me each morning at 0600 as I climbed on the platform to lead the exercises.
PT, then a five-mile run, and the rest of the morning whiled away learning about new ways to die. Tetrick lectured and lectured about booby traps, tried to teach us to make our own in the hope that we might understand the psychology behind Malayan Gates, Punji spikes, foot traps, and the ever-mined corpses. Two Special Forces sergeants came down from Okinawa to teach us a bit of the combination karate, judo, and barroom brawling they had learned. It wouldn't, as a few of the troops quickly learned, make a superman out of the average guy, but it did serve to remind us, John Wayne aside, that elbows, knees, feet, and teeth are more formidable weapons than the right cross.
A new shipment of M-14s had to be cleaned and fired again, since our usual armory consisted of old M-1s and.30 carbines, and even a few old grease guns. For sentimental reasons, Tetrick would not part with his grease gun, and a few of the officers preferred to keep the light carbine. We also picked up four M-60 machine guns, a supply of Claymore mines, five 81mm and two 60mm mortars, but we weren't able to find even one of the new M-79 grenade launchers. Someone in Okinawa kept promising them, but they never came. With the new equipment came new men to flesh out the tricks to fifteen men each, kids whose names I barely learned. Novotny had my old Trick now, and I was left with clichés about the loneliness of command. You can't have everything, Krummel.
At the range one afternoon, my old Trick was firing the M-14 on semi-automatic at pop-up silhouette targets at thirty to seventy yards. The targets stayed up for two seconds or less. Morning was on the line, and I was at the control panel, letting him fire until he missed. He had hit thirteen in a row when Tetrick came up. Morning hit five more in a row; like a cocky young gunfighter out of a bad western his movements were consciously slow and arrogant until the targets came up, and then arms and feet and rifle were slick and smooth and snake-quick. Tetrick told me to give him two at once, one thirty yards to the right, the other fifty to the left. Morning didn't even jump, but took the right one first, then hit in front of the second, but the ricochet took it down.
"Pretty good," Tetrick shouted to him. "But when it's for real, take the close one first."
Morning said sure, but with such sarcasm that I knew he would get killed, now, rather than do as Tetrick asked.
Tetrick took off his fatigue cap, then rubbed the fringe of hair, mumbling, "Kids like that took all my hair, Krummel. Now I'm bald. Shit, I'm getting old." He said that we had received a shipment of the new AR-15s that the Special Forces had been using in Vietnam and half a dozen shotguns. "Which do you want?" he asked as Morning walked up.
"Get one for each foot, Sgt. Krummel," Morning said. "Shit, that little old AR-15 bullet is better than a dum-dum. Shit, when it comes out of a man, it takes about fifty percent of the blood, bone, and flesh – no, that's semi-liquid gelatin I believe the Army calls it – right out the other side. And you know what shotguns do at twenty yards, don't you, Sarge? Shit, one for each hand."
"Morning, Morning, Morning," I said. "What am I going to do with you." I called him to attention. "What am I going to do with you."
"Push ups?" Tetrick inquired with a professional interest.
"He's already done about two hundred today," I said.
"Run him?"
"Another five miles?"
Tetrick laughed. "He is sure go
I turned back to Morning's face, which showed as little as did mine. "Pfc Morning, I want a hole, six feet long, six feet wide, and most of all six feet deep. You'll find an entrenching tool in the three-quarter and lots of dirt right where you're standing. Move." He moved with clean hate like a halo around him.
I went back out to the range at 2200. Morning sat on the pile of dirt, smoking a cigarette, looking up at the stars as if he were on a cruise ship.