CIVILIANS
As Crane remembers it, he had been pacing his apartment and getting more and more jagged, which happens to everyone, but single people feel it more, the same way one cat will always sit at the window looking down into the street, but two cats will keep each other busy, find something to ruin.
So ten minutes later he was dressed in his civvies—Dockers and a polo shirt actually, part of the new clothes Carla had taken him out to get, Carla feeling that all Crane needed was a new attitude—and was out in the Caprice heading east on Fort Riley Boulevard as the wipers ticked and clicked and made greasy arcs on the window and the streetlights smeared themselves across the glass.
At Eighth he made a left and drove slowly past the library, and then he turned right onto Poyntz. The wide street was slick and shiny with the rain, empty except for a cluster of cars halfway down the block. He cruised along it at twenty until he reached Harry’s Uptown, where he found a slot between a metallic green BMW and a racy-looking Seville. The Army-tan Caprice looked a little sorry there and Crane smiled as he locked it up.
He could hear music coming from Harry’s, maybe Billie Holiday. Harry’s Uptown Bar was on the ground floor of the old Wareham Hotel, right in the middle of the six long, wide blocks that people thought of as downtown Manhattan. The limestone face of the Wareham Hotel was wet with the rain and the deep-set windows were black and empty, but the ground floor was lit up and people were milling around in the bar.
Crane shoved the door open and the music broke over him, the voices and the press of people smelling of Boss and Chanel, tobacco and beer, everyone in suits or sports jackets, crisp white shirts and silk ties and all the women flushed and smiling and bright with talk, teeth wet and lips red.
Crane found a space by the service slot and waited for the bartender to notice him. Harry’s clientele was mixed, lawyers and clerical staff from the Riley County Courthouse down the street, some doctors and staffers from Memorial Hospital, some college kids and instructors from Kansas State.
Not a bad crowd but maybe a little too pleased with how things were going for themselves. Crane didn’t mind them as long as they gave him some space and didn’t expect shop talk from him. He didn’t come here too much. It was Carla’s territory anyway, and Crane was edgy around people like this, people he thought of as The Young and The Ruthless. People like that usually looked down on the grunts from Fort Riley, although it was hard to believe any of them would have jobs if it weren’t for all the shit going on up on Custer Hill. It wasn’t Kansas State University that kept this town going.
There was no doubt he was Regular Army, even in civvies. The haircut alone was enough to give him away, but his thin and angular frame and his bat-eared face like an elbow, full of seams and cracked around the eyes, and the way he held himself—something he couldn’t have changed by now even if he thought of it—marked him off and set him outside, that is, if people bothered to focus on him at all.
Right now this crowd was all wrapped up in their own wonderfulness so Crane felt pretty safe, could just snag a cold beer and settle down, listen to whoever was on now, something jazzy with a lot of horns—Duke Ellington doing “Willow Weep for Me.”
Carla wasn’t behind the bar. Crane had not expected her to be there, although he wouldn’t have been unhappy to see her. The new kid was in something agricultural at the university, Crane tried to remember his name—Tory, right?—and he called to the kid over the loud talk and the music.
Tory brought him a Miller Genuine Draft but no glass so Crane reached over the side of the bar top and got himself one. That was another thing with these people, always doing whatever they saw in a commercial, the cool guys don’t drink out of glasses, so now, go into a bar anywhere in the free world, you don’t get a glass for your beer anymore.
Right beside him he had a couple of guys, Levi’s and pricy cowboy boots, polo shirts, heads together talking about how the health system in America was on the edge of falling apart. Taking it very seriously too, from the sound of the talk.
There was a TV on behind the bar, something for Tory, Crane figured, Tory being a youngster and not able to go too far from a television set. Tory had it tuned to CNN and he was keeping an eye on it as he mixed and dipped and popped for the crowd along the bar. Crane looked away from the television set and concentrated on his Miller, only half listening to the two guys next to him who were convinced the country’s health system was a corpse that wouldn’t lie down.
Tomorrow was going to be a hard day. The G4 officer had let all the senior noncoms know that there was going to be a “surprise” CMMI sometime during the morning—Command Material Maintenance Inspection—although the noncoms always called it Coneheads Manifesting Minimal Intelligence: bean counters and bumboys from the Command Support Services section, clipboards at Lock and Load, inventory control printouts hanging from every orifice. Everyone from the noncoms on down would be climbing all over the Bradleys and the motor pool depot and the company arms compound with at least two CMMI pogues on his ass, looking to see if every bolt and oilcan was precisely where it was supposed to be and tagged in precisely the correct way.
All of this military energy and ambition ended up with Captain Wolochek, a lean yuppie-looking West Pointer. Wolochek knew the name and status of every one of Baker’s two hundred and four troopers, so whenever the pogues from CMMI dropped in and screwed up the training routines for the whole battalion, Wolochek would get all raspy with DerHorst, a lifer sergeant in his late thirties with ambitions for rank, and DerHorst would get jumpy and bad tempered with Crane. The thing was, if it wasn’t a good CMMI then it would affect Wolochek’s OER—his Officers Evaluation Report—which went straight to the Department of the Army in Washington.
This kind of situation was generally referred to in army jargon as FUBAR, which meant Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. So Crane sighed and stared into his glass, which was now empty, and tried to enjoy the music, which Tory was just now in the middle of shutting off.
Crane had his mouth open, ready to say something to Tory, but Tory had his back turned and was looking at the television set. On the screen there was a large map of Iraq and Kuwait, with arrows pointing into Kuwait from the Iraq border. Crane’s heart blipped and skipped. One of the guys next to him called out to Tory to turn up the sound.
And now the whole bar got real quiet as the CNN announcer introduced a Washington bureau reporter, and the picture then cut away to a brief clip of President George Bush.
In a steady voice but with a kind of angry vibrato underneath it, Bush announced that he had just been advised that several tank divisions of the Iraqi Army had just overrun the Kuwaiti defense forces and had taken over the entire country. The Iraqis had made their move at dawn, and estimates of the size of the invasion force varied but the figure one hundred thousand troops had “not been denied,” which meant it was probably three times that. There were unconfirmed reports of Iraqi atrocities coming out of Kuwait but that contact had been broken off abruptly. War had come to the emir’s palace itself. The emir’s brother had been killed.
War.
Crane felt a weird kind of dropping-away sensation, as if he had just lost a great deal of weight or the gravity in the bar had been turned off. He could feel the cold from the Miller bottle in the bones of his left hand. He had a kind of warming sensation running up the back of his neck.
They did it. They actually did it.
Bush had been snarling at Hussein off and on for the last year, and to an Army man the signs were all there. Bush was getting ready to do something, make a point, fight the “wimp factor,” get out there and nail some raghead balls to a door, and it looked to Crane as though this would do the trick, and besides there was all that oil.
War.
War in the desert.
They’d all had the doctrine brief back at the REFORGER war games exercise in Germany last year; oil supplies had been one of the probable ignition points for sending in the U.S. Army. And Kuwait had, what, ten percent of the world’s oil, so it was a high-risk scenario and they’d all played it out last year at the National Training Center in the Mojave. The 1st was mechanized infantry. That meant infantry trained to fight in tanker wars. Infantry that rode alongside tankers in armored personnel carriers. Infantry that fought mounted or dismounted but infantry that was designed for exactly this kind of war. Infantry that had been war-gaming Soviet battle tactics in the Mojave, going up against the permanent OpFor units stationed there, units that used Soviet T-72 main battle tanks and Soviet engagement strategies. And the Iraqis had been Soviet trained and Soviet equipped and the Iraqis used precisely the battle tactics that the 1st had been drilled in at the Fort Irwin NTC. And the 1st was part of the VII Corps, and the VII Corps was “tasked” for exactly this kind of operation. If the U.S. decided to do something about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, it was a dead-solid certainty that the U.S. would do it with the VII Corps.
Christ.
Crane stared at the screen and thought these thoughts while the bar started to react to the news, people slamming the bar top, voices all rising together, and somebody was tapping him on the left forearm, and Tory was in front of him, also watching Crane’s face. Crane looked to his left and saw a flushed, bearded face, one of the young doctors beside him.
“You Army? Excuse me, but Tory says you’re Army?”
Crane nodded and lifted his empty Miller up in front of Tory, raising his left eyebrow.
“Yes, sir.”
“What are you, an officer?”
“No, sir. I’m a sergeant.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to—what do you think they’ll do?”
“Who?”
“Who? Us. What’ll we do?”
“You in the reserves, sir?”
“Me? No, not personally.”
“So you mean what’ll Bush do?”
“Yeah … I mean, I guess they brief you guys about all of this stuff way ahead. You don’t have to say anything you don’t … it’s just, how’s this look to you?”
Tory came back with his beer. Crane looked down the bar, at all the people chattering and moving around, and back to the television where some guy was standing in front of the White House with a mike in his hand. He had the exact same look on his face as everybody along the bar, a look that was half nausea and half thrill, the look of the guy with a guaranteed note from his doctor, he’s not gonna go.
But damn is he interested in the look on your face.
“Well, sir, it looks pretty early.”
The man looked disappointed, checked his friend to see if he was behind him, came back into Crane’s face.
“We’re not gonna let this—I mean, Hussein’s—he’ll get all the oil and, well, we’re gonna—somebody’s gonna have to get in there, stop that, because there’s no way—”
“I understand that, sir. It’s just that, from a military perspective, it’s very hard to go in and root someone out, especially if the guy has time to dig in and get ready. From a tactical point of view, it’s better to defend than to assault, like a three-to-one advantage, so the problem here is, Hussein’s in and the best way to handle a situation like that is not to let it happen in the first place because whoever has to go get him out is going to have a very bad time.”
There was something going on in the guy’s face. Crane couldn’t make it out, but when the guy spoke it all fell into place.
“So you don’t want to go in there?”
“No soldier wants to go anywhere near a war.” Crane looked the guy over, thinking about how far into this he should go, was the guy worth the trouble? Well, he was a citizen, wasn’t he? Like an employer, in a sense. And sometimes you never knew, sometimes it was a good idea to get the civilians to try to see things better.
“Look, I don’t mean we don’t want to fight, sir. Fighting is what we train for. I’m just saying that, from a tactical consideration—it’s like in medicine?”
The man’s face brightened up. He was back in home country now.
“Say a guy comes in, he has lung cancer. The sooner you get to him, the more you can do, right?”
“Absolutely, but I can see where you’re—”
“Yes, sir, I know you can. But you see, that’s what it is. It’s better for the guy that he never started smoking in the first place. What we have here, we have a government—no offense to them—but they see things in a political way, use Hussein to back off the Ayatollah, that sort of thing. But then, things change, and suddenly we’re not friends with Hussein anymore, and now we got to get in there, take the guns and stuff we gave him last year away from him this year. That sort of thing, it gets on your nerves, because it didn’t have to happen that way. You see what I mean, sir?”
“Yeah … of course, and I guess, it’s been a long time since we went to a real war, right? I mean, no offense, but Panama and Grenada, they were more your police actions, right? Not like Vietnam—were you in Vietnam, Sergeant?”
Crane was going to say no he wasn’t but Tory spoke up, said that Crane was a Silver Star and had a couple of bongs and bolo badges, so that took care of that.
“Yes, sir, I spent some time there.”
There was a look on the man’s face but Crane couldn’t make it out.
“My dad was there, a place called Why Drag, something like that?”
His dad? Jesus, how old was this guy?
“You mean the Ia Drang?” Crane was starting to regret this conversation.
“I guess so. I never asked him. Was that a bad place?”
Was the Ia Drang valley a bad place? How the hell did a guy answer a question like that? Just asking a question like that meant the guy had no right to a polite answer. Crane let out a slow breath and pulled at his Miller.
“Was your dad in the Air Cav?”
The guy’s face went blank for a moment, then brightened.
“I don’t know. He was in the Seventh Cavalry. Used to get razzed about it, like he was with Custer at the Bighorn. Is that Air Cav?”
“Yes. The Seventh Cavalry was a part of the First Air Cavalry Division.”
“I thought they’d be separate units. You know, First Cav and Seventh Cav? Were they the same?”
Jesus.
“Sir, a division is made up of several different brigades, and a brigade is usually made up of battalions, and a battalion is made of three or four companies with about two hundred men in a company …” The guy was looking around for Tory and holding up his glass. Crane felt a sudden chill flood of embarrassment and shut his mouth while Tory filled the guy’s glass again. The Ia Drang valley. Christ.
Yes. It was a bad place, a very bad place for Company C of the 7th Cavalry. The Cav was new to the Nam, and the whole Airmobile thing was still being worked out. They dumped six choppers packed with cherry grunts into a landing zone made of mud and elephant grass. The 33rd North Vietnamese Regiment had the zone all sited in, just waiting for the slicks. LZ Bitch was the name they gave it later. The 7th had lost ninety percent of that company. The Air Cav had learned to fight in the Ia Drang, but not before it lost a hell of a lot of FNGs. LZ Bitch was studied at the noncom war-fighting school in Leavenworth. It was the classic case of a screwed-up Airmobile assault. What got to Crane was that this kid—was he maybe thirty?—that this man hadn’t bothered to find out what the “Why Drag” was all about. The guy was talking again.
“I’m sorry, you were saying—about companies?”
“Never mind. And yeah, the Ia Drang valley was a bad fight. Your dad never told you about it?”
“Well, yeah, but, you know … war stories, right?”
Crane’s jaw tightened and he looked down into his glass. The man was still talking, speaking for all of them, it seemed to Crane.
“But this time, this one, maybe we ought to get in there, do the thing right this time?”
“Yes, sir, maybe we should. It’s just that …”
“Hey.” The guy’s face was smiling but somehow Crane didn’t feel the smile was supposed to include him. “Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been pushy. I mean, what the fuck, hey? Who needs it, right? We have enough problems right here in town. We don’t want another Vietnam, right, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir. That would be right, sir.”
The man smiled again, thanked him, and turned back to his buddy, and they spoke in lower tones, so that Crane knew his part in their evening was over, and that one way or another he had confirmed something about the Army that they always suspected, which was that the U.S. Army couldn’t fight. It was too bad, but there it was.
Crane looked at the back of the guy’s head for a while, thinking about saying something to it.
But what? Even more to the point, why? Times like this, Crane felt the difference between himself and the civilians the strongest. This guy’s dad was a grunt in the Cav, probably a blue-collar guy, but he’s a doctor, pulls down sixty, maybe seventy thousand a year. Worked his butt off all the way through med school, long hours and no pay. Now he’s outin the world, got it all sewn up, and to a guy like that, Crane is just some poor scratch farmer, family plays the banjo, has nine kids each with one eye bigger than the other, sleep all together in a bed with a rope mattress, run corn liquor across the state lines, just another cracker soldier boy who couldn’t make it in the real world. Why else would a grown man still be in the Army, unless he couldn’t take the heat in the outside world?
Crane wanted to say something strong, something that would shake the guy out of his attitude, but all he could think of to say was one word.
Kasserine.
And that wouldn’t have meant much to the guy, but the last time the 1st was sent to the Middle East—Africa, really, but it was desert all the same, exactly like the desert in Kuwait—they had gone to Tunisia.
And on February 19, 1943, Rommel’s Afrika Korps Panzers had come on them, out of the sandstorm, come straight into them and they had lost a hell of a lot of guys, blown into meat, blown away in their boots, hand-to-hand in places, and the name of the place where this happened was the Kasserine Pass.
It was on the colors, one of the ribbons, and one of the 16th guys was a Medal of Honor winner, Bob Henry, but everybody knew, including General George S. Patton, who took over the 1st after Kasserine, that anybody who had been there would always find the room go quiet as soon as he came in.
The Kasserine Pass was one of those battles where you either court-martial the commander or you call him a hero.
That was the Kasserine Pass, and it was in Africa, which was, as far as Crane cared, just the same as Kuwait, a land where no American ought to go just to get killed in a tank battle.
But how could you get this guy to see that?
You couldn’t.
Because everybody knew the U.S. Army couldn’t fight.
Goddam Vietnam.
Vietnam was like this weird old uncle the Army had, something they had to keep in an attic and not bring up in polite conversation. It was hard being the first American army to lose a war, take all that condescending bullshit from some yuppie doctor who would have been the first one wearing a bra to the induction center if he’d gotten a call.
They all believed that the U.S. Army had gotten its ass kicked in Southeast Asia—even though they had never lost a single full-scale fight with the VC or the NVA and had, in fact, pounded the North Vietnamese into jelly by the end of 1969. But there was a story, one of the generals had pointed all that out to Giap or some other dink honcho at the Paris peace talks and the guy had thought it over, looked back across the table, and said, Yes, that was true, but it was also irrelevant.
And since then the Army had handed the American people nothing but excuses.
Excuses for the Son Tay raid, a real hot Special Forces op that had worked like silk except for the fact that no POWs were actually in the Son Tay camp when the Special Forces guys got there.
And then there was that enormous fuck-up in the Iranian desert, when a chopper had flown right up into a C-130 plane and the next day we still had all those hostages in the U.S. embassy in Tehran but. now we also had Iranian newsreels of dead U.S. airmen and smoldering U.S. aircraft in some raghead wadi east of nowhere.
And Grenada, where the press made sure that everybody found out about the Ranger drop on the airfield where a bunch of Cuban truck drivers shot the shit out of them as they hung up there in their parachutes.
And Panama. And the poor bloody jarheads in Beirut, blown out of their bunks by one raghead with a ton of C-4 plastic explosive in the back of his truck, and, let’s see, William Buckley, the CIA station chief tortured to death by the Syrians in 1985, and the Marine colonel, Higgins, hung like a gutted pig and videotaped twisting in the wind, and what does George do in the name of the American people?
He throws a barbecue on the White House lawn.
Crane had lived through all of that, and he knew what the guy was thinking. And what was there to tell him?
That it wasn’t true? That it wasn’t as simple as that?
Tell it to the Israelis, who once handled the problem of a KGB assassin squad working out of Lebanon by kidnapping the brother of one of the KGB men, cutting his balls off, and sending them to the man himself.
Maybe the guy was right.
Maybe America wasn’t up to it anymore.
Crane downed the rest of his Miller and dropped a ten on the bar top and went back outside. The rain was softer now, and the clouds were ripping apart overhead, the moonlight showing around the edges.
Crane started up the Caprice and headed back west on Riley, thinking he might go on out to Junction City and look for some of the guys in Baker. As one of the senior noncoms he ought to be around where the troops were, because the war talk would be burning them up and the kids would be full of questions, full of crazy war panic, half-mad, half-glad, and desperately in need of a simple, straightforward answer. And in Crane’s heart he knew what that answer would be.
He rolled westward along Fort Riley Boulevard and cleared the last lights of Manhattan. The road rose up into a saddle pass and curved left again and down through a lowland valley, and in the far west there was still the faintest tinting of red fire on the underside of the cloud drift. He held the wheel tight and felt his heart in his chest and the tightness in his throat. Later, when he had a chance to think it over, he realized that he was afraid, but that what he was afraid of wasn’t the idea of a war in the desert.
He was afraid of being left behind.