PERIMETER WIRE
Crane leaned back in his green swivel chair, groaned, and stretched, looking out the slatted blinds of his office at the troops going by on Normandy Drive. His air conditioner was wheezing away in the frame like an emphysemic banshee, but the single-story red brick building was still an oven, and the grass on the little lawn would have been a brown stubble if one of the grunts hadn’t been watering it every day. The light was changing a bit, as it does in September, maybe not quite so hot white, more amber in it, and the shadows were longer. A dusty wind carried the sound of a platoon doing a mile run a block over, the hoarse voices singing, “I don’t want no teenage queen—I just want my M Fourteen—if I die in a combat zone—box me up and ship me home.…”
The sound of the cadence faded away and disappeared behind the roaring of a convoy of trucks from the Engineers, going somewhere out into the ranges to screw up something, and when that faded there was the thump of boots in the hall and the rumble of voices from the other noncom offices. He looked around his office, at the pale green walls and the posters for the New Modern Army—“Be all you can be”—at the bulletin board jammed up like a collage with Polaroids of the guys, time sheets, service docs, ordnance reports, motor pool beefs, shots of a boot party at Lucy’s in JC, Mosby and Orso putting a black guy—Mitchell—through the Bouncing Betty initiation, a news photo of one of those plywood signs they’d put up in Saudi—“Welcome to Iraq Courtesy of the Big Red One”—behind his desk, framed certificates from various noncom courses, a yellowed and faded map of Vietnam with three darts sticking into it, marking off the Iron Triangle, an old black-and-white shot of DuPuy pinning a CIB on Crane’s bony in-country chest, and two flags on mahogany-and-brass poles, the Stars and Stripes and the blue and gold of the Army.
Christ.
Thirty years.
Crane looked back down at the papers on his desk.
Training reports. Readiness reports. Medical calls. Requests for loans. Complaints about Montgomery Bill accounting requirements. One of the Baker Company grunts wanted bereavement leave to go back to Wichita, some great-aunt or other had had her ticket punched and was taking the midnight train to Valhalla. A storekeep from JC had written complaining that four grunts from Baker Company had been rude to him the week before and he wanted them court-martialed. Here was Polanyi—he’d made his stripes and was a squad leader—asking for permission to move his leave up a month. He wanted to take his wife and kid to Yellowstone and the gates closed in late September, and he couldn’t wait any longer because he was being transferred to Fort Belvoir to do a second hitch with the Engineers.
Mitchell was tagged for Range Data. Most of the LTs were off to play the Great Game, taking courses at Kansas State or politicking for a posting to Leavenworth or Fort Monroe or anywhere in a Battle Group. Shabazz was gone to Fort Sill to study artillery. Ackisson had taken an Early Out and a big payout from the Drawdown fund and was studying to be a chiropractor in Oklahoma. Fanand and Seafferman were out of the Army, and DerHorst was on his way to Intel. The halls were crowded with brand-new LTs and cherry boots fresh in from Benning and Bragg. A new kid named Karpis needed dental work and wanted it done before his parents arrived to see him in October, but there was a line-up for dental work and Karpis was way back there. Other grunts were on the sheet, looking for outpostings to a trade service or hammering him for a training rotation somewhere, Signals at Fort Monmouth being the current top pick among ambitious grunts. Get those marketable skills, hit civvy street running, get a trick haircut, lease a Bimmer, buy a Hugo Boss suit …
It seemed that almost everybody in Baker was on his way to something else, that an entire nation of young men and women were on the prod for success and fame and four weeks paid vacation. Christ, the Custer Hill golf course used to be strictly officers. Now every green boot in Riley was out there every afternoon, tricked out in pastels and dragging a set of Ping Eyes around the terrain.
Everybody was headed somewhere, bug-eyed with plans and ambitions, and the only fixed point in the whole three-ring circus was First Sergeant Dee Crane and this puke green office in a red brick building up on Custer Hill. Even the OC, Rhame, had rotated, and now they had a new MG down at 1st Division HQ on Heubner.
No, somebody was staying eleven bravo. Mosby was coming back from the noncom school at Leavenworth later today, and Crane had a note here to go get him at Marshall Field, take him to Harry’s for the sergeant’s party later.
Mosby had made corporal in May of 1991 and sergeant in the spring of 1992. Now he was coming back—covered in glory—from Leavenworth and was probably going to make staff sergeant by the end of the year. Crane was proud of him.
And off to the left there, under a copy of the Manual of Arms and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, radiating threat and change, was Crane’s resignation form, filled out but not signed. Yet.
He looked back out through the Venetian blinds, seeing the soldiers in the street, everyone back in their forest camos. The chocolate chips were stored away, pressed and crated. The ground war had been so short, a lot of the troops had been able to turn in their chips and get a uniform credit as payback. Well, they’d had a lot of payback of one kind or another, hadn’t they? It was as if the country had been trying to make up for something.
The 1st Infantry had stayed in Saudi for another three months, policing the battlefield, destroying any remaining Iraqi armor and ordnance—the mines were out there in the millions and the Army had decided that the mines were a Kuwaiti problem. They could afford to hire civilian specialists to clear them off—which they had—and many of them had died trying to do that job in the year that followed. And civilians had put out the oil fires—over six hundred of them—losing a few men in that as well.
Crane and DerHorst had been busy getting their men back out of the war zone and seeing to it that nobody stepped on something lethal while they did it. They established rear-area AOs and set up resupply strips and generally handled about two hundred problems a day from the end of February to the middle of April, when they were finally relieved and DEROSed back to Riley, supposedly covered in glory. Supposedly.
But Crane still remembered Lieutenant Colonel Fontenot’s announcement after his 2nd Battalion of the 34th Armor had gotten up to Safwan Air Base and secured it so Schwarzkopf and Franks and the rest of the Third Army brass could take the Iraqi surrender there.
Fontenot had implied that the Iraqis had bugged out in panic as soon as they saw the first M1s clear the horizon line. His words were “… they didn’t want to tangle with the First Infantry Division … and we took the last objective of the war.”
Well, yes.
Sort of.
It turned out that somebody at VII Corps had gotten some wires crossed—or not—and somebody else, precisely who being an object of very hot debate, had told the CINC, meaning Schwarzkopf, that Safwan was already taken—it had been a 1st Division objective—when in fact not one 1st Division trooper had gotten anywhere near the place. The only humans anywhere near Safwan at that time had been an entire regiment of Republican Guards, and since there had already been one shoot-out after the cease-fire—the 24th Mech had smoked a Republican Guard brigade in the Euphrates valley, taking three thousand POWs, after the Guard commander had fired at some of their Bradleys—it was reasonable to infer that the Iraqis who were at that point squatting on Safwan could be seen as a threat to the formal surrender ceremony. There they were, contrary to the afteraction faxes littering Schwarzkopf’s desk.
When Schwarzkopf found out about the misfire, he apparently went straight up fifty feet and landed right on top of Fred Franks. Franks got chewed out like a lance corporal, chewed out for not being at Safwan and for not using his VII Corps aggressively enough during the Hail Mary sweep across the KTO. He still got a promotion, but the inference was pretty insulting to Franks, and Crane found the image hard to shake.
They had made a classic breakthrough at the first berms, blown the lines apart, lost not a man, and then they had accomplished, basically, dick until they hit the Tawakalna on Tuesday evening.
Crane did not believe that either Franks or Rhame—who was a hard-nosed and aggressive commander and nobody’s idea of a man who would dodge a fight—had tried to avoid Iraqi units.
But the non-negotiable reality of the thing was that VII Corps had in no way equaled the rapid advances of other line units in the same sector, including the 24th Mechanized and the 2nd Armored Cavalry. It was a matter of record that even the highly publicized Battle of Norfolk had been triggered by contacts developed by the 2nd Armored Cavalry, that they fired the first shots in that engagement, and that the 1st Division had not been allowed to pursue their war as aggressively as other units because Franks was so cautious.
Franks had not believed that the first after-action reports of a massive Iraqi collapse were accurate. He saw their Area of Operations as a “killing sack” highly vulnerable to chemical and biological attacks, which could kill thousands of men under his care and control. That was a valid fear, since no one in the KTO had any way of knowing that Saddam’s delivery systems for these weapons, his missiles, were so degraded by bad maintenance and so inaccurate that they presented as much of a threat to his own forces as they would have to an enemy concentration.
And it was also true that Americans had been gassed in the First World War and the memory of that gassing was alive and terrible in the senior ranks of the Army. Still, there was no getting around it; the 1st had done well, but not as well as it could have, although no one at Riley was saying this out loud.
As for Franks, it was Crane’s personal belief that Schwarzkopf was abusing Franks because, like Everest, Franks was there. The dirty little secret of the war was that after-action reports carried out by the 1st Division Intelligence teams showed that the Iraqis were not nearly as strong or as numerous as the Pentagon had been telling the American people. This tallied with Crane’s suspicions in the field, and it sure as hell conformed to common knowledge about the combat readiness of the Warsaw Pact forces. Even back at the NTC, the observers had admitted that they credited their own OpFor units with a far higher degree of mechanical fitness and durability than you would see in a real Soviet motorized rifle regiment.
But the Great Game had to be played, and the official record claimed that the 1st Division had fought its way through two hundred and sixty klicks of enemy-held territory—well, there was enemy somewhere inside it, anyway—they had destroyed close to eleven divisions of Iraqi forces, wiped out six hundred enemy tanks and five hundred personnel carriers and in the process taken more than twelve thousand enemy prisoners, a performance that earned the division two more battle streamers, the Defense of Saudi Arabia and the Liberation of Kuwait.
But Crane was eleven bravo and had a long memory. When the 1st came back to America, it was like six months of the Fourth of July. The entire nation threw a party for the returning heroes—the ticker-tape parade down Fifth Avenue, the marches in Washington, the television coverage and the songs and the speeches, all played out against a background of grinning troops in chocolate-chip camo marching column after column down Main Street America, flags fluttering in the great American wind, the bands huffing away at their brass, the drums booming and rattling, the stamp and shuffle of men and women marching by on their way back from history.
For Crane—and for any man or woman in the armed forces who had ever been to Vietnam—it was a bittersweet experience. Bittersweet first of all because the 1st Infantry lost eighteen men during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and not all of them in combat.
Five troopers had died in aviation accidents during the build-up and deployment in November. Another three had died in traffic accidents or turnovers when their IFVs had flipped over and tumbled down a sand dune or thumped into a hidden wadi. Two were killed by mines.
And two were killed by blue-on-blue fire, shot up by an Apache pilot during a preliminary advance before the ground war started. They were in the right place, but wrapped in darkness and rain and poor IR capabilities. The Apache pilot put two Hellfires into their Bradleys, thinking they were Iraqi scouts. That happened in war a lot more than any of these cheering flag wavers could guess. One of the reasons a seasoned patrol in Vietnam hated to take on an FNG was that, in a firefight, he was as likely to kill you as he was a VC. There were more names on the Wall who had died from blue-on-blue than anyone would ever know. Civilians who liked to whine about that kind of thing usually had no idea of just how wild and chaotic combat really is; soldiers get killed by their friends in every war, and the twitchier the technology, the greater the risk.
And there were other ways to get it. One died from a heart attack when he thought he was being gassed. Five died in combat, taking rounds from Iraqi soldiers. Of course eighteen dead out of a deployment of seven thousand soldiers sounded pretty good, unless you were the one who had to write their families. But it was bittersweet for another and older reason as well.
When Crane finally got diagnosed as fugazy at Ben Cat in ’69 and was ordered home, he had spent a lot of time in downtown Saigon, hanging around Annie’s Bar with a lot of other DEROSing grunts, belting back the Bammy-Bows and watching the girls in their ao dais go by on Tu Do. But sooner or later they’d all get around to that moment when the guy would climb down off the Pan Am jet in San Francisco and walk out into the lights and the music of the real world.
Crane was telling another soldier, a Spec 5 from the 9th in from Dong Tam, what he was going to do in San Francisco and who he was going to do it with and how often when a leathery-looking captain with a missing left cheekbone and a left eye that looked like a shattered glass ball and a Thundering Herd shoulder flash leaned over to their table and said, “Well, boys, whatever you do when you get back to the World, the first thing is you go into the washroom at the airport and change into civilian gear, because they’re waiting for you in the concourse.”
“Who are?” said the Spec 5, but Crane had an idea.
“Jody. Jody and your sister. And when you come down the ramp, they’ll throw a sack of baby shit at your breast bars and ask you how many babies you bayoneted.”
“Bullshit—no disrespect, Captain,” said the Spec 5.
“Don’t mean nothing to me,” said the captain. “Don’t say I didn’t tell you.” He smiled in a slow and considering way, revealing a set of brand-new teeth and stitches in his lower left gumline.
He turned away and after a while he got up and walked out of Annie’s with one of the girls. When they got to the door the girl in the ao dai was suddenly illuminated by the bright white sun out in the street and her body under the tunic looked slender and graceful and her hair seemed to glow with auburn and black firelights.
Crane watched her go and remembered what the captain had said. When he got to San Francisco he changed into Levi’s and a white tee shirt but they spotted him anyway. Later he figured it was his Army haircut.
Well, everybody knew that story, and “So what?” was all you could say. But when they’d had all the parades and the speeches for the Gulf War vets, it was hard not to remember that captain and his shattered eye and the brand-new nylon stitches in his gumline.
During the Topeka parade, the avenues had been lined with people, old vets in their VFW and Legion caps, housewives and office workers and teenagers in baggy clothes and trick haircuts, city officials and cops who looked too young to drive let alone ride those big escort Harleys, and everybody was cheering and waving, their voices hoarse and their faces bright red with pride and patriotism.
Or at least, that’s how it looked. But going down the road with Baker, Crane had seen a few faces in the crowd that weren’t smiling, guys with sad eyes, guys with Vietnam-era ribbons and colors, and every time Crane saw one, he felt just a little shamed.
At the time, none of the kids in the division had any trouble taking the bows and getting the parades, but as the weeks and months had gone by, some of them began to wonder if there wasn’t something false about the whole thing.
For one thing, here they were, late summer about three years after their first deployment to Saudi, and Hussein was still in power, still poking his finger in America’s eye every chance he got. Schwarzkopf had a book out—so did everyone who was ever there, it seemed—in which he was saying that those people who wanted the U.S. forces to go on into Baghdad were just rear-echelon chicken hawks who would never dream of putting themselves in the line of fire. That wasn’t true, since a lot of the ordinary soldiers who had been there were at least thinking that the war should have been pushed to a more clear-cut ending. That feeling had started around the time the Iraqis had used their treaty permission to fly choppers in southern Iraq to blow the daylights out of rebel forces, not to mention what they had done to the Kurds in the north.
Schwarzkopf’s answer to that was, Well, yeah, but suppose we did take Baghdad, suppose we could even find Hussein, let alone kill him, then guess who would have to pay for all of Iraq’s requirements. America would be an occupying force. American troops would still be there. It was a damn good point. But the survival of so many of Saddam’s personal troops, and the power he had to do harm in the region, much of that could have been eroded by a few more days of hardcore search and destroy—if you’re going to fight a war, then by God you finish it—and Schwarzkopf knew that damn well, because he was Infantry and eleven bravo himself.
But the men and women who were thinking that around Riley weren’t saying it very loud. There seemed to be a general agreement to pretend that the Gulf War was a complete success, a resounding victory in which the great combat record of the 1st Infantry had been renewed. For Crane, that was the truth, but not the whole truth, since he was in a position to understand what true combat was really like.
He wouldn’t say it to the kids, but if they spent the rest of their lives believing that what they had gone through in the Gulf was anything like combat, then they were very lucky kids. If the drums sounded a little hollow, well, they had in every war, and they always would. If you had hard combat, like they’d had in the Triangle, then no one wanted to know about it. And if your combat was relatively painless, as it had been in the Gulf, then it was just the other side of the same grim fact, and the troops were being celebrated because there was no pain in it for the citizens, and no questions that might generate answers they couldn’t handle.
War was always going to be outside the civilian world anyway, because that was where they wanted it. As far as Crane was concerned, there wasn’t a contradiction between the celebrations around the Gulf War victory and the silence around the Vietnam War Memorial; if the Gulf War had killed a lot of young men and women, America wouldn’t be giving anyone a parade. They’d be lynching the politicians who got them into it. Crane figured the parades were more of a tribute to the low rate of casualties than they were a party for returning victors.
A few days before, Crane had been sitting at the long bar in Harry’s when a news report came on Tory’s television. It showed the aftermath of a Special Forces fiasco that had taken place in Mogadishu that week. Somali gunmen had shot a Ranger chopper out of the air. The poor bloody pilot was a hostage, shown on video, shaken and bruised and clearly working hard to control his fear, which came off the screen so strong it made Crane burn in his belly.
And a large contingent of Rangers had been ambushed at the same time. It looked like there were maybe twenty killed, more than the 1st had lost in the Gulf War. So far, more servicemen had been killed in Somalia than in all of Desert Storm. And this night at Harry’s, they all sat in silence, watching a crowd of Somali kids drag a naked U.S. soldier around by the ankle. He was dead, and showed signs of having been mutilated. His right leg was broken, and the whole body was starting to come apart. Even more disturbing was that the man’s wrists were bound up in nylon restraints. Crane recognized them as Army gear. They had used thousands of them on Iraqi prisoners in Saudi. No one at the bar seemed to realize that the cuffs meant that this trooper was killed after he was captured. You don’t cuff a dead man. This American soldier was probably tortured and murdered by those skinny little Somali shits who were dragging him around, the same skinny little Somali shits they had supposedly gone in to save from starvation. It was a vile obscenity and Crane said nothing about it to anyone, not at Harry’s and not back at Custer Hill. But watching it put him right back in the jungle, and he stayed awake for two days and two nights just so he didn’t have to watch the scene over and over again in his skull.
At the time, the whole room at Harry’s Bar was stunned and silent. And someone from the back of the room said something about how America should just go in there, kick their asses. Crane didn’t turn around, but he was pretty sure the voice belonged to a civilian.
So where was this guy when Clinton was talking about sending American troops off on a feel-good mission to Somalia? Even after the Gulf War, the civilians hadn’t learned a damn thing. You don’t send troops to do things that troops can’t do. The Army is for killing, not for feeding the hungry and doing Peace Corps work. Any mission that has no clearly defined goal, and any mission that includes an order not to fight, was guaranteed to present you with a picture like this one sooner or later.
Clinton and his whole cadre of boomer yuppies wanted to feel good about the Army. They had the same delusions about the Army that they had about police forces, the same obsessions with doing good and being liked. So Clinton had turned an Expeditionary Force over to UN control, to accomplish an impossible mission, and every civilian in the United States had happily gone along with it, because what could be wrong with feeding the starving?
You want an answer?
Look again at that dead soldier, being dragged naked through a street in Mogadishu. He might be alive right now if the mission had been to go into Somalia to crush the warlords, disarm them, and turn the pacified country over to a competent local government. But that would have required a full-out war, fought to a bloody conclusion, instead of a warm-fuzzy free lunch program that everybody could get behind.
It was the kind of thing that Crane expected of Clinton and his crowd. Clinton had been a draft dodger, no matter how you phrased it. He and his wife came out of that sixties antiwar hippy culture, and they had grown up believing that it is better to feel good than to do good. Any use Clinton would make of the military would have to make him feel good about it inside.
If Crane had needed any confirmation of that, he got it in the summer of 1993, when Clinton ordered an air strike in retaliation for an attempt on George Bush’s life when he was visiting Kuwait. Clinton ordered a cruise missile attack on Iraqi Intelligence headquarters in Baghdad.
So far so good.
Then he went on television to make sure everybody understood that this counterstrike was “proportional” and “commensurate with the provocation.” What he seemed to be saying was that an attempt on the life of an ex-President by a hostile power was worth a certain number of “hit points,” the way a war-game observer would assess a tactical move. This drove the older noncoms and the officers at Riley crazy.
Where was it written that one dead President equalled one Iraqi building? Where was the rule book that you used to calculate the comparisons? What if they’d missed Bush but killed Barbara? Would that mean they’d only take out half the building? What if only a dog died? Would Clinton call in an air strike on a petting zoo in Basra?
As far as the Army was concerned, Hussein and his forces were terrorists, and it made no sense at all to talk about dealing with them “proportionally,” especially in a situation that Clinton himself described as “an attack against our country and against all Americans.” That was the same kind of “proportionalism” that made such a hell pit out of the Indochina War.
At that point, a lot of the noncoms and rankers in the 1st began to see a similarity between the Clinton approach to the Iraqis and the sudden pull-back at the end of the Gulf War; was that “proportional” too?
So many days of ground war and so many bombing sorties in exchange for one invasion of Kuwait? Eighteen dead soldiers from the Big Red One equals so many acres of burning oil? Was that why they pulled up before the kill? So Bush and Babs could feel good about their part in it? For more of the same old cold warrior “signaling”?
If so, was this poor dead grunt being desecrated in Mogadishu a sacrifice to Clinton’s need to feel good about himself? God help them all if Clinton decided he needed to feel good about Bosnia too.
It was all too depressing to think about. So after a while Crane said the hell with his reports and the hell with Karpis and his dental problems and the hell with Polanyi’s trip to Yellowstone park. He locked his office and said “later” to the Spec 5 clerk in the front office, and went to get Mosby down at Marshall Field.
The field was out in the open, across the Kansas and down a long stretch of road that ran from the shaded lawns and buildings of the main post down toward a flat delta that lay in the lee of a broad yellowstone bluff to the south. The interstate ran along the base of that bluff and Crane could see the tractor rigs and the four-wheelers racing by the gates. A huge water tower rose above the hangars and outbuildings of Marshall Field. On the side of the tower there was a huge red l and the words “Fort Riley, home of the Big Red One.”
Mosby’s chopper was already inbound when Crane pulled up by the landing pad. He watched the old transport Huey thunder in and flare up just as the rails touched, a real incountry touch-and-go that took him back thirty years, as it always did. Mosby clambered out in his Class As, carrying his kit bag and grinning like a demented coyote. Holding on to his hat, he bent down and frog-jogged over to Crane’s tan Chevy.
“How’d it go?”
“Outstanding, Sergeant Crane! Where’s Top?”
“With Polanyi and the guys. You remember what I told you?”
Mosby smiled again and dropped into a singsong recital tone: “The caliber seven-six-two M Sixty machine gun is a belt-fed gas-operated automatic weapon issued with an attached bipod and a tripod mount optional excellent weapon to suppress ATGM gunners vehicles and troops the night-vision device is the AN/PVS-Two and should be boresighted and zeroed on the IAW TM eleven five-eight-five-five dash two-oh-three dash thirteen prior to night patrols tracer burnout is approximately nine hundred meters—”
Crane was pulling out onto the interstate. He looked sideways at Mosby and said, “They asked you about the Sixty? Why?”
“Why not? I was ready for anything. I think they asked me about the Sixty just to see if I had history on the weapon. Which I do. I think I’ll get the ticket. I screwed up on Internet protocol with coalition forces but I was okay on all the MOPP drills and the nerve agent stuff was golden.”
“Good. Good work.”
“Thanks, Dee. It was all you.”
“Bullshit. I’m happy for you. You’ll get staff for sure.”
“Jesus. My dad will freak out.”
Mosby’s dad. Right. Mosby was someone else’s kid. The thought made Crane feel strange, saddened him for a while. Now and then, when he felt like this, he could feel an old man’s impatience coming over him, and a feeling that his time was narrowing down to one last military act, and after that … well, whatever, it was not yet.
But he was proud of Mosby and proud of all the eleven-bravo troopers he had taken to war. He had never shared any of his doubts about the war with the kids. Oh, they had them all right, at least the more intelligent ones did. But let them enjoy their victory and enjoy being combat vets.
Too many Vietnam-era soldiers were running around the landscape saying Yeah, but, and generally raining on everybody else’s parade. One more raggedy-assed Nam vet wearing too-tight boonie-rat gear and whining about his miserable existence and Crane would personally go over and throw up on him.
The Wall said it all. There were no more POWs and MIAs. All that stuff was a marketing scam run by redneck combat freaks and backed up by politicians who wanted to jerk the Vietnamese around to get votes back home. Everybody knew that you always reported a guy MIA instead of KIA, because that way, his widow got a kind of extended payout while the Army blundered through the paperwork. Otherwise, she was chopped, given a flag and his insurance money and a ride to the front gates.
The MIA thing was just a way for old grunts to hang on to the limelight for a while longer, even if they didn’t know it. The time had come for old grunts to fade away. Including Crane.
They pulled up in front of Harry’s Bar on Poyntz Street. Through the glass Crane could see a press of uniforms. Carla was behind the bar, serving and smiling, and they could hear the music out in the street, George Thorogood playing “Bad to the Bone,” which had become a kind of Baker Company anthem since they’d come back from Saudi.
Mosby popped the door and half stepped out. Heat flowed in around him and his flushed young face was shiny. He looked hard and polished and his sergeant’s stripes were bright yellow in the sunlight. His breast bars shone like colored silk. He was pure eleven bravo and Crane looked at him from the shade of the car.
“What’s the matter, Dee? You not going in?”
“I’ll be there. I got a few things to do.”
Somebody called Mosby’s name. They looked across the street. DerHorst, Polanyi, Orso, about twenty other soldiers, were standing in the window, holding up tankards of beer, waving and calling.
“You gotta come in, Dee!”
“I will. Gimme an hour.”
“Promise! You been dodging the crowd lately.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Okay.” Mosby shut the door and waved over his shoulder as he jogged across the street toward Harry’s Uptown. Carla was watching Crane as he pulled away.
He waved to her and accelerated up the street. He turned left at the town center and left again on Leavenworth. College kids were walking along the shaded street, heading back to their rooms or getting ready for the evening.
In a little while, he was westbound on Riley Boulevard. He drove through Ogden and on into the east gate, past the stone cairn by the railway track, past Camp Funston and on along Heubner until he reached the Main Post grounds. He turned right off Heubner and rolled quietly to a stop on Barry Avenue.
The post chapel was just across a little field, under a stand of oaks and cottonwoods. Beside it was a smaller building, made out of roughcut yellow limestone, the old St. Mary’s Chapel. Crane climbed out of the Chevy and walked across the dry grass of the lawn, feeling the late afternoon heat on his shoulders and back.
Inside the chapel it was cooler but very still. The two little rows of hardwood pews glistened with lemon oil and the air smelled of lemon and sandalwood and floor wax. A kind of amber sideways light was flowing in through the stained-glass windows. All along the sides of the chapel were tablets of wood with the names of old soldiers set down in brass and bronze, sergeants killed in the Indian Wars or before that, at places like Shiloh and Antietam.
In the chapel, it was possible to feel very close to them, to feel that you were a part of something very old and very fine, and that even if you had no family of your own, there were people who would remember you, remember what you had done and the places you had seen.
Up on Custer Hill there was a great hall and plaques with the names of men who had died at places like Berzy-le-Sec and Normandy and the Kasserine, Katum Airfield, the Plantation, Song Be, or Thunder Road. There were eighteen new names up there now, eighteen troopers of the 1st Infantry Division who had been killed in a war that everyone was saying was a great victory, although Bush was gone now, and Saddam Hussein was still in power.
Fighting halfhearted wars was getting to be a pattern now, and Crane hoped with all his heart that Clinton would keep them out of Bosnia. But he had come to accept that halfhearted missions were probably eternal, leaders being what they were, and the ambiguous nature of victory in the Gulf was no different than the victory of any other war; they only looked good from a distance.
Well, whatever Clinton was going to do, Crane was out of it.
Mosby was halfway to his staff stripes. DerHorst would make LT or better. Wolochek was a major and they had given Baker Company to Petrie—he was a captain now. Everybody was moving up or shipping out and even Custer Hill was changing. Crane had gotten into the habit of coming down here to the old chapel because it was one of the few places left at Fort Riley where he didn’t feel like a mile marker in someone else’s rearview mirror.
It was his intention to sit down quietly here for a little while, think about things, let his mind clear. Mosby was right. Lately he had been avoiding the guys, even his own ranks. He guessed he was getting ready to let go, and he thought about that Army discharge paper on his desk up at Custer Hill.
The time was coming. He was too old for another deployment. It had taken him months to get back to health after the Gulf deployment, and he still had aches and creaks from the long winter wait out in the Saudi desert. It was like he was chilled to the bone and only a long rest in the sunlight could warm him. There was a shaft of sunlight coming in through the stained-glass window and resting on his shoulder. He could feel the heat on the side of his face. It calmed and warmed him. He closed his eyes and tried to remember a prayer.
Sergeant?
Crane was dreaming about a river, lying by the river on a broad green bank, under the shade of old trees. The day was very warm and in the morning there had been a storm—a summer storm, like the ones they had in Kansas, where the sky would turn green and bruised looking and great anvil-shaped clouds would sail like galleons across the horizon line, rippling with fire along their edges and glowing deep inside. The sound of them was like a low pleasing voice in another room, maybe your father’s voice, the way you heard it through the walls when you were young. Then the rain would come, lancing, sheets of it, and the dry grasses in the fields would bend as the pattering drops came down, bend and then rise again, and the rain would gentle and roll onward, down into a long valley and up the far side, like a manta ray gliding over the floor of an ocean.…
Sergeant?
And as he lay beside this river, looking out into the late afternoon light on the broad brown waterway, he saw that a chain of lily pads was floating down on the current, a long chain of interlocking green vines and tendrils, like a floating island, with white flowers and red flowers and yellow flowers, and there was a scent in the air—it was jasmine, or perhaps lotus, but heavy and hypnotic, the breath of the East.…
Sergeant Crane …
Moths and a kind of cobalt blue butterfly he used to know from somewhere in his youth and dragonflies and tiny flying things were drifting and gliding over the moving island and there was haze in the air that softened the light on the water. Crane lay under the trees and looked out at the broad river and the slow sweep of the lilies floating past and after a while he raised his eyes and looked at the far shore, where a cool deep green darkness lay under all the trees, although the sunlight was strong and bright on the upper branches, and the sky was very blue and high like a bowl of glass. Crane thought if he could reach up and strike the glass it would ring high and very clear and the ringing would go on for a long time and not really end but just seem to float away out of hearing.
Sergeant … Sergeant …
Crane looked back down toward the far shore again and there was a man there, standing under the heavy trees and looking back at Crane. It was that captain from the Thundering Herd, the guy with the damaged eye who had warned him about the hippy chicks waiting for him Stateside, and when the light changed Crane could see there were other men behind him, Half Moon and Airborne, Weeks and Midget Suarez, and many others, standing under the heavy branches with tall grasses all around them.…
Sergeant Crane.
Crane came awake suddenly. He was very hot, and his face was wet and pale. He looked up into the face of a young black soldier who was leaning over him and had a hand on his shoulder. Behind the man there was a soft amber glow and Crane knew the glow was from stained-glass windows.
“I’m sorry to wake you, Sergeant. We have to close up. Are you okay?”
Crane wiped his face. His palm came away damp and he held it off his thigh, not wanting to stain his uniform. He looked down at the hand, seeing the light around it, as if his hand were glowing.
“Sorry … sorry. I guess the heat …”
“Yes, sir. It’s a warm day. But it’s September. It’ll cool off soon. Can I get you a glass of water?”
Crane shook his head and stood up. He looked around at the little chapel, at the hardwood arches and the plain white plaster vaulting, at the little stone altar in the nave. Two brass candlesticks, buffed and glittering, caught the slanting afternoon light and sent it rippling around the white walls. Beyond the stained glass a cottonwood swayed as the wind shifted, making the sun shimmer on the far wall, a liquid scintillation of green and gold.
Crane thanked the trooper and walked away down the aisle toward the old wooden doors.
He stepped outside onto the broad green lawn. Oaks and cottonwoods shaded the little chapel and the larger post chapel beside it. On the far side of the park a row of large old stone houses lay beneath a line of shade trees. Each house had a little white fence around it, and flowers in the garden. On the screened porches there were bikes and tricycles, skateboards in splashes of hard color against the ocher and deep green of the houses. Crane walked through them and along a quiet street, looking at the homes and thinking about the men and women who lived there, and the lives they had together.
Crane reached the top of the little lane and turned right, walking along past the low wooden veranda of Custer House. On his left beyond the bronze horseman the Cavalry Parade Field rolled away toward the museum and the buildings of the post annex.
The Main Post of Fort Riley was quiet at this time of day, the troops at work up on Custer Hill, in the motor pools and the training halls, and out in the ranges. Down here by the Kansas the old fort seemed to float on a river of time, a citadel for dead men.
Crane walked across the cavalry field toward Battery Rogers, his boots hissing in the dry grass, the sun burning down on his uniform shirt.
Duty. Honor. Country.
But don’t lose. Above all, don’t lose.
His car—the same tan cruiser—was parked down by the post HQ annex, a big stone temple-looking construction with “Patton” carved into the stone above the pillars. He climbed into it—Christ, it was hot.
He turned on the air conditioner and drove slowly through the Main Post grounds, past the old yellow buildings and the hundred-year-old oaks and cottonwoods, until he reached the road that led down across the Kansas River and the interstate beyond it. When he cleared the old forest and came down the long twisting lane he was suddenly into the hard yellow light of the afternoon sun. It lay on the Kansas River like liquid fire, shimmering and wavering on the water and shining through the dusty cottonwood leaves.
He pulled the car over and sat there by the side of the road, watching the light on the water. He rolled the windows down and felt a cool breeze roll in from the river. It smelled of earth and sweet grass.
Soon he would have to retire. Next year, probably. They were hammering at him to take a big payout. He didn’t have a lot of choice. He thought he would go back to Lake Placid for a while, because he missed the Adirondacks, missed the clear cold and the way the deep snow lay on the land all winter, and the colors of the leaves in the fall.
It would be hard. He had been nothing but a soldier all his life, but he was still young, only fifty-one, and could have another life. A second life, up in New York, in Lake Placid or Utica—see the Schultz and Dooley Museum again, and the House of a Thousand Animals. Carla had married one of her doctors last year. She seemed happy. Crane still lived alone.
Now that the afternoon was fading, the prairie wind was stirring and it made the surface of the Kansas shimmer with yellow and gold and red light. The hazy windshield was a web of flickering fire and he thought about the war, about everything he had seen, the dead and the living, and the places he had known, and he knew that he would leave the Army, make a new life for himself, see his own people again.
But he also knew as he watched the way the yellow fire rippled along the broad brown back of the Kansas River that he would never again feel his life so strongly and never again see the light in quite this way, and he sat there for a very long time as the wind rose and the light changed, caught in the narrowing iris of time.
Through the open window, he could hear someone calling a drill from a mile away. It was very still. It was as if time had stopped. At times like these, Crane felt that he was out of time, that he had stepped out of it when he joined the United States Army so many years ago. He had a lot of memories, some of them very fine, few of them connected to war. There had been good friends—all of them civilians now, or dead. He had some rank, although not as much as he could have had. He had never married, so there were no children, and no in-laws to avoid at Christmas. All around him at Riley, young men were racing past him on their way up the career ladder, playing the Great Game. The guys who weren’t going to stay in the Army were transferring out of Combat Arms into an MOS that would give them marketable job skills in civilian life.
And what about him?
What did it all add up to for him?
Well, he had combat ribbons, and a good record. Maybe there’d be work for him with the state patrol, maybe as a training officer. If he wasn’t too old? And there was security. There were big corporations in Kansas City and Wichita. Maybe one of them could use an experienced soldier to run their … their what?
What the hell did Crane know about security? They’d give him a job checking the underground parking lot and sitting in the lobby giving directions.
Middle management? Yeah, the only thing that set him apart from every other office manager was that he knew how to do it with a side arm on. And middle-management types were losing their jobs all over the country.
Damn, this was a depressing line of thought.
He had savings, and he’d get a big buyout to retire. Enough to go up to Montana, buy a place on the Yellowstone. Or set up in Livingstone, buy a bar.
MacArthur hadn’t been telling the whole story. Old soldiers may never die, but they don’t fade away either. What happens is, everything else fades away, and one afternoon late in your career you find yourself sitting in a tan Caprice by the side of the river, watching the light change and thinking about how much of your life was just an illusion, that while you were telling yourself all the stories about eleven bravo and the Army and the holy code of the warrior, everybody else was out there in civilian life, making a future for themselves. He could feel the Laphroaig at home, feel it calling him. Or he could get over to Harry’s, catch the tail end of Mosby’s party, make small talk with Carla.
Soon.
But right now, it was good to listen to the distant cadence and hear the rush of the Kansas River under the cottonwoods, and kid himself a while longer that even a soldier whose whole world was slipping away could close his eyes for a moment, smell the sweet grass, feel the cool mist off the water, hear the creak of his old leather garrison belt, remember the places he had seen and the things that had happened, and feel that in a small and fleeting way he had been a part of some great thing.