Honor and Duty (32 page)

I had jacks and nines with four of us still in.

“Out,” said Colonel Smits, banging down his hand and taking a big slug of Bushmills from a dirty tumbler. The pot was right. I lay down my two pairs, beating Clint’s kings. Duke had three sixes and a big smile as he scooped the chips with large arms.

The room was thick with smoke and rank with the thick aroma of pepperoni pizza, whiskey, beer belches, and warming bodies. Colonel Smits had a weak oscillating fan from his recent Vietnam tour, and from a small bookcase it pushed the bad air around like a tired traffic cop. The window was open, but little help came from it on a warm April night.

Lieutenant Colonel Franz Alonzo Smits was attached to Post Command, West Point. He was our Wild Hairy Renegade. He had a rancid mouth, foul armpits, excess body hair, bachelor quarters he shared with cadets, and all the bad habits that young men admire. He had a large, semiflat, closed face that could have been shaped on an irregular cookie sheet in high heat. His nose had been broken at least twice by different forces bearing from different directions. Something sharp had tried to chop off his chin, leaving a pale incision where the hair grew with less abundance. The dark eyes were hooded, injured, reptilian. He was Bluto in the “Popeye” cartoons, with the predatory grin but without the good cheer.

He had been a member of the 1952 Army grid team, but his tour in Vietnam had been compared to the play of snakes in Ireland. He had gone to MACV to win the Medal of Honor and had returned to West Point with a Combat Infantryman’s Badge and a Purple Heart, and no other decorations of distinction to match an enduring anger. The CIB and Purple Heart were revered awards, but they were not enough for him. He was six feet three and overly broad, with a chest designed for a lifetime of medals—all preferably centered on the constellation of stars on a dark blue field that denoted the nation’s highest award.

Rumor Control said that he loved one person—Coach Red Blaik—and that this distant connection had been sufficient for him to overcome a bad combat tour and get posted to the Academy staff. Legend had it that in the fifties, assistant coach Vince Lombardi had applauded Smits’s talent but had prayed
for his soul. Coach Blaik had seen the gold in Franz Smits and had never lost faith.

After the Navy game last year, Smits invited Duke and Clint and other cadets to use his BOQ for poker, pizza, and drinking. Having access to this type of facility—bursting with food and stamped with the tattoos of adulthood—was an undeniable take-Big-Bites Good Deal for cadets.

Officers were encouraged to develop relationships with cadets to facilitate the transfer of values and to provide a sense of kin. Officers served in a range of roles, from offering housing for cadet dates to direct, long-term mentorship. The Academy might have reconsidered the practice had it observed the Poker Society.

Duke had introduced me to the Saturday Night Poker Society after we finished our advanced infantry and patrol training at Camp Buckner. We returned to West Point and its new four-regiment organization to accommodate the further-expanded Class of 1969. Company H-1 had been reorganized as Company A-3. Hell-One had become Aches-in-Three-Places. Hellraisers had become Avengers.

Colonel Smits’s rotgut could be used as the poison you’d give a horse before you shot it with an unreliable gun. I was smug in rejecting it. Then Smits introduced me to Irish whiskey blended with brandy and chocolate ice cream—the Velvet Hammer. I drank Hammers like Popeye took spinach. It was candy with a kiss inside; I discovered the joys of inebriation: existential angst, incoherent speech, Falstaffian pronouncements, pounding headaches, and Olympian retching. My first binge was nothing to remember.

“Big buddy, you threw up all night,” said Bob Lorbus.

“Talked Chinese,” said Clint. “Had us worried, but we had to leave you in the showers or you’d tank the room.”

“Was I—was I embarrassing?” I asked.

“If I’m ever that blotto,” said Bob, “slit my throat.”

“Don’t be a Snuffy’s Special,” said Deke Schibsted. We couldn’t drink within ten miles of the Academy, and Snuffy’s was uncannily located just beyond the ten-mile perimeter line. Drinking with an officer in his quarters was not prohibited; the presumption was that a glass of port might enhance a lace-tablecloth dinner.

I liked being drunk, pleased by the sensation of my brains sliding out of my ears. I liked the absence of tension, the giggling.
Laughing had kept other demons from me. I felt quite adult, sophisticated, philosophical, and liberated.

“Why,
Hausheng
,” Uncle Shim had asked, “were poets drunks? They put
goliang
in their bellies to forget
gahng, lun
, and duty. They paid homage to the gods of poetry and writing. In their wine cups, they could enter the Other World, where they could feel pity and emotion and forget themselves. Think of the poet Li Po, who habitually drank to excess. He drowned when he leaned over his boat to kiss his own image in the water, and fell in.”

I had many Confucian relationships to maintain, but I was like Li Po; when the Irish whiskey went in, the
gahng
and
lun
went out.

“Why do you mess with Smits and alcohol?” asked Mike Benjamin.

“I kin handle it,” I said, embracing the commode like a baby koala holds its mother, trying to focus my bloodshot eyeballs. I used my best adult voice. “I’m, upperclassman.”

“You’re trying to drink like an Irishman. Knock it off. You’re blowing away brain cells like Hitler killed Jews.”

Mike set a rumbling tumbler of Alka-Seltzer next to me. I tried to think through the violent popping and fizzing. “Not nice comp’rison,” I said.

“Wasn’t meant to be,” he said.

“Wanna come ta Society, play cars—
cards?
” I asked.

“I wouldn’t go there if I were dead,” he said.

“Number-one drink of the gods,” Smits mumbled, pouring the sludge of the Hammer into my beer mug. “Cures all ills. Cleanses the soul, stitches up sucking chest wounds. Keeps your dick hard.”

Smits was a music fan. He played the Animals, Tom Jones, and Johnny Rivers at decibel levels that invited concussions and hearing loss. Sometimes, over my cards, I studied his hard, darkly bloated, crooked face as he mulled his whiskey, blinking from his blaring music, wondering why he favored us with his freedoms.

I had brought Arch Torres and Bob Lorbus along tonight to bring the Society to a perfect seven for poker, joining the colonel, Clint Zoo Keeper Bestier, Duke Troth, and Miles Brodie. Bob and Arch had observed the aftereffects of the Society’s temperance habits. They wanted to “see the elephant” and his dark, bohemian den. In the stairwell of the Q, we felt the vibrations
of a stereo system and heard the words to “Secret Agent Man.” We were all tall, fit, trained as killers, and dark to varying degrees. We identified with Agent 007, James Bond, the Man of our time. His enjoying the favors of many women I recognized as fantasy; that only happened to Arch and Bob. I liked James Bond because he ate like a starving restaurant critic wherever he went.

When we came through the door, Smits seemed to be seeing me for the first time. His eyes narrowed in suspicion. He was looking at the spic and the Chinaman.

Arch looked at him steadily. “Too many of us, sir?”

“Hell no,” he growled in a voice abused by yelling over artillery, imbibing over the limit, and living past reason. “Siddown. Whaddya drinkin’?”

Arch’s skill at seven-card stud lifted the level of play. We had finished the Velvet Hammers and had been at the Schlitz for a couple hours. I was drinking Bushmills and feeling no pain.

“Three, no help,” Arch said. He flipped up the fourth card for Clint with the sharp dealer’s snap that cracked like a dry branch on night patrol.
Snap.
“Club, flush,” he said to Duke.
Snap.
“Nine, straightening,” to the colonel.
Snap.
“Pair of eights up, four to the flush,” to Bob.
Snap.
“Ace, no help,” to me. I had stayed in to show guts and help the pot, but now I had two aces.
Snap.
“Pair of fours,” to Miles. “Ten, no help,” to himself. Arch led and Clint followed. I lagged with my average hand.

“Down and dirty,” Arch said, dealing the seventh card.

I intermixed the cards and fanned them: three aces, two down. Maybe two full houses, Arch showing three jacks and Lorbus with three eights and no flush. Duke had no flush. My bet. I threw in a modest I-am-still-here bet. Lorbus bumped again. I sweated his flush, feeling full houses.

“The problem is, no one’s getting laid,” Colonel Smits said. I couldn’t tell if he was complaining or cheering.

“The problem is,” said Arch, “I see the five, the five, the five, and ten more,” tossing in red chips the way Tony used to throw garlic, onion, sugar, and oregano into the vat of gurgling spaghetti sauce during the YMCA sleep-overs on the gym floor. The bets went around again, leaving Arch, Bob, Smits, and me.

“Oughta bet on women,” said Duke. Duke had set drags, or dates, for many in the Poker Society. Arch and Bob needed
help with women the way Tony Barraza needed boxing lessons.

“Three aces,” I said, laying them out and waiting for the full houses. Smits’s two pairs were the only threat, and he looked at me balefully as I gathered the chips. We had two decks, and Clint began dealing five-card stud while Arch shuffled.

“Arch,” said Miles Brodie, a wiry man from West Virginia, “that was a fine dish y’all dragged to the hop.”

“I’d low-crawl a mile to sniff her bicycle seat,” said Troth, who always handled his cards before the deal was completed.

“Uck,” I said.

“Makin’ Ting airsick again,” said Colonel Smits. There was laughter. My expertise with women was limited.

“Don’t like bicycles,” I said. Miles had king high showing and led the betting, everyone in.

“Her name’s Jill, and I think I’m in love,” said Arch.

“She ask about me?” asked Clint.

“Well,” said Arch. “When she was helping me unhook the bra, she broke a nail. She said ‘son of a Bestier!’ ”

“Don’t mind being associated with her bra,” said Clint.

“She was thinking of female dogs, Zoo Keeper.”

Clint was our zoologist. At Buckner, I had spent precious time coating all the movable metal in our gear with masking tape. In our final problem, I led the night patrol into an aggressor camp slowly and silently, creeping a few feet a minute in the final assault past their listening post. The paratroopers had been startled by our silent rising from the grass, our weapons on them. Clint had been on the right flank, but now he was missing. Billy Bader had been assistant patrol leader, and we both ran a one-eighty on our attack line. Several hundred meters back I saw the faint glow of a red-lens flashlight. Clint was on the ground, the earth about him uprooted. He had a baby starling in his hand and was feeding it parts of an earthworm, then dripping water from his canteen into its beak. “Little guy fell from the nest, and I crawled over him,” he said. “Made this peep. Damn near killed him.”

“You missed the attack, Clint. The lane grader’s busted you.”

“Damn worm’s no good—help find me another, Kai, quick.”

Duke was low man, with a deuce and a seven, close to folding. He turned to Miles, now with a pair of kings. “Lay your girl yet?”

Miles frowned. “What kinda bool-shit question is that?”

“Didn’t ask if she was good,” he said. “Asked if she put out.”

“Screw you, dirtbag,” said Miles, looking hard at Duke.

“Hey, pretty fuckin’ touchy, Brodie,” said Duke.

“It’s none a yore business. Ever hear a privacy?”

“Privacy!” snorted Colonel Smits, who also had a bad hand. “What the screw you know about
privacy!
You’re in the goddamned Army! Get a fartsack dream ’bout your squeeze, every swingin’ dick in the Corps knows her name. Shit—whadyya think this is, the British Army?” He blew smoke. “So, Miles. She any good?”

Miles jerked. “Hey, it’s nothing, Miles,” said Bob Lorbus.

“Bullshit it’s nothin’,” Miles said. He glared at Smits, who looked back with dead, hooded eyes. I thought he was restraining a smirk. I looked at Bob and Arch for guidance. They looked at Smits. Clint dealt the last card, down. I had nothing and folded as Miles led the betting and angrily took the pot with two pairs. Duke began dealing five-card draw as Clint shuffled.

“Listen, women are standard issue,” said Smits, betting heavily. “Same layout. Don’t need a doctorate to know
that
shit. Greeks, they got it right. Women’re slaves. No brains, no guts, just handy. Don’t go nuclear, Brodie—you wouldn’t care if people talked about your car, would ya? Ting—don’t Orientals treat women like chattel?”

“I don’t,” I said, my cheeks blushing with anger. Confucian teachings focused on the moral man, and said little about women. Women appeared in the
Wu-lun
only as wives owing duty to their husbands. What would Uncle Shim say to someone like Smits?

“You ever been married, sir?” asked Arch, matching the bet.

“Do I look like an
idiot?
” asked Smits. “Pot’s right. I’ll take three,” he said, throwing his discards hard into the table, blaming Duke with a glance for his bad hand as he stood. He cranked the stereo volume up as it played “Seventh Son.” The pictures on the wall rattled, humming harmonically in accompaniment to the alcoholic buzz in my brain. The pictures were of the temples of Angkor Wat, of Cholon, the Chinese district of Saigon, and of a firebase somewhere in Vietnam, which showed a hairy, smoking, barechested Smits. He had a flat butt and a large gut.

“And them Oriental women in their
ao-dais
,…” he said, sitting and smiling falsely at me with all his teeth. “They’re
sooo
fine! What kinda stuff ya want most, Scrounger?” Smits asked Duke. Duke disliked the nickname; I disliked the question. I took three cards, needing all kinds of help. I felt Arch had the cards.

“I’d like a stuck-up Hebe with lots of money,” said Troth.

I looked at Duke. “Jesus, you sorry—,” I said.

“Like to lay a darkie,” said Smits.

“Oh, man,” said Duke. “I wouldn’t even wanna
touch
one a them. They’re all like—”