Once an Eagle (133 page)

It is what you want.
Yes. But that was not enough. Not nearly enough.

5

“The name of
the game is: Bounce the Chinks!” Tony Giandoli declared. With a flick of his thumb he snapped open the cuff of his left sleeve and whipped out a wicked-looking Malaysian throwing knife strapped to his forearm. “All right, you Hai Minh hotshots—come on out of that folding bed! It's zapping time in old Khotiane …”

“Put it away, Gee, before you cut yourself and we have to leave you here as a line company replacement,” Colonel Krisler told him.

“I just want 'em to see I'm ready, that's all. There's no front lines out here, you know. Got to be ready to fight at three hundred and sixty degrees. Right around the clock.”

“What do you know about guerrilla warfare?” Captain Forbes taunted him lazily. “You've never heard a shot fired in anger.”

“I can wait,” Corporal Giandoli said. “I mean, let them work down the list till they get to me. You know?” He moved the blade along his bared forearm, staring in fascination as the thick black hair lifted away in tight rolls. “Look at that. What a gook-stabber … Hey, Chief,” he said to Damon, “hey, when we wrap up this high-level diplomatic caper, how about us making it over to Hong Kong for a quick Rape and Ruin?”

“What do you want in Hong Kong?” Sam asked him.

“That crew chief Wodtke was telling me about a jazzo place called the Blue Phoenix, where they give you a menu—only the menu hasn't got chow on it but tail. Yeah!” His big, liquid eyes gleamed. “You draw a circle around the names you like and
choong!
—there they are, right at your table, rubbing up against you like they meant it.”

“Come off it, Gee,” Forbes said.

“He's right, Bob,” Joey Krisler said with a grin. “Only thing: you'll have to pay four bucks an hour taxi-dance rental for each girl.”

“Yeah, but while it lasts—heaven can wait!”

The four of them were sitting in a seedy little café near the airfield at Pnom Du. The sinking sun poured gold over the metal tables, the half-reclining customers, the faded pink and yellow façades of the tin shacks across the street. Dust rose in quick eddies on the gusts of wind, and bits of paper and leaves tumbled past as stealthily as forest animals. Now and then a plane took off in a shuddering, straining roar, and all talk ceased; then it was gone, fading up the sky, and the dust and poured molten light returned, and the smell of the cooking fires, strange with iodine and mold and fish and old brass. Sam Damon, slumped in one of the wire chairs, worn with heat and the interminable waiting, was reminded of the smells in Pasay, and then the long room at Charmevillers, above the Marne: there was that same beguiling odor sharp with outlandish ways, which had always drawn him on—all the fantastic worlds beyond Walt Whitman, the island valleys filled with people in burnooses, pantaloons, barongs, loinskins, ao dais …

But this tawdry little midway of bars and cribs and laundries did not make the heart leap.

“Probably picked up a case of drippy tummy and changed his mind,” Joey was saying crossly. “God damn politicians—I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw one of these water buffaloes.”

Damon looked at his watch. Five twenty. “They could have had plane trouble, I suppose.”

“I don't like this, Chief. It feels goofy. Let me go over to the message center and check it out.”

“We'll give them a little longer,” he answered.

“You're the general.”

He finished the dregs of his drink. The others had wanted brandy and soda, but on an impulse he'd ordered a vermouth-cassis—and with the first sip of the sweet, flat, dense apéritif the Riviera had swept back, and with it the first twinges of the melancholy that now gripped him. He had sat at a café then with the father, filled with bitterness and confusion; now he sat with the son in another café halfway around the world, and the comparisons and contrasts were unavoidable. Rock-and-roll music blasted from radios across the street, two different tunes competing stridently, and shoeshine boys in ragged yellow T-shirts ran beside a passing soldier, begging cigarettes; he mopped his face with the big red handkerchief he always carried, and picked at his nails.

He could not shake off the depression that had dogged him all afternoon. Earlier, on receiving the coded radio from the Undersecretary, he had been elated. He had—somehow, unpredictably and in complete defiance of all the odds—stopped this lunatic design for a mammoth war on China, at least temporarily. Now, a day later, killing time, still wobbly from dysentery and waiting for the plane, he was assailed by doubts and despondencies. He had said what he had to; he'd spoken his piece and retarded the ominous drift of things. But he was unable to escape the sense that wily and powerful forces were moving against him with sure stealth, while he sat here twiddling his thumbs. Massengale would get rid of him one way or another, and they'd crank up the Khotiane war to their hearts' content. Only the other day he'd overheard Usher on Fowler's staff telling reporters—off the record, of course—that from one point of view it wasn't desirable to be too successful here; that the invaluable lessons to be learned by troops up to battalion level made it well worth prolonging things …

Well: they didn't have a thing to worry about. It would prolong itself just as long as those in power wanted it to.

“—swung around this bunch of rocks and there it was—a jeep and two trucks and an M-39, all squashed together,” Forbes was saying to Joey. “And that did it. The minute we stopped all hell broke loose—machine guns, automatic rifles, mortars, the works. The Chinks had it interdicted from the west slope. And cold! I want to tell you, it was a bitch. They died in the road, in the trucks, on the tanks, they were hiding behind boulders and running up and down the road screaming. And the fire just kept right on pouring down.”

“Man, that's bug-out time!” Giandoli chortled.

“Shut up, Gee,” Krisler told him.

“Yes-sir.”

“It was awful,” Forbes went on, his smooth, rather handsome features pinched with reminiscence. “I could see one of the Chinks up there, directing fire, waving his arm and hollering. I thought: There's only one thing to do. We've got to go up and get those guns. I crawled over to where three or four GIs were lying in a gully and said: ‘Let's go. Let's go get the sons of bitches. Who'll come with me?' No reaction. Then one of them said, ‘You want it, you go get it, Jack.' I said: ‘You want to lay here and get slaughtered, is that it? What's the matter with you people?' No answer. And then another one—a thin guy with a lot of teeth gone on one side of his mouth—said: ‘You go take it and then shove it up your ass … '”

“Interesting command problem,” Joey said. “How'd you play it?”

Forbes spread his hands on the table. “It's not in
The Armed Forces Officer,
I can tell you that. I had this pint of bourbon I'd been saving for two months. I figured now was the time. I hauled it out and took a good long slug and then I said to the guy without the teeth: ‘Here's twenty minutes' worth of courage, you stupid bastard. Pass it around. And then God damn it, let's go!'” The two officers laughed. “And it worked. I got them up and we started climbing that pass. Some other people had got the same idea, and we got one gun with grenades. They all wanted to sit down and call it a day then, the bottle was gone and I had a hell of a time. But I signed up three more warriors with a promise of another drink after we'd got the gun—I guess that comes under the heading of flagrant misrepresentation—and we dragged ourselves on up. It got colder every step of the way, it was so cold you couldn't think. Literally. And on top of all that it started snowing. About halfway up, the gun quit. He's sucking us in, I figured, he's running low and he's waiting. Well, I could see the gun's muzzle stuck in a little notch in the rocks, and that was all. Perfect field of fire, just about no cover at all for the last fifteen, twenty yards. I still had two heroes with me and we got up as close as the cover lasted. By now it was snowing like a bastard. I was so cold I couldn't lie there any longer, I just couldn't, and I waved the other guys up and we rushed it. Utterly ridiculous. Still no fire. I came up over the rocks, stumbling and staggering like an old drunk—and there he was, all alone, sitting straight as a ramrod, his hands on the grip, staring right at me, the snow in his nose and mouth. Frozen stiff.” He shook his head, staring. “The guts that took! Up there in that wind in that ragged beat-up old quilted jacket, no gloves, canvas shoes. Stayed right at the gun till he froze to death. I remember I thought: Jesus, we're going to be lucky to get out of this—any of us at all …”

Damon felt his lips move in a wry, sad smile. Fifty years ago he had sat and listened to the old soldiers; now he was listening to the young ones. He had traced the great circle, as Tommy called it. Some things had remained the same; but more had changed. On Memorial Day back home there had been the parade, led by George Verney and Old Emil Clausen in their fine, broad-brimmed hats and dark blue uniforms, striding right behind the band. Old Emil had walked very stiffly, carrying his sword with his forearm hooked under the hilt, but Mr. Verney had smiled around him, and now and then waved to friends. Behind them came the Spanish War veterans, the First Nebraska Volunteers, and there was Uncle Bill, if he was home, sweating in his tight-fitting khaki and looking bowlegged in his gaiters; and then the horse-drawn float from Shurtleff's with several of the prettiest girls sitting on the heaped banks of flowers, giggling furtively. And later, back at the house, the veterans would gather on the porch and George Verney would set out the big dark square bottle—he only got it out twice a year, Memorial Day afternoon and Christmas Eve—and the little glasses with the knobs all over them, and offer them all a drink. They would seat themselves deliberately, the older men and the officers on the chairs and settee, the younger men on the steps, their choke collars unbuttoned, their hats tilted back. The ridges where their hats had been made firm red lines low across their foreheads. Mr. Verney would stand in the center of the porch then and raise his glass—he called it a pony—and say, “Here's to the Republic, boys—may she always have men worthy of her in her hour of need.” And they would all solemnly down their drinks. After a suitable interval George Verney would pass the bottle along, and the talk would begin, brief and monosyllabic at first, and then gathering pace and passion in reminiscence. He himself would be sent up to bed then, but for hours afterward he would lie awake, listening to the voices drifting up to him with the cigar smoke and the sharp, burned-clean odor of whiskey, talking of Shiloh and Missionary Ridge and El Caney and Balangiga and Punta Grande.

Those had been the voices, the names that had set his blood to dancing, that had molded him and thrust him off along his own long, tortuous, troubled road.

Destiny …

He rubbed his jaw, watching these younger, firmer faces, not listening. The world had changed: the world he had grown up in. He remembered his father sitting at the kitchen table, his face dark and block-like just outside the soft flood of light from the kerosene lamp, saying, “No, I couldn't do that. I couldn't do anything like that.” That was because a man named Fryeburg had come by to return some tools he couldn't keep paying for because he'd lost his crop of winter wheat. That had been when Carl Damon had owned the hardware store. He needed the money, but he knew the man needed the tools more. After half an hour and two steins of beer he'd been able to talk Fryeburg out of it and sent him home. And then when his father was sick, legless and wasting away, Fryeburg, who had moved out to Keith County near Ogallala, drove all the way to Walt Whitman in a buckboard in bitter weather, bringing a side of beef and two great hams. And other neighbors had come around with eggs and vegetables, and sat and talked softly in the overheated kitchen. It was right. It was the straight thing to do …

“You know what your grandfather did once?” he broke in on Joey, who was talking about the night assault across the Roer River. Their faces turned toward him, startled, deferential. “Some old friends, there were four of them, I think, came to him and asked him to invest some money for them, and he did. And later the company folded—it was one of those Great Lakes mining ventures, I believe—and they lost all their investment. And your grandfather insisted on paying for it. To the nickel. It strapped him for years, nearly broke him; but he did it.”

“Yes, I remember something about that,” Krisler answered. “Dad said they'd have been pretty well fixed if Grampa hadn't decided to pay them all off like that. He was an impulsive man, Grampa.”

“But it was a personal obligation, Joey …” He stopped; he had spoken with more heat than he'd meant to. Their faces were grave, a bit constrained; they watched him levelly. They thought he was a tiresome old fool who had to be humored. Did they? Well, Rank Hath Its Pomposities, as Ben had used to say. Or should it read: Paralysis?

“I know, Chief, but it seems to me his first obligation should have been to his own family. He wasn't legally obligated to reimburse them—they knew the chance they were taking.”

“You miss the point.” He felt nettled and professorial. “You weren't in danger of starving. Don't you see?—he saw it as a matter of responsibility, a point of honor … ”

“I'll tell you what I mean,” he went on. It suddenly seemed like a very important argument. “When we were driving to Erie in '29—that was right after your Dad and I had completed the Company Officers' Course at Benning—I stopped to get gas at a little town outside of Cincinnati. Sharonville, its name was. The owner said my left rear was soft, and offered to check it. I'd had a lot of tire trouble that day, and I thought he was making something out of nothing, maybe trying for a little extra work for himself, and I said it didn't matter, let it go. And he told me he'd take it off and check it, and if he didn't find a nail he'd put it back without charge. I said okay to that; and he found the nail and patched the tire … Now who does anything like that nowadays?”