Authors: Stephen Hunter
Time to Hunt (2 page)
Part II - Sniper Team Sierra-Bravo-Four
THE PARADE DECKWashington, DC
,
April–May 1971
HAPTER
O
NE
I
t was unseasonably hot that spring, and Washington languished under the blazing sun. The grass was brown and lusterless, the traffic thick, the citizens surly and uncivil; even the marble monuments and the white government buildings seemed squalid. It was as though a torpor hung over the place, or a curse. Nobody in official Washington went to parties anymore; it was a time of bitterness and recrimination.
And it was a time of siege. The city was in fact under attack. The process the president called “Vietnamization” wasn’t happening fast enough for the armies of peace demonstrators who regularly assailed the city’s parks and byways, shutting it down or letting it live, pretty much unchecked and pretty much as they saw fit. This month already, the Vietnam Veterans for Peace had commandeered the steps of the Capitol, showering them with a bitter rain of medals; more action was planned for the beginning of May, when the May Tribe of the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice had sworn to close down the city once again, this time for a whole week.
In all the town there was only one section of truly green grass. Some would look upon it and see in the green a last living symbol of American honor, a last best hope. Others would say the green was artificial, like so much of America: it was sustained by the immense labor of exploited workers, who had no choice in the matter. This is what we are changing, they would say.
The green grass was the parade ground, or in the patois of a service which holds fast to the conceit that all land structures are merely extensions of and metaphorical representations of the ships of the fleet, the “parade deck” of the Marine Barracks, at Eighth and I, Southeast. The young enlisted men labored over it as intensely as any
cathedral gardeners, for, to the Jesuitical minds of the United States Marine Corps, at any rate, it was holy ground.
The barracks, built in 1801, was the oldest continuously occupied military installation in the United States. Even the British dared not burn it when they put the rest of the city to the torch in 1814. To look across the deck to the officers’ houses on one side, the structures that housed three companies (Alpha, Bravo and Hotel, for headquarters) on the other, and the commandant’s house at the far end of the quadrangle was to see, preserved, a pristine version of what service in the Corps and service to the country theoretically meant.
The ancient bricks were red and the architecture had sprung from an age in which design was pride in order. Conceived as a fort in a ruder and more violent age, it had taken on, with the maturity of its foliage and the replacement of its muddy lanes with cobblestone, the aspect of an old Ivy League campus. An unironic flag flew above it at the end of a high mast; red, white, blue, rippling in the wind, unashamed. It had a passionate nineteenth century feel to it; it was somehow an encomium of manifest destiny, built on a little chunk of land that was almost an independent duchy of the United States Marine Corps, stuck a mile and a half from and on the same hill as the Capitol, where the unruly processes of democracy were currently being strained to the utmost.
Now, on a particularly hot, bright April day, under that beating sun, young men drilled or loafed, as the authorities permitted.
In the shade at the corner of Troop Walk and the South Arcade, seven men—boys, actually—squatted and smoked. They wore the uniform called undressed blues, which consisted of blue trousers, a tan gabardine short-sleeved shirt open at the neck, and white hat—“cover,” as the Corps called hats—pulled low over their eyes. The only oddity in their appearance, which to the casual eye separated them from other Marines, was their oxfords,
which were not merely shined but spit-shined, and gleamed dazzlingly. The spit shine was a fetish in their culture. Now the young Marines were on a break and, naturally, PFC Crowe, the team comedian, was explaining the nature of things.
“See,” he explained to his audience, as he sucked on a Marlboro, “it’ll look great on a résumé. I tell ’em, I was in this elite unit. I needed a top-secret security clearance. We trained and rehearsed for our missions, and then when we went on them, in the hot, sweltering weather, men dropped all around me. But I kept going, goddammit. I was a hero, a goddamn hero. Of course what I
don’t
tell them is, I’m talking about … parades.”
He was rewarded with appropriate blasts of laughter from his cohorts, who regarded him as an amusing and generally harmless character. He had an uncle who was a congressman’s chief fund-raiser, which accounted for his presence in Company B, the body-bearer company, as opposed to more rigorous and dangerous duties in WES PAC, as the orders always called it, or what the young Marines had termed the Land of Bad Things. He had no overwhelming desire to go to the Republic of South Vietnam.
Indeed, in all of Second Casket Team, only one of the seven had seen service in RSVN. This was the noncommissioned officer in charge, Corporal Donny Fenn, twenty-two, of Ajo, Arizona. Donny, a large and almost freakishly handsome blond kid with a year of college behind him, had spent seven months in another B Company, 1/9 Bravo, attached to the III Marine Amphibious Force, in operations near and around An Hoa in I Corps. He had been shot at many times and hit once, in the lungs, for which he was hospitalized for six months. He also had something called, uh, he would mumble, uh,
brnzstr
, and not look you in the eye.
But now Donny was short. That is, he had just under thirteen months left to serve and by rumor, at any rate, that meant the Corps would not in its infinite wisdom ship
him back to the Land of Bad Things. This was not because the Corps loved his young ass. No, it was because the tour of duty in ’Nam was thirteen calendar months, and if you sent anyone over with less than thirteen calendar months, it hopelessly muddied the tidiness of the records, so upsetting to the anal-retentive minds of personnel clerks. So for all intents and purposes, Donny had made it safely through the central conflict of his age.
“All right,” he said, checking his watch as its second hand hurtled toward 1100 to signify the end of break, “put ’em out and strip ’em. Put the filters in your pockets, that is if you’re a faggot who smokes filtered cigarettes. If I see any butts out here, I’ll PT your asses until morning muster.”
The troops grunted, but obeyed. Of course they knew he didn’t mean it; like them, he was no lifer. Like them, he’d go back to the world.
So as would any listless group of young men in so pitiless an institution as the Marine Corps, they got with the program with something less than total enthusiasm. It was another day at Eighth and I, another day of operations on the parade deck when they weren’t on alert or serving cemetery duty: up at 0-dark-30, an hour of PT at 0600, morning muster at 0700, chow at 0800, and by 0930, the beginning of long, sometimes endless hours of drill, either of the funeral variety or of the riot-control variety. Then the duty day was done: those who had assignments did them, and otherwise the boys could secure (the married could live off base with wives; many of the unmarried shared unofficial cheap places available on Capitol Hill) or lounge about, playing pool, drinking 3.2 in the enlisted men’s bar or going to the movies on the Washington PX circuit or even trying their luck with women in the bars of Capitol Hill.
But the luck was always bad, a source of much bitterness. This was only partially because Marines were thought of as baby killers. The real reason was hair: it was, in the outside world, the era of hair. Men wore their locks
long and puffed up, usually overwhelming their ears in the process. The poor jarheads—and all the ceremonial troopers of the Military District of Washington—were expected to be acolytes to the temple of military discipline. Thus they offered nearly naked skulls to the world—white sidewalls, it was called—except for a permitted patch no more than three-quarters of an inch up top. Their ears stood out like radar bowls. Some of them looked like Howdy Doody, and no self-respecting hippie chick would deign spit at them, and since all American girls had become hippie chicks, they were, in Crowe’s memorable term, shit out of luck.
“Gloves on,” Donny commanded, and his men, as they rose, pulled on their white gloves.
Donny started them through another long fifty minutes of casket drill. As body bearers, all were on the husky side. As body bearers, none could make a mistake. It seemed meaningless, but a few—Donny, for one—understood that they did in fact have an important job: to anesthetize the pain of death with stultifying ritual. They had to hide the actual fact—there was a boy in the box going into the ground of Arlington National Cemetery forever, years before his time, and to what end?—with pomp and precision. And Donny, though an easygoing guy in most respects, was determined that in this one aspect, they would be the best.
So the team turned to, under his guidance and soft but forcefully uttered commands: they walked through the precisely choreographed steps by which a flag-draped box of boy was smartly removed from the hearse, which in the rehearsal was only a steel rack, aligned by its bearers, carried with utter calm dignity to the grave site, laid upon a bier. Next came the tricky flag folding: the flag was snapped off the box by six pairs of disciplined hands and, beginning with the man at the boot of the casket, broken into a triangle which grew thicker with each rigid fold as it passed from man to man. If the folding went right, what was finally deposited in Corporal Fenn’s hands was a perfect
triangle, a tricorn, festooned on either side with stars, with no red stripe showing anywhere. This was not easy, and it took weeks for a good team to get it right and even longer to break in a new guy.
At this point, Corporal Fenn took the triangle of stars, marched with stiff precision to the seated mother or father or whoever, and in his white gloves presented it to her. An odd moment, always: some recipients were too stunned to respond. Some were too shattered to notice. Some were awkward, some even a little starstruck, for a Marine as good-looking as Donny, with a chestful of medals hanging heavily from his dress tunic, his hair gone, his hat as white as his gloves, his dignity impenetrable, his theater craft immaculate, is indeed an awesome sight—almost like a movie star—and that charisma frequently cut through the grief of the moment. One broken mom even took his picture with an Instamatic as he approached.
But on this run-through, the corporal was not pleased with the performance of his squad. Of course it was PFC Crowe, not the best man on the team.
“All right, Crowe,” he said, after the sweat-soaked boys had stood down from the ritual, “I saw you. You were out of step on the walk-to and you were half a beat behind on the left face-out of the wagon.”
“Ah,” said Crowe, searching for a quip to memorialize the moment, “my damn knee. It’s the junk I picked up at Khe Sahn.”