by Dennis Foley
Michaelson quickly handed the folder to Hollister without opening it. “Everything you need to know is in there.”
Somewhere out in the darkness, through the open window, one of the LRP teams had a radio on. It was playing “The House of the Rising Sun.” Hollister scanned the paperwork—words jumped out at him: Lucas, Died of Wounds suffered in RVN; NOK: Margaret and Ellis Lucas, New Canaan, Connecticut; Marital Status: Single; Dependents: None …
He closed the folder and listened to The Animals for a moment, not aware that Michaelson had opened the footlocker next to his desk, pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels and a couple of mess hall cups.
Michaelson poured a long shot in each cup and pushed one in front of Hollister. “Here,” he said, gesturing to the cup. “Have yourself two fingers of R and R.”
Hollister lifted the cup and took a good-sized sip of the liquor. It assaulted his parched mouth and burned down his throat. He immediately felt the flush that it always gave him.
“You leave in the morning,” Michaelson said. “You have any questions?”
“Yessir. What about my platoon?”
“I’m pretty sure that Sergeant Davis can fill in for you while you are gone. The question is, who will fill in for Davis?”
“Camacho. He’s been ready for a team for a long while, sir.”
“Okay. Don’t worry about anything. Go help Lucas’s family. I’ll have a letter ready for you to take with you in the morning. You can tell them that I am recommending him for the Silver Star. From what I’ve been able to find out from the others on the team, he deserves it.”
After killing the rest of the booze, Hollister got to his feet and stared out the window at the dark night. A chopper was flying across the far side of the base perimeter. Its flashing lights triggered Hollister’s memory of Easy’s chopper carrying the dead body of the Air Force pilot—the strobe flashing.
“What’s the story on the Air Force flier we evac’d?”
“He’s alive. But that’s about as good as it’s going to be. Doc Tillotson talked to the hospital about an hour ago. He’ll keep the legs, for all that’s worth. They found out that he’s got some spinal damage, too,” Michaelson said.
Hollister dropped his head to think of the pilot. It seemed to him that the bad news was running ahead of all other news. “Oh” was all that he could muster. He raised the folder and changed the subject. “I’ll get my gear packed. I’m not sure about this. But I guess someone ought to go who knew him.”
“Try to squeeze some time for yourself out of whatever time Brigade gives you back in the World.”
“Hey, Lieutenant!”
He heard someone yelling, but Hollister wasn’t even sure what time it was. He had fallen asleep on his cot trying to read Doctor No. He had been trying to read it for weeks, but that night the exercise was just to distract him from Lucas and the rescue operation and Vietnam in general without using booze to dull the noise in his head.
It bothered him that he hadn’t finished a book since he’d been in country. He had always loved to read for pleasure when he was in high school and during his first years in the Army. Vietnam had cut into his Ian Fleming novels.
“Hey, Lieutenant,” two voices yelled from outside.
Hollister looked at his watch. It was almost two. The voices were clearly Doc Norris’s and Theodore’s. He got to his feet and stuck his head out the door of his hooch. There they stood, in all their drunken glory, each gripping a bottle of Jim Beam by the neck.
They managed two unsteady salutes and became very formal. Theodore spoke for both of them. “Sir, Team Two-three and Two-one are having a—a … a meeting. Yeah, a meeting. And we were sent by Allard and Davis. Oops! Sergeant Allard and Sergeant Davis, to invite you to the meeting.”
Hollister smiled. “Okay, if it’s an important meeting I’ll get over there in zero five.”
Theodore straightened up with an unsteady swaying. “No sir. We were instructed to escort you and to protect your flanks from any hostile fire in the area. We’ll wait here till you’re ready … sir.”
Having been to late night meetings before, Hollister knew that there would be no rational conversations for the next few hours.
The two teams had taken over the mess hall dining area. The building was everything they needed for their meeting. It had light, chairs, tables, and some ice.
Kendrick’s night shift was working in the kitchen area and wasn’t worried about the two teams getting stinko. It was becoming a ritual. Hollister entered, flanked by the two trying-too-hard-to-look-official LRPs.
Camacho was the first to spot the trio. He jumped to his feet, accidentally collapsing his folding chair behind him with a loud metallic clunk as he screamed, “Attench-hut!”
The ten LRPs and four spoons in the background snapped to a wide variety of positions of attention.
“Carry on. Please, as you were,” Hollister said.
They all immediately returned to what they were doing. Davis, Allard, and Camacho stood against one wall drinking while trying to maintain some faint vestige of dignity. The other, younger and more junior soldiers were carrying on the way young soldiers have done for centuries. War stories were picked up where they had left off. And topics like women and cars were reevaluated in the haze of beer and bourbon.
Vinson stepped up to Hollister as Theodore and Doc Norris broke for the beer cooler. “Sir, what’s yer poison? We got us Jim Beam and San Miguel. Davis has some buddy over at the PX that got us the sierra mike. It’s great to drink something out of a bottle instead of those rusty cans.”
“Beer’ll be good for me,” Hollister said.
Vinson started to walk toward the beer cooler when Hollister reached out and stopped him with a touch on his sleeve. “No. You finish yours. I can get my own.”
The gesture didn’t go unnoticed. Vinson caught another LRP’s eye as Hollister walked over to the iced beer and reached down into the elbow-deep ice water.
“Hey! Listen up! Hey! Shut the fuck up, you assholes!” Theodore yelled. The others quieted down and looked over.
Suddenly realizing his error, Theodore shot a glance at Hollister and said, “I, ah, I meant you … uh, us junior enlisted assholes.”
The room erupted in laughter and cheers. Then Theodore raised his hands again. “With the lieutenant here now, we have an impartial judge. He can do the job. Right? With him here we can move the tables around, act like stupid squids and start doing—”
“Carrier landings!” the others all chimed in at the tops of their voices.
Wiping beer from his lips, Hollister rolled his eyes. He had been through carrier landings as a young soldier.
Three of the more sober LRPs grabbed two of the long mess tables, moved them to the center of the room and placed them end to end. The others cleared the scattered chairs and other tables out of the way while Doc Norris poured beer on the tabletops.
“Hey! You guys fuck up my mess hall and you’ll be spending all morning cleanin’ it!” yelled the assistant mess sergeant from the kitchen area. His announcement was met with a barrage of hisses and boos.
As the booze was turning the setup into an uncoordinated effort, Davis, being the second ranking man in the room, took over. “Okay, most of you guys know the rules. You fuckin’ newbies just shut up and listen up.
“The deal is—each man starts his flight approach from the other end of the room. With your arms extending out to the side, shoulder high to increase your aerodynamics. In that posture, you will simulate a navy airplane coming in for an aircraft carrier landing.
“The tables will serve as the carrier deck. You must approach the deck at full speed, using your arms to stabilize your descent. At a point to be selected by you, you will vigorously leap into the air and make a belly-down landing on the beer-soaked tabletop.
“The object of the drill is to slide to the far end of the table and come to a complete stop with your nose exactly over the far edge of the second table. And I mean exactly! Duri
ng your landing you must not touch the table with your hands or arms or hook your toes or legs over the sides to slow your landing. Got that?”
The others yelled out, “Clear, Sergeant! Airborne!”
Davis finished. “Any man here who fails to come to the correct stop or touches the table with his hands or feet will be expected to immediately hit the floor, knock out ten good Airborne push-ups, get back to his feet, kill one cold San Miguel, and come around and do it again. And any arguments will be decided by the lieutenant. He has final say! Okay, Theodore. Yer first.”
Theodore handed another LRP what was left of his beer and a half-eaten can of Vienna sausages and backed up against the far wall. Once in position, he leaned forward, started making engine noises, and thrust out his arms. The others started clapping in unison and yelled “Go, go, go” as Theodore ran, full speed, toward the table, reached it, leaped into the air and belly flopped on a veneer of foamy beer.
They cheered loudly as Theodore slid freely down the length of the first table, overshot the end of the second table and crashed, face first, into a pile on the concrete floor beyond and below it.
Laughing hysterically, the others started screaming, “Knock ’em out! Go around! Kill that beer!”
Theodore did all three and joined the line that had formed near the back wall.
The landings continued for the better part of an hour. As they got drunker, they got worse at it and no one was able to stop. They looked like bums in their beer-soaked uniforms, but there was a smile on every face. They were simply stealing the moment from the war to have fun and blow off some of the tension.
Hollister was pleased to be included. But after a few beers laced with bourbon shooters, it was getting too late for him—remembering that he had to get an early start for Japan.
Japan. The word rang some bells in his head. He would be able to go to Japan, but he wouldn’t get a chance to enjoy any of it. He wondered if he’d have time to get something for Susan. Susan! He hadn’t let her know that he would be coming home. That would have to wait until he got to Japan. There was no way he could get a call through to her from Vietnam before he left.
The LRPs were getting drunker and louder. Hollister looked over at Davis and made a silent gesture. Davis motioned as if he were going to announce the lieutenant’s departure.
Hollister shook his head, pointed at his watch, then pressed the tip of his index finger to his lips.
Davis knew of his early morning mission, so he gave his boss a somber salute.
Someone knocked on the frame of Hollister’s hooch. “Sir, it’s 0430 hours, and you said that you wanted someone to wake you up.”
Feeling the chill in the damp morning air, Hollister slowly came out of his fog. Then he remembered—Japan. His head hurt. He sat up and grumbled, “Oh, yeah. Okay. Thanks. I’m up.” Hollister stood and immediately felt the uneasiness in his stomach.
Ten minutes later, Hollister was shielding his eyes from the bright lights inside the mess hall. As he started toward the thirty-gallon coffeepot on the field range, he looked around. The damage to the mess hall was moderate.
The floor was a limp goo of beer and gravy-colored mud. A chair was broken, a tabletop was delaminating before his eyes, and the area was littered with empties. That wasn’t going to go down well with several people in the chain of command. Before he could run through the available options to prevent his people from getting heat, he was interrupted.
“Don’t worry about it, sir,” Sergeant Kendrick said as he stepped up to the coffee urn and poured a cup for Hollister. “I sent one of my boys over to wake up Allard and Davis to invite them over here before we serve breakfast. I want to give them an opportunity to disappear all of this before it becomes a real problem.”
“I appreciate it, Sergeant Kendrick. They were just blowing off a little steam.”
“Oh, I have no problem with that, sir. I just want them to take their steam outa my mess hall now.
“Would you like some eggs, sir?” Kendrick asked.
Hollister tried to shake off the repulsive thought of the greasy offering. “No, I think that right ’bout now coffee is all I can handle. Thanks.”
Kendrick looked at Hollister and realized how hung over he was. He poked his thumb over his shoulder at the trashed dining area. “You part of all this carryin’ on last night, Lieutenant?”
“Let’s just say that I was in the cheering section when I should have been getting some rack time. Now, I’m paying for it. Big-time.”
Hollister felt the chill through the soles of his Corcoran jump boots. The metal floor of the C-130 was very cold after flying for three hours over the Sea of Japan. He tried getting up and walking around the cavernous interior of the plane to get some feeling back into his toes.
At the front of the aircraft he found a double-pot coffee maker that was held in place against the bulkhead by an ingenious combination of cargo strapping. There, a tired-looking load-master—an Air Force sergeant with an uncountable number of stripes—was pouring himself a cup. “You think that you might want some’a this shit, Lieutenant?”
“Yeah, anything dark and warm will do.”
Wrapping his hands around the sides of the cup for warmth, Hollister tried to ignore the smell and taste of coffee that had been on the burner far too long. He threw some of it back, gritted his teeth, and swallowed.
“Humpf,” grumbled the loadmaster. “You must be a desperate man. Going home? Your year over?”
“I’m going back TDY. I’ve got to pick up a friend’s body in Japan and escort it home.”
“Yeah, I see lots of that,” the loadmaster said matter-of-factly as he topped off his coffee mug, then climbed the short ladder into the cockpit—without saying another word to Hollister.
Hollister wandered over to the forward window. Bored, he bent down and looked out into the night. He could faintly see the outline of the horizon. It was purple above a crimson line that fell off to black. He looked at his watch. It was nine P.M. Vietnam time, but he had no idea what time it was in Japan. All he knew was that crossing open water in C-130s seemed to take forever.
It felt like it was well below freezing when Hollister walked down the tail ramp of the C-130 at Tachikawa Air Force Base. The roar of the four huge prop engines running down kept him from being able to talk to the loadmaster. But the loadmaster knew what the question would be anyway, and pointed to a small building between two of the maintenance hangars. Hollister smiled and thanked the rumpled airman.
“There’ll be a shuttle bus leaving from the front of this building in fifteen minutes that’ll take you to Camp Zama, sir,” an Air Force tech sergeant told Hollister as he pointed in the direction of the army hospital compound that was less than an hour away.
Hollister looked at the clock on the wall to get a fix on the local time and pulled the stem out on his watch to make the adjustment. He was not sure if he was ahead or behind on his sleep, but no matter what, he had never liked being awake at quarter of four in the morning—even in Japan.
Outside, the sky was overcast and snowflakes spat at Hollister. The field jacket in his B-4 bag would be a little bit warmer, but it looked like crap from months of being folded up in his duffel bag back in Vietnam. He decided to tough it out. The fresh air was crisp, and he figured that he needed to clear his head anyway. He was happy that the major pain of his dull hangover was almost gone as the shuttle bus pulled up.
Camp Zama was a small army post, well outside of Tokyo, that also housed a hospital. The hospital was an intermediate step on the way back to the States. Such hospitals were scattered throughout the Pacific, in Okinawa, the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii. Some of the wounded were patched up and sent back to Vietnam. Most were given a breather, some additional treatment, and then shipped to hospitals in the States as soon as they were fully stabilized.
Expecting the Graves Registration building to be filled with the dead soldiers’ bodies, Hollister was surprised when he found that it was only a small of
fice next to the baseball diamond.
“Lieutenant, here are your flight orders, customs forms, and transportation vouchers for air movement on commercial carriers once you reach CONUS,” the clerk said, handing Hollister the paperwork without looking up from behind the customer counter.
Hollister was just as happy. He really didn’t feel in any mood to discuss his task.
The clerk read from a typed-up briefing that took up several pages in a notebook and was protected by cracking plastic covers surrounding each yellowing page. He continued to read until he reached a blank line that had to be filled in according to the topic.
“You will have to contact … ah.” The clerk looked from the briefing book to the paperwork and found the exact entry he was looking for to finish his statement. “Callestone, Captain Callestone in New York City. He is the Survivor’s Assistance Officer appointed to take care of the deceased’s family needs.
“He will fill you in on what has been done for the family and give you the details of the family’s wishes for the remains.”
The clerk slapped the last of the paperwork on the countertop. “And here are your personal travel vouchers. You will be paid per diem and mileage for any official travel not covered by a military travel voucher.
“You will be leaving tomorrow by bus at 1620 hours. Please be here in time to get checked off by the driver.”
The clerk took a breath, but didn’t change his flat delivery. Hollister wondered how many hundreds of times he had done this.
“You will be expected to travel in Class A uniform during the performance of your escort duties. If you are missing any uniform items, the Quartermaster Sales Store is directly behind this building and is open during normal duty hours. Since you are an officer, you will be expected to pay for all missing items yourself.
“You will check in with our detachment at the airfield, in Building T-1542, to sign for the remains. You can stay at the BOQ that is down four buildings to your right as you get outside.
“The maid service in your BOQ will launder any clothing you need if you get it turned in by 1900 hours tonight.”