by Dennis Foley
As he considered his options, he turned off the range road leading to the housing area and headed for the Officers Club and the infamous Infantry Bar.
The Infantry Bar was a tradition for infantrymen at Fort Benning. It had gone through several moves and remodeling drills—still it was the IB, the Infantry Bar. The only stag bar on post, it was located in the basement of the main club and thus was windowless. It was a perfect watering hole, where officers could gather at the end of the day, drink, swear, and tell war stories. And given enough time in the IB, an officer could be part of, or at least witness, a good fistfight.
Another major feature of the IB was that it was one of the few places at Fort Benning where officers could go in fatigues. All these features made it the most popular after-work bar on post.
Careful to remove his patrolling cap before stepping off the top landing, Hollister descended the steep stairs to the bar. Custom was that anyone who entered the bar with his headgear on, or placed his headgear on the bar, was immediately obligated to buy the house a round. Lucky young lieutenants learned the expensive custom at someone else’s expense. Unlucky ones paid as much as a month’s salary to wet down up to sixty thirsty bar patrons. At $222.30, before taxes, a new lieutenant only made the headgear mistake once in a career.
“Hey, Hollister … you worthless bipod for an M16!” a voice yelled from the far end of the L-shaped bar.
Hollister looked over the heads of those seated at the bar, and several others who were standing behind the seated ones and saw a GMT-Master Rolex and a hand waving him over.
As he threaded himself through the others, he finally saw the face behind the mock insult. It was Captain Mike Taylor, an infantry aviator who had flown gunships in support of Hollister’s long-range patrol detachment in Vietnam. Taylor’s was a friendly face. He and Hollister had seen plenty of shooting together and were fond of teasing each other about their respective jobs. But underneath all the kidding, they were solid friends, each of them confident of the other’s reliability and happy to have him as a friend.
“Hey, Cap’n Mike. Any beer left? Or have you been here all afternoon?”
“Yeah … but y’er buying.”
Pulling out a stool next to Taylor, Hollister waved for the bartender to bring another pitcher of beer and a second glass.
Pointing at the empty pitcher, he asked, “Damn, you celebrating something or what?”
“Got my orders today.”
The announcement was not a surprise, but it still caused Hollister a sinking feeling in his gut. He looked at Taylor, expecting him to drop the other shoe.
“Got lucky.”
“Where you going?”
“Back.”
“Back? I thought you got lucky,” Hollister said, a little confused.
“I am lucky. I’m going back to Vietnam to a flying job… I was sweating out an advisory job with the little people.”
It was too common a worry for Hollister to be surprised. He nodded his head in agreement. “Yeah, word’s out, I guess. It’s all over the Ranger department. If you served with American units on your first tour, you’re going to MACV on the second trip across the pond.”
“I’d rather have my eyelid torn off with pliers than pull an advisor tour,” Taylor said, pouring himself a glassful from the new pitcher of beer.
“You know where you’re going?”
“Not yet. They told me that it was a gunship outfit, and I have to go to Cobra transition school en route.”
“Cobras?!”
“Yessir! There’ll be no more slow-movin’ Huey hogs for me. Soon enough, I’ll be a qualified, bona fide, Cong-killing, woman-charming, snake driver.”
“I saw a couple of them flying over the other day, going to the mad-minute demonstration at Ruth Range. I’d sure like to see one of those suckers in action.”
“They’re something else all right. I took a familiarization ride in one last month. What a machine! Cobras make the old gunships look like something out of the Stone Age. So it’s good news. U.S. unit and a snake-flying job.”
Taylor looked over his glass at Hollister. “You should get so lucky, my friend.”
Quiet for a long time, Hollister toyed with the condensation on the bottom of his beer glass. He touched it to the bar top, leaving a drop of water, and then dragged it into a straight line. After a couple of inches he would make another line parallel to the previous one. “I just know I’m going to get nailed with a MACV job.”
“Why don’t you just get your hat and go out and join the unwashed long-hairs out on the street. You can learn to be worthless and disorganized. You’ll fit right in,” Taylor said, voicing the commonly held attitude at Benning about the average American civilian.
“Oh … sure. Me, a civilian.”
“It’d be tough. You’d have to make hard decisions, like what color socks to wear in the morning, and who should be president, and whether you should buy a station wagon. Sure, you could even learn how to whimper and whine and drag your ass around, scratchin’ your crabs and demonstratin’ against fine, patriotic warriors like me.”
Putting the glass down, breaking the pattern of lines, Hollister looked up at Taylor and kicked down to a more serious tone.
“What the hell would I do? Only decent jobs there are need a college degree, and it’s gonna take me at least five years to get through it—working part-time.”
“If you don’t kill some long-hair at some campus demonstration.”
“Maybe if I just get the next tour behind me, Susan and I can get enough money put together to pay for college without me having to kill myself to afford it. Anyway, they aren’t letting anyone out now.”
“You got that right,” Taylor said, saluting the fact with his beer glass.
Hollister’s stated reasons were not the whole truth. He had spent hours and hours dwelling on his obligations to the army, to Susan, and to the soldiers he had served with and would serve with. He knew it was a foolish idea, but he felt guilty about just trying to cut and run. He felt there was an obligation to be true to those who had followed him into battle and risked their lives for him. Some of them had paid a very high price. He couldn’t just turn his back on them. But he didn’t want to discuss his arguments in such intimate detail at the IB.
Taylor laughed. “’Member Gratten?”
“Over at the School Brigade?”
“Yeah,” Taylor said. “He put in his papers to resign, and he got a pretty quick response out of Infantry Branch.”
“What’d they say?”
“Told him that they’d favorably consider his request and would allow him to hang up his green suit just as soon as he got back from his next tour in Vietnam.”
Looking up from his glass, Hollister made an uncertain face. “Was he on orders for Vietnam?”
“He is now,” Taylor said, then raised his glass and tossed the contents to the back of his throat. “Why don’t you just put your papers into bail and take your chances? If you stay, you’re going back. If you try to get out—you may be able to pull it off.”
“Yeah, Susan would like that shit.”
Taylor’s tone changed.
“So, how’s it going with her?”
“Man, I don’t know. She and I are okay, I guess. She’s just having trouble getting with the program. This man’s army is nothing like she expected. Amherst and Greenwich Village didn’t prepare her for this outpost on the nation’s frontier. Gotta hand it to her, though. She has been a real trooper. I know that so much of all this is eating her up inside, but she isn’t an anchor.”
“She’s pissed that we’re all going back, and she’s pissed about the war, huh?”
“No. She’s pissed that I might go back, and she’s pissed that she’s confused about the war,” Hollister countered.
“She isn’t alone. I’m havin’ my own troubles gettin’ a handle on it.” Taylor kidded him to soften the pain he saw in Hollister’s face.
“She’s smart. Real smart. She reads
everything about the war, and listens to all the crap we throw around, and she still can’t nail it. I think she knows what makes us tick. We’ve been there. And, in her mind, we wouldn’t be going back unless there was a reason, even if we can’t describe it.”
“Hell, I’m going back for the flight pay and the suntan and all the exotica I can suck up.”
Refilling his glass and silently signaling for another pitcher of beer, Hollister smiled at his friend, knowing he was trying to raise his spirits.
“If I believed that I’d blow all this off and really join one of those hippie communes.”
Raising his beer to the thought, Taylor mused, “Yeah, man, free love and no fuckin’ reveille! I could get used to that.”
“Thought that’s how aviators live normally,” Hollister jabbed.
The new pitcher of beer came, and Hollister stole a quick glance at his watch while Taylor poured two more.
“Worryin’ about gettin’ home late?” Without giving Hollister time to reply, Taylor continued, “Oh, yeah, I remember that shit when I was married. You know, of course, that there are only two kinds of aviators—divorced and gonna be divorced. Lucky you didn’t go to flight school.”
“Seems to be an epidemic here.”
Taylor pushed his glass away and leaned back on his stool. “You’re right. My guess is that more than half the married guys in my Advanced Course class have split the blanket with their ol’ ladies by now. We still have a couple of weeks for the other half to get their divorce papers in,” he added, half kidding.
“Not too reassuring, is it?”
“Well, look at it this way. At least you know that the gut-grindin’ Susan’s goin’ through is goin’ around. Not like she’s alone or something.”
“Doesn’t help.”
“Well, drink up then—and get your ass on home. Sittin’ here shootin’ the shit with me will only get you in deeper. You come in shit-faced, late, and scroungy as you are, and she’ll put your ass on listenin’ silence and short rations for sure.”
There was an unwritten code that among the brotherhood of the infantrymen no one would really complain about either their domestic situation or the fear of returning to war. They were each bound by the code that demanded of each of them a loyalty to those who were still serving in Vietnam. To bad-mouth the war was to malign those who were slogging through endless rice paddies. It was just considered bad form not to take it like a man.
The drive home to the Custer Terrace housing area only took a few minutes, but Hollister kept looking in the rearview mirror for any sign of MPs. To get stopped on any army post with alcohol on your breath was almost certainly the end of whatever promise your career held.
The drinking and driving consequences seemed to Hollister to be in direct conflict with the army’s acceptance and even expectation of officers’ drinking. Drinking was expected in celebration of promotions, christenings, weddings, retirements, prop blast ceremonies, and endless hail and farewell parties.
Nondrinkers were looked upon with suspicion, as if there were something wrong with them. But let an officer reeking of booze get pulled over by the MPs, and it was a slippery slope to removal from the army for behavioral irregularities.
No one ever got thrown out of the army for just a DWI. But the die had been cast once the first DR came across the offender’s commander’s desk. In no time there would be a letter of reprimand in the officer’s file. That would be followed by a marginal efficiency report, and that would be followed with a shitty assignment that would lead to further decline in the officer’s promotability. In short order, the offending officer would find himself doing poorly at jobs without status or ones that led to a file that showed little potential for higher responsibilities—and higher responsibilities were the goal of every infantry officer. Reduced potential meant certain recommendations that the officer be passed over for promotion or retention on active duty.
The Custer Terrace housing area was a cluster of fourplex, one-story brick houses for permanent party officers assigned to the garrison. Driving through the winding streets at absolutely no more than fifteen miles an hour was a seldom-broken rule.
Even those officers who might disdain regulations, and who might seek out opportunities to bend regulations to show their bravado and their skills, were loath to speed in a housing area filled with so many little children. Everyone who lived there wanted to feel that it was a sanctuary where his kids could run and play without fear of dangerous drivers.
There was a sparkle to each of the aging sets of quarters in the housing area. The glass in each window reflected sunlight without a trace of dirt or film. The wood trim that accented the traditional brick construction was bright, as if freshly painted. There were no junk cars, discarded sofas, haphazardly placed bicycles, or commercial advertising signs of any kind in the area.
In front of each fourplex a cutout in the sidewalk provided parking space for its tenants. People parked in their assigned parking spaces and expected others to do the same.
Also at each curb were neat, fenced-in setoffs that held just the right number of uncrumpled galvanized garbage cans for the number of tenants they served. Nowhere were there cans without lids or remnants of garbage that had not quite made it into the cans.
The policing of the garbage cans and enclosures was the responsibility of each of the families who used them. To disregard the orderliness of these facilities was to invite DRs for the infraction.
In front of each of the tiny housing units, the lawns were manicured to a uniform height and trimmed on the margins to specifications prescribed by the post engineers, but maintained by the units’ tenants. Leaves were all raked and removed. Shrubs and bushes were trimmed and well watered. And that compulsive neatness was topped off by the straight, trimmed edges where the grass met the sidewalks and curbs. Uniformity was paramount. Individuality didn’t exist in Custer Terrace.
As Hollister walked up the short sidewalk from his car to his front door, he glanced up at the wooden nameplate hanging from the near edge of the roof overhanging the front door. It read 1ST LT JAMES A. HOLLISTER in perfectly painted black block letters on a white background. It was the only thing that distinguished his own small quarters from the two that flanked them.
Looking at the sign, Hollister realized he would have to put in a requisition for a new one. He would be making captain soon, and it was expected that he replace the sign with a correct one as soon as possible.
“That you?” Susan called from the kitchen.
“Yeah. Home from the wars, hon,” Hollister answered as he dropped his car keys and his patrolling cap on the government-issue dining-room table just inside the front door.
In the kitchen Susan smiled at hearing Hollister’s voice. She wiped her hands on a dish towel and ran her fingers over her hair to make sure it was in place as he entered from the dining room-living room.
Susan met him at the side of the refrigerator and embraced him. “Hey, you’re home, and it’s still light out. Did the president call off the war?”
“Don’t you wish,” Hollister said as he released her and stepped back to take her in. “No, actually we had a schedule change, and I got caught in the right part of the squeeze. I only had to run half a leg of a patrol before I was replaced.”
He pulled Susan to him and reached out with his other hand to open the refrigerator behind her. “How we fixed for cold beer? A Ranger needs his nourishment.”
Frowning without letting him see her, Susan moved out of his way to let him get a beer. She turned back around and handed him the bottle opener. “Don’t you want to wait for dinner?”
“Sure, I’ll have one then, too,” he said as he pulled a pair of bottles out and handed one to Susan. “You’re off duty. Have one with me.”
Susan smiled at his boyish way and took the bottle. He took the opener and popped the tops on both bottles, making the caps snap as he did.
She took her beer and sipped slowly as she watched Jim. He was able to take
a long drink of beer while he squatted back onto a dining-room chair and quickly unlaced the top three sets of eyelets on his Corcoran jump boot.
As fast, he switched hands—beer for laces. He did the same to the other boot. It always amazed Susan how Hollister could lace or unlace his boots without ever looking down at what he was doing. He had once explained it to her. That it came from years of night operations where the luxury of seeing what he was doing was not afforded him. He had mastered many more important field skills over the years that she was happy had kept him alive.
He ran his index finger down the center of the tongue on his boots, loosened the remaining rows of crossed laces, and then slipped his feet out. Once out of the boots, he scrunched up his wool-clad toes and enjoyed the relief of being free from their confining dimensions and weight.
His hands and feet free, Hollister reached for his beer and took another long drink. As he did, Susan flinched a bit. “Linda Quinlin’s husband …”
“Next door? Yeah?”
“Got orders yesterday. She is really bummed out. The baby is due in three months, and he has to be in-country in two,” Susan said, as much to give him some news as to fish for some from him.
Hollister knew that Susan had her fingers on the assignments patterns that had been emerging. She had talked to many of the wives and probably had better G-2 than the men did.
“So how long’s he been back?”
“Nine months,” Susan said, with no note of judgment in her voice.
“Whew! That’s not much time. He’s hardly got his laundry back,” he said.
“That’s just too damn little turnaround time, Jimmy.”
Hollister took a sip of his beer and didn’t answer. Instead, he looked over on the dining-room table and spotted the small stack of mail that Susan had left unopened for him. “Anything but bills?”