MATT HELM: The War Years

by Keith Wease

  "On the other hand, when you've got your back to the wall you don't waste time figuring the odds. If your life is at stake, you just blow away the guy in front of you and grab his weapon if yours is going dry and start walking and keep firing. Eventually you're either out of there or dead. And if you're dead, they'll remember you, those who're left standing. They'll remember how hard you were to put down, and how many you took down with you; and maybe they won't be quite so eager to tackle the next guy from your outfit who comes along. We call it public relations. We're a bunch of screwballs. Certain things were left out of us, or trained out of us, or beaten out of us. Like a normal reverence for human life, and that includes our own human lives. In other words, we were taught that if we gotta go, well, we gotta go; let's just see how much company we can take to hell with us."

  While he had been talking, I was visualizing the situation, feeling I'd been there with him. You don't get that feeling from someone who is only teaching theory. There was a brief silence before he continued with the class, when I had the distinct feeling that he had not so much been talking to us as he'd been remembering lost comrades in another place.

  And speaking of Karl, he'd been the second of our group to be promoted to instructor status. We spent the entire time brushing up on our German, both in formal classes, which Karl had been quickly drafted to teach, in the field and in our spare time. We'd all been exposed to German at one time or another - apparently that was another criterion Mac used - and were all fluent by the time we graduated. It was what you could call an essential part of working undercover in Germany, or German-occupied territory. We also practiced French and Italian. I'd had German and French in college, pretty much standard with journalism majors, and could speak pretty good Spanish after growing up in New Mexico. As I've previously indicated, I also learned Swedish from my parents, after a fashion. But I seemed to have a mental block when it came to Italian - maybe it was too close to Spanish and I got confused. In any case, Mac never sent me to Italy - I spent the entire war in England, France and Germany.

  There were occasional fights, but those were broken up fairly quickly by the instructors at first, and by the rest of us as our training progressed - we were getting too skilled at murder and mayhem to allow a fight to go much beyond the pushing and swinging stage. Somebody could die. Toward the end of the course, we'd pretty much worked out all the petty disagreements and could live with one another - self control was high on the list of subjects taught.

  There was one other subject taught during the course. It was considered the most important and wasn't so much a class as an ongoing harassment - my word, not theirs. It was called preparedness or alertness or some such title. The way it was done was this: you'd be walking innocently between buildings at the school, or having a beer at the canteen, and you'd be chatting with an off-duty instructor in a friendly manner. Suddenly, smiling, patting you on the back and telling you what a swell guy you were and how he'd never had a pupil like you, he'd produce an unloaded gun and shove it in your side. At least you hoped the gun was unloaded. At that place you were never quite sure. And it wasn't just the instructors; it could be the guy you bunked with, or the pretty girl at the canteen. Your job was to react and react fast, even if it was Mac himself. If you wasted any time in conversation, you flunked the course.

  We'd been taught how to break a strangle-hold, either with a smashing upward drive of both arms - hands locked together - or finger by finger. Somehow, the classroom training made it seem perfectly logical and relatively easy … until someone snuck into your room at night and grabbed you by the neck. The combination of sleep fog and instant unadulterated terror drove home the lesson in a way classroom training would never do.

  It made for an interesting, if stressful, two months…

  Chapter 8

  There's a big mystique associated with seamanship. If you weren't born in a forecastle in the middle of a hurricane and didn't cut your teeth on a marlinespike, you'll never qualify. Well, hell, they told me just about the same thing about horses when I was a kid. The fact is, there are people with vested interests in just about every sport who get a big kick out of making their particular athletic activity seem too difficult for ordinary mortals to comprehend, let alone master. I've been known to tell beginners how hard it is to shoot straight, myself. Actually, making a boat or horse go where you want it to, or making a gun go bang in approximately the right direction, isn't all that tough once you've decided not to let the experts intimidate you. Sailing, however, seems to attract an inordinate share of these unforgiving experts. You've got to call everything by the right name or the damn boat will sink like a rock. At least that's the impression I got from the dockside geniuses.

  We had been sent to Annapolis for a two-week course in small-boat handling for spooks who might be put ashore on strange coasts and were learning to do things the Navy way, on the water, at least.

  We'd each been given a two-week leave before reporting to Annapolis. I'd spent part of mine in Albuquerque with an old friend - well, girlfriend - who was willing to overlook our last disagreement. She hadn't appreciated, nor understood, my sudden decision to join the Army. She thought it was just terrible that men had to kill each other and why did I have to stoop to that level? I think Kathy also had other plans for me which involved a ring and a church, but that was strictly a one-way proposition. I avoided the subject as much as possible to keep the peace, but anyone who calmly eats meat of any kind while railing against the hunters who kill those poor animals is not going to figure much in my long-range plans - especially matrimony.

  I always swore that the first time I met a girl with smoke still curling up from the barrel of her rifle, a hunting knife in her hand and blood up to her elbows from dressing out her kill, I would propose on the spot. I knew there was at least one like that out there somewhere. My life would have been a cruel joke if there wasn't. Meanwhile, while I was waiting for my dream girl, simple biology played its own jokes on me. I seemed to be constantly getting involved with otherwise intelligent females who looked at me in horror when I insisted on my annual hunting trip. You'd think I would have found one who, although not sharing my interests to the point of joining me, would at least be tolerant enough to indulge my infrequent forays into the wilds. The closest I ever came was one who condescended to join me on a fishing trip, but refused to touch a worm or a fresh-caught fish. She was, however, perfectly willing to eat the fish after I did the necessary preliminary work, including the cooking.

  I'll admit I don't understand this aversion on the part of the current female population to harm an animal which, for thousands of years, had provided sustenance to their ancestors. It seemed to me we were breeding most of the survival instincts out of the human race. I can't remember anything that startled me more than one episode during training. I'd found myself being attracted to Stella, despite her attire. Well, the fact that she was the only female in sight might have had something to do with it - I'm human, regardless of some opinions to the contrary. She might have been inexperienced with firearms, but put a blade or a garrote in her hands and she was sudden death. She got carried away in one practice session and damn near strangled me when I failed to get my hand between the loop and my neck. She was concentrating so much that Rasmussen, the instructor for the class, had to stop her before she did some permanent damage. She immediately apologized and, far from being upset, I was looking at her with a new respect.

  Later that night, a few of us were sitting around the canteen, discussing various hunting experiences. Stella came by and I half-jokingly - if she'd accepted I would have gladly followed through - suggested she join me in a deer-hunting trip after training to give her some practice with a real live target. She looked at me in astonishment and coldly stated, "I would never kill an innocent animal!"

  I thought she was joking back at first until I saw the look on her face. She was actually disgusted with the thought of killing a deer, but apparently had no qualms - witness my sore neck - about
strangling a fellow human being. I'd met several hunters who had serious problems with killing humans, and even thought the death penalty was immoral, but this was the first time I'd run into the reverse. I had obviously been born in the wrong century. At least I wasn't alone. The guys sitting with me seemed almost as flabbergasted as I was. That effectively killed any further ideas I had concerning any kind of amorous relationship with Stella.

  Anyway, between Stella and my long abstinence, the pressure had been building up, so to speak, and Kathy looked pretty good to me. She'd decided to forgive me and give me a proper send-off to war. It was nice for a while, and biology is a fairly reliable source of motivation, but when you've run with the wolves you kind of lose interest in cocker spaniels, bright and docile and well-trained though they may be. A few days before my leave was up, I told her goodbye and headed up in the mountains for a fishing trip with a rented pick-up and a small motorboat. I figured to get in a little practice with small boats and indulge myself - I didn't think I'd get a chance to do much fishing again for quite a while.

  I arrived at Annapolis, rested, confident and relatively free of sexual tension. I was looking forward to the small-boat training. Imagine my surprise… To me, living in the land-locked southwest, a small boat was a twelve-foot rowboat with an anemic little trolling motor attached as opposed, say, to an eighteen-footer with twin outboards. These guys measured small on a scale that included destroyers, carriers and cruisers.

  We spent the first three days in a classroom, looking at pictures and memorizing the names of things - our instructor was one of those who insisted on the right terminology before he would allow us aboard. Finally we loaded up in a military bus and headed for the dock. There were seven of us from Mac's outfit, along with an assortment of shady-looking characters from - I assumed, since they weren't talking any more than we were - some other undercover agencies. Two of our group - Gene and Derek, if it matters - had been recruited from the Navy and had graduated from Annapolis, rendering small-boat training a tad redundant. The two of them, together with Charles, an Army Air Corps pilot - the code name probably came from Lindbergh, given Mac's dry sense of humor - had the slightly pompous sense of self-importance which seems to be prevalent - not to mention irritating to the rest of us - among people who have developed highly-specialized skills, especially skills involving large killing machines. In fairness, I suppose I sounded fairly pompous myself when teaching the others the finer points of the three-hundred yard shot from a prone rest. By now, I guess you're beginning to get the idea that we're not noted for brotherhood and companionship and esprit de corps and you're right. In the more traditional armed forces, they've got discipline. It must be nice. All we've got is temperament.

  We got off the bus, accompanied by our instructor and two midshipmen who had been hastily recruited to repair our mistakes before they got fatal - well I understand that overturning a sailboat is not necessarily a disaster as they don't sink without a lot of help, but I've never felt that strongly about my swimming abilities. I'm built all wrong and tend to sink like a rock if I stop moving. My dad had tried to teach me something called the "dead man’s float", a nomenclature that, had I relied upon the technique, would have been more literal than descriptive.

  The boat was up on shore when we first saw her, as part of our training was to get her in the water. Why we needed that particular talent, I don't know. I suppose that, as usual, Mac had been less than totally honest as to how the training was to be put to use, and they had assumed we were to learn everything there was to know about sailing, including the manual labor part of it. Twenty-eight feet long on deck, with a bowsprit adding another couple of feet, she was sandwiched in between two larger and racier powerboats that made her look quite small, but sturdy and seaworthy, by comparison. The mast seemed very tall, however. The name on the transom was Betty, which seemed rather unoriginal.

  Setting sail is, I believe, supposed to be a five-minute job on a boat the size of Betty. It took us well over two hours. All the lines seemed to go to the wrong places, and if they were correctly led, we found them tangled in the rigging overhead when we tried to haul on them. The mast was equipped with a rope ladder, so you could climb up to fix things at the top, but then the ladder seemed to have a devilish affinity for any rope that flopped within range. Nothing worked right the first time, or even the second, but at last we had the little sail hoisted forward of the mast and the big one hoisted aft of it, reasonably taut and pretty. Actually I think they're called the forestaysail and the mainsail, respectively, but I won't guarantee it.

  We sped out of the harbor at a gentle two knots with an occasional surge to three. Hardly America's cup performance, but good enough for a few landlubbers feeling their cautious way toward seamanship. Once we got far enough out, they had us break out the real stuff, something called a Genoa jib, affectionately known as Jenny. With Betty pitching gently in the slow swells, we had to crawl out onto the precarious bowsprit - my job, naturally - and set the giant as it flapped wildly. It took an hour to get the big sail up and organized to our instructor's satisfaction. Finally we had to tidy up the foredeck and bring down the little forestaysail and roll it neatly again, because, he said after careful study, it was too small to pull worth a damn under the conditions and it disturbed the wind for Jenny. Taking the helm himself, he had us crank in a bit on this winch and ease that sheet a touch - it took fifteen minutes more before he pronounced himself satisfied with all adjustments.

  It's the great sailboat fallacy, as far as I'm concerned. It's a pleasant way of getting around on the water, it's nice and quiet, and the wind is free although the sails damn well aren't; but fast it isn't, so why not just relax and glide along at three knots instead of beating your brains out to make three and a quarter? Then I decided that this was the wrong attitude. After all, it was a useful educational experience for me, and the others seemed to be enjoying it, so why spoil the fun? With this attitude, I was able to enjoy the rest of the course and actually learned something. By graduation time, I could handle the boat as well as the rest of them, so long as I was left alone to do the job and not remember the damn names of everything, a particularly snobbish attitude for a guy who gets upset whenever someone refers to a cartridge as a bullet.

  The last day, we enjoyed the full U.S. Naval Academy Band giving Sousa hell as the midshipmen passed in review on the banks of the Severn. It was a stirring sight; however, I gave thanks to whatever impulse prompted me to join the Army, a hell of an attitude given my Viking ancestry.

  Chapter 9

  We flew to London via military transport, in uniform and carrying orders and ID cards which looked real. Well, I suppose they were. It's not considered counterfeiting if you use real forms with official seals. The fact that the unit assignments and specialty descriptions were false didn't make them less real. And, on the small chance that anybody checked, there were real records back in Washington which backed up the orders and IDs.

  I wasn't sure whether or not to be happy about flying rather than sailing across the Atlantic. On the one hand, flying was faster, thus making my discomfort shorter. However, I was about ten times more scared of flying than sailing, so I guess things evened out. Given a choice, I would prefer to drive but the last I heard, there were no bridges spanning the Atlantic. Everybody's got their own hang-ups - heights and depths were mine - and the fact that I was happier doing a hundred and fifty miles an hour on a racetrack in a souped-up hot rod, rather than flying or sailing, didn't seem at all inconsistent to me.

  I once knew a guy who'd cheerfully climb a vertical mountain cliff with a mile of empty space below him and only a rope and a few long nails - I think they're called pitons - between him and certain death. He called it a hobby. He also climbed stairs - he was scared to death of elevators or any other enclosed space. I've also heard of lion-tamers who were afraid of snakes. The next time you feel like criticizing someone for an unreasonable fear, remember that the victim knows it's unreasonable, but just can't help
it. He just has to learn to live with it. That's the way I am about planes. I know that it's silly, that the safety record for planes is much better than for automobiles but I still grip the armrests until my knuckles turn white on take-offs and landings and, when given a choice, always opt for an aisle seat, preferably over a wing.

  This was the longest flight I'd had to date and the only way I got through it was to sleep most of the time. That's my greatest talent. I can usually sleep anytime and anywhere, given half a chance. Once we landed, I limped off the plane painfully - those seats were not really made for sleeping, especially when your legs are a full foot longer than the space provided for them.

  Vance was there to meet us, which surprised me at first. Later, he explained that each group of instructors stayed with one class all the way into the field. That made sense after I thought about it. It provided continuity of training, while ensuring that no one instructor knew too many of Mac's agents, for security reasons. It also made me wonder who could take over in the event something happened to Mac, but I decided it didn't matter - without Mac there was no group.

  We got everything loaded and took off in the dark - daylight had come and gone while we were in the air, with the sun disappearing as we landed. As London was blacked out, we had no idea where we were going. Three hours later we arrived, were greeted by the rest of the instructors, off-loaded and assigned sleeping quarters, with orders to meet in the cafeteria next to the hangar at oh seven hundred.