The Berets

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Can you think of anything else?” Taylor asked the personnel sergeant.

  “Advance pay?”

  “Thirty days advance pay,” Taylor said. “Do all that right now, Phil.”

  “Can’t you hear the rattle of my typewriter?”

  “Now we’ll run you out to McCall and you can pick up your gear,” Taylor said to Wagner as he led him out of the headquarters toward a jeep. “In the morning the paperwork will be done. I know the sergeant in post housing, so you can move your sister in tomorrow, get her settled, and then go to D.C. the day after tomorrow. Sound all right?”

  “Fine,” Wagner said. “Thank you very much, Sergeant Major Taylor.”

  “Listen, don’t let what Colonel Mac said bug you too much.”

  “I understand him,” Wagner said.

  “I don’t think you do,” Taylor said. “I soldiered with him in War Two. When he was an enlisted man. I was with him at Anzio. We were Pathfinders. What it was, Wagner, believe me, was that he knows what it’s like to be busted. He thought you were just being a little stupid about not taking a good deal when one was offered.”

  “With respect, Sergeant Major,” Wagner said, “I think you are wrong.”

  “I am?”

  “Lieutenant Colonel MacMillan is a soldier. A very good soldier. In almost direct proportion to how good a soldier a man is, he has contempt for a turncoat. I am in the unfortunate position of having to agree with him.”

  “I think you’re full of shit, Sergeant,” Sergeant Major Taylor replied. “And also dumb, if you haven’t figured out yet that we’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys. Or did you come through the wall because they caught you with your hand in the officers’ club cash box?”

  “Of course not,” Wagner said.

  “So far as I’m concerned,” Taylor said, “a turncoat is somebody who changes sides when it looks like his side is about to lose.”

  “Perhaps you are right,” Wagner said.

  Taylor did not feel that Wagner had been altogether convinced of the logic of his argument.

  XIV

  (One)

  Camp McCall, North Carolina

  2005 Hours, 4 February 1962

  Private Geoffrey Craig had been retired for the evening for almost an hour when he was summoned to duty. It was the first time in forty-eight hours that he had either undressed before retiring or slept within the relative comfort of a sleeping bag, mountain; on a cloth, ground; beneath a shelter half. It was in fact the first time he had had his clothes off in forty-eight hours, the previous two days having been spent acquiring the skills necessary to move cross-country under adverse conditions (in this case, snow mixed with freezing sleet), using a compass.

  Before retiring, it had been necessary for him to infiltrate into the cadre area to steal a second shelter half from the supply room. Following the sudden and unexplained departure of PFC Karl-Heinz Wagner, he had no buddy, and thus only half of the two shelter halves necessary to form a pup tent. The cadre having proven themselves totally unconcerned with his problems, he had the option of finding what shelter he could from his shelter half or of acquiring a second half.

  It had been constantly reiterated that the first qualities a Green Beret must have were self-reliance and resourcefulness. He had taken that to heart, his conviction buttressed by his awareness that unless he got the second half to make a pup tent, he was going to sleep under a blanket of snow and freezing rain. The obvious thing to do was steal a shelter half, and he had, and he was not going to concern himself for the moment with the shit that was going to hit the fan when the cadre supply sergeant found that the padlock had been torn off the supply quonset, a shelter half had been stolen, and a case of ten-in-one rations broken into and pilfered.

  Also, Private Craig had had damned little to eat in the past forty-eight hours, and he had concluded that it was just as well to be hung for a wolf as a lamb. After all, what could they do to him? Send him to the John Wayne Course at the Camp McCall School for Boys?

  “Drop your cock and pick up your socks, Candy-Ass,” the cadre sergeant said to him. “Your beloved country has need of your services.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

  “Yours not to reason why, Candy-Ass,” the cadreman said. “Yours but to get your ass out of that bag before I shovel snow in it.”

  He wondered if the theft had already been discovered and if he had been discovered to be the culprit. If that was the case, they were liable to roast his ass over a slow fire.

  Under the circumstances, he decided, that might not be as bad as it sounded.

  He dressed in winter underwear over his T-shirt and shorts, and with difficulty managed to get his feet in his mostly dry and thus quite stiff jump boots. He had a great deal of difficulty in lacing the boots. It was as dark as the womb in his pup tent, and his fingers were wooden from the cold.

  Finally he zipped the sleeping bag shut, crawled out of the pup tent, and put on his field jacket. It was hard as concrete, and he wondered if the goddamned snow-soaked sonofabitch was actually frozen. He had a hell of a time getting the zipper ends together with his wooden fingers.

  “One must always try to remember, mustn’t one,” the cadreman said, “that it is extremely difficult to shoot the bad guys if one has forgotten one’s rifle?”

  “Shit!” Private Craig said. He bent over and pulled his M-14 from beneath the pup tent and slung it over his shoulder, then followed the cadreman off into the dark. He had been issued a flashlight, but he had forgotten it, and he couldn’t go back for it now.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I am going to bed,” the cadreman said. “You’re going to Fort Bragg.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “The way this system works is that the privates have to do what the sergeants want them to do,” the cadreman said. “You may have noticed that you are a private.”

  A supply detail, Private Craig decided, a one-man goddamned supply detail. He was going to be put in the back of a three-quarter-ton truck and have his ass frozen off between here and Bragg, where he would load something heavy, like cases of groceries, onto the three-quarter-ton and then have his ass frozen all the way back to McCall, where he would then be permitted to unload the heavy cases of groceries.

  When they got to the motor pool the first sergeant was there. For a moment, until he realized that the cadre had all sorts of things, like electric lights, that made it possible for them to stay up after the sun went down, he was surprised to see him up so late.

  “Two envelopes, Craig,” the first sergeant said to him, holding one up in each hand. “One goes to Headquarters, and the address is on the other side. You will deliver them and then return. Can you remember all that, or would you like to take notes?”

  “I think I can remember it,” Geoff said.

  “You’d better,” the first sergeant said. And then he said something that for him was extraordinarily compassionate and tender. “You don’t have to rush back here. Why don’t you take a shower and a shave while you’re on post? You smell like a leprous goat.”

  “Who’s going to drive me?” Craig asked.

  “I couldn’t steel myself to ask one of my delicate cadreman to drive all that way through the ice and snow,” the first sergeant said. “Take my jeep.”

  It was as cold as a witch’s teat on the twenty-mile trip back to Fort Bragg, even though Geoff put up the hood on his field jacket and pulled the cord so tight that only his nose stuck out of the opening. He had to hold his head very carefully so that he wouldn’t be blinded if he moved it within the hood.

  He delivered the envelope to the Charge of Quarters in the headquarters building, and then asked if there was someplace he could take a shower.

  “You better deliver the other envelope before you worry about taking a shower.”

  Geoff looked at the other envelope. It was addressed to Apt 2C, Building Q-404, 14 Carentan Terrace.

  “Where is this?” he asked, showing
the envelope to the charge of quarters.

  “NCO housing area,” he was told. “Go onto the main post, drive past the main post theater on your left, and then turn left toward the division area.”

  “What the hell is this, anyway?”

  “How the hell would I know?”

  Building Q-404 turned out to be a two-story frame building—a duplex, if that was the word—with two apartments on each floor of each half of the building. Deciding he didn’t dare leave the rifle in the jeep, he slung it over his shoulder and climbed the stairs to the second floor.

  The door of 2-C had a sign on it: S/SGT. WAGNER.

  He wondered who the hell Staff Sergeant Wagner was, and what was his importance to the system that he got personal messenger service from Camp McCall. He knocked at the door and waited. He could hear the sounds of television in other apartments and the sound of a kid giggling in delight, and then he heard footsteps inside the apartment, and the rattle as a door chain was unlocked.

  “Ach du Leiber Gott!” Ursula said when she saw him. She covered her mouth with her hands.

  “Jesus Christ!” Geoff said.

  Ursula surprised him by throwing her arms around him, right around the dirty, cold field jacket.

  In a moment, as if suddenly aware of what she had done, she said, “I’m so glad to see you.” There had been time, before she broke away, for him to feel the warmth of her back through her bathrobe.

  “Where’s Karl-Heinz?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They sent him someplace he couldn’t tell me.”

  “Whose apartment is this?”

  “His—ours. They made him a staff sergeant, and I am entitled to live here.” She looked at him, met his eyes, and asked, “What are you doing here?”

  He took the envelope from his field-jacket pocket and handed it to her.

  “What’s this?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Come in, God, what’s the matter with me? You look frozen. Let me get you a cup of coffee. You want something to eat?”

  She led him into the kitchen, put water in a kettle, and turned the stove on.

  She turned to look at him, and there was movement beneath her nightgown and bathrobe, and he knew that she was naked beneath it.

  “Take off your jacket,” she said. “You’re not going anywhere until you’re warmed up.”

  “I think I’m in love with you,” he said.

  “You’re a fool,” she said. “A young boy and a fool. I don’t want you ever to say something like that again.” She paused, as if considering what she had said. “Love? How can you even think of love? You’re a fool!”

  She turned angrily from him and found a small jar of instant coffee.

  “Do you want me to go?”

  “I want you to take off your jacket and warm yourself,” she said.

  He took the field jacket off and hung it on the back of a chair. The apartment was completely furnished, simply but completely. He decided that since they didn’t have any money, the furniture belonged to the army.

  “Tell me about Karl-Heinz,” he said.

  “What do you know?” she asked.

  “All he said to me was that he was going on TDY and could he borrow the Volkswagen.”

  “It’s in back,” she said. “I run the engine every morning to keep the battery charged. It was dead when he went to get it.”

  “You’re not driving it? Why not?”

  “Because I am not the good driver, and I could not pay if I hurt it.”

  “It’s insured, you drive it,” he said. “It’s better for it if you drive it, and I’ll be out in the woods for another goddamned month.”

  “If that would be best,” she said.

  “Tell me about Karl-Heinz,” he said again.

  “He wouldn’t tell me where he was going, but I think Germany.”

  “Why do you think Germany?”

  “Because he did not want to go.”

  “Then why did he?”

  “Stupid question,” she said. “Because he was told to go. Sometimes you’re a fool.”

  “He told me he had made a deal that he wouldn’t go to Germany,” Geoff said. “A deal’s a deal.”

  “And a fool is a fool. He is a soldier, and he goes where he is told to go.”

  The kettle whistled, and she poured boiling water and made instant coffee for him.

  “I’ll make you a sandwich. Or soup? You want soup? I have made a soup.”

  “See what’s in the envelope,” he said. “Then give me some soup, please.”

  She tore the envelope open. It contained two letter-size envelopes. She opened the thicker one. It held a stack of twenty-dollar bills. She looked at him to see his reaction, and he looked in her eyes and thought, Shit, I do love her. That’s all there is to it.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  She tore open the other envelope, took out a sheet of paper, read it, and handed it to him.

  “What does this mean?” she asked.

  It was a short, typewritten note:

  Dear Miss Wagner:

  S/Sgt. Wagner won third place in the pool. I thought I had better give you this, since he is on TDY.

  Yours sincerely,

  Scott Tourtillott, 1/Sgt.

  She counted the money. There was just over three hundred dollars.

  “We don’t need this, we won’t take this, you take it back and say thank you very much.”

  “He won it, Ursula,” Geoff said. In a pig’s ass, he did. He can’t hit the broad side of a barn at ten yards with an M-60.

  “Won it? What is a ‘pool’?”

  He explained it to her, and in the explanation got his own explanation. First Sergeant “Indian Joe” Tourtillott had had him deliver the money because he knew that he would be able to think of some way to get her to take it.

  “He was an officer,” Ursula said. “He is a very good shot.”

  “I know,” Geoff said.

  “He should have won this money when we needed it so badly,” she said. “Now there is money enough, and more.”

  “Is there?”

  “Mrs. Sergeant Major Taylor came to see me, and she told me exactly how much money Karl-Heinz will now make, and that the army will send me a check next month, on payday, that he has made the allotment.”

  “We don’t give the woman the husband’s title in this country, Ursula,” Geoff said.

  “You don’t?”

  “No. When you marry me, for example, you will simply be Mrs. Geoffrey Craig.”

  “I told you once I don’t want to hear any more of that foolishness,” she snapped. “You must be crazy.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “You don’t stop it, once and for all, you go,” she said. “If Karl-Heinz hear you even talking like that, he be very mad.”

  “You said something about soup?”

  The soup was delicious.

  “Can I tell you something?” she asked.

  “Anything.”

  “You stink, you need a bath.”

  “I know.”

  “And your clothes are filthy rotten stinking,” she said. “You have to go right away?”

  “No.”

  “You take a bath. I wash the clothes,” she said.

  “How are you going to dry them?”

  “There is the machine,” she said.

  “I said ‘dry,’” he said.

  “There is the machine,” she said. “You put the clothes in, and it spins around with heat, and the clothes are dried. Mrs. Sergea—Mrs. Taylor showed me how to work it.”

  “And in the meantime, while the clothes are drying, I get to chase you naked around the apartment?”

  “Don’t be silly!” she snapped. “I give you something of Karl-Heinz to wear.”

  There were a pair of panties, labeled THURSDAY and embellished with hearts; a brassiere; and a slip hanging from the shower curtain.
He had never seen anything so erotic in his life.

  She gave him a shirt and a pair of pants to wear while the washer and dryer were operating. They didn’t fit, and they were of a strange, cheap material. He asked if Karl-Heinz had brought them from East Germany.

  “Not good, are they?” she asked, nodding.

  “Never look a gift horse in the mouth,” he said. “I wasn’t criticizing. I was curious.”

  She had, he thought with regret, taken his joking remark about chasing her naked around the apartment at least half seriously. She had dressed while he was bathing in a sweater and skirt, and she’d done her hair up in the back.

  “They’re no good,” she said. “Everything back there is cheap. I mean cheap-made, not cheap to buy.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “Do you think Karl-Heinz will be back when they say?”

  “Sure,” he said. “How long did they say?”

  “Ninety days,” she said, and then added happily, “Mrs. Taylor says that if I want, I can get a job in the PX.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Working as waitress in snack bar, to start.”

  Fuck that! he thought angrily.

  “Do you need the money that bad?”

  “I want to help,” she said. “You know, we’re poor.”

  “Well, you’ll get a chance to meet a lot of men in the snack bar,” Geoff said. “Try to meet a rich one.”

  She thought it over and decided to consider it a joke.

  “What would a rich man want with me?”