Arnason stared across the table at Spencer and could see that there was more on his mind than just testifying at James’s court-martial. “Spence… we’ve got to let the Army handle James!”
Barnett slowly turned his head so that he could look directly at his recon team sergeant. The look in his eyes made the recon sergeant shiver; even the natural curls at the corners of Spencer’s mouth looked demonic. “I am going to let the Army handle him.” Spencer tried smiling but the effect was lost when it reached his eyes. “Why wouldn’t I”
Lieutenant Colonel Martin stepped through the open back door of the barracks that led out to the picnic area. A wooden privacy wall had been erected by the Special Forces Training Detachment years earlier around the building and they had used it for a special briefing area. The FBI had erected a ten-foot-high Cyclone fence around the wooden fence, fifty feet away, and had installed a electronic gate-locking device. The three witnesses were as much prisoners as James was until the court-martial was over with and their lives weren’t in as much danger. “How are you guys doing today?”
Instantly the look on Spencer’s face changed to a jovial, elfish grin. “Great! Shrink… what has the outside world brought us today?”
“Some magazines.” Martin held out a Time magazine to Spencer. “You’ll like this one.”
The front cover of the large-circulation weekly bore Spencer’s picture. He was smiling and his Medal of Honor hung around his neck. The picture was expertly touched up to emphasize even more his boyish good looks and fiery blue eyes.
“Cute, Spence—real cute!” David Woods leaned over Spencer’s shoulder and looked down at the cover. He patted Spence’s rear. “Cute ass, too!”
Spencer ignored the kidding and kept looking at the cover.
“You falling in love with yourself?” David reached over to take the magazine and Spencer pointed to a person in the crowd. “Mary!”
Spencer nodded. Mary was in the background, a little out of focus but recognizable.
“I can see that’s going to be framed,” arnason said, joining the kidding.
“Yep.” Spencer smiled.
“So! How are you guys doing?” The psychiatrist sat down at the end of the picnic table and tried opening a conversation.
“Good… What’s going on over at the trial?” arnason asked.
“So far, they’ve just approved the board: four officers and three enlisted men. James’s lawyers demanded that there be enlisted men on the board, and according to the Manual for Courts-Martial, he’s entitled to that privilege.”
“What does he think? Enlisted men are going to go easier on him?” Woods was getting angry.
“They feel that he has a better chance than with all officers.” The psychiatrist looked over at Spencer and met a large smile followed by a slow wink. “I must say they did a decent job picking the enlisted board members; Sergeant Major Thomas is black, Master Sergeant Valdez is Mexican, and Sergeant First Class Colorado is an American Indian.”
“I know him” arnason looked at Spencer. “He’s a fine recon man. Two tours in Vietnam.”
“Which one?” Martin asked. He was playing the psychiatrist’s game of asking questions that didn’t seem to have much impact but normally ended up as very important.
“Colorado… he’s a pure blood Cheyenne. He even practices the old Indian religion and worships the manitou. I can’t see James’s lawyers letting him stay on the board without challenging him. He is one hard-core soldier.”
“He was the only one they didn’t challenge.” The psychiatrist glanced again at Spencer and received the same smile and slow wink. A flash of irritation gave away what the shrink was thinking and Spencer smiled even more.
“That’s interesting.” arnason shook his head.
“When do you think we’ll be called on the stand?” Woods was getting tired of waiting.
“Probably late this afternoon or early tomorrow morning. I think the first witness will be Major General Garibaldi.”
“He’s here?” Spencer spoke with the smile still glued to his face. He knew that it was getting to the psychiatrist.
“Do you have to smile constantly, Corporal Barnett?”
“I’m happy, well adjusted, and recently laid.” Spencer wiggled his eyebrows.
Lieutenant Colonel Martin turned away from Spencer. He had failed to get to the soldier and he knew it, but that didn’t change his assignment. He was supposed to monitor all the witnesses for signs of strain, but actually he was the one who was feeling the strain. The Army’s colonels review board had just released its recommendation list for promotion to colonel and his name wasn’t on it. He was sure that the lieutenant general had taken him off the promotion list because of Spencer Barnett, but he couldn’t prove it.
“Look at that.” Spencer drew their attention to the cicada that had just fallen out of the pine tree they were sitting under.
“What is it?” The psychiatrist was city-bred.
“A cicada.”
“Shit” Woods slipped over the seat away from the thrashing cicada. “Look at the size of that mother!”
A wasp dropped down out of the tree on her three-inch wings and grabbed the paralyzed cicada. The insect was too heavy for the giant wasp to fly away with, so the mother hunter used her legs to drag the cicada over the loose sand and her wings to give her a little lift. She walked her prey over to the trunk of the pine tree and climbed up the bark until she was about five feet off the ground before she let go and flew over the picnic table on her flight back to the communal nest that she shared with two of her sisters.
“Damn!” Woods leaned back as the giant wasp flew within a meter of his head.
“She won’t bother you. She’s too busy getting food for her larvae.” Spencer sipped his warm Coke.
“That was one big fucking wasp!” Woods shook his head. “That thing could knock down a Cobra gunship!”
“Not quite, David.” Spencer huffed and smiled over at the psychiatrist.
“So do we have to remain in uniform the rest of the day?” arnason asked. He wanted to slip into shorts and get a little sun.
“No, but have your uniforms ready just in case they call you to appear.” The psychiatrist glanced again at Spencer. “As soon as General Garibaldi is finished over in the court room, I want to bring him over here to brief you on what’s going on so that there won’t be any surprises when you testify.”
“Fine with me. I want to see the colonel again.” Spencer leaned over to untie his dress shoes. The sun was so hot that the spit shine was melting. He would have to polish them again as soon as it got dark, and then he would put them in the empty refrigerator in the back of the barracks so that the wax would harden.
“He’s a major general now....” The psychiatrist was becoming irritated with Spencer’s constant referral to the Air Force general as a colonel.
“I know that.” Spencer pulled off his socks and picked up his shoes. He started walking back to the barracks.
“We should be here by four.”
Spencer nodded and disappeared into the dark barracks. He slipped out of his khaki pants and folded them neatly on a hanger before going back outside carrying an olive-drab Army blanket to lie on in the sun. He was wearing only his white briefs as he passed the psychiatrist.
“I hope you’re going to have more than that on when the general comes over here.”
“I might… sir.” Spencer smiled and winked.
He lay on his back in the hot sun and felt the sweat forming pools in the eight-pack of muscles that covered his stomach. Woods was stretched out on a blanket a few feet away from him, wearing only his underwear too; neither of them had thought to bring shorts with them to the court-martial. Sergeant Arnason wore a pair of cut-off tiger pants that he always took with him to use as pajamas. Woods was sleeping on his stomach with one of his legs pulled up. Arnason tried reading the paperback book he held in front of him but the position was becoming very uncomfortable. He had to hold the book aw
ay from his body so that the sweat wouldn’t ruin the pages. The upper right-hand corners of the pages were damp from his fingers turning them.
“Shit!” arnason swore under his breath. A large drop of sweat fell off his nose and landed on the center of the page. “Christ, is it hot out here!” He adjusted his position on his blanket and decided to call it a day and go inside to take a shower.
Spencer moaned in his sleep.
Arnason stopped folding his blanket and looked over at the soldier.
Spencer moaned again but this time there was fear and pain in his voice.
Arnason laid his blanket down on the picnic table and sat on the bench. He used the back of his hand to wipe the sweat off his face and snapped it, sending a line of wet dots across the sandy soil.
Spencer started breathing very shallowly and rapidly in his deep sleep. He arched his back and whimpered.
Arnason started looking worried.
Spencer spoke. “Please?… Please… get the fuck away from me.” He brought his legs up to his chest and curled into a fetal position on the warm blanket. “Colonel! That bitch is sticking her tongue out at me!” There was a pause, then Spencer mumbled under his breath, “Uh… huh… I will, Colonel.” He sighed deeply like a person who was about to give up. “Oh… shit… her head is only a foot away from me! Colonel… I can’t take this shit anymore!”
Spencer jerked upright on the blanket with his eyes wide open, scaringarnason.
“Fuck it! Do you hear me, Sweet Bitch! Fuck it… fuck you… fuck James!… Fuck all your commie asses with elephant dicks!” Spencer’s eyes weren’t focused.
Arnason saw Woods staring at Spencer with a look of fear on his face. “Sarge… is he all right?”
Arnason nodded. “Shhh…”
Spencer dropped back down on the blanket and groaned again, then screamed at the top of his lungs. His own voice woke him up and he lay there blinking his eyes, drenched in sweat. He sucked in a lungful of air and shivered when he exhaled. “Fuck!”
“Bad dream?” arnason spoke softly.
“Yeah.” Spencer held his head in his hands and looked down between his legs as he sat on the blanket. “Real bad.”
“Who’s Sweet Bitch?” Arnason maintained the same tone of voice.
“She was the NVA lieutenant who ran our POW camp.... She used to really smoke my ass.”
“How?” arnason realized that Spencer had never before told anyone about what had happened in the POW camp.
“I was just dreaming about it.” Spencer remained sitting on the blanket with his eyes locked on the large black letters printed on the cloth: USA. “She had captured a huge flicking snake… I mean huge.” He looked at Arnason, who could see that Spencer’s face was white. “It was bigger around than my waist and at least thirty feet long! Colonel Garibaldi said probably thirty-five feet!”
“She put you in the cage with it?”
“Yeah.”
Woods felt like he was going to cry but fought the urge. Spencer wouldn’t have been captured if Woods had insisted on staying back as the rear guard on the mission, instead of Spence.
Spencer continued, “They put a South Vietnamese officer in the cage the first night.... He committed suicide before dawn by hanging himself with his pants.” Spencer’s eyes lost their focus for a couple of seconds and he tried smiling but failed. “So, when they put me in the cage they stripped me naked.... I didn’t give a fuck at first, but then when I saw Mother Kaa close up, even a pair of pants and a shirt would have helped… but being naked, I felt so… helpless.” Spencer’s hand started shaking. “She was one big snake.”
“So what happened?” arnason wanted to get Spencer’s mind away from the snake.
“A Montagnard boy was hiding under the cage and shoved some bamboo sticks up through the floor in front of me so Mother Kaa couldn’t touch me.... There was some kind of stuff rubbed on the bamboo, because she wouldn’t come near it.”
“Was the Montagnard boy the same one they killed?” David entered the conversation.
“Yes! How did you know that?” Spencer’s eyes focused completely now and he joined his friends back at Camp McCall.
“We just came back from a mission over there with his father.” Woods could see that Spencer was very interested and continued, “The old chief and his son have started a private war with the NVA and we set up a resupply for them.”
Arnason shook his head. “We’ve been fools! We should have told you earlier about this!”
“Go on!” Spencer used his hands to emphasize.
“There’s not a lot more to it. We set up a resupply drop and the Montagnards now have some modern weapons to fight with.” David went over and took a seat near Arnason in the shade in front of the fan. “The Montagnards have a way of letting the NVA know that it’s them killing their comrades.”
“How’s that?”
Arnason grabbed David’s arm and shook his head.
“Tell me!” Spencer’s jaws tightened.
“You don’t need to know.”
“Tell me!”
“They impale the NVA on bamboo stakes.” arnason watched for Spencer’s reaction.
“Through their asses?”
“Yes…” Arnason’s voice was a whisper.
“Good! Those mother fuckers deserve it!” Spencer smiled, “Payback is a bitch!”
Arnason sighed. He was worried that talking about it would break Spencer, but the opposite had happened. Spencer actually looked relieved of a great guilt.
“They put that little Montagnard boy on one of those stakes and made me watch....”
“That’s not the way the chief tells the story.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that you volunteered to take the boy’s place.”
Spencer shrugged.
“That was a brave thing to do, Spence....” Arnason nodded.
“No… actually it was the cowardly thing to do. The brave thing would have been to sit there and watch them torture that kid and do nothing.” Spencer’s logic was clear to his teammates.
“Why did they bury the boy underneath you?” David risked asking for an answer to the question that had been bothering him ever since they had rescued Spencer and he had seen the tiny hand in the dirt under his teammate.
“They had left him on the stake for three days in the jungle heat…” Spencer didn’t have to go into detail for his teammates—they knew what a body looked like after three days in the sun, “and they weren’t going to bury him. He was being made an example for the rest of the Montagnards because he had helped me.” Spencer grinned and added, “I bet they wish now that they had left that kid alone!”
“So who buried him?”
“I did, and then James came up with the bright idea that I should be buried up to my neck in the grave over the kid.... He thought that was funny.”
“James did that?” Arnason felt his throat muscles tighten in anger.
“Yeah, and then he was going to blow my brains out, but only after I suffered for a couple of days in the sun. Nice guy, huh?”
“I didn’t know....” David felt the first tear coming.
“Don’t start bawling on me, Woods!” Spencer frowned.
Woods smiled. “You are one hard-core southern boy!”
“That’s right! I owe you!… Remember?” Spencer sprung at Woods and knocked him off the blanket onto the sandy ground.
“Get off me!” Woods used his leg to flip Spencer over on his back and jumped up on his feet. “Or I’ll have to really whip your skinny ass good!” David dropped down into a wrestler’s crouch.
“Remember back in the hotel? You called me a boy in front of Mary… remember?”
“Yep… boy… I remember.” David braced himself for the attack that followed.
Arnason rose and began heading toward the barracks to take a cold shower. It was too hot even to watch them.
“You’d better stay here and save this Nebraska punk from a sure death!” Spencer spok
e from his position on the bottom as he tried bucking to keep his shoulders from being pinned.
“Kill yourselves… you’ll dehydrate first!” arnason came back and changed the direction of the fan so that it blew over the two men wrestling. He didn’t know how much good it would do either of them, but at least he had done something thoughtful.
Spencer lay flat on his back, looking up at the cloudless blue Carolina sky. Woods lay on his stomach a few feet away, spitting out the sand that had gotten into his mouth.
“Shit… I’m going to die!” Spencer spoke at the sky.
Woods gagged, struggled to his feet, and lunged toward an outside hose for some water. Spencer had been raised in the South and could almost predict what was going to happen next. He rose on one elbow and started laughing as Woods turned on the faucet and held the end of the hose up over his head. The first rush of water was hot.
“Oh fuck!” David dropped the hose in the sand and tried brushing the hot water off his matted-down hair.
“Use the hose now, you dumb ass.” Spencer roared with laughter at the stupidity of his northern-born teammate; everybody down South knew that the sun baked the water trapped in a rubber hose. “It’s cold now after you used up all the hot water!”
“Spence, you knew that was going to happen!” David picked up the rubber hose and wet himself down. The water felt great after wrestling in the rough sand. “Shit, I’ve got sand burns all over me!”
“Baby!” Spencer could feel his skin burning from the same thing.
“What’s going on back here?” The familiar voice caught Spencer’s ear.
“Colonel!” Spencer jumped up from the ground and rushed over to shake hands with the Air Force major general.
“Don’t you dare, Spencer Barnett!” The general pushed the soldier’s hand away and hugged him.
The general’s aide-de-camp was a couple of feet behind the old fighter pilot, followed closely by the psychiatrist, who tried shoving his way around the aide so that he could see the reunion between the two POWs.
“I brought you something.” Garibaldi waved for his aide to bring forward the large box that was being carried by his driver.
Spencer smiled the instant he saw what the driver was carrying. “Colonel! Damn, you do keep your word.”
Court Martial Page 14