Army Blue

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “If you were my age and you had been recently drafted, I'm sure you would have given the same matter the same amount of thought,” said Sullivan.

  The Colonel directed him to the orderly room door and turned to Sergeant Major Clinton.

  “You know where I'll be, Sarenmajor,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Come on, Lieutenant,” said the Colonel. “Let's take a ride in my new jeep.”

  The two officers climbed in the jeep, the Colonel up front, next to the driver, Lieutenant Sullivan straddling the jump seat in back, next to the battalion radio and its fifteen-foot-long whip antenna, looped forward and tied to the jeep's windshield. The drive to the main gate took about twenty minutes. Neither officer said anything. Once the radio crackled with a call from one of the company commanders who was in the field on a training exercise with one of the OCS classes. He wanted someone at brigade headquarters to call his wife and remind her to send a birthday card to his mother.

  When the main gate first came into view as they rounded the last bend in the road leading off-post, it was almost unrecognizable. More than a dozen military police vehicles were parked in a semicircle inside the gate, blue lights flashing. Some fifty helmeted MPs stood in a line, nightsticks at the ready across their chests. On the other side of the gate, a huge cluster of police vehicles from every conceivable jurisdiction could be seen. Civilian police in blue, tan, black, and gray uniforms were standing around in no particular order. On the edge of the police cluster, a lunch truck had pulled up and opened the aluminum doors to its coffee and sandwich display box. Half of the civilian police had gathered around the lunch truck and were munching doughnuts and sipping coffee.

  The Colonel told his driver to proceed through the gate and stop next to the lunch truck. As they passed the gate, both the Colonel and Lieutenant Sullivan looked around for the protestors. So many MPs and policemen were crowded into the grassy triangles on either side of the road that they couldn't see the women.

  “Do you think they've gone home, Lieutenant?” the Colonel asked.

  “I doubt it, sir. Melissa wouldn't miss this for the world.”

  The driver stopped the jeep next to the lunch truck. A rotund man wearing a tan shirt and pants and a cowboy hat and boots approached.

  “I'm Sheriff Grady,” the man said. He was wearing dark glasses, and a pair of black leather gloves were jammed through the epaulet atop his left shoulder. “You the Colonel they been tellin’ us is comin'?”

  “I'm Colonel Blue,” said the Colonel, stepping out of the jeep. He held out his hand to the rotund sheriff, who shook it perfunctorily.

  “You gonna do what they said you gonna do?” asked the sheriff.

  “I don't know, Sheriff Grady. What did they say I was going to do?”

  “Get rid a’ them damn protestors over there,” said the sheriff, pointing in the direction of a grove of trees to the right of the Fort Benning sign.

  The Colonel looked where the sheriff was pointing, but he didn't see the protestors. What he saw was a huge gathering of policemen standing around drinking coffee and talking.

  “Where are the protestors, Sheriff?” the Colonel asked.

  "Right there," said the sheriff, pointing toward the sign. “We done confiscated their signs. Found a law said you gotta get zonin’ approval for advertisin’ signs. But they still standin’ there, under the trees, where they been all mornin’. And I want ‘em the fuck outta here, Colonel. Off my property.”

  The Colonel stepped on the jeep's bumper and peered over the heads of the policemen clustered under the trees. About fifty yards distant, up against the sign, he saw them. Three well-dressed young women, two in skirts and the third in an ankle-length dress, two with baby carriages. They were surrounded by policemen who didn't seem to be paying much attention to them. On the other side of the Fort Benning sign, the line of MPs stood at the ready. In all, there must have been at least thirty officers of the law for each protestor.

  “It doesn't seem that you all are in too much danger here, Sheriff,” said the Colonel, stepping down from the bumper. “If I were you, I'd go ahead and dismiss my men. My guess is the demonstration will break up as soon as those women can make their way back to their cars.”

  “I'm not much for your opinion, Colonel,” said the sheriff. “They told me you were comin’ down here to get rid a’ them. Now get it done so we can be about our business.”

  “I don't take my orders from you, sir,” said the Colonel. He turned to Lieutenant Sullivan, who was still in the jeep. He winked. He signaled the driver.

  “Let's go,” he said.

  They drove back through the gate to the far side of the line of MPs, and the Colonel told the driver to stop. He turned to face Lieutenant Sullivan.

  “Do you want a word with your wife?” he asked.

  Sullivan nodded.

  “Scoot around the far edge of the sign. She's standing right there.”

  Sullivan walked through the line of MPs and around the corner of the sign. His wife and two of their friends were standing in the midst of about fifty policemen, who by this time were ignoring them and talking among themselves.

  “Melissa,” he called. She turned.

  “Johnny! Look at this! Can you believe it?” She was beaming, flushed from the excitement.

  “I think you guys have given Fort Benning more of a Moratorium than they had counted on, don't you think?”

  “You'd better believe it,” said Melissa.

  “Do you want to have some lunch later and tell me about it?” Lieutenant Sullivan asked.

  “Sure,” said his wife.

  “Why don't we all meet at Lum's at noon,” said Sullivan. He leaned closer to his wife and kissed her on the neck. “We can celebrate,” he whispered.

  All three women laughed, and his wife kissed his cheek.

  “We'll be there,” she said. She raised her right arm. Her hand was a fist. The others raised fists, too. Sullivan glanced at the policemen. None of them seem to have noticed. Sullivan walked to the corner of the Fort Benning sign and paused. The women had formed a line, strollers leading the way, and were pushing their way through the assembled policemen. The woman in front had one hand on her stroller and one fist in the air. It was his wife. Sullivan walked back to the jeep and vaulted into the backseat.

  “It's over, sir,” he reported.

  The Colonel didn't envy Sullivan's position, caught between his wife and the Army, which was why he had purposely never given Sullivan an order to say anything specific to his wife. His confrontation with the sheriff had convinced the Colonel that there were better ways to handle civil unrest than that which was in evidence at the main gate to Fort Benning. While the nation's forefathers had foreseen the need for a right to assemble peacefully, he doubted they had foreseen the consequences of such a freedom being exercised at the gate to a major Army post in south Georgia in 1969.

  It wasn't an easy equation. The Colonel was very much in favor of the war in Vietnam—he had served two tours there, after all: one before the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, as an “adviser,” and the second in ‘67-'68, commanding a Battalion in the Mekong Delta. And he was “bothered” by the antiwar sentiment in the country. That was the word he always used: “bothered.” He didn't know quite what to make of it. In part, he suspected, antiwar sentiment was motivated by self-interest—the self-interest of those who didn't want to be drafted, those who were unwilling to risk their lives in combat anywhere, for whatever reason. But he also suspected that self-interest played no part whatsoever in the opposition of others to the war. He knew it was possible to see the war as something less than a noble crusade against communism, for democracy. It seemed as though everyone had come down with a kind of Asian flu, and temperatures were running very, very high. There were times when he wondered if either Vietnam or America could survive the war. When he had watched the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on television the year before, he had wondered if the cure would be worse th
an the disease, but this wasn't one of those times. Three women, two children, and a couple of handheld signs did not a riot make. Everyone on Fort Benning might be running a fever, but three women standing outside the main gate wasn't exactly Lincoln Park.

  They were on their way back to the brigade area when the radio crackled again. This time the voice was recognizable as Sergeant Major Clinton's. This wasn't like him at all. He broke radio protocol, failing to identify the Colonel as “Six.”

  “Sir, sir,” said Sergeant Major Clinton, clearly nervous. “You got to get back here. We got a call for you from Pentagon Switch. I told them you was on the way, and they're holdin’, sir! Pentagon Switch is holdin’ for you, sir!”

  “Wait one,” said the Colonel into the mike.

  The Colonel considered the possibilities. Pentagon Switch was the communications center at the Pentagon that transferred all calls from within the Pentagon—as well as those from distant lands—to any telephone within the military telephone network. It might be news of a reassignment from Infantry Branch. It might be an old pal floating a call through the Army phone network during duty hours in order to save a buck or two—not unheard of among military men overburdened by the costs of raising and educating children, and unburdened by adequate pay and allowances. Who could know?

  “Tell Pentagon Switch to place the call again in ten,” said the Colonel.

  “Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Major Clinton, still clearly flustered. “Will do.”

  The Colonel turned to Lieutenant Sullivan.

  “You don't think the Department of the Army has focused in on our situation already, do you?” He was joking, a big smile playing across his face.

  “I couldn't tell you, sir,” said Sullivan, looking nervous. This hadn't been the most wonderful morning of his life.

  “Don't worry, Lieutenant Sullivan. I'll take whatever heat they can crank out. That's one of the advantages of being a lieutenant, didn't you know? Not being a colonel. Colonels are kind of like hot pads. They afford some protection from the heat of situations like the one you found yourself in this morning.”

  “I don't know what to say, sir,” said Lieutenant Sullivan.

  “When in doubt, don't say anything, Sullivan,” said the Colonel. “Silence contains no clues. You've heard that one, haven't you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Neither had I, before this moment,” said the Colonel.

  The jeep pulled up outside brigade headquarters. Sergeant Major Clinton was standing on the gravel walk leading to the street.

  “Colonel, sir, Pentagon Switch refused to hang up and call back. They're still holdin’, sir. Bigger'n shit, sir.”

  “Okay, Sarenmajor. Let's see what Pentagon Switch has got for us. Nothing would surprise me at this point. Nothing.”

  The Colonel walked into his office and sat at his desk. Sergeant Major Clinton set a cup of hot coffee at his right hand. The Colonel picked up the phone.

  “Colonel Blue,” he said directly and clearly, as was his custom.

  “Colonel, this is Pentagon Switch. We have a call waiting for you. Can you stand by, sir?”

  The Colonel sipped his coffee and said, “Will do.”

  “Wait one, sir,” said the voice calling itself Pentagon Switch.

  There transpired a series of clicks and clacks and whistles and wheezes over the phone line leading to the brigade headquarters of the 196th. Finally the line cleared and a voice could be heard clearly.

  “Pentagon Switch, sir. I've cleared you through.”

  The Colonel waited while another series of clicks and clacks and wheezes and whistles filled his ear. Then the sounds subsided for an instant, and he could hear.

  “Dad . . . Dad . . . is that you?” he heard.

  “Colonel Blue here,” he said, hesitating.

  “Dad. It's me. Matt. They've got me under arrest. I couldn't think of anyone else to call.”

  “Under arrest for what, son?” asked the Colonel, gripping the receiver so tightly his knuckles whitened.

  “Desertion in the face of the enemy, Dad. But it's bogus, totally bogus. It's crap. I didn't desert anyone or anything. They're out to get me, Dad. You've got to understand. It's crazy over here. I've seen things you wouldn't believe . . .”

  The phone crackled and wheezed and faded.

  “Matt? Matt?” the Colonel called. He listened for several seconds on a dead line, then hung up.

  He'd been cut off, and he didn't even know where his son was calling from, except that it was somewhere within the Republic of Vietnam.

  2

  * * *

  * * *

  The General, at age seventy- two, in more than fifty years of service to his country, had never been fired, but on the morning of October 15, 1969, the Washington Post said that was exactly what had recently happened to him. Two weeks previously, the paper said, the General had been called into the office of the White House Chief of Staff and asked to submit his resignation. The General walked into the Chief of Staff's secretary's office, plucked a sheet of typing paper from a pile on her desk, and hand-wrote:

  Dear Mr. President. I resign.

  He signed the letter as he usually did:

  Matthew Nelson Blue, Jr., Gen., U.S. Army Retired.

  Now he was sitting in the breakfast room of his Georgetown town house, reading the paper. The front-page story in the Post said the White House had waited thirteen days to announce the General's resignation, trying to figure out how to manage the story. But now it was official. General Matthew Nelson Blue, Jr., was no longer the United States of America's ambassador-at-large. The story printed the White House line that the resignation was part of a “house-cleaning,” but hinted that there was more to it than that.

  “Thirteen goddamned days it took them to work up the guts to announce my so-called goddamned resignation. If they'd stop trying to goddamn handle things and start standing up and taking responsibility for the crap they're responsible for, we'd be one hell of a lot better off,” he bellowed to no one in particular, though he knew he'd get a response from his wife, who was one room away in the kitchen.

  He spoke in a hoarse, gravelly growl starting somewhere down within his ample midsection and reaching a full-blown rumble by the time he barked, a result of scarred vocal cords from having taken a swig of carbolic acid as a child.

  “They're not too bright, are they, Buddy?” asked his wife. That's what she called him: Buddy. He didn't know where she'd come up with the nickname, but that was it. Buddy.

  “You'd think for once the bastards could tell the goddamned truth. Just once. For the thrill of it, just to experience the sensation one time, so they'd know what it felt like. Who do they think it's going to hurt, telling the world that their pet general has gone haywire? Christ! If they told the truth, all the fingers would be pointing at me, for crying out loud. I'm the one who left the reservation. I'm the goddamned oddball. Hell, I'm seventy-two years old! What in hell can I do to them in the time I've got left? What in hell are they afraid of? I'll tell you why they're afraid. If the world knew why they had to ask for my resignation, somebody would take a hard look at how they're fighting that goddamned war.”

  He paused for a moment, and removed his half-glasses. His hair was white, and his face deeply lined from years outdoors in the sun. He had a slightly bulbous nose that had been broken six times, twice in fights, the rest by horses’ hooves and polo mallets while playing the sport he had loved and played better than any man alive in the 1920s and 1930s. He was not a tall man, only five feet nine inches in his stocking feet, and the years had broadened him considerably, so he was wide at the shoulders and thick equally in the chest and the waist. “Stocky” was the way the newspapers described him—generously, he'd always thought. Now the days of newspaper generosity were probably over for good. It wouldn't take the Post very long to figure out that he had left some overturned furniture behind him at the White House. Soon enough, the ultimate insider would become the terminal outsider. All he had
to do was answer the phone a couple of times, take a few reporters’ calls. Tell a few secrets out of school. It was just a matter of time. The old soldier was going to be hung out to dry. It had happened before. God willing that his health stayed good, he might be lucky enough to have it happen again.

  When he finished breakfast and reading the paper, he liked to repair to his study upstairs and read, or work on designs for furniture he built in the garage downstairs. After a lunch at the Army-Navy Club downtown, the General would take a nap, then work in his garden. This was his new, post-resignation schedule, of course. Things had been mighty different over the past half-century, his years of public service in the Army and within the government in various capacities. But the General was used to change. He thrived on it. He had been born in a sharecropper's shack in southwest Oklahoma before the turn of the century, and he had lived through two world wars, the coming of the automobile, the airplane, television, and the computer. He had watched technology seep into virtually every crevice of humanity, and for a long time it had seemed that technology would win the struggle between man and machine, prevail in some unknowable way. But now he was watching technology get its great comeuppance in a war in a little country ten thousand miles away, where peasants carrying rifles and bags of rice on their backs were holding off the greatest military onslaught since World War II. More bombs and artillery landed on Vietnam in one day than had landed on Europe in all of World War II, and still the technological war was not being won.

  He had been married, widowed, and married again. He had watched his children grow up to become people he hardly recognized. Change was the only constant the General had ever known. As a general in the Army, he had shaped events, fought battles, won wars. As Deputy Director of the CIA, he had helped reconstruct postwar Europe. But when it came to his own home, he had been at the mercy of events that in truth he had never really understood. If there was one thing he'd have changed, he often thought, he would have learned to love earlier, in order that so much of his life that now felt alien to him would instead be his own.