I hold tight in the loader’s seat as The Claw slams over ground at thirty and thirty-five. Our platoon’s four tanks are moving all but abreast when the lieutenant shouts an order to prepare to commence firing. Our main gun is loaded with a practice HEAT round, and when the lieutenant calls, “Tanks! Right front! Turning east! Commence firing!” Noordwink calls out, “Identify! Inside-out! On the way!”
Riding the recoil, I bang my knee to open the blast door to ammo storage and grab a new round with both hands. Releasing the knee switch (the trap door slams shut automatically) I push the round into the breech, grab the hand grip, shout, “Up!” and listen for the lieutenant to shout the identity of the next target.
Just like that, we’re into a cannon-belching attack. To avoid having an arm or leg smashed by the recoil, riding each firing and lifting of The Claw’s body, I keep hitting the knee switch and doing it again at high speed, loading rounds at ten to fifteen seconds, one after another.
The lieutenant, in the commander’s seat with its separate thermal-imaging screen, coordinates with other tanks and communicates with the captain in his mud-belly blasting on at the heart of things. He communicates with Sherman, too, in his control of The Claw’s speed and direction and the positioning of its array of radar screens. A tread-head at heart, the lieutenant keeps our mud-belly charging like a relentless rhino.
All at once we take a hit. Of an instant the lights go off, screens go dark, sensors start their maddening beeps. Only when the Lieutenant calls into the calamity, “Anybody not dead?” does it occur to me in the din that my sensors remain silent, which has me taking down my helmet and M-16 and squirming in darkness out through the belly hatch into smoky, dusty air, crawling into the open apart from the rear of the tank, crawling another dozen yards as a lone survivor, lifting at last to my knees and crouch-walking to the left until I flatten to the ground to lie on rolled and broken dirt for a moment, trying to sort out what to do.
I run my checklist: Wounds? Crewmates? Should I seek safe ground or, as a cadre combat officer at Knox liked to say, should I follow the sound of the guns?
With all crewmates dead, and knowing I’m not really going to die no matter what my MILES beeper may decide to say, the vacant lots of my childhood are there in my mind and it isn’t a hard call. Despite dust in my eyes and mouth and noise in my ears and skull, my thought is to have a shot at the rear grillwork of a passing enemy tank. M-16 cradled, lifting to knees and elbows, I look over the weedy terrain before crouch-walking another ten yards, and another ten, to where I have a bit of a view as well as some cover from curls of tread-marked soil. Could my non-whining, non-beeping sensors be malfunctioning, giving me a cat’s nine lives on the battlefield?
What a score it would be, I keep thinking, despite ending up dead, if I racked up a tank kill for my crew! With dirt in my mouth and the racket of blinking lights from kills all about, I remain low before dashing another ten yards to another curl of soil and mangled brush, believing I’m hearing, nearby, the squeak and growl of moving armored vehicles. It’s a scene from a horror movie in which I can hear but not see the source of the squeaking until I move again, but ten yards farther I take in a sudden formation of twenty T-72s and command vehicles coming hard along one side, down a slope, their inverted V formation easy to read. It was an ambush! It was! They anticipated our charge as in a chess match, and we did not hit their flank at all but let them hit ours! The sneaky bastards! is my thought. The conniving smartasses! How could they anticipate our strategy? Was it child’s play to them, too, like older kids from another block?
Lying pressed to a curl in rough terrain, extending my neck, I keep myself covered as much as possible by soil. They knew! I keep thinking, no matter the captain saying our maneuver had been devised only last night! Did OPFOR have spies, or had they simply known what an inexperienced troop would believe to be a bold move and lain in wait to smash our flank? However they did it, there are our dead beeping tanks filled with dead tankers, and their T-72s coming on in that angled V formation that will take them past our blinking mud-bellies into flank assaults on Fox and Eagle.
Dust and dirt unroll in their charge while I elbow-crawl a dozen yards to one side, for added concealment within the curling soil. My view improves as the formation of T-72s is passing on the lower side of where I’m pressing the ground with my M-16. What to do? It’s like a movie in which a submarine entering Tokyo Harbor raises its periscope to a sudden view of a flotilla of warships. Act! I tell myself. Seize the moment! Get off a shot at a rear grillwork! Why not a command vehicle, I also think, to disrupt their maneuvering as much as possible? Do it! I think. Seize the day! Fucking do it!
So it is that I twist and rise to my knees, position my M-16 into a shoulder crotch, select the command vehicle at the rear of the passing V, lean into it to settle my aim, and fire one! Instant blinking-beeping-flashing occurs as the vehicle grinds to a stop on losing electronics and mobility. Swiveling left, thinking to work inside-out-left and feeling like Audie Murphy himself in World War II, I’m about to take out another tank when a sound explodes into my ears close–Beeep! Beeep! Beeep!–telling me that I’ve been hit, am disarmed, will get off no more rifle spurts as much as I pull the trigger.
To protect my ears against the shrill sound I roll and push my helmet between my legs as the piercing beeep! keeps stabbing from my helmet and web gear. How could they have hit me? No one is in view! How could I have been seen? Not even Audie Murphy could have beaten electronic sweeps and automatic fire!
Of all things, I realize I’m not dead at all, but wounded! How could I take a hit and only be wounded? Nothing makes sense. What did they do, sweep the perimeter with laser fire on having their command vehicle taken out? I would just as soon have been killed, because now I’ll have to be rescued and given first aid in ways that will call attention not to what I did but to what I failed to do in the relinquishing of my cover, as tenuous as it may have been.
The maddening beeep! persists, throbbing into my skull like an instant headache. Still I need to endure being cited by a referee (a failure of character) and losing any points I may have won for Geo. I did take out a command vehicle, a hit of which to be proud, but now I’ll be IDed as another negative digit requiring first aid. Got greedy. Should have hunkered on scoring the hit, kept pressed into the dirt, and lived to fire another hit into another mud-belly’s rear grillwork.
Half an hour later, the remaining enemy armor gone and the dust settling, charging on, I imagine, to lay seige to Fox and Eagle, a Huey comes clattering, then thwonks to the ground twenty meters away, blowing up so much noise and dirt that my nose, eyes, and ears receive pings of grit no matter how tightly I cover the cranial openings, the thwonk-thwonk so aggravating that I believe my skull is going to explode from its hammering.
Arms about my head, I feel burdensome and foolish, frustrated on being removed from the game, disappointed in not having taken out another T-72. Being wounded seems unfair. I saw no infantry, nor anything indicating machine gun fire, no strafing from any vehicle, and as two wind-bent medics press a stretcher to the ground beside me, I shout, “Was I hit? How’d I get hit?” only to have one of them shout back, “How the hell do we know how you got hit? Shut your fucking mouth!”
A final straw, an ultimate frustration of warfare: Overlapping explosions go off all around, creating more whines, the big chopper sensors beginning to blink yellow. Mortars. We’re all dead, just like that. Lights and beeeps! persist as medics drop to the ground, as required, one of them cursing, “Sonofabitch!” Every sensor is whining, indicating that all has been lost in an attempt to rescue a lone soldier who–it will come out–crawled from the cover of a wounded tank and a curl of soil on getting greedy and acting stupidly.
Later, free of beeps and the blinking lights, no one is speaking to me, nor are they speaking to each other. The lieutenant, he of the ever-ready reply, is sitting by himself in the falling light. If our gung-ho lieutenant is demoralized, what hope is there for the
rest of us?
“Lieutenant, come on,” Noordwink says, which has the lieutenant flicking a hand and saying, “Leave me alone.” Then, from over the radio net behind us we hear the captain calling, “Captain Kinder here! Word is a soldier from Geo took out a command T-72 and saved the sorry asses of Eagle and Fox! All wasn’t lost at all! Tell me it’s true! One of our guys took out an enemy command vehicle? Are you kidding me?”
The lieutenant perks up and looks my way, given that I was the only soldier in our crew to slip from a hatch with an M-16. “Murphy, was that you? You hit a command vehicle? You hear what the captain just said? Somebody from Geo took out a command vehicle and saved the asses of Eagle and Fox!? Saved 2nd Cav’s ass from OPFOR! That was you, wasn’t it?”
“Had a shot, sir,” I admit. “Scored a hit. Sorry I couldn’t get off more shots before I was taken out by enemy fire.”
“Are you kidding!? You took out a command vehicle! Do you know what that means?”
“Hit it right in the ass, sir. The rear grillwork.”
The lieutenant howls with newfound joy, pushing to his feet. “You saved Eagle and Fox!” he says. “I can’t believe it! Murphy, do you know what it means to take out an OPFOR command vehicle? I am a sonofabitch! You say you’re sorry you didn’t take out more? Creativity! That’s what it is! It’s what I’ve been dreaming could happen around here! Creativity! I’ll tell you this, right now. The gunner’s seat is yours! Sergeant Noordwink will be ZI-ing soon and when he does, the gunner’s seat is yours! We return to garrison, I’m putting you in for E-4, straight off! This is what I’ve been wanting to see around here! Murphy, you confirm my faith in mankind! Take out a command vehicle outside your vehicle in combat, know what you’d do…you’d win a goddamn Silver Star! Posthumously, of course, but you’d win one all the same!”
It’s then that Captain Kinder comes back on the net, his message buzzing with static: “Geo Troop! Hear this! Captain Kinder here! The colonel himself will be stopping by. Wants to salute the soldier from Geo who took out an OPFORS command vehicle. Hope you heard that right. Soldier…whoever you are…haven’t even learned your name…congratulations from me and from everyone. We’re proud to be serving with you. Lieutenant Kline, get your soldier front and center to be saluted by the colonel!”
“Holy shit!” the lieutenant cries. “Did you hear that? Colonel’s stopping by to salute one of our own! Murphy, goddammit…like I say, you restore my faith in mankind! E-4, when we return to base! E-4 and the gunner’s seat before you know it! You’ve earned it! Couldn’t make me more proud in a hundred years.”
“Frigging hero,” Sherman utters sotto voce at my side, which remark draws laughter in the exhilaration alive within me and within The Claw’s four-man crew.
The colonel’s visit, when it goes down, is brief though celebratory for all involved. As we wait outside our vehicle, where the lieutenant checks me over like a mother hen, there suddenly appears a phalanx of half-dozen field-grade officers hard-striding to stay with the tall regiment commander leading the way. As the lieutenant snaps, “Tensh hut!” the colonel says, “Toujours pret!” and throws a nifty little salute.
The officers following the colonel are his aides and adjutants, several mid-twenties majors and early-thirties lieutenant colonels, pleased to be present in a ceremony of a soldier being honored for something good. “This is him, sir, Private First Class Murphy,” the lieutenant says.
“Soldier, what you did was unprecedented,” the colonel says. “I don’t believe an OPFORS command vehicle has ever been taken out like that! Your actions were smart and courageous. In a battle you’d have saved two troops from annihilation. It is my honor, soldier, to salute you.” On which note the lanky colonel snaps off another salute, which gesture is repeated by the field grade officers, who add, “Good job, soldier,” and is returned (if uncertainly) by yours truly. Thereupon, as the colonel adds, “I’ll be talking about this in the AAR. Good evening, gentlemen.”
As the phalanx withdraws back into the night with dim flashlights, the lieutenant says, “You’re IN for E-4! Ain’t nothing going to get in the way of your promotion.”
“Frigging hero,” Sherman mocks as before, failing this time to get any response.
“Those field grade officers,” the lieutenant says. “They’re West Pointers. Except the colonel. Texas A & M. PhD from Yale. Taught two years at West Point. Fast track. Will be wearing a star before you know it, especially with one of his soldiers taking out an OPFORS command vehicle at Hohenfels! Yowee!”
In the regiment’s after-action-review, mention is given, as promised, to “the soldier from Geo who, surviving a lethal blow to his tank, escaped through the loader’s hatch and did no less than destroy an OPFORS command vehicle with a single shot to the T-72’s rear grillwork!”
That was it, in the AAR, though it drew a glance and a wink from the lieutenant. Lesser accolades followed. A major from Headquarters Troop approached in a chow line and said, “Soldier, what you did was remarkable. Good job.”
On our last night in the field (but for those pulling vehicle guard) we’re free to visit beer and/or movie tents. It’s a cool fall night, and thinking beer, I seek out Sherman after chow, only to hear, “No thanks, mon, avoid beer guzzling on a regular basis.”
I go on my way. My feeling, on trying to decide what to do, is that Sherman and I may not turn out to be army buddies after all. Maybe he’s put off that I’m in line for promotion to E-4. In truth he dislikes the army, while my head is in the game and I’m having the time of my life. What choices do I have?
In the beer tent with its dim hanging bulbs, I sip from a large brown bottle of German beer and, feeling an odd melancholy on field maneuvers ending, wonder what it is that allows soldiers to become buddies and what has gotten in the way with Sherman and me. Too little in common, I imagine, while seeing no problem in our racial difference. At least I hope there are no problems, recalling that it was Sherman to whom I pointed out the gangbanger and that I need to acknowledge that Sherman is the only African American in our crew.
Do we have shared experience besides being crewmates? In that early ‘dynamic duo’ designation by the lieutenant, I thought Sherman and I would in fact ascend to a level we haven’t achieved, while it’s become ever more clear that it isn’t likely to happen. If one guy wants to drink and laugh and the other guy disapproves, you aren’t going to become buddies. Oil and water. You’ll go along and get along, but will never bond in the way that friends do.
Back at garrison with its newspapers and TV news reports, rumors of Kuwait and Iraq are flying hot and heavy. Having logged eighteen days in the field, free time is allotted (I’ll be making a trip into town!) and I have time to catch up on my sleep, scan magazines and books in the library, and get up to date with my journal entries.
Wrapping up another steno pad before putting it in the mail (to you, my favorite teacher!), I spend time in the library reading copies of stateside publications to see what is being said at home about what is happening here. All I can say is that the reports are threatening and have me thinking about all kinds of things, not least of all life and death. The war games in the field could become real after all… as removed as Germany may be from the Persian Gulf.
CHAPTER FOUR
Looking For a Place to Live
A stretch of six or seven weeks has slipped by since my initial visit to Bristol, and it’s time to begin making real plans for a major move in my life. I need to confirm that relocating to a town bypassed by time is what I wish to do. A new semester is underway and I have its remaining weeks plus the following semester during which to search out a place and carry off a move, probably with a U-Haul van. Thereupon a quiet life in a fifties world more or less bypassed by the threats and violence, the impatience and noise of urban life. A place wherein I might walk and work, think and read, give my creative impulses an opportunity to thrive…if they are ever going to do so. A town, I must admit, that is exerting a pull in the form of a woman na
med Bert with whom, on my earlier visit, I exchanged a few friendly words.
The lone student I’ll be retaining, by correspondence, will be my mentee presently serving in the army in Germany, where he is facing a high likelihood of deploying to the Persian Gulf in a war that appears certain to break out. A candid eighteen-year-old, he’s one of the brightest students, by way of his honesty and unique circumstances, I’ve known as a teacher. I like him as a young man of integrity and intelligence and enjoy reading the steno books he’s been sending my way as installments in a journal given to his time in the army and his coming of age in the midst of individuals who appear to be better teachers for him than any puffy professors he would have encountered by going directly into college.
At heart, in truth, I worry over Jimmy Murphy like a son, hoping he won’t get hurt. At the same time I must admit that I derive vicarious pleasure in the growing-up experiences he describes. I’m good for him as a sounding board, as he is good for me in the perspective he allows me to know in my overview of existence. An honest reporter with a good eye. A quick learner. A kid who already knows more, I think, than his contemporaries, be they enrolled at Harvard or at my own Mass State. If he leaves the army for college at twenty-one (as he plans to do) he’ll have a leg up on his classmates and his classroom learning experience will be deeper than any serious curriculum planner would ever intend.
Bert is present in the dairy bar in her white and yellow uniform, and I experience anxiety confronting the nudge in our friendship I’m of a mind to advance. I doubt she’ll remember me (it’s been many weeks), imagine she’s happily married (or committed) and, if she does remember me, will have no interest in walking out for coffee at another cafe, let alone–on a subsequent day–joining me for dinner at a restaurant with white tablecloths and candlelight.
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