Three Little Snowmen (Damned of the 2/19th)

by Timothy Willard

  Nancy climbed back in bed, putting her arms around me.

  "Gimme kisses," She whispered.

  Afterwards we laid there in the dark, only the night-light providing any illumination.

  "Tony," she asked quietly.

  "Yeah?" I opened my eyes, looking into hers.

  "Did you think I wouldn't notice?" She asked me, her voice and her eyes soft.

  "What?" I asked, already knowing what she was going to say.

  "That you let everyone else talk. All those words, all that time, and you didn't say anything about yourself that anyone didn't already know," she said. She moved forward, kissing my lower lip, the biting it sharply before pulling back. "I thought about it. I really don't know much about you, Tony."

  "What's to know?" I asked, kissing the tip of her nose. "I'm just a kid from backcountry Washington. Nothing special."

  I could see the doubt in he eyes, but she bit her lip.

  "I love you," I told her.

  "I know you do," she said softly. "Close your eyes and hold me," she said, rolling over.

  I did.

  I dreamed of apple blossoms and cruelty.

  Taking Stock

  "The cold was an ever present factor

  in my life for half the year.

  Did you know blood will freeze in seconds?"

  2/19th Company Area

  Restricted Area, Fulda Gap

  Western Germany, Europe

  09 November, 1984

  I woke up on the top bunk, with the usual glaze of ice on the ceiling above my head from where the moisture in my breath had frozen, shivering from the cold even under my heavy quilt and two issue OD green wool blankets. Nancy's absence told me that she'd left my bed while I was sleeping and returned to her room. She'd stayed long enough for me to go sleep in her arms after we'd had sex, and the fact that she'd gone back to her own room wasn't a surprise. She was rarely there when I woke up, usually only because she'd had too much to drink or because she'd been too exhausted to stay awake.

  The fact she was gone caused a small ache in my chest and I cursed myself for being a weakling. I knew better than to form any attachments to someone like Nancy. The fact that Bomber was leaving soon had reminded me I was stupid to form any kind of emotional attachment while I was in the military.

  For a long time I glared at the patch of ice I could faintly make out. I had to piss pretty bad, so I threw aside the blankets and climbed down, careful when I put my weight on the floor. Sure as Hell, a thin patina of ice coated the waxed and polished tiled floor. The room was silent, dark, and lonely; my roommate with the rest of the unit at Grafenwoehr and Nancy back in her room. The room was almost pitch black, just faint light oozing in around the curtains and through where I'd left them a hand span separated. A quick glance showed me that the lights on my stereo system were dead, so I didn't even bother with the light switch when I moved past it on the way to the small bathroom in my room.

  The power was out in the barracks again.

  I took a leak, naked and shivering from the cold, flushed, and moved over to the sink to wash my hands. Although I couldn't see the mirror or my reflection I put my hands on either side of the mirror, the pain from the cold cinderblocks was something I relished for a moment before speaking.

  "Nobody likes you. You are worthless beyond the fact that you will die so that someone better than you will survive. You will never be worth anything more than whatever good your death can do. Nobody will ever love you, everyone can barely tolerate you, and you deserve nothing good." I told my unseen reflection. "You will die alone, and nobody will know or care that you are gone."

  Satisfied I'd reminded myself my place in the world, I turned from the unseen mirror and went over to my desk to grab my keys then headed back to my wall lockers, which were built into the cinderblock wall of the room. In the darkness, I unlocked and opened them so I could get dressed. Long johns underneath a T-shirt, jeans, and a flannel shirt, with nice warm socks and my combat boots still wasn't enough to keep the cold from seeping into my body. My gloves were on the desk, wool liners and leather gloves, but I figured I wouldn't need them just to hop down to the CQ Area and back. Just in case, though, I dropped the inside flaps of my soft cap down and pulled it onto my head, covering the ¼ inch of blond fuzz that passed for hair on my head. Normally, you weren't supposed to wear a cover inside a building, but it was too cold to mess around, and there wasn't anyone around to bitch at me for breaking regs in order to stay warm.

  Plus, rules were different on the mountain.

  Shivering, I grabbed my keys, flashlight, and wallet off of the top of my desk and then headed out the door, locking it behind me. The hallway was as long as a city block, pitch black with just a dim glow from the emergency lights providing light, and had ice glittering redly on the walls. I thumbed on my flashlight and clipped it to the pocket of my flannel so I didn't have to bother holding onto it. The light didn't do much to illuminate the hallway, just made the frost on the walls and on the tile floor glitter in the darkness. I walked down toward the double doors that separated the hallway into two halves. Up on the second floor, where I lived, both sections were known as "Hammerhead Hall"; on the first floor the end closest to the Charge of Quarters desk was known as "Titty Territory" and housed the female soldiers, while the far end was known as "Queer Country" where known homosexuals and bisexuals were housed.

  Despite the fact that homosexuality was normally a reason to be ejected from the military, our MOS was chronically understrength, to the point where something like open homosexuality was ignored. Numbers are what mattered, the mission came first, and something like sexual preference wasn't about to get in the way of the unit accomplishing the mission as far as the Department of Defense was concerned. I'd learned that the biggest problem with homosexuality was the fact that it made the person in question susceptible to blackmail by the Soviet Union. Being in the closet meant that the KGB could threaten someone with revealing their secret to the military, to their family, to their hometown, in hopes of gaining whatever intel they needed, but being open about it, well, nobody really cared about it.

  Plus, no matter how DoD looked at it, let's be serious, all you could say to a guy who has possession of an entire site of nuclear and chemical weaponry is, "How's liking the cock working out for you?" To say anything else made you into a goddamn idiot who deserved what he got. I wasn't thinking of any of that, though. I was more concerned with the fact that the power was out, the temperature was dropping, and there was only a handful of us in the barracks.

  Something banged and screamed behind me as I approached the double doors.

  I hunched my shoulders and pushed my hands into my pockets, ignored the low moan as I passed the laundry room and pushed my way through the double doors, the wire-reinforced glass covered in a thick layer of frost. The pushbar was wooden, otherwise it was cold enough that I would have left behind skin from my hands when I pushed down on it to open the door. A whiff of decay, rotting meat and the unmistakable subtle scent of rotting blood was whipped away by a cold breeze that swirled around me until the doors closed and my breath plumed out in front of my face.

  My jungle boots thudded on the tiles as I headed toward the far stairs, passing by people's rooms. People I knew, people I drank with, fought with, and worked with. People that had gone back to the States or were deployed to Graf or Bremerhaven, leaving only a skeleton crew of 24 "mission essential" personnel behind in the cold isolation of the barracks. I opened the door to the main forward stairwell, which went 2 stories above me and 2 stories down, the last underground from the front side of the barracks, at the level of the parking lot and loading docks on the back side. A shriek sounded from upstairs, followed by a low sobbing moan from the darkness below me. I shivered and went down the flight of stairs, keeping one hand on the ice-slicked wall in case I hit a patch of ice, which might have coated over the grip strips, and went down the stairs. It wouldn't help me, but it was more habit than anything else. It was
just prudence.

  Prudence meant survival. A lesson 2/19th taught quickly.

  I pushed open the door that led from the stairway to the CQ Area and panned my flashlight around the room. Between shining my flashlight and the dim red light from the emergency light behind the CQ counter, I took in the whole room. I'd noted that the door to the 1st Floor Rec Room was closed, along with the doors to the Day Room, the Game Room and, of course, the unisex bathroom that nobody used.

  The same bathroom that Tandy vanished out of before the building had burnt down. The bathroom had one door in or out, no windows, and he'd vanished until his body had been found the following spring on the other side of the mountain by two privates that had gone out to man an observation point we'd dug earlier in the day. The military had ruled that Tandy had died of exposure, and the melting snow sliding down the mountain had carried him almost five miles to the other side of the mountain. Except, when I'd scouted out the area for the Forward Observation Post earlier that day, Tandy's body hadn't been there. The whole official story was bullshit as far as I was concerned.

  I'd watched with my own eyes as the ambulance crew loaded Tandy's body up and left with it, and had seen my older brother write up the reports since he had been Sergeant of the Guard when Tandy's body had been found. I'd helped put the white cloth strips called "Engineer Tape" around the body while we waited for CID and the MP's to arrive to examine the area where he'd been discovered.

  That didn't mean Tandy was gone, though. Either he or someone wearing a sick mask had knocked on windows, stalked people on guard duty in the motor pool, and once even attacked someone. Rumor control stated that either the coffin had arrived Stateside empty or Tandy had vanished from the post morgue.

  Now he haunted our side of the mountain, and three disappearances that had been officially listed as "death by misadventure" were rumored to be Tandy taking them. We talked about him in whispers and wondered what he wanted, or what whatever dark force inhabited the man's body could want from us.

  A low moan drifted through the dark room as I stared at the bathroom door, remembering what Tandy had come to mean.

  I pulled my attention from the bathroom door and the thoughts, panning the flashlight out again.

  "Jakes?" I called out. Specialist-Six Jakes was the NCOIC of the Charge of Quarters for the night. He was the Section Sergeant for Second Section, First Ammunition Platoon and had been in the unit since about a month after the barracks had burnt down. Not one of the First Twenty, as those of us who had been there and survived called ourselves, but a solid NCO all the same.

  No answer, except for the emergency light behind the desk giving it up and slowly fading out, pulsing slower and slower, before finally being nothing more than a faint red glow, more felt than seen.

  No CQ, no ACQ, no Duty Driver, no Assistant Duty Driver, no nothing.

  Just me, shivering and breathing out plumes of steam.

  That wasn't like SPC-6 Jakes.

  The man would be considered an anal retentive micro-manager in any other unit, but his attention to detail, his insistence that both the written procedures and the unwritten rules were followed, and his careful method of making decisions had meant that he hadn't lost a single soldier to the dangers of the units and the sites. His section had suffered injuries, yes, including a few bad enough that the soldiers who had suffered from those injuries had been medically discharged, but no deaths.

  Unlike my own Section Sergeant, he was willing to stand up to the Chief, and it was a favorite story of us enlisted about the time he'd walked into the Chief's office and told him that as soon as the Chief left his office to go home, Jakes would bring his crews in. That his crews would only work as long as the Chief and not a second more.

  He wouldn't leave the CQ Area unattended unless there was a major emergency, and if one had happened, he would have alerted the entire barracks to it as well as left someone at the CQ Desk to coordinate things.

  Curious, I walked around behind the desk and opened the log to look for any reason for Jakes to abandon the CQ Desk. If the clocks on the wall were right (and they were all off between 5 and 15 minutes, consistent with the rumors that no two clocks in the barracks had the same time) Jakes had answered the phones when the eight ammo sites called about an hour and a half before, to let the unit know that they were all clear, but nothing else was written outside of the hourly checks from the FSTS sites, the hourly check-in with the MP unit on main post, hourly weather readings, and the hourly check with the V Corps NBC Liaison.

  This was weird. The calls should have come in an hour before and been logged, there shouldn't have been an hour and a half, almost two-hour gap. Something had pulled the entire CQ crew from the desk when SOP stated that at least the ADD should have remained behind. If it was a serious emergency, the CQ should have woken up everyone behind while SPC-6 Jakes unlocked the arms room for us to gear up in full battle rattle.

  Jakes would have followed SOP all the way, including alerting the next highest ranking in the barracks, which would have been me. My Corporal rank put me over the Specialists, and Jakes and I had worked together a few times, most recently during Reconstitution early in October, where his crew and mine had worked with 3rd Armor to reload vehicles as fast as possible in practice for the frantic loading that would take place during a Soviet invasion.

  He hadn't woken me up, hadn't logged any disturbances, and that was strange.

  Strange was dangerous.

  The fact he had missed answering a call from the FSTS sites meant the MP's would have called the V Corps Liaison, and the MP's should have called the Ranger detachment down on main post and put them on standby. If the V Corps Liaison couldn't get a hold of us for more than 2 hours, the Rangers would be deployed to come up and either mount a rescue mission or assault any forces that had taken the unit. The timer should have been ticking.

  It was a very real fear. We knew for a fact that the phones for our unit were tapped, both by our own side and the enemy. Twice, the Rangers had engaged special operations troops that were observing our unit. I'd heard about the short sharp clashes between the Rangers and Warsaw Pact special operations troops from the men who had taken part, drank the spirits of the men who died to the afterlife with them, and appreciated the fact that they'd protected us.

  To everyone else, the Cold War was just NATO and the Warsaw Pact glaring at each other and making noise, rattling sabers, and muttering threats.

  To us, it meant blackmail, surveillance, espionage, and even sabotage and combat.

  Frustrated with the lack of information, I closed the logbook and turned around, checking the rest of the CQ area.

  Parkas, cold weather masks, trigger mittens - all were laying on the table against the back wall. Four stacks on the table.

  Shit.

  If they'd gone outside they were dead already, and without their cold weather gear, as cold as it was getting in the barracks, two hours had a good chance of being fatal, even inside. Still swearing softly to myself, I dug out my keys before I walked to the back of the CQ area. I opened up "The Closet", where the breakers were and the weather readouts, and flicked the switch out of habit, getting nothing.

  My flashlight revealed that all the gauges and dials were dead. Water pressure was about all we had, and the power had been out long enough that the water-heater temperature was down to about fifty degrees farenheit. The outside temperature was well below freezing, wind speed was above fifty miles-per-hour, humidity was bad, and the barometer was going south, dropping while I was watching.

  Shit.

  I went back out into the CQ and checked the phones. Three were dedicated lines, one to V Corps, one to the MP's, and the last to the Rangers. The other four lines were standard phone lines, used to make normal calls. The other lines were only for emergencies, as standard check-ins came over the normal phones.

  All but one of them were dead, nothing but an echoing silence. The one dedicated Ranger line gave a steady crackling hiss that felt vaguely
menacing and made the shaved hairs at the back of my neck try to stand up. The lizard hissed in rage.

  I heard a low chuckle behind me and the door to The Closet slammed shut, making me jump.

  Damn it. It's just nerves. This is the 1980's and I'm a soldier, not a Victorian maid.

  I dug out the morning report from the middle drawer built into the CQ counter and crosschecked the names with room numbers in the alert roster. Only thirteen of us in the barracks, the rest either lived off-post or in on-post housing. From the sheet, Jakes was the highest ranking according to the morning report from the day before, with me, Bomber, and Nagle coming in second, third, and fourth, respectively.

  Opening the rest of the drawers didn't turn up the keys, the vehicle dispatch, nothing that should have been there.

  I checked the log again. Nothing about the Duty Driver or the ADD having to go somewhere. No emergencies. Only standard "All reports logged" and times, along with 1LT Jackson calling in that he was heading to Frankfurt but no reason why 1st Platoon's second section leader was leaving us without an officer against SOP. But then, LT Jackson had only gotten to the unit two months before, and in the week I'd been back to the unit I'd heard him wax poetically about how everything that had happened was either bullshit or how, if he'd been here when everything went up in flames, things would have turned out differently. He'd been angry to find out that a Second Lieutenant was in charge of a section of the platoon, while a First Lieutenant was in charge of the platoon, unlike a normal unit, where the only officer in a platoon was the Platoon Leader and usually a Second Lieutenant. Between his bullshit about how things would have been different and his griping about being relegated to being in charge of three squads instead of an entire platoon, he always had something to say about the unit, the SOP, and all of us, and usually none of it good.