A Story I Never Believed

In Germany, at the height of the terrorist alerts, and during the most ferocious snowstorm I had yet witnessed there, we went on deployment again. The sirens rang at two a.m.; the alert drivers stumbled from their bunks, got dressed like unhappy Eskimos in their fur-lined parkas, hopped in their jeeps, and drove out every direction into the blinding storm, like so many hung-over, stoned-to-the-gill Paul Reveres, to spread the alarm. By daybreak everyone was feeling the pain, and the convoy stretched for over two miles along the mud-and-snow-encrusted autobahn. Going up to the deployment site, we all had to mind our manners. We drove in formation, with the captain’s jeep in front, its little American flag flapping in the icy air. Behind it came the other officer, security police and NCO jeeps, and then the troop transports and deuce-and-a-halves, with all the shelters and equipment. Driving into the mountains, all the engine governors were in place, limiting top speed to about eighty klicks or kilometers per hour, which didn’t really matter to us, since we all felt like cold gravy, anyway, and had nowhere else to go.

By late morning we arrived at the twenty-acre mountaintop meadow and circled the vehicles like a giant wagon train, preparing for the Indian attack. Before site construction began, we broke rations. If you were lucky, you got the beans and weanies, which tasted all right cold or hot, just like the civilian beans and weanies we all remembered; if not, you got the mystery meat, encased inside its thick layer of quivering, yellow, gelatinous matter that had to be melted down atop a hot-running deucer engine to reveal what was inside. However, more often than not, after the revelation you would usually just throw away the green tin of swirling flotsam and smoke the two Lucky Strike cigarettes, which came inside the rations box like the toy inside Cracker Jacks. We knew these were really old cigarettes, we figured, from WWII or before. But they were so stanky and vile, they made you forget what you had just seen emerge from the yellow matter, so you didn’t mind so much.

By midday until dark the construction went on. In the beginning, our shelters were the simple rib-and-roll design. These were easy to build. You began by clearing an area for the deck, which were the rectangular wooden crates the rest of the material came packed in. After the floor was laid, the wooden ribs—think St. Louis Gateway Arch, but on a smaller scale—were assembled and began to rise above the decking, side by side, about two feet apart. Once the ribcage was in place, rolls of canvas were unfurled to cover the openings. The smallest soldiers were made to scamper up the arches, dragging the canvas strips behind them like ants dragging crumbs up an anthill, one after the other, with other soldiers lashing them in place at either end. After the shelters were secure, the heaters and generators were positioned, and then the interiors were constructed. CRC, or the Control Reporting Center, was the scope dopes, the radar stations that monitored air traffic and coordinated the close-air and reconnaissance flights. The TACC, or Tactical Air Control Center, was just that. Officers sat at their tables on rising daises and monitored the war taking place on the plotting and status boards below them. Deployments usually lasted three or four days, at which time the site was torn down, packed back into the wooden crates, loaded back onto the deuce-and-a-halves, and everyone drove home.

The only change to this routine came when the military tried to introduce a new shelter design, we enlisted referred to as Rubber Duckies. In a nutshell, these were computerized, sectional, blowup shelters that, when properly inflated, I think was supposed to resemble one of those giant, ominous, floating creatures in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Rattling compressors pumped air into one section, then another, while the second lieutenants and the zebra sergeants manned the controls like so many Wizards of Oz, giving a little more air here, a little less there, while we (of course, not smart enough for such a delicate operation) stood back and watched. The only things missing from this Laurel-and-Hardy routine were the derbies and bowties; and, I believe, by my last deployment we were back to the good old ribs and rolls again, and the top sergeants and second lieus were back, running around, barking orders at no one in particular, as if anyone had any idea what was going on to begin with.

But regardless of what shelter we used, breakdown was the moment everyone—and I mean everyone—waited for. That’s when orders came down from Brussels the war was over, NATO forces had been victorious, yet, again (“Hoo-ray! Hoo-rah!”), and we could all go home. Then the captain kicked the anthill and all hell broke loose. The command post that had taken hours upon hours to carefully construct now came down in literally seconds and minutes. The reason for this manic group hustle was simple. Upon receipt of the final battle order, the exercise was officially over. The officers and zeebs had already vanished. And the moment you got your crates loaded, launched and delivered back to the base—you were free. Of course, such enticements come at a cost. Shelter arches collapsed on troops, breaking arms and legs; vehicles skidded off icy mountain roads, with everyone trying to be the first back down the mountain to the autobahn (where even gods and generals could not impose a speed limit). Of course, the last thing everyone did, leaving the mountain, was to disconnect the governor on their engine. Now, with visions of Jackie Stewart rounding the far corner at Hockenheim in his snarling Formula One, a hundred military vehicles hit the German freeway in approximately the same ten-minute timeframe. For the next hour or so, vomit-green troop transports dueled it out on the icy road with sleek black Porsches, while deuce-and-a-halves held their own against angry BMWs and indignant Mercedes. They had the speed and mobility (and the custom leather gloves), but we had size and determination. Plus, since the first introduction the majority of the German population had to the motorcar was Hitler giving them the frigging Volkswagen (the people’s car), we—who had been raised on Chevy Malibus, GTOs and Cuda 442 engines—had the edge on experience. It was WWII redux, but without the beach landings and destruction of irreplaceable medieval architecture.

After these autobahn destruction derbies, the sun always seemed to be shining when you dropped off your vehicle at the base compound, hopped into your Opel Sport Coupe, and drove over to pick up your waiting Fraulein. Finally, you would meet your friends at the corner Gasthaus that was
centuries older than America, and you would laugh and drink the delicious beer, and laugh some more, and the miserable deployment would be forgotten…almost.

Because on this particular deployment, something different had happened that I could not forget. Someone different. And sitting there, drinking the beer and watching all my German friends laughing and joking in their way, I recalled what had happened the night before, back up on that snowy mountaintop, where I had been pulling midnight guard duty. As I said, at the time the German terrorist alerts were at their peak. And we knew it would be a real coup de main for some splinter group to disrupt our war games, all the way from spray painting our vehicles with their cute little company logos, to dropping a bomb or two into our midst. Site perimeters were always floodlit
and secured, and we enlisted loved nothing better—after spending the day wet and frozen, while participating in our group activities, and then crawling into our wet and frozen sleeping bags to try and shiver oneself to sleep—than to be awakened in the middle of the night to go stand wet and frozen, clutching your weapon and staring with numbed anticipation into the swirling white morass
surrounding you.

And that’s where I was when I first saw him emerge from that morass like some forever-trudging, ill-omened figment of my imagination. And I raised my rifle.

“What’s shakin’, chief?” he called out to me, raising his hands above his head in mock fashion. “Just out stretchin’ my legs some.”

He was Army, I saw by his rumpled, big-pocketed fatigues and insignias, without a coat, and clutching a quart bottle of Johnny Walker Black in one of his ungloved hands. When I lowered my rifle and he came up to me, I saw his face, his eyes—the way they seemed to slice and dice me in a fraction of a second, before moving on—and never forgot them after that. Never forgot him.

In my novel American Warrior is a character named Bradshaw, with a deep, raggedy voice that sounded like forty miles of bad country road. And this may be the only instance, I can recall, of someone stepping flesh and blood from my life into my fiction. I’ve thought about why that is, and I realized he came as a set piece. In the few hours I knew him, and we talked, he so vividly revealed himself (perhaps, in hindsight, actually revealing very little, or nothing at all), there was nothing to add or take away. He was set. He was done in a way the best characters are done. They come to you suddenly and as a whole, and you can only be grateful and whisper thanks to the muse or whatever, before moving on yourself.

We stayed together until daybreak and just talked. First, the hour of guard duty I had left, walking the perimeter side by side. Then we went back to a quiet corner of my Quonset hut, where a big oil heater sat radiating rings of heat through the wall, and talked there. He said he was in Germany for medical reasons. “Seein’ them quack majors over at Ramstein,” was the way he put it. He looked perfectly fine to me, and I didn’t inquire what the reasons were. Instead, I listened to him talk about his farm back in Missouri, and the woodshop he had there that he just loved to stand in the middle of, close his eyes, and smell the fragrance of the various lumbers. But when I asked him about Vietnam, how long he had been there, the almost gentle expression on his face changed. Fairly drunk now, he leaned toward me and whispered, “For a thousand fuckin’ years, chief.” Then he leaned back, took another swallow from his whiskey bottle, and suddenly began to talk about things: people and places, terms and expressions, situations and incidents, I had no idea what. He was telling me things, rather, mysterious snippets and secretive pieces of things, that were so incredibly foreign to my experience in the military, my bullshit meter began to go off, and stayed wagging back and forth inside my head, until he finally stood up, weaving and stretching, and said, “Nice talkin’ to you, chief.” And disappeared forever into my past.

That is, until years later, doing research for the novel, I turned a page in a book and discovered his photograph—so young-looking, so ferociously smiling—right there in the middle of it all, just like he said it would be.

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