Little Casino

Four soldiers

HE WAS ONE OF FOUR SOLDIERS IN A SALOON somewhere, after so many years, it’s hard to remember. That’s what he says, in any event, probably a dodge. The others cannot be located, or accounted for, or so he says. A saloon in maybe Baltimore, or Blackstone, maybe Glen Burnie or San Antonio. This was another world, existent before probably three-quarters of the people presently dwelling, as best they can upon this earth, were born. There was a dance floor, big enough for three couples, just off the end of the long bar and near the two booths at the back of the room. The usual jukebox, some of the songs that year were “And So to Sleep Again,” “I Won’t Cry Anymore,” “Mixed Emotions,” and “Unforgettable,” the last cited the only one to have survived. A blonde. A pale-blue dress. Reminiscent of something that he could not quite place, but it may well have been important. He was giving this blonde some story about being shipped out in a week to FECOM, la-la, la-la, la-la. Then the pale-blue dress presented him with another image of another girl at another bar, OK, FECOM, oh yeah. The dress might have been a uniform, white, or an elegant sweater with tiny faux pearls in a fleur-de-lis pattern on the bosom. The feel of ice-cold fur with a hint of clean, fresh perfume.

Now, how to get this blond girl with her small breasts and lovely hips away from the other girls and his three pals, Privates E-2 Blank, Blank, and Blank? She was a little drunk and he was telling her a lot of lies, and her pale-blue dress was somehow responsible for the smell of ether and hospital meat loaf and cold, soggy carrots and peas. What the hell?

Yeah, they’ll be cutting our orders for Fort Ord in a couple of days, damn it. What a sorry-looking soldier he was, his khakis disgracefully wrinkled and stained with beer and whiskey and ketchup, his low-quarters scuffed, his brass dull, his tie missing, his cap in his back pocket. He looked at her, his face suitably and bravely stricken. Honor first, yet — apprehension. And love! Love! He slid his dirty hand down the smooth fabric of her dress till it rested between the small of her back and her buttocks, and she tentatively pushed her thighs against him. But where could they go, for God’s sake? A walk, a cup of coffee, a movie, bowling? Then, maybe, maybe what?

They might well have been in Wilmington, Delaware, for that matter. How come you didn’t join the Navy if you, gee, don’t like the Army? He told her, in hesitant speech, of his noble brother, nobly killed in action aboard the U.S.S. Portland in the Coral Sea, and how he’d promised their mother — an invalid now — that he’d never, never … oh, he told her many things, many ingenious lovely things. He had his hand on her thigh and could feel, through her skirt, where her garter clasped her stocking. He did not tell her that he didn’t mind the Army at all, that it was a place wherein you were safe in your head, but he dutifully pushed his groin against her belly, and she smiled at him, the lights from the jukebox flashing off the lenses of her glasses. Ah, how nice it would be to fuck her, all of her, her dress, her hair, her garters, and her glasses. She said that she really had to be getting home for supper, it was really getting late. Ah, he said. OK.

Soldiers often attempt to seduce women with announcements of their imminent dispatch into the Jaws of Death. It is an old and respected con, wholly understood by both soldiers and women.

WELCOME. MEDICAL REPLACEMENT TRAINING CENTER 2ND ARMY. FORT MEADE, MARYLAND.

One of the soldiers in the saloon on that late September afternoon had his face and both arms blown off while in action with the 5th RCT on Hill 923, somewhere near Obong-ni Ridge, North Korea; another died of multiple myeloma, as a result of exposure to radiation during a nuclear exercise in White Sands, New Mexico, where he was sent, with other troops of the 2nd Army, to serve as part of a ground-forces reaction operation; the third returned to Germany, where he had been born to parents who were soon burned to crisps in an American incendiary raid in 1944; and our man, “the dancer,” after a short and unremarkable military career as a medical-aid man, moved to California, where he immediately felt, as an absolute stranger among strangers who are themselves absolute strangers among strangers, in a state not meant for human habitation, at home. One day, he saw a Jodie suit, in faded blue denim, in the window of a hip men’s boutique in San Francisco.

What about the girl in the blue dress? What was her name?

The Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) designation for Medical Aid Man is 3666. During the Korean War, their mortality rate was just slightly lower that that of second lieutenants of infantry.