One to Count Cadence

1. Base

"This is a strange outfit, Sgt. Krummel," 1/Sgt. Tetrick said on that morning I first arrived in the Philippines in the late summer of 1962. "Unusual. Different. We're a small outfit, less than seventy men. It really ought to be good duty, but somehow it ain't. The work's too easy, and these kids get bored, and when they're not bored, they're pissed off. Their bowels jam up or run like crazy because of the work schedule, and their sleep is always screwed up." Tetrick stood and shuffled his way over to the trick schedules. His feet were still tender from a case of jungle-rot he caught in Burma during the war. He was careful never to put a foot down any harder than necessary. He explained that the 721st Communications Security Detachment had only an Operations Section and a small Headquarters Section of cooks and clerks since most of the administration and personnel work was handled on Okinawa. The men in Operations, "Ops," were divided into four tricks of ten men. Each trick worked six days, 0700 to 1600, then had a seventy-two hour break; six swings, 1600 to 2400, then a forty-eight hour break; and then six mids and another seventy-two hour break.

"Your trick is on break now," he said, "and they're all in Town – that's what they call Angeles – drinking and whoring and anything else they can think of to get in trouble. Town is bad. Three-fourths of it is off-limits forever, two-thirds of it after 1800, and all of it after 2400. But will they be back before curfew? Shit, no. They got to run and hide from the APs and laugh about how much fun it is. And if they can get knived by a calesa driver or run over by a jeepny or drown in a sewer for all I know – or care." He shrugged, sighed, then walked back to his desk and continued, "But somehow all the bastards will get back in one piece just in time to wash off the crud, shave, brush their teeth maybe, and get to the three-quarter before it leaves for the Ops Building." He shook his head and folded his long arms, then stared at the rain beyond the half-screened passageway. "It rains all the goddamned time, too."

1/Sgt. Tetrick, ex-marauder, twenty-two years service – the last twelve as a first-shirt – was of medium height, but because of his heavy, sloping shoulders and long arms, seemed much shorter. A little hair adorned his head, a gratuitous bit of sun-bleached fuzz circling from ear to ear and no more. This too was another small reminder of Burma, but he wore his baldness as if it were dictated by military expediency. A golf tan, his single vice, didn't cover the rich ocher-yellow malaria stain on his skin.

"But they're a good bunch, damnit," he said quickly, out of his reverie as if the distant bugle he heard had stopped. "And it's our job to keep them out of the stockade – damned Air Force calls it the Confinement Facility – and the hospital so they can do their work." He glanced back at the rain and shook his shining head again. "You just can't run an Army outfit on an air base anyway. Damned airmen don't blouse their boots and wear baseball caps and bus-driver uniforms. Shit." He shuffled behind his desk. "You were in an infantry outfit on your last hitch?" he asked, already knowing the answer.

"Six years ago."

"Long time to stay out. How come you came back in?"

"Like you said: it's a long time."

He dropped it. "Don't expect this to be like a line outfit. Not at all."

"I didn't."

"I don't know what it is," he said, "but it ain't soldiering."

Tetrick continued explaining the 721st Com Sec Det as he deftly handled my paperwork. His voice was roughly concerned, even irritated, but still tender as he spoke of the outfit; like a Nebraska farmer whose four grown sons had left the land for the cement and money of the city, leaving only his swollen hands to toil in the land of his father: he could not understand, but his dust-thickened voice kept whispering, "God love 'em. God love 'em." The Army had not issued Tetrick a wife, as the saying goes, but it had these sons. And me too, for that matter. Everything I needed from the supply room – bunk, mattress, field gear – had already been carried to my quarters on the second floor. Tetrick apologized for not having any regular NCO quarters, then added that he liked for his trick chiefs to bunk with the men. I was pleasantly surprised when I was assigned a houseboy, a young Filipino who, for five pesos a week, would clean my quarters, take care of my laundry and shine my boots, etc. Enlisted men also were allowed houseboys and even the KP was pulled by Filipino workers. It all seemed very British, darkly faithful Indian batman and all that, but the houseboys were all hard-core finger-popping black-marketeers, already more Western than Oriental. Tetrick then took me in to meet the company commander, Capt. Harry Saunders, and the executive officer, Lt. Dottlinger. The lieutenant merely grunted and squeezed my hand, giving me the impression that he didn't care for me before he met me. It took longer to meet Capt. Saunders.

Capt. Harry, as he liked to be called, came from Brunswick, Georgia, and his lifetime ambition was to win a medal of some, of any, sort, then retire to home and become a Republican. All this, and the additional "u" in his name, was to prove that he was more than a redneck kid who had gone to college on a football scholarship, arriving with only a single pair of shoes, tennis shoes at that. In spite of all his posturing, he was a happy, shambling bear of a man whose only real fault lay in the unsophisticated nature of his dreams. He had a tendency to say "men" in all capital letters, but he had an easy, open-armed way and a smile which said he truly loved everyone in the world. Except his wife. And Lt. Dottlinger. Capt. Harry seemed pleased with me, mainly because I was both a Southerner and a "collegeman."

"A master's degree, huh?" he said several times. "How about that, Sgt. Tetrick? How about that? We damn well need more NCOs with a college background in this outfit. They seem to get along better with the men. What's it in?"

"Sir?"

"Your degree."

"Soviet Studies, sir."

"Well, how about that? I'll bet you're the only sergeant in the whole Army with a master's degree in Russian… what was that? History?

"Yes, sir."

Capt. Harry went on and on about the degree until I wished that I had not listed the thing on my 201 file. There was a painful irony in being faced with my own vanity, in being asked why, with the degree, I had reenlisted. "A man's wife leaves him for the civil-rights movement, for an ideal not another man, then it is certainly no wonder whatever he does," I often told myself. But no one else. No, nor Capt. Harry when he asked that day.

I accepted their good luck wishes, and left, again asking "Why?" as I had for the two months of basic and the six months at Fort Carlton. But I had no answer, and perhaps wanted no answer. I had the rain and the random barracks noise and time… time clicking past like a pale young whore popping her gum behind too bright lips, endlessly unconcerned and unsatisfying, hopelessly desirable.

The 721st resided in a single two-story concrete building. The mess hall, the day room, orderly and supply rooms, and quarters for the First, Supply and Mess Sergeants filled the first floor. The second contained fifty two-man rooms divided by a long hallway. Each room had an outside wall of adjustable aluminum louvers and an inside wall of wooden ones. The rooms were quite large and, except for the usual bareness, were not too military in effect. No metal foot- or wall-lockers knifed the space. Instead there were two large closets, a gray metal table with two office chairs, and a three-quarter-bed-size bunk.

My cot sat next to the adjustable louvers, lengthwise to catch any breeze. I had never seen one of the new, larger bunks before. Ordinarily only the Air Force used them. I dropped my gear on the floor, kicked off my shoes, stripped out of the heavy green wool uniform I had been shrouded in for two miserable days on the MATS flight from California, and then stretched out on the bunk. None of those thin, cotton-lumpy racks the Army called a mattress, but a thick, foam rubber one to hold my weary bones. Yep, Sgt. Tetrick, I thought, scratching one foot with the other, This is a strange outfit. All I need now is a swimming pool and a spot of sunshine to be a real recruiting-poster ground pounder. Hoping for some sign of the sun (it had been raining since my flight arrived), I cranked open one set of louvers. The rain still fell heavily, but across the street a small building was visible. I hadn't noticed it when I ran from the jeep to the barracks, but there it was, my swimming pool. Not exactly mine, but right across the street, and I could use it anytime. Okay, I thought, If the sun comes out, I'll just take a goddamned swim. It didn't, so I unpacked my gear, showered, then slept through evening chow.

I awoke after sundown. The rain had disappeared into a mist which gathered in fuzzy balls around the street Lights. My watch had stopped. Across the hall I heard the whirr and click of a record changer and very faintly the opening bars of Bolero, The hall was empty, quiet and solemn, as if everyone had gone away. I knocked and entered when a voice said, "Come in."

A very tan young man in his shorts sat on one of the cots, resting his back against the wall and a writing pad on his knees. He had one of those clean muscular bodies in hope of which ten million little boys eat Wheaties, skin the color of butterscotch pudding, crystal-white teeth flashing in his quick grin, and one left leg entirely masked in scar tissue. A burn, obviously, puckered and crisp-bacon brown scrambled with rotten off-white. (A bucket of roofing tar had been dumped on his leg from atop a new supermarket in Laramie, Wyoming one summer.) A magnetic deformity which drew a curious eye, a lingering look, perhaps even a poke with an inquiring finger to see if, Like a burnt marshmallow, the outside would crumble and reveal a soft, sticky white core. The rest of his body seemed so perfect as if to compensate for that leg.

"Seven-thirty," he said cheerfully when I asked for the time. He paused. "You Sgt. Darly's replacement?" I nodded. He paused again, then did a good thing: he stood up, reached out a hand, and said, "Tom Novotny."

"Jake Krummel," I answered, though "Jake" sounded odd in my mouth after so many years of being "Slag." Never Jake, but always Slag, I no longer had the self-confidence or, more likely, conceit, to introduce myself by that audacious nickname. (All this a waste of time, though. I exposed my real identity the first time I got drunk.)

He offered me a smoke, handling the ritual of the pack and matches as if he had just begun smoking, though he had been for years. I think he realized how odd a cigarette looked in his healthy face. He and I sat on opposite bunks, exchanging the amenities of strangers to the increasing volume of the music.

Novotny reached to the only odd piece of furniture in the room, a chest-high mahogany cabinet, and eased the volumn down. The cabinet was rich Filipino mahogany, with carved jungle scenes on every flat surface which, when examined very closely, revealed a large number of couples, triples and daisy-chains in various stages, states and forms of – intercourse is not strong enough; fucking too crude for the artistry of the carving; copulation too limited; so I choose – cohabitation, for the figures did forever live in the wood. I had to laugh: a sexual stereo system able to handle LPs, 45's and 78's, tapes, AM-FM radio and Freudian nightmares.

"Hey, is this setup yours?" I asked.

"Naw. Belongs to Morning. Matter of fact, this isn't even my room. I just come here to write letters to my girl," Tom said. "She likes classical music."

A nice thought, I mused as I rubbed the wood. Three shelves above were filled with paperback books, perhaps arranged too neatly, too organized by subject and author. Dostoevski, of course, but no Chekhov or Tolstoy. Sartre, but no Camus. Just a shade off-center of what I would have chosen. Too French, too black, and too avant-garde for my tastes, the books still made me want to talk to their owner.

"What's this guy's name?"

"Morning. Joe Morning."

"He on my trick?"

"Yeah."

"Seems to read a lot."

"Yeah. Says he writes poetry too, but I haven't seen any of it. He spends too much time in Town to do much of anything else."

"Say, are you on my trick?"

"Sure."

"Tetrick said you all were in Town."

"Didn't go. Go to Town 'cause I'm tired of base. Sometimes I stay on base 'cause I'm tired of Town. Ain't new anymore. Only so many ways a man can get laid."

"I wonder," I said, touching a wooden maiden who clutched a small and hairy object to her crotch which I assumed to be a monkey, "after seeing this thing. There may be something new under the covers." We chuckled together in that easy way which told both of us we would be friends.

It pleased me that Novotny did not seem ill at ease or in any way treat me as a sergeant, and at the same time we understood that the moment would come when I would have to tell him to do something or other which he did not want to do. If he respected me, he would do it and not, as others would, dislike me for the accidents of time and place which made me his sergeant. The months at Fort Carlton in training school had been unpleasant because I had been a barracks sergeant, a bad barracks sergeant, too easy at first, then too hard later when the man tried to take advantage of me. I had no business being a sergeant anyway. I was just a guy who had stayed in the reserves for the hell of it and the money (and maybe because I hoped I wouldn't miss the next war as I had the Korean one). That lack of experience, and my attempts to be intellectual about something which isn't, caused me much trouble. There is no rationale about orders: they have to be given and taken, but never can make much sense if thought about. Given a choice, I would have preferred to forge my tiny link on the chain of command out of mutual understanding of and respect for the necessity and value of discipline, but men who defied God certainly were not going to bow to any abstract discipline. But oddly enough, my foolishness was going to work in the 721st because the men were good. Not all, I guess, but enough. Like Novotny: good men whatever their educational or personal differences.

As our conversation faltered, I asked Tom about a place to eat on base.

"Say the food is okay at the NCO Club," he said, giving me an out if I wanted it.

"No club tonight."

"Pretty fair steaks at the Kelly Restaurant."

"Where's that?"

"I'm going up, if you want to come along."

"Sure. What about your letter? I'll wait if you want to finish it."

"Fuck it," he laughed. "She'll marry some prick before I get stateside anyway. Get ready."

As we walked down the hall to the central stairwell to call a cab, I was again struck by the quiet, the sense of desertion, but as I moved between those rooms, those walls which could not hold even a breeze, I realized they provided an unusual privacy for enlisted men. People were behind those walls – signaled by a muffled laugh or cough, a book falling from sleepy hands, a radio humming, a bunk groaning under a restless sleeper – privately behind them. I could not remember a single moment during my first hitch of being alone in the barracks, not even in the latrines.

"You people live good," I said.

"Ain't home," Tom said, turning into the stairwell.

The Kelly Restaurant was exactly what you would expect on a military installation: the second-best eating place in any small American town where the Baptists and Methodists gather to exchange weather complaints, clothing compliments and pessimism, a warehouse of scratched and chipped formica and cracking plastic, except the Kelly Restaurant served Japanese beer in liter bottles.

"The steaks were okay," I said as Tom and I were on our fourth or fifth bottle, "but the waiters were surly as hell."

"Fuckers," he said, grinning so hard his cheeks bunched into tight little balls of leather. "Real shits. Don't tip 'em, they pick your pocket on the way out." He raised the tall green bottle. "Banzai!" We drank to that. "Crazy little Japs," he said, "Tried to win the war." He shook his head without shaking his grin at all. "If they'd a give this stuff away free, they could a walked on the drunks from San Francisco to Cincinnati. Wouldn't be no wars if people drink more."

"Just be sloppier. Huh," I said as an airman second and his date strolled past our table, "That wouldn't be a bit sloppy." The airman turned around, but I smiled at him, and he turned back around.

"Leech bitch," Novotny said.

"Who?"

"Fucking leech. Dependent child. Sixteen years old and already given the clap to thirty-seven guys."

"You know her?"

"Comes to the pool all the time to make us holler. Ain't hollerin' yet. Only airmen mess with leeches. Below our principles."

"Might be all right."

Novotny straightened up, dropped his grin, and very solemnly said, "Man might as well be a lifer as screw a leech." He paused, concerned, "You ain't no lifer, are you?"

"Lifer?"

"Taking twenty?"

"Shit, I don't know…"

"What the hell you doing back in the Army anyway?"

"Shit, I don't know. After my wife left me, I…"

"Woman trouble. Knew it," he interrupted. "Soon as I laid eyes on you, knew it. Woman trouble. You know I'm the only guy been here long as I have hasn't got a Dear John. Only one left. Seen 'em all go down. Woman trouble. Spot it a mile away." He shook his head. "What you need is a seventy-five cent love affair, fellow."

"Is it that cheap? I don't have a pass yet, anyway." All new personnel had to be on base fifteen days before they were allowed a pass.

"No, no. This's different. Over at the Airman's Club. Six bits. No nookie, just true love and dancing. Be my guest."

We settled the check, then walked through a drifting mist toward the barn-like tin building which housed the Airman's Club. Our voices and laughter rang in the cool, damp night, clear and echoing along the glittering black streets. The soft halos of the street lights wavered in easy breezes and jeeps and trucks hissed politely past. I remembered, remembered those Friday nights in Seattle, Ell and I wandering home from weekly hamburgers and beer at a neighborhood bar; madcap rainy evenings that seemed to dance to our laughter, alone and together, untroubled as never before or again, wet and cold and happy as when we were children. And later tipsy and steaming under the shower, slick and soapy, and we could never wait, never.

Novotny danced and furiously danced with his seventy-five-cent-love-affair until I expected his bad leg to fly off and tumble right up to the bandstand, felling potted palms as it went; but it seemed as able as his other. Able enough to play football, he explained, and added that the season would start soon and anyone who wanted to play could go over to the Agency outfit and sign up. The three Army units – Agency, ACAN and the 721st – had one team among them.

"We really tear up airmen," Novotny said, sitting down while his girl caught her breath – my affair had long since left me to my sullen silence. Novotny had that same strained grin again, as if he did not intend to wait for the season. "I hate this fucking place, but we get a good club like last year – won the base championship – and it's okay. Football season goes real quick, bam bam bam, then six more months and I'm going home. Back to the ZI, the Zone of Interior, the Land of the Big PX, multicolored staff cars and concrete barrios. No more PI for this GI. I'm going civilian-side."

All the way back to the barracks he explained why I too would soon adhere to the motto, IHTFP or I Hate This Fucking Place. At the time I wondered what there was to hate, though I later understood that it was the time itself, the slow, inexorable murder of the time, the boredom of escape, the pure nihilism of the peace-time soldier, suffering not only the contradiction of terms "peace" and "soldier" but that of "time" too. But I didn't hear what Novotny was saying then: I had my own enemy, blacker and vaster than time – memory, or history as it is popularly called. I named it my enemy then, hating it as the Roman soldier who pierced Christ's side must have hated Him. Salvation is a hateful thing: surely the memory of man proves that.

No, I didn't hear the pain in Novotny's voice, the grinding agony of having no meaning. I fell asleep, thinking, Surely soldiers gripe in Heaven… no one understands the reward for virtue… only the penalty for guilt. Then I dropped away to visions of a scarred leg dancing alone in the desert, a vast stone leg pursued by a girl-child, pretty and pink, but when she caught it, her hands rotted black and fell away as my father's voice tolled, "My name is Ozymandias, king of despair: / Look on my works, ye warrior and king." (I always dream what I've read, though changed in my mind as if I'd written it. A mighty conceit.)

Later that night I dreamed of home, a cool spring morning, soft and fresh. As I walked to my car, the sweet air tickled my face and sprinkled goose-bumps with a quick shiver among the sun-white hair of my arms. The chill, pleasant and deep, touched with excitement, caused me to pee in the thick grass where the washing machine emptied. It was right, the sky open and blue and the long run of the pasture glistening clean and dark green with the dew, and the patch of grass curled and thick, and all this mine, and the sky and the fields and the grass, all mine, and me, young and king in the heart of her.

The stream, golden arch into the tight grass, sparkled and slowly rolled, then I too, like a wisp, toward the dark tangled hairs flew. As I drifted, the grass bore my Ell, my first, naked and green in the sudden night, arms and shining legs lifted. Then finished, easily I rested in her, lovers on the patchwork fiber of my back seat, my car half-hidden in a low brush thicket, and I lost in her, in the ease and softness of her under the wide sky of night, my Ell, my fallen breath cupped in the curve of her neck. But quickly she whispered of things wet, warm, and dangerous, of spermy traps, and I leaped away to clutch the condom bloated with the tinkling afterthought of a pee. The thin walls burst, flooded the shame of my waste across the moonlight plain of our loins. I cried in guilt for she saw… and woke crying in fear of the loneliness too she must have seen. Else why she should love me? I asked half-dreaming as I crawled from the damp bed.

I stripped the bunk, flipped the mattress, and wandered to the latrine to shower. Back in the room I smoked, leaning against the screen. I wonder if John Wayne ever peed the bed? The stretch of a grin on my face only eased the mood for a second.

Ah, you crazy bastard, Krummel. What are you doing here? Came to laugh. You dream of being a warrior? Seems to me you pee the bed and cry for yourself. What else should I do? You could have been anything? I wanted to be everything. I couldn't decide. I always got to places too late. Now you've learned the worth of a limited choice. No, I just made the wrong ones. So now you wait for a war like a fool? Why not start your own? You know your history. You need nothing else. Whatever I say, you'll say I'm just afraid, which I am. I can only be what I am. And your history, your memory as you call it, dictates what you must be? Yes. You wandering purposeless fool, out of time and place, remembering wars that never happened, heroes that never died much less lived. I couldn't stop dreaming of a better time, of honor and heroism and virtue. Where else can I find them? They told me that is where they were, cast in the fires of battle. Maybe they're right in some way they don't understand. Maybe you're a fool? Maybe.

I watched the rain suck at the curling blue smoke, the mourner's rain, chokingly heavy and black, and the glittering drops plummet to earth, to earth and who knows how much farther.

The next morning Sgt. Tetrick gave me a guided tour and lecture on Clark Air Force Base, Philippines. Clark Air Force Base lies on the central Luzon plain in the province of Pampanga near the city of Angeles. It is bordered on the west by the Bambam river which skirts a heavily jungled range of hills and on the east by the Manila-Baguio highway. Clark is one of the largest bases in the Far East. It provides runways and support facilities for countless jet fighters and bombers which guard Southeast Asia against China, or for American business interests, or against the Eskimos, depending on your politics and memory. The base, in its turn, is also guarded. A strong hurricane-wire fence encloses the entire base. The fence, as any other important facility of the base, is also closely guarded by the Air Police, Filipino constabulary and Negrito pygmies. The APs patrol the perimeter in jeeps and three-quarter-ton trucks, armed with Browning automatic shotguns, submachine guns, carbines, rifles, pistols, and angry German Shepherd police dogs. The APs shoot on sight, usually forgetting the warning shots, and quite often kill, not only thieves and infiltrators, but expensive dogs and each other on occasion. When an AP kills a Filipino intruder, he is quickly court-martialed, found guilty, fined one dollar, given a carton of his favorite smokes by an apologetic major, then flown back to the states on the next flight. The Filipino constabulary, being indigenous, suffer no such inconvenience. They are merely required to reimburse the government for each round of ammunition expended that does not find a human target. They seldom miss; ammunition is expensive. The Negritoes, true pygmies, live mainly in the hills except for a small group which resides in cardboard, tin and board shacks near the back fence. They are famed for their unreasoning love of Americans, their righteous hatred of Filipinos and Japanese, and their action against the Imperial Army of Japan during World War II. Their favorite trick, since they are able to stalk and hunt quite well, was to quietly remove every other man's head in a Jap barracks or bivouac at night, placing it on his chest so that his comrades might find it the next morning. This usually disabled the whole unit: those who weren't sleeping forever never slept again. In spite of these gruesome tricks, the Negritoes are jolly little folk in their gray uniforms and silver badges, bare, dusty feet and bush hair only half hidden by helmet liners, and faces split by smiles twice too large for men only four-feet-six. They perform their work in the highest of spirits and with the greatest of efficiency.

However, the base loses approximately $140,000 in theft and pilferage each month. In a single night eighteen hundred iron crosses were lifted from the military cemetery for scrap iron. On another, five two-and-a-half-ton trucks and six jeeps were stolen from a motor pool and driven on boards over that high, well-patrolled fence. Still another time an imaginative thief stole a fireman's uniform, then a fire truck to go with it. He drove the truck out of the station with siren and flashing lights going full blast, raced the five miles to the Main Gate as seven Air Policemen stopped traffic for him.

Tetrick pointed out all these events should have been expected once the Army allowed their personal Air Corps to become something he called the "Air Farce" – unfairly, I'm sure. "Three old ladies with blowed-up rubbers could take this place," he grunted.

If the base, as we agreed, existed only because intelligent thieves were leaving something for next time, the base didn't seem excited about the danger. Conditions were calm, situations normal at the seven swimming pools, the PX shopping center, the Officer's and NCO's and Airman's clubs, the veterinarian's office and the golf course (where every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon Tetrick baked his bald head and managed to get drunk before the sixteenth tee). The residential sections were as cool and unruffled as if they were in Indianapolis and Vietnam on the dark side of the moon. Everywhere was order, lawns just so high, geometrically trimmed hedges and trees, clean sidewalks, uncluttered roadsides. As Tetrick drove me around base, I was reminded of the just completed campus of a mammoth junior college in Southern California. "I don't know what it is," Tetrick said again as we drove toward the Main Gate, "but it ain't soldiering."

About half a mile from the gate, just as I could see the guardhouse through the heat haze, Tetrick swung the jeep left down a side road toward a distant group of large frame buildings. "Central Exchange," he explained. "They keep the scrip there," he said, referring to the Military Payment Certificates, MPC, Scrip, or Funny Money as it was called, which was paid instead of green backs as a courtesy to the Filipino economy. "When what's left of the Huks don't steal it. They got $60,000 three years ago. They'll be back when it runs out." He turned left again about half a mile from the Exchange on a gravel road leading toward a square, windowless building. He parked next to the double hurricane fences with the challenging barbed wire strands leaning out along the tops.

"This it it," Tetrick said as if it were. "Seven hundred twenty-first Communication Security Detachment Temporary Operations Building." He pulled a security badge out of his shirt pocket and gave me a temporary one. At the gate he waved to the guard on the roof of the building, then inserted his badge into a waist high slot in a black box next to the gate. "That checks the badge. If it is right, a light comes on up there and he opens the gate." A buzzer sounded, and Tetrick opened the gate. "The second won't open until the first is locked again." Another buzz and we were in the compound. As usual the grass was just so, the sidewalks bordered in neat, ankle-high hedges, and a yard-boy, a jolly-eyed, bent, old man peeking from a floppy straw hat, leaned on a hoe. I glanced back at the elaborate gate system, at the yard-boy, then at Tetrick.

"Don't let it trouble you," he chuckled. "The girls in Town know more about what we do than we do." He opened the steel door by inserting his badge in another slot, then led me into the electronic murmur of secrecy. Behind me I noticed that the old man had, with polite discretion, turned his back.

I took the ease of the afternoon after Tetrick's tour, swimming and resting in the sun. The pool was mine except for a middle-aged dependent wife sitting on the edge of the pool, three loud children, the golden-fuzzy lifeguard, and two airmen. The woman alternately heaved one massive leg then the other through the water as tiny whirlpools in the chlorine-tinted water sucked vainly at her massive flesh. She sat under the lifeguard stand and chatted with golden-fuzzy. She seemed to be trying to peek up his trunks, and he down her blue suit, though why, I did not dare guess. The children were hitting each other, the meek waters of the kiddie-pool, me twice with rubber toys, and their mother for attention. At times all three balled at her passive shoulders, yammering and pounding their flesh of flesh. Mrs. Leech would shrug, laugh and shake her brown hair like a starlet, and fling the children away like so many dirty drops of water off an angry dog's back, then turning up to golden-fuzzy again, grin up his skinny leg. The two airmen were quiet. One spent the whole afternoon rubbing iodine and Johnson's baby oil into his already brown-black skin, while the other swam the length of the pool twenty times at an eight beat crawl, rested for five exact minutes, then swam again.

From the towel I communed in the broad open plain, bowing to Mount Arayat, the lifeless volcano squatting like an altar on the level distance, a ruined memory of ancient sacrificial fires, the tip of its cone crumbling into a snaggle-toothed decay as hordes of jungle clamored upward, hand over fist, pulling down the tired slopes. It was told that Huk bandits and headhunters shared the distant giant, secure in his hairy trunk, lost to man and his reckoning of time.

At five it rained for eleven minutes, sudden heavy drops, and at five-thirty the sun disappeared into a deep purple mass of clouds rising soft and curved against a shell-pink sky. I paused to watch the sunset, the purple reaching for black, the pink easing to purple, as I strolled back from the pool, toasted, hungry, tired.

After a silent meal I laid out a uniform, read for a bit, then dozed, awaking to the tickle of laughter, talk and the ringing of bottles. Never having been one to either stuff wax in my ears or tie myself to a mast, I slipped into my trousers and nosed down the hall toward the open door of Novotny's room. As I passed, he called an invitation to me for a beer. I nodded, guessed that I would, and went on to the latrine.

As I entered, I nearly stumbled over someone crawling toward the urinals. He had that odor and slept-in look which I assumed to be Town. In spite of the dirt, the stubble and the glasses, he appeared to be a clean-featured young man of perhaps twenty or twenty-one, handsome in a tall, muscular manner, but his unkempt face hung like a bad smell over his dirty clothes. I offered to help however I could. He stared at me for a moment as if he knew who I was, then looked very bored with me.

"I'm Marduke the Mandrill and I play the mandolin with my mandible, baby, and I'm all right," he said, holding up his right hand to show me the bloody, swollen knuckles. His voice, like his face, did not fit: his words were carefully enunciated, formed like bricks to be used in the construction of a Tower of Philosophy, absolutely undeniable. "Except for my left mandible, man," he continued, examining the right hand under a pursed mouth, "I seem to be limping on it. I'm a cripple, you know, a fucking cripple, and there is no home in the American Army for a cripple crutch or a cripple creek or any other kind of deformity. Sorry about that, man. Suppose I'll just be limping on home now," he finished, crawling under the sinks toward the far end of the latrine, singing, "We shall overcome!"

He seemed happy and harmless (he had a great ability to seem), so I left him alone. As I left, I heard him shout, "Overcome! You've heard of overkill? Well, this is Overcome! Sperm whales of the world, unite! We shall overcome!" Then laughter mixed with the spasmodic gurgle of vomit. Then: "And the angel of the Lord thrust his sickle into the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and cast it into the great wine press of God's wrath." I shook my head and walked back to Novotny's room.

If I had any questions as to the stability of the men of my trick after my encounter in the latrine, Novotny's room answered them. They were, to the man, crazy. They called it "going Asiatic." Six or seven drunks – they didn't stand for counting – packed the room like an overcrowded cage of underfed monkeys. They chattered, they laughed and shouted in high, tired voices, they snatched squatty brown bottles of San Miguel beer from a waterproof bag filled with ice and drank them in quick selfish gulps as if afraid they might be stolen before finished. I accepted the offered beer and sat on the bunk next to Novotny.

"There's a drunk crawling around the latrine," I said.

"Don't sweat it. That's Mornin' and he gets like that sometimes. He's our demonstrator and Freedom Fucker." He snipped off the ends of his words with the tight little grin of the night before.

"Well, he said he was all right. Except for his left mandible," I said, holding up my right hand.

"I don't give a shit who he calls it," shouted a small fellow suddenly dancing in front of me. "Don't care at all, just so he keeps decking them flyboys away. Deck 'em away, away!" he said, slamming a fist into his other hand, ignoring the beer he held. Foam sparkled in his heavy black eyebrows and beer ran down his cheeks. "Saved me from that airman, he did. Swept him off my back like a fly. Boom! Swish!" Another fountain of beer. "Might have killed me, mac," he said, holding his collar away from his tiny neck to expose six or eight blood-crusted scratches.

"Airman tried to give him a higher asshole with a rum bottle," Novotny explained casually. "Then Mornin' got the airman. That's what they're doing back so early. APs don't understand that sort of shit."

"Sgt. Krummel," Novotny added, thumbing at me.

"Cagle, mac," the small one said, holding out a hairy little hand.

"Caglemack?" I asked, shaking it.

"Just Cagle," he said, wrapping his whole tiny face around a cigar. He continued dancing like a doll on a string, a leg this way, an arm that, and all the while his black little moustache wriggled and squirmed as if trying to crawl off his upper lip into his mouth. "Boom!" he shouted, whirling to the other side of the room. "Swish! Fly, flyboy, fly!"

I listened to the recounting of the three days, the new fuck at so-and-so's, the arguments, Levenson's tumble into the creek – he was pointed out as the naked, dreamy one in the corner, nonchalantly nude – the fight again, Franklin's walk past a girl with the clap without catching another dose, and what a wonderful, awful Break it had been, hadn't it? Their frenzy increased with each beer. They asked more than three days could have: life, love, and happiness.

After a couple of beers I went back to check on Morning. He was sitting on the lip of the shower stall, leaning against the frame, and beating his head on the tile, singing again, but the song was too soft to hear.

"Hey, you need a hand?" I asked. He was hitting his head quite hard against the tile.

He stopped, but still sang. He sighed, and looked up calmly. He seemed tired, looked haggard. Just that second it came to me that he was not as drunk as he wanted me to think, but drunker than he realized.

"I didn't mean to kill my brother, you know," he said in a quiet, normal voice, a very collegiate voice which might have advertised fraternity blazers on the radio. "I didn't mean to." He had been crying.

"Sure, buddy, I know," I said, helping him to a sink. I ran cold water over his head for several minutes before he raised his face to the mirror. He stared at his reflection, then dried his glasses and said, "When I was a kid, I used to lay in bed after they made me turn the light off, used to lay there and make faces in the dark until I had one I thought was pretty good. Then I'd run to the bathroom and flip on the light to see it in the mirror." He paused, replaced his glasses – Army glasses with colorless rims which should have seemed out of place on his face, but they gave him a bemused, scholarly dignity – and looked at me. "Now I come down at night to make sure I'm not making a face, just to be sure." He shook the water off his hands, glanced once more into the mirror without expression, then walked slowly out.

Back in Novotny's room, another beer in hand, I told him what Morning had said about killing his brother.

"Ain't got no brothers. Just drunk again," he answered.

"Morning's my friend," Cagle chimed, "but he's a lousy fucking drunk sometimes."

"How do you know?" Novotny asked, his grin sly.

"What the hell you mean, 'How do you know?' " he answered, mimicking Novotny's clipped words and grin. "I've known him since basic, that's how I know."

"Bullshit," Novotny said calmly, challenging the world.

"What do you mean, 'bullshit!?' " Cagle's voice was high and shrill, and he stomped his foot. "Huh?"

"Never seen him drunk when you weren't too, you little hairy fart, so how the hell do you know how drunk he gets. And speaking of lousy drunks, who was it beat up that jukebox? and who can't go in the Tango anymore 'cause they don't pay for their beer? and just who the hell did the APs find under that Flip's house at three in the morning?"

"You never seen a woman so ugly. I couldn't believe that guy was really going to screw her, even if she was his wife. I had to see," Cagle said, smiling at the memory. "Didn't get written up, so fuck you, Navaho, and your pinto pony too."

"Keep away from my woman, piss ant," Novotny laughed and turned to me. "Ask the Beetle there," he said, pointing at Cagle, "how many times he's fallen on his fucking head and busted up an eyebrow. Everytime something hits the floor, everybody stands up and says, 'Okay, where's that fucking bug? Got to take him back and get his goddamned eyebrow stitched up again.' "

"There's a man knows a fine scar when he sees one," Cagle said, pointing at the four inch half-moon on my cheek. He showed me the crosshatching of thin white scars hidden in his brows. "How about…"

"Oughta take up a collection to buy the Beetle a crash helmet for drinking," Novotny interrupted.

As the hours passed I began to feel some responsibility as trick chief to get everyone to bed for a Little sleep before 0645. How should I play sergeant, I asked my beer bottle. An authoritative hint: "All right men, six o'clock comes pretty early!" A fawning plea: "Okay you guys, let's break it up, huh? Get a little beauty sleep, you know, ha, ha." Or a Listen-I'm-one-of-you-boys-and-I-hate-to-say-this-but-we-better-hit-the-sack sonnet. Perhaps just stand, flex my muscles, curl the ends of my moustache, and order, "Stop this shit." By the time I finally decided to hell with them and that their sleep was their business, the gathering ended as neatly and naturally as I could have hoped. The three-day frenzy was over for them, and the six-day drag just beginning. Letters they had meant to write, sleep they had hoped to catch up on, and last-Break resolutions never to go to Town again were all lost chances. Fatigue muffled their "Goodnight, shitheads" and fogged their red-rimmed eyes and wrapped around them like tattered old blankets.

From my bunk, as I had a final cigarette and the night breeze stroked me, I heard Morning's record player from across the hall. A high, thin female voice drifted easily around a guitar, sounding very small in the night.