Sniper Ridge

Chapter Six

While Chen was receiving accolades in the Chinese headquarters several mountain ridges away, Cole was hauling buckets of dirty gray dishwater to be dumped on the hard-packed ground outside the mess tent.

"Get your ass in gear!" shouted Sergeant Springer, the grizzled NCO who ran the mess tent. He had greeted Cole on his first morning by throwing a dirty apron at him, and then put him to work reconstituting powdered eggs that were then heated up on a griddle. Cooking for an army in the field was about quantity, not quality. By six a.m., the sight and smell of the reconstituted eggs had Cole feeling sick to the stomach.

There was an old saying down South that you should never trust a skinny cook. Judging by the belly on Sergeant Springer, there wasn't any danger of him not inspiring trust in his cooking — so long as you didn't mind a few cigar ashes in your scrambled eggs or in your mashed potatoes. Short, squat, chewing a cigar stub, and gloriously profane, he was like a cross between Chef Tell and Napoleon.

Sergeant Springer barked a lot, but he didn't bite so long as you worked hard, which is exactly what Cole did. The kitchen was a cramped space, with a long galley of cooking stoves and work tables separated by a narrow aisle. Unlike some of the field kitchens in WWII that had dirt or grass floors, this one had an actual wooden floor of rough-sawn boards. The boards had come from a dismantled Korean barn.

Kitchen duty was about what Cole expected. He found himself assigned all of the grunt duty. After the eggs, he set about opening endless Number 10 cans of green beans and peaches and beans. He plunged around in vats of greasy gray dishwater, scrubbing pots and utensils to some degree of cleanliness, or at least, cleaner than they were.

He might even have been able to tolerate the work for the duration of the war if it hadn't been for Tater Kelly. He was just a cook, a private like Cole, but he lorded it over the kitchen help like a five-star general.

"I got my eye on you," was what Tater said to Cole by way of introduction. "You best do whatever I tell you."

Tater was the bully in the kitchen. He pushed, he shoved, he browbeat. Sgt. Springer either didn't notice or didn't care because Tater didn't give him any trouble.

It was hard to say how Tater got his nickname other than that he looked like a big spud. He was a huge guy, six-foot-two, around two-hundred and eighty pounds — with most of it in a beer belly and massive biceps. If the mess hall chief demanded nothing but hard work, Tater did whatever he could to make sure someone else did his work for him — when the chief wasn't looking.

Cole's new strategy was to lay low and stay out of trouble. He was done with being a soldier. Lieutenant Ballard had beaten him down one too many times. Peeling potatoes was fine with him. With any luck, he could wait out his two years in Korea in the kitchen. He might never have to go on the battlefield again. By the end of that first day, however, he realized that Tater was going to seriously spoil his plans.

Tater was a bully who picked on everyone in the kitchen, but he had it in for Cole the minute he laid eyes on him. For his part, Cole kept hoping that Tater would leave him alone once Cole wasn't the new guy anymore, but the big fool seemed to have it in for Cole, zeroing in on his mountain accent.

"Hillbilly, must be strange for you to wear shoes, huh?" or "Hey, you know what they call a hillbilly girl who can outrun her brothers? A virgin!"

It was odd how the name "Hillbilly" just seemed to follow him around. Cole supposed it was his accent.

Cole could take the name-calling and the jokes, but he drew the line when Tater got physical.

The first time was when Cole was carrying a big pot of soup, hot off the stove, to the mess hall itself. Cole struggled with the heavy pot, navigating the narrow aisles and dodging other men busy with their tasks. He knew that he'd catch hell from the mess chief if he spilled so much as a single drop.

Just as Cole was in the home stretch, headed for the door into the mess hall, someone shoved him from behind. Cole staggered, fighting to keep the soup from spilling, but he was only partly successful. Soup splashed everywhere: the floor, the walls of the tent, and all over Cole. It didn't help that the soup had been boiling on the stove less than a minute before.

The spilled soup had not escaped the cook's attention. "Goddammit!" he shouted, so angry that he plucked the damp stump of the cigar from between his lips. "Can't you even carry a pot of soup without spilling it? You are fucking useless! Now get that out to the mess hall and then get back in here and clean up this fucking mess! Goddammit!"

"Yes, sir." Cole felt sheepish for spilling the soup and drawing the mess chief's ire. But it hadn't been entirely his fault. He looked around and saw Tater leaning against a stainless steel counter, snickering. The other kitchen staff was looking from Tater to Cole, wondering what would happen. If Sergeant Springer had seen what happened, he had chosen to take it out on Cole and not his right-hand man in the kitchen.

"What's a matter, Hillbilly?" Tater asked. "Not used to wearing shoes?"

Cole glared at him. "That's once."

"What, do I get three strikes? What happens then?"

Cole didn't answer, but just struggled into the mess hall with the heavy pot, blinking soup out of his eyes.

Cole got through most of the next two days without trouble from Tater, but he should have known that wasn't going to last. Meanwhile, he turned his attention to the other staff. He really had it in for African-American guys, calling them all sorts of names. They glowered at him, but that was just about all that they could do. The Army was no longer segregated, but that didn’t mean a black man had equal say.

Tired from a day in the kitchen, Cole let his guard down. He was carrying a tray of dirty dishes when he felt the massive shove from behind. The tray — and Cole — went flying. He found himself down on his hands and knees, dirty utensils were strewn across the floor and getting under everyone's feet.

"Goddammit!" shouted the mess hall chief. "Pick that shit up!"

Tater stood nearby, grinning at Cole like the cat that ate the canary.

"That's twice," Cole said.

"Let's see how high you can count, you dumb hillbilly," Tater said, and kicked a pile of utensils under a stove, where they would be hard to reach.

Cole seriously considered taking a carving knife to Tater and skinning him out. He was that angry. But Tater would have welcomed a brawl. In the tight space, his size gave him every advantage, and he was the biggest guy in the kitchen.

What Tater didn't know was that Cole had already been thinking up a plan. He'd been a trapper in the mountains, and he knew how to set a good trap. He had a piece of cord in his pocket that he'd been trying to figure how to use.

Down on his hands and knees, Cole came up with a plan. He scuttled among the legs of guys busy making hamburger or mashing potatoes, hunting up the stray utensils. He also took a moment to tie one end of the cord to the heavy leg of a cook stove. The cord went into a crack in a floor board where it would be out of the way, across the narrow aisle to the stainless steel counter, where he snaked it up a leg of the counter and knotted it so that it wedged in the corner where the rim of the counter came together. One good yank and the cord would stretch tight across the aisle.

Cole finished cleaning up the utensils and got back to work. Fortunately, it was toward the end of the day. He'd held his temper in check enough for one day. It didn't help that whenever Tater caught his eye in the kitchen, the big man was laughing at him.

Laugh while you can, Cole thought.

The next morning, Cole was back in the kitchen for another day of endless chores. The Army was a funny thing, he decided. You could sit out in a foxhole all day and literally do nothing except get shot at from time to time, or you could do all sorts of menial, exhausting work all day in the kitchen, but not have to worry about getting shot.

Cole was not complaining. He thought about Pomeroy and the kid out there on the line. He felt kind of bad that he wasn't there with them, but that was the old Caje Cole. The new Caje Cole worked in the kitchen, keeping his head down and counting the days until his time in the service was up.

It would all have been fine if it hadn't been for that goddamn Tater. That bully just couldn't leave well enough alone. He seemed to leave Cole alone just long enough to torment the others in the kitchen. As soon as he could, Cole checked to make sure that the cord he had tied in place yesterday was still there. Reassured that one good tug would pull the cord taut across the narrow galley aisle, he got back to work.

Just after lunch detail, Cole was slinging the mop around over the rough-cut floorboards in the galley between the stoves and counters, trying to get up the worst of the grease. The task wasn't made easier by the fact that the space was narrow and hard to maneuver. Just about everything cooked in that kitchen was greasy in one form or another: bacon and hamburger, mostly. So much of that grease got on the floor over a couple of days that it was actually a slipping hazard.

When the mess hall chief went out, Tater had free reign. He helped himself to a cup of coffee and then smacked a couple of the African-American guys in the head for no other reason than to torment them. He followed up by calling them lazy — and worse. They didn’t have any choice but to take it.

Then he made his way up the narrow galley to where Cole was mopping and, without warning, kicked over the bucket that stood between them. The sudsy, gray, greasy water sloshed everywhere.

"Oh, now you've done it, you dumb hillbilly. If I were you, I'd get mopping faster before the Old Man comes back in."

Cole hit him in the face with the dirty mop.

Tater stood for a moment in shock because he began to sputter and curse, spitting the filthy water out of his mouth and wiping it from his face.

"Taste good?" Cole asked.

"You're dead, Hillbilly!"

Like a bull, the big man charged up the aisle after Cole, who barely had time to get out of the way. For his size, Tater was awfully quick — or maybe his anger had made him swift. Cole tossed the mop aside to free his hands.

Cole stepped over the cord that lay tucked into a crack in the board, with Tater hot on his heels. He grabbed for the knot tucked into the steel counter to his right and pulled it tight, hoping that there was enough distance between them for it to do any good. If Tater caught him, Cole had to admit that the much larger man was likely to beat him to a pulp.

The cord pulled taught. The big man tripped.

Tater went down hard.

One second he was barreling after Cole like a steaming locomotive, and the next second he was hitting the floor like the proverbial sack of potatoes.

Cole didn't give him a chance to get back up. He didn't plan on fighting fair.

Instead, he grabbed an oversized cast iron skillet off the stove and clobbered Tater over the head with it. One-handed. If he'd used two hands, the blow would have cracked the other man's skull like an egg and killed him. Tater screamed, not so much from the blow as from the fact that the skillet was full of sizzling bacon fat that was now oozing over his head and shoulders. Still on his hands and knees, Tater clawed and swiped at the dripping grease.

Cole let go of the skillet, letting it clatter to the floor. As far as he was concerned, he was done with Tater.

But the others were just getting started.

To Cole's surprise, the other kitchen staff that Tater had tormented moved in. He caught sight of two of the African-American cooks, one carrying a big two-pronged fork used for handling chunks of meat. Both men had murder in their eyes. Before Cole could open his mouth to speak, the fork jabbed down, again and again, as if Tater was a juicy roast beef. Tater cried out in agony as the fork plunged into his plump bits. Two more cooks jumped in, kicking and stomping the fallen bully for all they were worth.

"All right, that's enough," Cole said half-heartedly. "Don't go killing him."

Nobody was listening. The blows continued. Cole shrugged. Nobody could say that Tater didn’t have it coming.

That's when the mess chief walked back in. He stared in astonishment at the violent scene before him. His mouth fell open and his cigar actually fell out. His mouth opened and closed, but no words came out. For once, he seemed to be caught speechless.

The beating continued until the chief managed to boom at the top of his lungs, "Knock it off!"

Cole wiped his hands on the apron and picked up the mop. When Tater finally came around, Cole figured his days in the mess tent would be over.

Somebody ran to fetch a medic.

Staring down at the groaning mess, Cole said, "Looks to me like Tater has done been mashed." He then went back to mopping the floor, humming tunelessly to himself.