CHAPTER THREE: Cool Down
THE DEATH OF SERGEANT YORK BY JACK HAMILTON SIMONS
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CHAPTER THREE
Cool Down
York walked toward the compound’s club building called the Pill Box, which was a nice play on words since it reflected both the defensive mission of the building and the items sometimes traded at its tables. He held the report where he could read it, scanning the marked lines. He chuckled once, but the small laugh was more about the sergeant major denying himself the pleasure of murdering Skevo than anything else. Then he thought of Petrocelli spending the day within easy yelling distance of Foster and laughed aloud.
The Pill Box had an unsavory reputation with higher commands because the colonel had lavished more money on the club than on any other building in the compound. The club stood in the center of the base, a large rectangle with a pagoda roof. Colonel Marshall had justified the expense by making it the fortress of last resort if they were overrun. The Pill Box was built like the keep of a great castle. The bottom half of the building had two parallel concrete-block walls laid a foot apart, the space in between filled with packed sand. The club’s concrete-slab floor covered a basement redoubt that held weapons, ammunition, and other supplies necessary for a short siege. Above the block wall, large screened windows connected to one another provided air, sight and light. The screens went from waist high to the struts that supported the spreading eaves of the roof.
York found Skevo and Petrocelli sitting at the corner poker table drinking beer. Skevo flinched when York entered, then waved. York ignored the wave, but greeted the mama-san behind the bar.
“Am I in trouble?” Skevo shouted at the sergeant.
York came to the table and studied him like he was a strange creature in a zoo.
“You are in Vietnam. You serve with Special Operations Group. You are uninsurable.”
“Oh,” Skevo said. “I thought I was in trouble.”
“Not at all,” York said. “I explained to Foster that you were high-grade cannon fodder and shooting you against a wall would be a waste.”
York’s dead-pan delivery put Skevo off.
York tossed the report to Petrocelli. “Don’t forget to fix it.”
Petrocelli’s face whitened. He picked up the report and left. York sat down in Petrocelli’s chair and leaned across the table toward Skevo.
“You have about as much sense as a chicken running around a barnyard without its head.”
“I do a lot of things for this war, but I won’t stop thinking.”
“Then straighten out your thinking. You live in a kill zone. Everyone is a killer. Some of the killers on our side would just as soon kill you as anyone else. So you call a CIA mission chief a spy.”
“I had an epiphany.”
The word “epiphany” stopped York cold. He leaned back in his chair.
“I went to college too, and your epiphanies are a pain in the ass.”
“How about barely in my right mind. No sleep. Drugged to the gills. The Russian calling me by name. Tuong’s dying. All the NVA in the world chasing us for two days. We should be dead.”
“I was there. I didn’t lose my mind and accuse a CIA mission chief of being a spy.”
The two men’s eyes remained locked, then Skevo looked away. He knew the drill: Do your duty, keep your mouth shut, and die if you have to—no excuses.
“Okay, Sarge. Tell me what to do.”
“Clean the equipment. Inspection tomorrow. Run forty laps on the beach this afternoon.”
Skevo frowned, then brightened. “Is the court martial over?”
“Yes.” He signaled for two beers. “A little early for you, isn’t it?”
“I’m taking a one-day pass where I don’t do anything but solve unnecessary personnel problems. You can drink in the morning because you don’t care—you will anyway, and it will not lower the quality of your already piss-poor work.”
Skevo leaned close to York. “You tell me.”
“The missions?”
“On the best day, the missions are attempted suicide,” Skevo said.
York’s eyes were unreadable. “No. Just extremely dangerous,” he said.
“That’s a slim distinction.”
“Tell me why you volunteered,” asked York.
The question took Skevo by surprise. He had wanted to be a soldier—the best that could be found. It had led him to SOG and missions into Laos.
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
York studied him with cool eyes.
“You go into Laos because you want to be a hero and die like a hero. This is the way you found to do it.”
Skevo reacted with a half-smile and frown.
“Nobody knows that.”
“I know myself, and I know you.” York raised his beer bottle. “Here’s to suicide.”
Skevo lost his smile.
“Listen, if I’m a suicide, I might as well kill the people I hate instead of the North Vietnamese.”
“Anybody but me hears what you just said and they throw you into a rubber room.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Foster gave me the unofficial green light. We do what we have to do: change the LZ, alter the objective, and change anything that the North Vietnamese can know in advance.”
“That’s an improvement.”
“Not so much. Let’s suppose your epiphany”—York grimaced when he said the word—“was right. Then what have you done?”
“Things couldn’t be much worse.”
“They could. You made it personal.”
“Three months and I go home.”
“Let’s hope you make it.”
York downed his beer and left. Skevo followed York to the door, but stayed on the porch. He looked toward the sea. Low scudding gray clouds with squalls of rain blew toward the shore. Thunderheads bathed in bright sunlight reached to the top of the sky.
Skevo made it to his hooch as rain swept into the compound. His mood was as gray as the weather despite the good news of the sergeant major’s promise to turn a blind eye and deaf ear toward how they conducted their missions. The Viet Cong who worked in the compound as cooks or mechanics couldn’t discover the team’s plans. Those plans went through many layers of command on both sides, the American and Vietnamese. On the American side, theoretically, all the way to the president. Spies could be housed anywhere. The missions originated or were approved at the top, and were betrayed somewhere in the chain.
In the hooch, Webb packed his newly-cleaned radio. Tuong’s cubicle had been emptied, its mattress tightly rolled at the foot of the cot. His own cubicle was tidied, the Swedish K broken down, cleaned, and spread over a towel lying on the bunk.
“Who’s the Christian?” Skevo said.
“I’m Buddhist,” Dong said.
“Buddhist,” Skevo said. “Thanks.”
Webb placed the radio under his bunk. He lay down, crossing his hands behind his head on the pillow.
“That’s done. Now we do training on the beach.”
“Not until the afternoon,” Skevo said. “Let the rain pass.”
“Yards (Montagnards) don’t do training,” Rhade said from his cubicle. “Yards live hard all the time.”
“Yeah, Yards are the toughest,” Webb said.
Skevo assembled his Swedish K.
“You can watch me. York sentenced me to a ten-mile run.”
“That must have been some sin,” Webb said.
“You know Skevo, nothing done halfway,” Dong said.
Skevo produced his medic box.
“Sick call! Come on, you malingerers: puncture wounds, knife wounds, bullet wounds, and clap. I heal them all.”
Rhade came to his cubicle and sat on the bunk looking sheepish.
“Look at my foot.”
He unlaced the boot on his right foot. Skevo went down on his haunches to help him remove the bloody boot from a swollen foot.
“I don’t want to see this, Rhade. I’ll break the Hippocratic oath.”
Rhade smiled broadly.
“First, I’ll fix your foot, then I’m going to kill you for not telling me earlier,” he said.
He pulled off the boot and sodden sock and saw a bloody mess of shrapnel wounds.
“Oh, Rhade, you’re going to have to be medevacked.”
“No. Yards are tough. You do it.”
“Damn you, Rhade.”
Rhade sat on the bunk, still smiling. Skevo sprayed disinfectant all over the bloody foot and began to pluck shrapnel from the wounds with medical tweezers.
“I hope this hurts a lot, Rhade.”
Rhade never stopped smiling.
“Dumb Yard. You’re on medical rest.”
Later in the afternoon, Webb and Dong sat on the beach watching Skevo jog toward them at the end of his ten-mile run.
“What did he do?” Dong said.
“Nobody knows,” Webb said.
Skevo finished and walked around, his hands on his hips. He came toward his team-mates.
“Give me a cigarette.”
Webb threw a pack toward Skevo. He plopped down on the sand and began removing his boots and socks. Behind him, the jade-green surf of the South China Sea crashed on the beach.
“You play poker tonight?” Webb said.
“Are any of the players still alive?”
“Hell, yes,” Dong said. “They’re all clerks.”
“Beaux Rouden’s not a clerk,” Skevo said.
“Some are radio operators,” Webb said.
“I’m playing poker,” Skevo said.
He looked toward the long waves curling onto the shore.
“Let’s cool off.”
All three ran into the ocean and body surfed in the twilight.
A bomb in The Pill Box set to go off after dark would have done considerable damage since all the important people came there when the sun went down. York sat at a table with senior NCOs drinking beer and trading stories. Petrocelli found a seat at the corner of the bar nearest the table reserved for poker. SOG teams drank together. Clerks and cooks, medics, and supply personnel occupied the rest of the tables, and looked upon the ones who regularly went into Laos as exotic creatures whom they would never understand.
The poker table was a world of its own—an intense, sometimes explosive world. They played the old-fashioned games that dominated poker before Texas hold ’em: seven-card stud, five-card stud, and five-card draw; three-dollar limit, four bumps a round. Like most poker games, it had regulars supplemented by fish, a slang way of describing suckers.
Tonight Door-Gunner Sam showed up with a fish—a sergeant from the Marine Corps named Nero Watts. Gunner regularly lured fish to the game. He could meet plenty of young men as he was a helicopter door gunner with the Special Forces support group and moved constantly around the various local commands. The other regulars were a MACV interrogator named Max Hammer; a Navy radio-intercept specialist named Brad Franks, whom Skevo considered to be the most dangerous player at the table; a local supply sergeant named Bill Quinton who was the worst player, a permanent fish who had bought a chair at the table and was determined to unload his money on everyone else; Beaux Rouden, a member of another SOG team, whose spirit never took a break from the quick menace of a killer. Skevo didn’t fear him, but he was careful with him, like he would have been careful with Doc Holiday.
Gunner and his friend came to the game in a feisty mood of swagger and talk. They took seats opposite one another. Gunner sat where he could see most of the room. Skevo sat next to him in the seat that had the better view. Beaux Rouden sat one player to Skevo’s left. Watts sat next to Beaux Rouden. MACV Hammer, Navy guy Franks, and Total-disaster Quinton made up the table.
Quinton dealt first. He brought restless, sick eyes to every game, as though the poker game was not just an arena where he lost all his money, but a pit where he fought a losing battle with the rulers of the universe. He called 7-card stud, his favorite game because it gave him the most chances to bet money while he waited for the hand to improve.
They played for more than an hour and Skevo began to notice a pattern between Watts and Gunner. One would bet, the other would raise the max and keep on raising to the last card and then fold. He also noticed a lot of ear-lobe pulling, face touching, shuffling of hole cards, and other movements that seemed to occur more than necessary. He decided that one was telling the other to push the bet or somehow say: “I have a good hand.” Anyone between them at the table who met or raised the bet would be whip-sawed. The pair didn’t win every hand, but after an hour their money stacks were the highest.
Beaux Rouden had been caught with raises following his raise three times. Skevo was trying to work out if there was anything more specific in the signals than “I’m good, push it,” when Beaux Rouden exploded. He grabbed Watts’s arm as he raked in the cash and chips from the center of the table.
“You pull on your ear, you scratch your nose, and you play with your white chips while you study your cards again, and I’m going to take you outside and bust your ass.”
Watts’s eyes widened, his mouth formed into a snarl. “You calling me a cheater?”
“I’m telling you I’m going to break your face, kick the shit out of you . . .”
He didn’t have a chance to say more. The Marine jumped to his feet, picking up his chair as he moved, waving it in front of him like lion tamer.
“No one calls me . . .”
Beaux Rouden jerked the chair away from Watts, then hit him with it. Lots of things happened at once. The room suddenly went silent, all eyes turned to the explosion at the poker table. Gunner made the mistake of lunging across the table to grab Beaux Rouden, but Skevo caught him by the neck and dragged him off the table scattering chips, money, and cards in all directions. He held the larger man by the throat. Both were on their feet in the space that Skevo had occupied by himself.
Skevo pulled Gunner’s face right next to his. “You were part of it, Gunner.”
Sergeant Major Foster moved as fast as dignity would allow toward the poker table.
“Stop that! Stop that! Take it outside.” He had everyone’s attention.
Skevo shoved Gunner away and pointed toward the door. Beaux Rouden threw the chair at Watts.
Foster couldn’t do any more than shout, “Outside. Take it outside.”
Beaux Rouden stuck his thumb toward the door like he was a hitchhiker.
“Outside,” he said to Watts.
“Do I have to drag you outside?” Skevo said to Gunner.
“You can’t accuse us of cheating,” Gunner explained.
“You think I was asleep?”
Fights occurred regularly enough that the crowded bar began to empty with the first raised voices as men eagerly sought the best places to stand in the local fight pit under a blue fluorescent street light. Sergeant Major Foster had a view of the fight from his table next to the window. He sent York outside to see that the violence stayed inside the boundaries of propriety, which were pretty loose, seeing as the loser (sometimes the winner) often spent two or three days in a nearby field hospital to recover from injuries suffered in what the official records called “unplanned physical activity.”
Beaux Rouden and Skevo walked toward the door, unbuttoning their jungle jackets as they walked.
“You coming?” Skevo shouted to the pair in the middle of the near-empty bar.
“You’re gonna wish we hadn’t,” Gunner shouted back.
Outside they handed their fatigue blouses away—Skevo to Dong, Rouden to the Yard on his team. The challengers stood under the 400 watt mercury lamp, the spectators forming a large semi-circle around them.
Gunner and Watts came charging out of the bar without jackets, waving their arms in exaggerated motions, Watts yelling out, “No one calls me a cheat!”
They looked impressive when they came into the circle of light, their fists raised as though ready to do damage, their faces red with anger, their muscles standing out under fatless skin. Beaux Rouden and Skevo waited for them with their hands down, looking like over-matched middle-weights. They put space between themselves for more room to operate.
Watts went for Beaux Rouden and Gunner went for Skevo. They had watched too much televised boxing when growing up and made a critical error: They imagined a period of time that allowed them to feel out their opponent with jabs and fake lunges.
Rouden and Skevo leapt on them like they were rabbits—each one grabbed his opponent’s throat and repeatedly hit him with the other fist. It was a short fight that ended when Sergeant York stepped forward and said, “They’ve had enough.”
Skevo released his hold on Gunner’s throat and stopped pounding his stomach, liver, and heart. He stepped backward. Gunner fell onto his knees and then on down to his hands. Beaux Rouden held Watts on the ground in a sleeper hold. He rolled away to stand up.
“He’s not dead,” Rouden said to the medics who rushed in to help the Marine.
Everyone trooped back into the Pill Box to drink to the victors. Sergeant Major Foster ordered Petrocelli to make sure the losers made it to the field hospital or back to their outfits, and he resented the order because he wanted to stay for the celebration. Petrocelli found Skevo on the porch, slowly buttoning his fatigue blouse.
“Aren’t you going inside?”
“I don’t want to drink. Too tired to think.”
“That rhymes. Are you a poet?”
“A bad one.”
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