“So how’d you feel?”
“Well, I felt real bad about Goose. He was a good guy, y’know? Tough getting it like that.”
“I mean how did you feel?”
“Like I had never left Marine recon. At least my jungle rot wasn’t itching. That was something. I skinned out of all that survival gear and kept only what I needed and decided to set up an ambush. What I really wanted was a rifle. All I had was the forty-five. And my knife.”
“Didn’t you think they might catch you?”
“No way, man. I knew they wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Not unless they shot me or something. I was on the ground for two weeks and had people walk by within six feet of me and they never saw me.”
“So what did you do?”
“Do? Well, I found a guy who had a rifle and took it, and his food. Ball of rice, with a lot of sand mixed in. You sort of have to develop a taste for it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Checked in on the emergency freq about once a day, when the gomers weren’t close. Didn’t want to overwork the batteries in that radio. But they never heard me. A patrol found me on the fourteenth day. It was a good thing, because my jungle rot was starting to itch by then. You can never really cure that shit, you know.”
“So how many gomers did you kill?”
“A dozen that I know about.”
“Know about?”
“Yeah. I kept busy building booby traps and such. With a little luck the traps got a few more of ’em. In a way, it sort of made up for losing Goose. Not really, I guess. But it helped.”
“Uh-huh.”
“A fucked-up war, that’s what it was. A hell of a mess.”
“Yeah,” Jake said, and checked the fuel and the clock on the instrument panel. “I think we’re going to have to turn around.”
“Okay,” Flap Le Beau said. “Boy, it sure is pretty out here today.”
“There’s a decision point for every career officer,” Lieutenant Colonel Haldane said, “one day when you wake up and decide that you want to make a contribution. And for pilots, that doesn’t mean driving an airplane through the sky every day.”
He and Jake were sitting in the ready room. Jake had the duty and sat at the duty desk and Haldane was in his chair just behind it. There was only one other officer in the room, doing paperwork near the mailboxes. Haldane’s voice was low so that only Jake could hear it.
“True, some officers merely decide to stay until retirement, and I suppose that’s okay. We need those people too. But the people we want are those who dedicate themselves to making the service better, to being leaders, people who try to grow personally and professionally every day. Those folks are few and far between but we need them desperately.”
Jake merely nodded. Haldane had read the latest classified messages and handed the board back to Jake just before he began this monologue. Apparently Jake’s letter of resignation was on his mind, although he hadn’t mentioned it.
Haldane went on, almost thinking out loud: “In every war America fought before Vietnam, the people who led the military to victory were never the people in charge when the shooting started. U. S. Grant and William T. Sherman weren’t even in the army when the Civil War started. Phil Sheridan was a captain. Eisenhower and George Patton were colonels at the start of World War II, Halsey and Nimitz were captains. Curious, don’t you think?”
Before Jake could reply, he continued, “In peacetime the top jobs go to politicians, men who can stroke the civilians and oil the wheels of the bureaucracy. During a war the system works the way it is supposed to — men who can lead other men in combat are pulled to the top and given command. In Vietnam this natural selection process was stymied by the politicians. It was a political war all the way and the last thing they wanted was to relinquish the controls to war fighters. So we lost. And you know something funny? We could afford to lose because we didn’t have anything important at stake in the first place.
“Someday America is going to get into a fight it has to win. I don’t know when it will come or who the fight will be with. That war may come next year, or twenty years from now, or fifty. Or a hundred. But it will come. It always has in the past and evolution doesn’t seem to be improving the human species anywhere near fast enough.
“The question is, who will be in the military when that war comes? Will the officer corps be full of glorified clerks, efficiency experts and computer operators putting in their time to earn a comfortable retirement? Or will there be some military leaders in that mix, men who can lead other men to victory, men like Grant, Patton, Halsey?”
Haldane rose from his chair and adjusted his trousers. “Interesting question, isn’t it, Mr. Grafton?”
“Yessir.”
“The quality of the people in uniform — such a little thing. And that may make all the difference.”
Haldane turned and walked out. The officer doing paperwork had already left. Jake pulled out the top drawer of the desk and propped his feet up on it.
That Haldane — a romantic. Blood, thunder, destiny…If he thought that kind of talk cut any ice anymore he was deluding himself. Not in this post-Vietnam era. Not with the draft dodgers who didn’t want to go and not with the veterans who weren’t so quick.
Jake Grafton snorted. He had had his fill of this holy military crap! His turn expired when this boat got back to the States in February. Then somebody else could do it.
And if the United States goes down the slop chute someday because no one wants to fight for it, so be it. No doubt the Americans alive then will get precisely what they deserve, ounce for ounce and measure for measure.
What was that quote about the mills of the gods? They grind slowly?
16
Singapore lies at the southern end of the Malay peninsula, a degree and a half north of the equator. This city is the maritime crossroads of the earth. Ships from Europe by way of Suez and the Red Sea, India, Pakistan, Africa and the Middle East transit the Strait of Malacca and call here before entering the South China Sea. Ships from America, Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea and the Soviet Far East call here on their way east. The city-state is close enough to the Sunda Strait that it makes a natural port call for ships from the Orient bound for South Africa or South America via the Cape of Good Hope.
Although it is one of the world’s great seaports, Singapore doesn’t have a harbor. The open roadstead is always crammed with ships riding their anchors, except on those rare occasions when a typhoon threatens. There are few piers large enough for an oceangoing vessel, so the majority of the cargo being off-or on-loaded in Singapore travels to and from the ships in lighters. The squadrons of these busy little boats weaving their way through the anchored ships from the four corners of the earth and all the places in between make Singapore unique.
As befits a great seaport, the city is a racial melting pot. The human stew is composed mostly of Malay, Chinese, Thai, Hindu, Moslem, and Filipino, with some Japanese added for seasoning, but there are whites there too. British, primarily, because Singapore was one of those outposts of empire upon which the sun never set, but also people from most of the countries of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and, inevitably, America.