Jungle Rules (37 page)

“Yeah, and write up the poor schmuck who dropped his weapon, unless he got seriously wounded or killed,” Kirkwood added. “The brig’s full of guys who couldn’t shit a helmet, flak jacket or, heaven forbid, a rifle when the first sergeant held inspection.”

“Hey, you know, that’s the Marine Corps,” O’Connor chuckled, shaking his head, shouldering the two rifles. “Hell, the guys who lost these peashooters probably already did six months in the can for it.”

“What’s the deal with lunch, though? It’s only ten-thirty,” Kirkwood said, looking at his watch.

“Yeah, I know,” O’Connor said, joining his partner at the door, “but Staff Sergeant Dixon’s squadron moved from the base, here, over to Marble Mountain. I’m catching a chopper there now. Don’t you want to come? You can see your renegade sergeant this afternoon or tomorrow. What the hell’s the rush?”

“I know,” Kirkwood said, walking out the door with O’Connor, “but I can’t stop thinking about how this sergeant must feel, getting interrogated for three days in the brig, and not having anyone on his side. You know Charlie Heyster has given him the shits by now. No telling what the son of a bitch told the kid. Probably sat there pretending to defend him while the guy got the third degree by Dicky Doo himself, no doubt. No, the sooner I talk to Sergeant Donald T. Wilson, the better.”

“You sure the fuck aren’t going to let that mojo SOB get that fragging bullshit introduced as evidence,” O’Connor snarled. “One part of me stands fully shocked and amazed, but deep in my heart I know that’s what Dicky Doo will push. Look, we’re talking about a matter of simple disrespect: an offense they should have handled with office hours, for crying out loud. Article fifteen, nonjudicial punishment by the man’s company commander, maybe boot it up to the missile battery commanding officer. They’ve got this case already elevated to special court-martial status, and I’ll bet they’d love to pretend it’s murder and boot it on up to a general court-martial if they can. Don’t count that out.”

“That’s why I’ve got to get to the brig and dig into Sergeant Wilson’s skull,” Kirkwood said. “This stinks of railroading. I’ll bet you next month’s pay they did their dead level best to try to pin a charge of attempted murder on this guy but just had no evidence. We’ve definitely got a fight on our hands. I only hope that this kid will open up and talk to me. Otherwise he’s dead meat.”

“Hopefully, Wayne and I can get the Celestine Anderson trial put to bed this week,” O’Connor said, walking with Kirkwood to the staff jeep. “Then I can pitch in with you on this one. I’ve got a head of steam worked up for this Sergeant Wilson. I’d love to have the combination to the lock for the inside of his head. Bet that would be an eye-opener.”

“I’ll keep you posted on what develops,” Kirkwood said, getting into the jeep. “What time you think you’ll be back? Maybe we can catch evening chow.”

“Sure, probably three or four o’clock,” O’Connor said, getting in the jeep’s passenger seat. “Give me a lift to the flight line, if you don’t mind.”

“Yeah, no sweat,” Kirkwood said, backing the vehicle into the street and heading down the roadway to the apron, where rows of helicopters sat. “You just going there and back?”

“I might swing over to China Beach and try to grab lunch with Wayne and his wife,” O’Connor said, and flashed a toothy grin at Kirkwood. “Might get a good look at how she trims out in beachwear, if you know what I mean.”

“You’re a degenerate, you know that?” Kirkwood scoffed. “She’s a man’s wife, for Pete’s sake. You’d look up her dress if she uncrossed her legs, wouldn’t you.”

“Damned right I would,” O’Connor hooted. “Nothing wrong with a little sightseeing.”

“I’m going to tell Wayne you’re lusting after his wife, you perverted sack of shit,” Kirkwood huffed with a halfhearted laugh.

“That’s right, me and every hard dick between here and wherever her freedom bird lands,” O’Connor smirked, blowing off his pal’s idle threat. “Wayne had to learn to live with that fact of life long ago, my friend. You recall what they did to us in the O Club, don’t forget. He seems pretty comfortable with it, if you ask me.”

“You’ve got a point,” Kirkwood said, pulling the jeep to a stop in front of a Quonset hut where several Marines in helicopter flight gear milled around. “Just don’t get any bright ideas about leering at Katie that way when we get home.”

Terry O’Connor jumped out of the jeep, grabbed the two rifles and pairs of headsets, and jogged toward the hut.

“Your wife is a fox, Jon,” he shouted back, looking over his shoulder and jeering. “I have wet dreams about her.”

 
SITTING IN THE door of the Huey, Terry O’Connor could see Toby Dixon standing on the tarmac outside the ready room door as the chopper set down at the Marble Mountain air facility. Another man, dressed in a green flight suit, stood next to the staff sergeant, and waved when Dixon raised his hand to signal the captain.

“How’s it going, sir?” Dixon said, greeting O’Connor on the flight line. “I wanted to catch you before you went inside with those rifles. So we didn’t get asked questions.”

“Sure, whatever you like,” O’Connor said. “Where do you want to put them?”

“Right over here,” Dixon said, walking down the asphalt apron past a row of UH1H Hueys and several AH1J Cobra helicopter gunships. “We’ll stick them back in the cargo box on my plane.”

“Terry O’Connor,” the captain said, putting out his hand to Dixon’s friend, who had a rank insignia with three inverted chevrons under an eagle pinned on the leather name patch of his flight suit, and “HN1 Doc Adams” stamped below it in gold lettering.

“Sorry about that, sir,” Dixon said, pointing to the man. “That’s my home boy, Bobby Adams. We call him Doc. Of course, we call all corpsmen Doc.”

“Doc Adams, just like on TV, you know,
Gunsmoke
,” O’Connor said, shaking the hospital corpsman’s hand. “You get any Matt Dillon, Chester, or Festus jokes?”

“No, sir,” Bobby Adams answered, shrugging. “I think you’re the first to ever make that observation. Besides, I thought that was Doc Holliday. You know, Dodge City and all.”

“He was Wyatt Earp’s partner,” O’Connor said, walking to the side of Dixon’s helicopter and handing the crew chief the headsets and rifles. “Doc Adams was on with Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty.”

“My grandmother always watched
Gunsmoke
,” Dixon said, shutting the lid on the helicopter’s cargo box. “I was like ten years old when I saw it with her. That was when Chester was still on the show. We always thought it was Doc Holliday.”

“Now they got Festus, and that new kid that’s the gunsmith, Newly what’s his name,” O’Connor said.

“So, where you headed now, sir?” Dixon asked, walking back toward the ready room.

“Thought I might catch a shuttle to China Beach and have lunch with a buddy and his wife,” the captain answered.

“Going to be about forty-five minutes or so wait,” Dixon said, looking at his wristwatch. “Want to grab some coffee with Bobby and me?”

“Hey, thanks,” O’Connor said, looking at his watch, too, and following the two men inside the crew lounge where a silver, two-gallon coffee urn sat with its black-handled spigot hanging over the edge of the table, enabling a person to fill one of the oversized mugs from the stack of glassware that sat by the big pot.

“Where’re you guys from?” O’Connor said, taking a seat on one of the brown vinyl-covered lounge chairs ringed around a coffee table.

“Me and Toby grew up together in Artesia, New Mexico,” Bobby Adams said, sitting in a chair across from the captain.

“Yes, sir, we went through grade school, junior high, and high school together,” Dixon said, sitting next to the navy corpsman. “We played football, basketball, and baseball. Won state championship in football our senior year, 1965. I played halfback on the offense, and Bobby played end on defense. We was good.”

Then the staff sergeant pushed up the sleeve of his flight suit, exposing the dark brown skin of his forearm for the captain to see.

“Sir, take a look at this bulldog I got tattooed here. That’s not a Marine Corps bulldog, that’s an Artesia bulldog.”

“You guys graduated in 1965 and you’re a staff sergeant and Bobby’s a first-class petty officer?” O’Connor said, quickly calculating their time in service. “That’s quite impressive, both of you making E6 in about half the time it normally takes a person.”

“People come from where we do,” Dixon said, looking at his hometown pal. “We’re raised that way. Put out one hundred and ten percent. Our coach back home, he’d take off our heads if we didn’t. Coach, he even had these Vince Lombardi signs all over the locker room. Winning is the only thing. Operating on Lombardi time, ten minutes early. All that stuff. So we learned only one way to do anything. That’s nothing less than our best. Rank just kinda happens for us both. I guess natural, given where we come from, and how we were raised.”

Bobby Adams smiled and added, “Also, our occupations have a lot more opportunity for advancement. Aviation and medicine, both high demand and you can’t be a rock.”

“Still impressive, Doc,” O’Connor said, and took a sip from his coffee. “Me, I graduated high school in Philadelphia in 1958. Born and raised there. I was too small to play football. I love the game, though.”

“You live where we grew up,” Adams said, smiling, “even you would have played football. If a guy didn’t at least go out for football, he had to put on a dress and pick up pom-poms.”

“Hey, look at me,” the captain said, standing and turning around. “Five-foot-ten if I stretch. I’m all of what, a hundred fifty-six pounds, dripping wet with my stomach full. Not your standard state football champion material. Back in high school, I couldn’t get my weight beyond a hundred thirty-five pounds.”

“Philadelphia’s probably a lot different than Artesia, too,” Dixon added. “We had a hundred fifty, maybe two hundred students in our class. Hell, the whole high school wasn’t more than five or six hundred kids total. Where you grew up, you most likely had six hundred in your class.”

“We had eight hundred fifty graduates in my senior class,” O’Connor said, nodding at the two men. “That’s after half the population dropped out when they turned fifteen. Big, inner-city school. Predominantly black. Tough as hell, too.”

“So, your old man a steelworker or coal miner?” Dixon asked and smiled.

“You’re thinking of western Pennsylvania and places like Pittsburgh,” O’Connor said, putting his feet on the coffee table when he saw the two enlisted men do it. “My dad is a college professor. Teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania. I joined the Marines to please him, one of the reasons. He fought on Iwo Jima, and I admired him for it, so I thought he’d like me joining the Marine Corps, too. I got a rude awakening when I told him what I had done.”

“Why’s that, sir?” Bobby Adams said, raising his eyebrows.

“He’s dead set against this war, right from the get-go,” O’Connor said and shrugged. “He never really talked about it with me, nothing serious, just mixed with all the other political garbage he’d spew while reading the newspaper. I should have figured it out, though, when he pushed me to enroll at Columbia University in New York rather than Pennsylvania. I just assumed that he considered Columbia Law School top drawer. Me and my blinders, I can’t see the forest for the trees. So I graduated college in ’62, law school in ’64, and then joined the Marines.

“Columbia, as you may know, is to the East Coast liberal community what the University of California at Berkeley is to the West Coast left wing.

“I knew my dad was an old school Democrat, and I took his comments about the war to be simply that of a history professor. I never really understood the depth of his passion against this war until I came home and surprised him with my contract and orders to OCS, TBS, and Naval Justice School at Bridgeport, Connecticut, after I finished law school.”

“Shit, sir, being a lawyer beats hell out of being a private in the army, which is what you would have gotten had you hung out for the draft to get you,” Bobby Adams commented, and took a sip of his coffee.

“Absolutely right, but my dad would have rather seen me drafted in the army, or better yet, ducked out to Canada,” O’Connor said, and laughed. “You should have seen him when I voted for Barry Goldwater that same year, on top of joining the Marines, and then told him about that, too. The little rusty-headed Irishman was on his toes and in my face, screaming how I betrayed everything he had ever taught me to believe. He’s a couple of inches shorter than me and has a firecracker temper, if you can picture it. I thought his head would explode. Me in the Marine Corps, and then voting for Goldwater. He blew his gaskets.

“He’s pissed off at President Johnson, says he won’t vote for Humphrey either, since he’s Johnson’s man and probably crooked. He doesn’t trust Bobby Kennedy, and sure as hell won’t vote for Nixon or
any
Republican, for that matter. So now he’s preaching Eugene McCarthy since he came out against the war with that book of his,
Limits of Power
, which lambastes Johnson’s foreign policy and the war. McCarthy damned near beat Johnson in the New Hampshire primary with forty-two percent of the vote, probably the biggest reason Johnson decided to bow out of the race, but still I don’t think Clean Gene’s got a prayer, despite his victory over Bobby Kennedy in the Oregon primary. At any rate, my dad told me if I voted for anybody other than his man McCarthy, I should consider moving to Arizona, where Republican lawyers are welcome.”