Laughter in the Shadows (4 page)

“One last thing. You can quit any time. But while you’re here, you will do what I tell you, when I tell you. Don’t smart-ass me, and remember, you can’t shit an old shitter!”

For the next six months we remembered.

I wondered if I had gotten on the right bus. Silent killing? Sabotage? I had thought this special training was going to be about recruiting agents in Viennese Rathskellers and pilfering secrets in Istanbul souks. I looked around at our group. One or two could be smoke jumpers or linebackers, but most were nondescript school teachers, bank clerks, or management trainees. None looked like potential saboteurs or silent killers.

I had no time to reflect, however. Hodacil was barking for us to double-time over to the mess hall.

Bert

My eyelids were still crusted when Hodacil rousted us out the next morning for physical training. Bert, the instructor, looked like Charles Atlas in the ad about “making MEN out of ninety-eight-pound weaklings!” He was bald and barrel-chested. His neck was so thick it was hard to tell where it ended and his shoulders began, and his top-heavy torso obscured the wiry muscled legs that pumped up and down while he led our exercises.

Bert had been a Presbyterian minister and lived by the credo that the human body was a gift from God and abusing or neglecting it was a sin. His physical prowess was legend at The Farm, where he dove through ice-crusted ponds to retrieve ducks shot by fellow instructors and dropped them at their feet like a faithful Labrador.

I was a disappointment to Bert. I made it through the push-ups and duck-walks and wheezed along the three-mile run. But I failed him on the obstacle course, a satanic steeplechase of greased poles to shimmy up, ravines, and three walls. The ten-foot wall was my nemesis.

I could vault over the six-foot wall, pull myself up and over the eight-foot wall, but the ten-foot wall stymied me. Others danced up the barrier like Jimmy Cagney in
Yankee Doodle Dandy
, but I always bounced off and landed on my back as the rest of the group ran by, splattering mud on their prostrate classmate.

The forays against the ten-foot wall took a toll on my rib cage, and I began sneaking around the wall when Bert wasn’t looking. One day, however, Bert caught me as I was making my furtive detour. He had a pained look on his face
and called me over to where he was standing. “St. Martin,” he said. “one day you will find yourself in a gulag behind a wall like that one. If you can’t make it over, you will spend the rest of your life in a Siberian stalag. Now get back there and try again. And again. And again, until you make it over that wall.”

I wanted to tell Bert about my battered rib cage, but he would have just told me to “work it out,” so I went back to try again. I crouched down, dug in my toes, and ran toward the wall. My momentum almost carried me over, but as I grabbed for the top, I slipped and fell, hitting the ground hard. The wind was knocked out of me, and my eyes began to water, and I could just make out Bert standing there, unmoved.

His stone-faced look angered me, probably as Bert intended. I picked myself up and went back for another try. Pawing dirt and snorting, I took a deep breath and ran. I hit the wall so hard I was carried straight up, and suddenly I found myself on top. I swung my leg over and, for a moment, just sat there savoring my triumph. Then I dropped down on the other side, where Bert stood waiting, a trace of a smile on the ex-pastor’s face. We jogged together the rest of the way, and at the end of the course Bert pressed a piece of paper in my hand, a poem he had copied by hand:

It’s the plugging away that will win you the day

So don’t be a piker old pard:

Just draw on your grit, it’s easy to quit
,

It’s the keeping the chin up that’s hard!

I ran into Bert ten years later on another obstacle course called Vietnam, where “keeping the chin up was hard.”

The formal course began with weapons training, learning how to assemble, disassemble, and fire Russian Kalashnikovs, Israeli Uzis, American violin-case Thompson submachine guns, and “Swedish Ks.”

I was told that covert merchants had fanned out during the Cold War, buying up weapons of foreign origin, including a large number of Swedish K submachine guns. A number of these “sterile” weapons were allegedly stored behind the Iron Curtain and later reportedly unearthed by KGB canines. Some remain buried to confound future archaeologists.

Lanavoski (Ski) taught us the “art of silent killing.” To Ski the jewel of the crown was the stiletto, which, when inserted into the jugular, would dispatch the victim without a gurgle. One volunteer for Ski’s stiletto demonstration still bears a four-pointed scar on his neck as a reminder of Ski’s “jewel.”

The Survival Course was a welcome change. We spent two weeks in the field learning carving fishhooks, setting snares, and cooking three-star bouillabaisses of grub worms.

Suturing

Holmes had more than once left the classroom when a live rabbit was to be chloroformed beseeching his demonstrator not to let it squeak.

—MATTHEW PEARL,
The Dante Club

The course on first aid began with a slide show depicting ripped abdomens, severed limbs, and distended intestines. When the lights came on at the end of the slide show, two instructors were standing on either side of a stainless steel operating table holding down a live rabbit.

We sat transfixed like premed students at their first postmortem. One instructor held up a bottle of chloroform, sprinkled a few drops on a wad of cotton, and put the wad over the rabbit’s nose. When the rabbit stopped twitching, the instructor held up a scalpel for our inspection and then made an incision along the rabbit’s stomach, leaving a thin red trickle to mark the scalpel’s route.

The instructor then held up a needle and began to sew up the rabbit, pausing to identify the “I,” “H,” and “T” stitches. He completed the operation with the “X” tie-off stitch and held up the sutured comatose rabbit up for our inspection. He seemed disappointed we didn’t applaud.

Several minutes later the rabbit stumbled off the table and groggily hopped out the door. That was when we applauded.

No one had noticed that a member of our class had slipped out the back when the stitching operation began. Cauley didn’t return until the operation was over, and the instructor was announcing that the class would be divided into two-man teams for a live suturing exercise the following day.

Cauley

Cauley was a study in perpetual motion. A feisty redhead, he was unable to sit still, continually slapping his knees and cracking his knuckles and coming out with Gaelic aphorisms only he understood. In the field Cauley was the class leprechaun, somersaulting down trails, darting out from behind trees, and playing Puck’s bad boy.

The evening following the suture demonstration, we were sitting around the bar in the recreation room when Cauley burst in, jumped up on one of the bar
stools, and called for silence. “Tonight the bells of freedom are ringing out over The Farm!” he said. “This Irish mother’s son has just liberated all those pink-eyed prisoners on death row! No scalpel will cut into their pink tummies, because at this very minute they are hopping down the freedom bunny trail!”

Cauley’s outbursts were usually ignored, but this time he had our full attention. He told us how he had broken into the lab where the rabbits were kept, opened all their cages, and sent them hopping off into the woods.

Cauley the clown had now become the “great rabbit liberator”!

When the empty cages were discovered, neither the training staff nor Hodacil were amused. An extra mile was added to our morning run, but we didn’t mind, because Hodacil had to run with us to make sure we went the distance.

The Air Drop

Using powdered lime, we had marked out the “T” on an open field selected as the drop zone (DZ). When the plane appeared overhead, we threw out a smoke grenade to indicate the wind direction and that the DZ was secure. We had been ordered to remain concealed off the field until the drop was over and the plane dropped down to “buzz” the DZ.

The airdrop almost went as planned. The plane made several passes, parachuting bundles rumored to contain beer and cigarettes. Instead of waiting for the signal that the drop was over, the impatient Cauley rushed out onto the DZ and began tearing at the straps of the nearest bundle. Concentrating on untangling the straps, Cauley didn’t hear the plane coming in over the trees to buzz the DZ. It was heading straight for Cauley.

We shouted warnings to Cauley, who couldn’t hear over the noise of the plane’s engines. When he finally did look up and saw that the plane heading directly at him, he froze. Then he panicked and apparently lost his bearings, because he suddenly began running down the field in the same direction as the plane. We watched in disbelief as our “Charlie Chaplin” churned down the DZ, the plane almost nipping at his heels. Cauley and the plane reached the end of the DZ at almost the same time. The plane pulled up sharply over the trees, but the downdraft from the engines sucked Cauley up into the air and then dropped him unceremoniously back onto the DZ. Yesterday’s rabbit liberator lay spread-eagled in the mud as his classmates rushed out to retrieve the spoils.

Out the Door

I didn’t look forward to parachute training. Defying gravity with a flimsy nylon canopy was risky at best, and Hodacil’s jokes about “streamers” and ripped crotches and his song about “blood upon his risers and blood upon his chute, his intestines were a hangin’ from his paratrooper’s boot,” didn’t help.

Hodacil was a seasoned paratrooper, however, and an excellent trainer and in two weeks had turned us into mindless jump-happy automatons, standing up, hooking up, and jumping out the door with only slight pushes.

We made five jumps. I preferred the night jumps, because I couldn’t see the ground coming up at me. After our last jump, Hodacil pinned on our parachute wings, then took them back the next day “for security reasons.”

The Comp

The finale to our training was The Comp (comprehensive field exercise), the field test putting into practice what we had or had not learned over the past six months.

The day before it began, we were issued French identity cards and told to stand by. At midnight two trucks drove up to the barracks, disgorging hooded figures shouting French epithets:
Emmerdeurs
! Shitheads.
Cochons
! Pigs. Prodding us with bayonets, they herded us into trucks. After an hour’s jarring ride scraping trees and slipping in and out of ruts, we pulled up in front of Stalag 13.

Searchlights swept along the ten-foot-high fence around the stalag. Triple strands of barbed wire were strung along the top. Sentinels with guard dogs patrolled the perimeter.

We were shoved through the gate into the stockade and marched off to be interrogated. The interrogators handed us confessions to sign, but since heroics come easy in make-believe, we all refused. We were then hauled outside and put in “the hole.” Hunger and the chill of a long cold night broke our resistance, and we all signed confessions.

We were split up into four-man teams. Team Fox—
Equipe Renard
—consisted of Jean Gabin, Jacques Pipi, Con Rouge, and Jules Salaud, myself. We were locked in a cell, where we stayed until nightfall, when a figure darted by our cell and tossed a packet through the bars. The packet was our escape kit and contained a compass, canine repellent, and a map marked with the coordinates of the rendezvous point where we were to wait to be contacted by the “Resistance.”