Defense of Hill 781 (2 page)

CHAPTER 1
First Impressions

Lieutenant Colonel A. Tack Always found himself standing on the hot strip of desert sand that separated the endless straight track of the Santa Fe railroad from the dilapidated, broken blacktop road that accompanied it along its length as it disappeared in either direction over the horizon. A few dozen meters beyond the road lay U.S. Route 15, the major highway from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, over which traveled the eager souls hell-bent on throwing away the riches they had reaped from their industry in the lands astride the Pacific shore. His eyes were glassy, his head ringing, his battle dress uniform dusty and wrinkled, faded by long days and nights of unbroken use. For the life of him he could not remember how he came to be here, alone, unaccompanied by his soldiers, and without any means of transportation. Confused and befuddled, he walked over to the blacktop secondary road, trying to get a fix on his location. He had seen this place before, but that thought came to him only as if from a distant dream, unclear, hazy, and ominous. Where could he be? Why was he here?

Aside from the cars rushing past on the highway, there were no signs of life anywhere. Large power lines strung off into the distance, but nary a bird, jackrabbit, or snake broke his
solitude. He was alone, utterly and completely. The heat was stifling and he turned to his canteen for relief, only to find himself choking down a stale, hot gulp of water.

I’ve got to collect my thoughts, figure out what the hell is going on, he thought, his mind virtually creaking at the effort it took.

As he walked toward a highway overpass several hundred meters away, he sensed a lightness to his body, oddly counterpoised by a heaviness to his soul. The thoughts just were not coming, and try as he might, he could not focus. A sign came into view as he closed on the overpass, taped to the columns supporting the roadway above, “HALT” emblazoned across it in big, thick black letters. Beneath, in finer print, was a series of instructions as to how a military convoy was to pass under, at what interval, at what speed, and so on, as if the poster of the sign was afraid that an unguided unit might sweep the columns out from under the highway, closing the artery bringing the sinners and their money to the Sodom and Gomorrah of the desert.

Well, that seems unfriendly enough, thought Lieutenant Colonel Always to himself. But the relative coolness of the shade beneath the overpass beckoned him on. For a moment he paused as his eyes adjusted to the darkened light. Then he saw a second sign hanging on one of the middle columns, this one less official looking than the first. Scrawled in an uneven hand with gaudy colors was the message, “Welcome to the Twilight Zone. Abandon all hope.”

“Good morning, sir.” A voice startled him from his reading, but with habit formed by many years he instinctively returned the salute as he tried to focus on the source of the words. “Are you Lieutenant Colonel Always?”

“Yes I am. Who are you, please?”

“Sir, I’m Command Sergeant Major Hope. I’ve been expecting you for some time now.”

“You have?” Colonel Always was trying to gain his composure. Here was some hope that he might discover just what was going on. If a man, indeed a command sergeant major, was in this godforsaken place waiting for him, then there must be some logic as to how he came to be here.

“Yes, sir, ever since you died last night.” The words hit Always like a thunderclap, and in an instant the memory came back to him—the long march through the swamps, followed by the steep climb into the high ground, along snaking ridge lines, rucksack knifing into his shoulders as he led his light forces for the umpteenth time on a field exercise designed to show their mobility, sustainability, and hitting power. The fatal step had come as a result of his own obstinacy, his decision to show his soldiers once and for all that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the army ration known as the Meal Ready to Eat, or MRE. How sick he had been of his men’s derision of this space-age update of the old C ration, their snide referral to it as the Meal Ready to Excrete, and their utter conviction that the man was not yet born who could eat three of them in one day and live. And so it was with great fanfare that he ate one meal after another during the day, despite the warning signs that had been building throughout the afternoon—a reverberating wrench in his gut and a rumbling resonance in his bowels. He dug in, undeterred by the delectable delights of a barbecued beef. It was unclear if the final explosion was brought on by the dehydrated potato patty or the freeze-dried strawberries. All he could remember was his adjutant asking him if he would like some water to wash it down, his offhanded acceptance of that offer, a gulp, and a flash. That was the last thing he recalled before waking up here in the desert.

Fighting to retain his composure he asked, “Uh, look, Command Sergeant Major, I’ve had a hard few days and I would appreciate you refraining from any flip humor.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I meant no disrespect, but I assure you
that what I say is true. You did in fact die last night and even now the accident investigation team is struggling with the problem of how to document the cause of death as the MRE, a completely unacceptable finding for the board. I can imagine how hard it is for you to accept, this being your first time dead and all, but I swear that it’s true by the proof that you’ve left no tracks in the sand.”

Slowly, Lieutenant Colonel Always turned his head back to glance from whence he had walked and to his dismay saw that he had in fact left no depression, despite the softness of the sand.

For the first time since he had found himself on the desert floor, a coldness swept over his body. So he was dead! The thought was heart-stopping, or would have been, he reflected.

“Well, if that’s true, why are you here and where am I?” Always turned to Hope, afraid of what he might hear.

“You are at Manix railhead,” said the sergeant major, indicating a lone cement ramp rising from the sand at the end of a rail siding. “This overpass we are standing beneath marks the entrance to what in life was known as the National Training Center. I am to be your guide in your sojourn here. We will be moving up the desert trail a couple of dozen miles. They’re expecting you there.”

It was all coming too fast for Always. He had steeled himself to accept the fact that he was dead, but what did the National Training Center have to do with that, and who was waiting for him twenty some miles deeper into the desert? He had been a professional officer for most of his adult life, and not a bad one at that. For the most part he had lived a decent and respectable life. Yet if these were the gates to heaven, and the man standing in front of him was the gatekeeper, it was not exactly what he had been led to expect.

“Sergeant Major, if you don’t mind, I would like to ask a kind of personal question.”

“Not at all,
sir.”

“Are you dead too?”

“Yes, sir, I am. Been dead quite some time as a matter of fact.”

“And does that give you any insight into what this is all about?” Always was starting to regain some of his authoritative bearing.

“Well, Colonel, it does and it doesn’t. I know this isn’all clear to you yet, so perhaps I should do a little explaining. The first thing I would like to make clear is that I asked to come down here, specifically to be your guide.”

The word “down” gripped the officer in an icy vise, his breath escaped him, and for a moment he thought his knees would buckle. Could it be the worst had happened? What had he done to deserve it? Hadn’t he always made the morning run with his troops? Never once did he tamper with a readiness report. And the annual general inspections—he had always pulled those off pretty well without undue harassment of the soldiers; well, at least without
extreme
undue harassment of the soldiers. And all the social events. Sure, he never liked them, but he had gone, behaved himself reasonably well, complimented his hostess on something or other in every case, and always tried really hard to make that one brilliant statement that would indelibly imprint itself on the minds of his superiors for later recall.

“Just what is it you mean by ‘down here,’ if I may ask?”

“Yes, sir, you certainly may. This is kind of a touchy subject for an enlisted man to be telling an officer, but the fact is, Colonel, you didn’t quite make it into heaven.”

As Always blanched at the words, the command sergeant major picked up his mood and quickly went on. “Now don’t go jumping to any hasty conclusions. It’s not as bad as you’re thinking. If you didn’t make it to heaven, you didn’t quite end up in hell either.” A sense of déjà vu hit the colonel as he remembered his last efficiency report. “The truth of the matter
is that you’ve made it into Purgatory, which is what the National Training Center is used for. You see, sir, you didn’t quite have an unblemished record in the army, so the System has arranged this little stopover for you until you can make it up. Just how long that takes is up to you.”

Although the news was disconcerting, Always felt it was futile to resist it, afraid he might be left behind in the rush should he fight the logic of the words. The sergeant major was not being harsh, just straightforward. In that, Always found solace. There was something comforting about the noncommissioned officer, so respectful, so knowing, seemingly so in charge. It occurred to him that that was the way it had always been for him with sergeants major. It was a marvel how they could show deference to an officer, yet at the same time be so much on top of things.

Swallowing his pride, Always asked the burning question. “What did I do to deserve this? I mean Purgatory and all.”

“Well, sir, I figured that would be one of the first things you might want to know, so I checked with the Chief before I came down here, and although many of these things are beyond me, I did get a feel for your particular situation. Again sir, meaning no disrespect, it had to do with believing your own propaganda, so to speak.”

“Excuse me, Sergeant Major, did you say
propaganda?”
Always was clearly irritated at the pejorative term.

“Yes, sir, I did, but of course that’s just my own word for it, and I can see it might not have been the best one. Maybe I can explain it like this. You know that army recruiting theme we adopted in the 1980s—‘Be all that you can be!’—well, you started really believing that you had a corner on that market. Not that being infantry, and airborne, and a ranger weren’t good things. In fact, that helped your ledger a great deal. But after a while you started thumping on that stuff a little too much, and, well, you kind of put a whole bunch of other people down
while you were doing it, and when that happened, well, you just didn’t let them think that they were being all they could be, and if they were, it just wasn’t anything to write home about.”

For all his faults, Lieutenant Colonel Always was an honest man, and even as the sergeant spoke he reflected on all of his disparaging comments about soft staff officers, “legs” (nonparatrooper qualified soldiers), support branch personnel (“remfs,” “wimps,” “pukes,” et cetera). It was true. How much he had coveted his senior parachutist wings! How heroic it had been to posture about his ability to walk unlimited distances, suffer sleepless nights in the cold and wet, thump his chest and bellow the guttural sounds so endearing to all real infantrymen and so offensive to those who wished they were. But he had not thought there was anything wrong with that. After all, he had been taught the very same things when he was a young officer—unless, and the thought was sobering—unless those who had taught him had also ended up in a mess like this. Maybe he had embellished some of those war stories a bit too much, but to consider that to be anything worse than minor exaggeration …, well, that seemed a little hard. He hadn’t meant to hurt anybody’s feelings, even if they were miserable pantywaists. Always’ head began to hurt from all this thinking.

“Sergeant Major,” Always seized the initiative. “It seems to me that if this is Purgatory, and mind you I’m not convinced yet of anything I’ve heard, then I seem to recall that it’s only a kind of transitory post, sort of a temporary duty station, until I can complete my business and get on to my permanent assignment.”

“Right, sir.”

“Well then, just what are my terms of duty here?”

“Do you mean how long are you here for and what do you have to do?”

“Precisely.”

“As I said, sir, I know a few things about what’s going on but not all of it. How long you’re here for is up to you. The purpose, as the Chief put it, is ‘to teach you the error of your ways.’”

“You mean I’m to be punished for my, uh … well, my ‘arrogance’?”

“No, sir, not really punished. That’s not the way the Chief works. It’s more like He wants you to appreciate what some of those other guys, those guys you made a habit of belittling, do. He feels that you never will really have a place amongst them in heaven unless you first learn what an important contribution they make.”

“And can you tell me, Sergeant Major, just how do I gain that appreciation?”

“Colonel, that remains to be seen. I’ve a general idea of the plan, but I really don’t know all the details. To be quite honest, sir, I think I’ve done my job of bringing you in on the problem, and probably the best thing we can do now is to proceed further on into Purgatory, the National Training Center that is, and you can see for yourself what’s in front of you.”