The Rake (10 page)

Honolulu, Hawaii, February 1972

When he walked down the gangplank of the SS
Helmsley
in Honolulu, Lieutenant Reuben Castle was off his stride. He left behind on the navy transport vessel 1,082 men, going home after fighting a losing war. Their destination—the next stop after twelve hours of reprovisioning—was San Luis Obispo, California, where rapid discharge papers would be made out. The restless, bored soldiers were not permitted shore leave in Hawaii, even for a few modest hours.

Castle was happy to leave the ship, but a little apprehensive about being alone for the first time in a year and a half. Two days before, Lieutenant Castle had been handed a dispatch by a courier from the radio room. It was from the Department of Defense. The first line caught his eye. His father was dead.

He knew what the letter would go on to say. As a duty officer at the Personnel Deployment Office with the Fourth Infantry Division in Vietnam, he was familiar with bureaucratic army prose. He had seen dozens of dispatches notifying soldiers of deaths in their families, and it had been his job to relay to the Pentagon word of soldiers lost in action. These dispatches in turn generated letters carrying the bad news and extending the condolences of the nation, signed by the president.

Late one night, after much drink with Bill Sulla, Reuben thought of devising different form letters for the army to use. This permitted a little morbid fun, but the two young men didn't act on the idea. “Look, Reuben,” Bill said the next day, “these notices have to be utilitarian. You can bring out the violins when it's a soldier who has been killed, but you can't get in anything weepy if it's a dead parent. How can you expect the Department of Defense to know if you and Dad even got along?”

First Lieutenant William Sulla, West Point Class of 1970, was a practical man, except for what Reuben considered his insane desire to court death. After a mere three months serving at Personnel, where the job was to route incoming soldiers to their destinations, Sulla began his agitation to be assigned to combat duty. “What's your hurry?” Reuben asked him. But he didn't pursue the point. Bill Sulla, West Pointer, had accepted that fighting the war was the main task in South Vietnam. And that was what he wanted to do.

Sulla got his way after just three months of petitioning. In early May, the tall, bronzed lieutenant—he managed one hour per day of South Vietnam sun during his desk duty—was formally assigned to the First Battalion, Eighth Infantry. But exactly six weeks later he was back at his old desk at headquarters, assigning other American soldiers to combat. Bill Sulla had led his infantry platoon on a mission and on day two set off a land mine, happily underpowered. He suffered a leg wound. The Purple Heart injury was not incapacitating, but under the get'em-home regulations in force by that point in the war, Lieuten
ant Sulla was told he was entitled to return to the United States. He didn't want to leave, though. Not until he was ordered to leave. He felt he owed West Point active duty for two years.

“Okay, Lieutenant.” Sulla was being spoken to by Major O'Reilly, personnel officer. O'Reilly was a bearded veteran, by nature ruler of the roost. He'd have been efficient—and content—managing a truck depot. “We'll let you stand in at the personnel desk. I suppose I could say that if Colonel Sapperly” (the staff called him “Colonel Sarsaparilla”) “was on duty today he'd have called out a parade to honor your sacrifice.”

“Cut it out, Major.”

“Okay, okay. Anyway, nice show. Go back and report in to Lieutenant Castle. You're familiar with responsibilities there.” So Bill Sulla returned to the PDO, working next to Reuben Castle, who never left the office during the day, not even to catch the sun.

Reuben was handed the DOD letter as the liner trod tirelessly over placid hot seas, bearing toward Hawaii at twenty-one knots. The letter informed him of the death of his only living relative. He explained it to Bill Sulla, who had seven siblings. “My mother died soon after I was born. I have no aunts, no uncles, no siblings, no—” Reuben paused for an instant “—no offspring.”

The news brought back the memory of a phone call he had received during his dwindling days at UND. Reuben had been relieved when his father told him that he did not want to attend any ceremony or celebration other than the commencement itself. “You know, Reub, I don't mix things up very well, lots of people around I don't know. Your mother was good at it and you
inherited all her way of doing things. You'll go into politics one of these days, I know. Well, you're in politics now, in a way. You ever lose an election?”

“I guess I didn't ever, Dad. But I've got a new election coming up.”

“What's that?”

“I'm going to apply for law school.”

“When?”

“Well, right away. Usually the law schools like applications to come in six months before term starts. If they insist on that, I'll have to go for spring term to start in.”

“Spring term when?”

“Well, spring term next year.”

“What does your draft board tell you about that?”

“If I'm actually
in
school, I'm safe.”

“Safe from what? From Vietnamese gunfire?”

“Well—well, yes, obviously. They're not going to come over and shoot me here.”

“Now, look here, Reuben. I want you alive. But not as a man who refuses to do his duty. It's okay to criticize policy, and you've done that enough. But now you're soldier age and if the draft board tells you it's your turn to fight, then it's your turn to fight. When I get to your commencement I want to know what day you're signing up.”

And that had been that.

The message advising Reuben of his father's death had a practical side. Details were given in a printed paragraph from the adjutant. Lieutenant Castle was entitled, under existing regulations, to request discharge from the ship's roster at “the next port of call”—in this case, Honolulu—leaving him free to
put in for a slot on an air force transport, to expedite family funeral arrangements. Such transport flights left every few hours, carrying personnel and special equipment from Hawaii to “the mainland”—idiomatic use in Hawaii to designate the continental United States.

Reuben had plenty of time to reflect on his options. Honolulu was thirty-two hours away.

Yes, Bill Sulla was familiar with the office in which he had worked for six months. At the Personnel Deployment Office, four officers, two warrant officers, and six enlisted clerks decided, weighing demands, where to send the men who arrived from training in the States. In the months Sulla had served there before moving on to combat duty, a half million men had been processed, arriving in Saigon and fanning out to do duty as artillerymen, snipers, cooks, and orderlies. They had come and gone through the PDO, more than three thousand of them shipped back in caskets.

Bill Sulla had spent many hours with Reuben Castle, but not many discussing the war in which they were both engaged. They talked about everything else. Bill found Reuben astonishingly well informed on what was going on in the noncombat world. He admired Reuben's capacity for work and his skillful allocation of his energies—Reuben Castle always had time to address any problem, and time to engage in any diversion. He managed, even, to feign interest in what it had been like spending four years at West Point.

Routinely, individual officers working at the PDO were sent out for duty in the field after a few months. It was to advance
himself on that combat-duty list that Sulla had labored. That summer and fall, back at the PDO, he allowed himself to wonder how it was that Castle's name never appeared on the combat-duty roster, even though he had been much longer than six months at headquarters. Sulla did not bring up the point, but he could not help noticing that Castle cultivated the approval of the middle-aged, shrewd-eyed soldier most directly in charge of the weekly shuffle of names which moved personnel from clerical to combat status. This clerk was a mere sergeant, though a master sergeant of over thirty years' service. Young lieutenants would come for a few months to the PDO, then go out with fighting units. Reuben Castle would always see them off, sometimes buying the beer at the good-bye affairs.

Bill Sulla declined to harbor any thought that cowardice was a factor. He liked Reuben too much to indulge any such suspicion. Reuben's permanence in Saigon was just the luck of the draw, Bill told himself.

Eventually the day came to disassemble the PDO—not enough U.S. soldiers were coming in to South Vietnam any more to justify a continuation of the personnel unit. Those who arrived could be deployed by a computer operating out of Hawaii. And so Reuben and Bill found themselves sharing with two other officers a tiny cabin on the SS
Helmsley
, bound for Honolulu. Nobody, by the beginning of 1972, was clamoring for combat duty. Not in Saigon, not at the Pentagon.