The Captains (13 page)

“A realist, sir.”

“You're a captain. Platoon leaders are lieutenants.”

“You can have the railroad tracks,” Lowell said. “I think I can hold my own with a platoon, if you'll give me one.”

“It doesn't work that way, Lowell,” Colonel Jiggs said. “It doesn't work that way at all. Captain, you now command Baker Company. Get your ass up there, look around, get settled, and I'll be up either later today, or in the morning, and we'll have another little chat.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That's all, ‘Yes, sir'?” Jiggs asked.

“Yes, sir,” Lowell said.

(Four)
Company “B” 73rd Medium Tank Battalion (Separate)
The Naktong River, South Korea
24 July 1950

The jeep driver who came from Baker Company to pick him up was a staff sergeant who needed a shave and whose fatigues were streaked under the arms, between the legs, and down the back with grayish-white. At least they were taking salt tablets, Craig Lowell thought; at least they
had
salt tablets to take.

He was aware that the staff sergeant was examining him with contempt and resignation. The staff sergeant had seen the Bloody Bucket patch of the 28th Infantry Division, Pennsylvania National Guard, sewn to Lowell's now sweat-soaked fatigue shirt.

“You taking over, Captain?” the staff sergeant asked. When enlisted men dislike officers, they address them by their rank and avoid the use of the term “sir.”

“Yes, I am,” Lowell said.

“Just get in from the States?”

“‘Just get in from the States,
sir?
'” Lowell corrected him. “Yes, Sergeant, I just got in from the States, and I'm a chickenshit candy-assed National Guardsman who will bust your ass down to private the next time you fail to call me ‘sir.' ‘Captain' will not do.”

“Shit,” the sergeant said, and Lowell turned, surprised, to glower furiously at him. The sergeant was smiling at him. “You a mind reader, Captain?
Sir
.”

“You can bet your regular army ass I am,” Lowell said.

“Most of the replacement officers show up in brand-new fatigues,” the sergeant asked. “Did they run out of them over there, too?”

“I don't know. They didn't issue me any.”

The sergeant nodded his understanding. He had not called Lowell “sir,” but there was no longer surly disrespect in his tone of voice. Lowell let the failure to call him “sir” pass.

“The company's short of clothing?” Lowell asked, as the jeep bounced up a narrow, rocky road.

“We're short of everything,” the sergeant said, and this time he remembered and added, “sir.”

“What do you do?” Lowell asked.

“I lost my tank,” the sergeant said. “Sir.”

“What happened?”

“Sonofabitch collapsed of old age,” the sergeant said, “Engines won't take this fucking heat. Nothing takes this fucking heat long.”

“What's the company doing?” Lowell asked.

“Sitting on this side of the Naktong, waiting for the gooks to cross it.”

“Using the tanks as pillboxes?” Lowell asked.

“That's about it, sir,” the sergeant said, seemingly surprised that a replacement officer would know enough to ask that kind of a question.

“Have the tracks been exercised? Will they run if they have to?” Lowell asked.

“Some of them,” the sergeant replied. “And some of them won't.”

“Maintenance?”

“Shit!” The disgust and resignation was infinite in the single word.

They came to the command post. As at the battalion CP, a sandbag bunker was being built against the side of a hill. There was a field kitchen set up under a canvas awning, called a “fly,” and behind it was a grove of tall, thin poplars. There was an enormous mound of fired 75 mm shell casings and beside it an equally large mound of the cardboard tubes and wooden cases in which the shells had been shipped from the ammo dumps. There were three eiqht-man squad tents set up on the bare, baked ground; and sandbag-augmented foxholes—one-man, three-man, and one large enough for eight people—had been dug around them. They were intended to provide protection during mortar and artillery barrages, Lowell realized; but they were dug in the wrong places.

The realization that he had spotted something wrong pleased him. It was a suggestion, however faint, that he knew more than whoever was presently in charge here.

“The lieutenant's in there, probably, Captain,” the staff sergeant said. Lowell looked at him. When Lowell's eyebrows raised in question, the staff sergeant added the required “sir.”

“You're learning,” Lowell said, smiling at him. “You're learning.”

The staff sergeant had indicated the sandbag bunker, but Lowell didn't go there when he got out of the jeep. He walked first to the eight-man tents and stuck his head inside them, one at a time. In each were sleeping men, stretched out on folding canvas cots. There was a strong smell of sweat in each tent.

Lowell then walked up the gentle slope of the hill against which the CP bunker was being built.

At the military crest (just below the actual crest) of the hill, eight M4A3 Sherman tanks had been emplaced so that in their present position, or by moving them no more than ten feet, their tubes could be brought to bear down the far side of the hill, which sloped gently down to the banks of the Naktong River. Four hundred yards to his left, Lowell saw a bridge, both rail and road, that had been dropped into the river.

He walked to the nearest M4A3. Its crew members, sweat-soaked, were either sitting or lying on the ground in its shade. Two of them were shirtless, and all of them were dirty, tired, and unshaved. None of them moved when he walked up. He looked down at one crewman until he reluctantly got to his feet.

“What shape is this thing in?” Lowell asked.

“It overheats,” the crewman said. Lowell looked at him curiously as if he didn't understand.

“It overheats,” the crewman repeated. “Gets hot. Fucking filters are all fucked up, and so's the radiator.”

“From now on, you say ‘sir' to me, soldier,” Lowell said.

“It overheats,
sir
,” the soldier said. “You some kind of inspector or something?
Sir?
”

“I'm your commanding officer,” Lowell said. “What do you plan to do about cleaning the filters? About flushing the radiator?” Lowell went to the tank and stood on the bogies and ran his hand into the slots in the armor over the engine. “And about getting the mud and crud out of there?”

“You work on it in this heat,
sir
,” the crewman said, impatiently explaining something quite obvious to a moron, “you either burn your hand, or you get heat stroke.”

“Have you checked the water in the batteries today?” Lowell asked.

“Yes, sir,” the crewman said.

“Then it could be reasonably expected to start?” Lowell asked.

“It would probably start, yes, sir.”

Lowell quickly climbed onto the side of the tank and then dropped into the hatch over the driver's seat. The temperature inside the tank, which had been exposed to the sun all day, was probably 120 degrees, possibly even higher. His body was instantly soaked in sweat. The batteries sounded weak when he started the engine. By the time he had it running and the engine smoothed down enough to move it, the lever—exposed through the open hatch to the direct rays of the sun—was too hot to hold. He squirmed around and got a handkerchief from his pocket and used it to keep his hand from being burned.

Then he raced the engine to signal he was going to move, locked the left track, and threw the right into reverse. The M4A3 backed out of its position. When he had it pointing in the right direction, he drove it quickly down the hill, past the field kitchen, and ten yards into the grove of poplars, crushing them under the tank. Then he got out of the tank.

By the time he walked back to the field kitchen, his presence had been made known to the acting company commander, who was waiting for him. The acting company commander was a thin first lieutenant in salt-streaked fatigues. He needed a shave.

“Are you Captain Lowell, sir?” he asked.

“Get yourself a shave and a clean uniform, Lieutenant,” Lowell said, cutting him off in midsentence. “And then report to me properly.”

He turned his back on him and looked up the hill to the revetment from which he had driven the M4A3. The crew was standing up now, looking down to see what the hell was going on. Lowell pointed at them, finger and arm extended, and then made a fist with his hand and pumped it up and down over his head, the signal to “form on me.” Hesitantly at first, the crew of the M4A3 started down the hill, eventually breaking into a little trot.

“Yes, sir?” the man he had spoken to on the hill said.

“You're the tank commander?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you know in which of those squad tents the mess sergeant is asleep?”

“Yes, sir,” the tank commander said, baffled by the question.

“Ask the mess sergeant to report to me, please, Sergeant,” Lowell said. “And then take those tents down, slit the seams, and rig a sunshade where I parked your tank. Then flush the radiator and the filters. When you've done that, you and your crew can get some sleep.”

“Rip the tent up?” the tank commander asked, incredulously.

“A fightable tank is liable to keep us all alive, Sergeant,” Lowell said. “That makes more sense to me than providing a place for the mess sergeant to sleep.”

“Yes, sir,” the tank commander said, more than a little pleased that this new company commander was going to throw the mess sergeant's ass out of bed.

The mess sergeant, a fat, heavily sweating, nearly bald man in his middle thirties, his fatigue shirt unbuttoned, his feet jammed into laceless combat boots, approached Lowell a few minutes later, his bluster fading as Lowell met his eyes.

“The captain's got to understand that other people, I mean not just the cooks and KPs, use them tents.”

“Not anymore they don't,” Lowell said. “What have you got cool to drink, Sergeant?”

“We ain't got any ice or anything like that, Captain,” the mess sergeant said, “if that's what you're asking.”

“Get me what you have, please,” Lowell said, coldly.

The mess sergeant waddled to a Lister bag and returned in a moment with a canteen-cup full of water. Lowell took it, tasted the water, and spit it out.

“That's the purifier, Captain,” the mess sergeant said. “Can't do nothing about that.”

“You can purify drinking water by boiling it,” Lowell said. “Water purification pills are intended for use only when there's no other means available. Why is it that I don't see water boiling?”

There was no reply that could be made to that. The mess sergeant flashed Lowell a wounded look.

“You do know how to make GI strawberry soda, don't you?” Lowell asked.

“Sir?” the mess sergeant replied, baffled by the question.

“You heat cans of strawberry preserves and gradually add water which has been boiled,” Lowell said. “It's not much, but it's a hell of a lot better than that chemically flavored horse piss you're handing out. Put someone to work on that right away.”

“Sir, I don't know if we got any strawberry preserves,” the mess sergeant said.

“Then make it out of what preserves you do have,” Lowell said, icily. “And if you don't have any preserves, Sergeant, then go steal some.”

The acting company commander returned, in a clean, unpressed fatigue uniform. His face was bleeding from his shave. He walked up to Lowell and saluted, holding the salute as he recited, “Sir, Lieutenant Sully, Thomas J. I've been acting company commander.”

Lowell returned the salute, very casually.

“My name is Lowell, Lieutenant,” he said. “I herewith assume command. Please see that a general order so stating is prepared for my signature.”

“Captain, we was never even issued a typewriter,” Lieutenant Sully said.

“In that case, Lieutenant,” Lowell said, “find someone who prints very neatly. Where is the first sergeant?”

“Captain, we've been taking turns, twelve hours on and twelve off. He's sleeping.”

“Where?”

“In the bunker, sir.”

“Have we got a field first?”

“Staff Sergeant Williams, sir. The man who picked you up at battalion.”

“Oh, yes,” Lowell said. He looked around and located Staff Sergeant Williams, and made the “form on me” signal to him by pumping his fist over his head.

“Yes, sir?” Sergeant Williams said.

“You've heard what I want done with the squad tents?”