Missile Rats, page 11
The doctor had made a mistake. I sighed. “You mean that you don’t file a report on me to include the gist of our session.”
The doctor chewed on his lower lip. He had abruptly realized his mistake. “What I mean is that I give a general accounting, but personal issues stay in this room.”
“So, for example, if I threatened to do something illegal, you wouldn’t report it?” I couldn’t help it. It kind of popped out. If the doctor wanted to spin big fairy tales then I was going to poke him in the ass with a needle until his bubble burst.
Bob looked at me. He had his neutral expression down pat. I already knew what he was going to say before the words started out of his mouth, “Are you telling me that you’re thinking of doing something illegal, Richard?”
I sighed again. “Jaywalking springs to mind. Speeding might be another if I can get time to get a driver’s license for in-country. Thinking lewd thoughts about one of the female lieutenants. But then, that’s not illegal. But hey, Doc, if you saw her, you’d think lewd thoughts, too. Va-voom.” I wanted to imitate Veith’s hand gestures indicating mammary gland size, but somehow didn’t believe the doc would get it, of if he did, he was too white bread to appreciate it.
The doc smiled again. It must have been some sort of reaction with him. Smile to relax the patient. A big, hairy smile always makes another fella loosen up and spill his guts to the shrink. Smile and he will lay his cards on the table, unmask the super hero, spit it out, sing like a stool pigeon, or even raise up the stage curtains. “You like to use humor in your daily life quite a bit.”
It wasn’t exactly a question so I didn’t exactly feel like answering.
“Some might call that a defensive reaction,” he commented, not idly.
I decided that by calling it a defensive reaction he was trying to get me to become defensive about my defensive reaction of using humor. I shrugged, very un-defensively, I might add.
“But humor can be a very healthy way of dealing with life’s little foibles,” he said after my abject silence. “Would you say you’re a happy person, Richard?”
“Call me Skeet,” I said. What the heck was a foible?
“Well, then, Skeet, would you say that you’re happy with your life?”
I considered. “To begin with that’s two different questions. Am I happy with my life and am I a happy person? You know, if I just said yes to both, we wouldn’t have a very long conversation.”
Oops. His right eyelid twitched. He had just lost a little bit of composure. My mission in life was successful. Dr. Goodbar would never look at another patient in exactly the same way. Forever would his undebauchedness be debauched. No more morning dew on his face. Now that I was happy with my lot in life I might be inclined to share.
“Doc,” I relented. “No, I wouldn’t say I was a happy person. But then I wouldn’t say I was an unhappy person. Sometimes I don’t get what I want, which is a part of being alive, because you can’t always get what you want. Lately I haven’t been getting what I wanted out of the Army. But does that mean I won’t do my job, that I’m untrustworthy because of it. No, because I do my job in the best way I can, most of the time.” Silently, I berated myself for the lie. I would have to chalk that one up for the next confession. It was more like 75% of the time I tried to do my job the best way I could, and it was slipping, but it was because I was dealing with the brick wall that was my commander and the concertino wire that was SSG Vanhoos. What the hell good would it do telling this guy, who probably went to the field once when he was going through OCS, all about the daily crap one had to undergo in the Det? Not a bit. I suppose I should have felt a little guilt at yanking on this guy’s chains but I knew this would make him a better psychiatrist.
“Tell me what is it that you haven’t been getting out of the Army,” directed the doctor.
“I signed up to be a Nike-Hercules missile electronics mechanic,” I answered. “I have never done the job, not in the two years and seven months that I’ve been in the Army, and probably not in the approximate year and a half that I have left.”
“What are you doing?”
“Yesterday they made me a ComSec Assistant Custodian. Communications security, that is. That means that I have to help out the ComSec Custodian with all of the security issues dealing with the crypto room. Keep the safes secure. Keep all of the messages secure. Do cookie runs. That’s the little authenticators that we use to verify if a message is accurate. They kind of look like a cookie wrapped up in a foil package. I also help in the supply room preparing for an IG inspection that may or may not happen. Every third day I have twenty-four hour duty as a B-Side.” I considered my statements to see if I had included everything. “That’s my job, pretty much in a nutshell.”
Dr. Goodnight nodded slowly. “Sounds like a lot of work.”
“Some of it’s very interesting. You should come out sometime. See a nuclear weapon site. Get an idea of what the men are dealing with who are talking to you about it.”
He looked at me curiously. “How did you know I hadn’t been to a site?”
“You’ve got a kind of innocent expression on your face,” I said sincerely. And he really did. After a moment I asked, “Do you believe in personal responsibility, Doc?”
“What do you mean by personal responsibility, Skeet?”
“I mean, taking responsibility for your actions. Actions that you do and that no one has forced you to do.”
“I suppose consequences of one’s actions are a part of our lives that most of us learn, even from early on,” suggested Dr. Goodbye.
I leaned forward. “Yes. Our parents teach us that for all of our actions there is a reaction. Like Einstein.”
“Newton,” said the doc.
“Okay, Isaac Newton. But the point is that when we do something, whatever that something is, then something else is going to happen. So by consequence, aren’t we responsible for the second something happening?”
“Indirectly we are,” the doctor admitted.
I waved my hand. “So if I punched out a kid in the fifth grade, and forever more that kid has been scarred, mentally, by that fight, and he goes out tomorrow and robs a bank, kills a guard, and takes out a school bus trying to escape from the police, then aren’t I responsible for that?”
The doc smiled at me again. “You’re an intelligent person, Skeet.”
I shrugged magnanimously. I was. I admit it to one and all.
“But there’s a flaw in your logic. You’re assuming that if we’re all responsible for each and everything we do then we have to take the consequences for everything. What if, by following that same logic, then you accidently tripped on a sidewalk when you were twelve and a twenty year old woman stopped to help you. Then because she stopped to help you she wouldn’t have been hit by a bus a minute later, and consequently she bears a child that invents a cure for cancer.” Dr. Goodlord seemed very pleased with himself.
“Well, that’s peachy, but I’m thinking about taking responsibility for the bad things I’ve caused or inadvertently caused.”
“Then you have to take credit for the good, as well.”
I chewed on my lip. He had me there. One of these days I had to get him in a conversation about when a captain put a gun to your head and commanded you to shoot an unarmed civilian, and see what he did with that. “So what you’re saying is that since we can’t possibly know or expect the down-the-road effects of everything we do, then we shouldn’t worry about them.”
“No, I didn’t say that,” said the doc. “But you did. And it’s the right way to go.”
“But what if I know the decision I’m making is going to hurt people.”
One always has the benefit of 20/20 hindsight with the passage of time. Later I knew I shouldn’t have said it. Although the doctor was a little innocent, he certainly wasn’t stupid. Although I never said I was talking about the situation I was in at the present time, doing the things that I was doing now. That message hadn’t come in, the one that would say, ‘Release the nukes to the Germans,’ and there was no reason to believe it ever would. But I think Dr. Goodcheer had an inkling. An inkling that niggled at the back of his cerebellum. He gazed at me with his ivy-school face and tried to decide if I were up to the job. If I were a man who could be counted on to do the right thing. If I were cognitive and rational.
“What do you think about that kind of decision?” he asked softly, just the right kind of response from a psychiatrist attempting to pass judgment on me.
“I think that making the right decision is important. Sometimes I have to hurt people by an action of mine. If that’s what I have to do, then I’ll do it.”
I knew that that was what Dr. Goodhumorman wanted to hear. But he really wasn’t listening. I didn’t mean that the people I would hurt would be those affected by fall-out. I meant that if my own morals didn’t permit me to follow through with a message to allow the Germans to shit in their own backyard and I had to hurt the people of the United States of America by doing it, then that was exactly what I would do.
Chapter Eight -
And I settled into a routine. Not that anything around the Four-Oh-Worst was ever routine. Routine for the Det was distinctly not-routine. The un-routine. The anti-routine. It was the old argument of what really was normal. Was I normal? Or were the loons around the Det normal? What the hell was normal? Antee was distinctly antagonistic to everyone with a pulse. Huffstickler would show up to work getting antsy like he was coming down off a cocaine high and say weird things like, “Beware the white rabbit,” and “Don’t trust no one who makes over $30,000 a year.” Vanhoos was like Big Brother and boy-howdy, did he know it was 1984. Captain Roy continued his cowpoke ways and someone said he was from Oregon. That was Portland, Oregon, which was not exactly what I’d imagined to be a buckaroo kind of town. Top Breedlove stayed in his office and never seemed to come out. I thought maybe that he could have been an alien. He never ate. He never slept. He never took a dump or a whiz. Faircloth remained moderately stable, the one I would have called ‘normal.’ He didn’t talk much as if his mouth was sewn shut. Lieutenant Cupcake continued to be a little ditzy. She lost a security book once and every single person in the Det searched for it. But then she remembered that she’d put it in one of the two-man safes. Lieutenant Petteway continued to be unable to tie his own boots. In fact he got a little insert that enabled him to zip his boots up instead of that complicated process of lacing those cursed enigmas that we were forced to wear on our feet on a daily basis. Poor, stupid bastard. Chief Lacobee got so drunk once he put a fist through the glass part of the main entrance doors, but he didn’t even scratch himself. God was certainly watching over drunks and grumpy warrant officers. John Brown was lackadaisical as usual. Captain Roy told Vallery he couldn’t watch Soul Train anymore and he’d taken up watching the same Wheel of Fortune over and over, just to see Vanna White and what she was wearing lately. No one dared remind him that he was watching a series of five repeats on a single half-inch tape and she would be wearing pretty much the same thing she wore the last time he had watched it. Bobby Stone’s wife ran up a bill for phone service in the amount of five thousand marks, or about three thousand dollars. She missed her folks, and Captain Roy had to do a little fancy footwork with the local telephone company. Nice shooting there, Tex. Those were just the people.
In other news, the Det underwent the IG inspection. Specialist Huxley hid the property book and we folded like a piece of fancy paper in an envelope in a stationary factory. Why had he done that? Because a bunch of guys with a bunch of magnifying glasses were going to pry in places that cause a proctologist to say, “Yuck.” Because he wanted to be obstinate. Because he was a perverse guy. Because only he knew why.
Staff Sergeant Artemis Jones pretty much lost his mind when he couldn’t find the property book. The morning of the inspection he started scrounging around the supply room. I was typing a form that indicated that Private Bobby Stone had lost a weather-proof, BDU jacket liner, and that he had been issued another one. His verbal excuse for losing the first one was, “Stone look and jacket liner nowhere to be found. Think wife used it as rag for cleaning up dog doo-doo.” I had to stop my single-minded, yen concentration when Artemis started his second search around the supply room. He started to get a little...unnerved.
“Skeet,” he said agitatedly. “Have you seen the property book?”
“Saw it yesterday,” I mentioned, studying the document before me intently. The typewriter was a Selectronic and older than some of the guys in the Det. I didn’t know how to type and had to use Wite-Out with great repetition. There was supposed to be a correction ribbon on the typewriter, but the last time the Det had received one was when Nixon had been President. Wite-Out was one of the things we tended to run out of in the Det on a regular basis. I applied it liberally to where I had typed in a capitol letter ‘V’ instead of a capitol letter ‘R’ for Robert E. Stone. I really couldn’t type.
Artemis started to twitch. The IG fellers were due at 1000 hours and he rubbed at his mouth distractedly. “Where did you see it, Skeet?” His question had gotten a little louder.
“On your desk,” I answered promptly. “You had it out and were doing the inventory on the tool boxes.”
“That’s it?”
“Yep, Sergeant,” I replied and waved my hand at the Wite-Out to stimulate the drying process. It didn’t really help, but maybe it was a psychological thing because it made me feel better waving my hand at it. “You worked on it all of yesterday.”
“I did work on it all of yesterday,” he agreed, not exactly calmly. “Where’s Huxley?”
“Went to see Top about something. Think he saw Jesus Christ’s image in a pile of blankets and is determined to make it a shrine.” When I looked up to see why Artemis wasn’t answering me, I could tell he was wigging out, but I chalked it up to the inspection. He usually chastised me for that kind of statement. It wasn’t nice to say unkind things about a fellow soldier’s religious inclinations. But then Huxley hadn’t told Artemis that he was going to burn in hell yesterday. Like he had me.
I had said to Huxley, exasperated with a prolonged encounter of preaching, “You sound like Jimmy Swaggart on uppers.”
Huxley had said, “You’re going to burn in hell, Skeet.”
I had said, “That’s what Ma says, too.”
Huxley had said, “Then I guess she should have used birth control.”
I had said, “She didn’t have your face to look at.” I thought that one came out pretty good. I laughed at it myself which had caused Huxley to turn a shade of pink that one normally didn’t see in nature. The little peckerwood didn’t believe in birth control anyway. He was on this earth to fertilize the woman who would become his wife with little, miniature, bible-thumping, God-fearing, fanatical zealots, just like him. Even Ma would have been horrified. Of course Ma didn’t have to spend even a few minutes with him in the same confined room listening to AFN, the Armed Forces Network radio station, during the Hour of Power, or when the evangelists came on and gave their enthusiastic spiel on the ways and means that man was driving himself to the burning gates of hell and taking the rest of the holy with them. I had to listen to his choice of listening pleasure because he had successfully lobbied Artemis Jones and the first sergeant about if he had to listen to mine when AFN played the demon rock, then I should have to listen to his, when they had Billy Graham on. I wanted to mention that the demon rock that AFN played consisted of Kenny Rogers, Michael Jackson, and Peaches and Herb, but it was all heathenish devil-worship to Huxley. I vowed to bring in a cassette of ACDC , Pink Floyd, and Black Sabbath for an explicit informational learning lesson on the differences.
Huxley had been highly offended at the end of our so-called conversation, having lost at verbal sparring, and the best he could follow up with was, “I know you are, but what am I?” or a variation of how I was going to hell and it wouldn’t be soon enough for him.
Artemis asked, “Do you know why he went to see Top?” He pulled the ever present bottle of Pepto Bismol out of his pocket and swigged about a quarter of it.
“Probably because I pissed him off yesterday. He said I was going to hell. I told him something equally offensive. He got in a snit. Then he disappeared this morning about fifteen minutes after I got here.” I thought the Wite-Out was dry but it wasn’t and I had to put more on. The form, and particularly the Wite-Out, was vexing me.
“Did he take the property book?”
I looked up again. This time I think I truly realized how unsettled Artemis was. A muscle in his check had started to twitch uncontrollably. He was about to snap. “I dunno.”
I have mentioned the importance of the property book. Emphasizing the word and capitalizing the ‘p’ and the ‘b’ was a good start to how vital this book was to the unit. This single item accounted for every piece of equipment in the Det. In the book there was a list of sixteen M-16's along with their identifying numbers. The book also said how many sets of sheets belonged the 401st. The book accounted for desks, beds, telephones, security equipment, safes, arms, and the shelves on the walls. And everything that was listed in this book was something that Captain Roy had signed for. If the book wasn’t available then things might disappear and if things disappeared then the United States Government would want someone who was accountable to pay for those items. Naturally the person who had signed his little John Hancock next to another list of these items, held in perpetuity by Fifth Group, the lord master and overseer of the 401st, would be responsible and might well have his salary garnished for the next thirty years. Captain Roy, being that very person, would also hold the rest of us accountable, and there were a few people in the unit, like Staff Sergeant Artemis Jones, who wanted to make his next rank, and who wanted to retire from the Army in the future with his pension intact. In an oft-used Army way of speaking, it behooved him to produce said book and produceth it soonest, else his enlisted evaluation report was going to read like a rock dropping down a bottomless pit.
