“I didn’t come all this way to watch some clerk talk to a computer!”
I turned and saw a gorilla-size silhouette darken Jacowicz’s doorway.
Judge March bulled past the orderly and planted his feet in the middle of Jacowicz’s office. The old boy wore a black suit with the sleeve pinned and a bow tie. I looked closer. The button-size fabric rosette in his lapel was pale blue with white stars. It was the first one I’d ever seen. The old boy was a Medal of Honor winner.
Jacowicz cocked his head. “Who the hell are you?” Then he stretched his neck forward toward Judge March’s lapel and the Medal of Honor rosette. The only reward America’s highest decoration actually brings you is that everybody up to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff owes you a salute.
Jacowicz straightened and snapped off a sharp one.
The judge returned it. “My name is March. Formerly Colonel March, Captain.”
His Honor a full bird? Damn!
“Sir, what are you doing here?” Jacowicz asked.
“I’m here for Trainee Wander’s graduation from Basic. With no goddam planes flying it took me thirty-six hours on a train.”
Jacowicz and I looked at him like he’d grown fur.
“Jason sent me an invitation.”
“I don’t understand,” said Jacowicz.
“Trainee Wander was once what you might call a customer of mine. I traded my rank for a judgeship years ago. But when I called for more information about the ceremony I heard about Jason’s problems and about this upcoming hearing.”
Ord. He had to have talked to Ord.
Jacowicz thrust out his jaw. “It’s not upcoming. It’s over.”
“You know better, Captain. Whether the proceeding stays closed is entirely within your discretion.”
Jacowicz stared at Judge March. “Why would I want to reopen the matter?”
“I’d like to speak on behalf of Trainee Wander.”
“As a former field-grade officer, and a judge, you know he’s not entitled to counsel.”
“He’s entitled to fair treatment! As an officer who served with your father, I know that!”
Jacowicz stiffened. “You’re Dickie March?”
Judge March nodded. He reached his one hand across Jacowicz’s desk and touched a framed picture angled toward us. A gray-haired man in fatigues who looked like Jacowicz smiled, a foot on the bumper of an old-fashioned Hummvee. “He was one hell of a soldier.”
Jacowicz blinked. “Thank you, Colonel. Judge.”
Jacowicz straightened the picture and cleared his throat. “What did you want to say?”
“Trainee Wander came to the Infantry as a result of events I set in motion. I thought it would be good for him. And he for it. I still do.”
“He committed a grave offense.”
“I understand Trainee Wander took a very normal dose of nonprescription, perfectly legal medication on a single occasion.”
“And the regs are crystal-clear on the consequences of such behavior. Especially in light of aggravating circumstances. A trainee died. In combat it could have been far worse.” Jacowicz shook his head.
“In combat we understood that even good soldiers make mistakes. And good soldiers are hard to find.”
Jacowicz pressed his lips together.
“You know what your father and I did during the Siege of Kabul? When there was nothing to do all day but duck when enemy artillery came in?”
Jacowicz squinted while he nodded politely. So did I. The old fart was rambling.
“We sat around on cots and swapped stories. And we smoked a little grass.”
My jaw dropped. Not because I couldn’t understand him. “Grass” was old slang for marijuana. It was illegal back then.
Jacowicz seemed to know it, too, because he shook his head, slowly. “I find that incredible.”
“I find it incredible that you think your father would have told you everything he did in his off-duty hours. And that you think it made him a worse soldier. Do you think the army would have been well served to get rid of us if we’d gotten caught?”
Jacowicz pushed back from his desk, spun his chair, and looked out the window with his back to us.
Judge March looked at me and tapped a finger under his chin.
I nodded and raised mine.
in the distance Here engines whined then died as a transport landed.
Jacowicz spoke without turning to us. “Come back in fifteen minutes.”
Judge March and I stood in the company street. “Your Honor, thank you. Thank you so much! For coming. For eveiything.”
Judge March turned to me and flicked his eyes to inspect my shoeshine. “You wear the uniform well. How have you been, Jason?”
“Not so great like you heard.” It all seemed incredible. That Qrd had taken my part. That the judge had come here. That he’d been a decorated, field-grade officer.
Judge March pointed at the mess hall, with its vacant horizontal ladders and that scrawny sapling shivering bare in the breeze. “You think an old soldier could scrounge a cup of coffee in there?”
Three minutes later Judge March and I hunched over coffee cups at an empty mess-hall table while the kitchen grunts clattered around in back burning evening chow.
He sipped. “You ever do any drugs besides that Prozac stuff?”
“Never. Swear to God, Your Honor.”
He nodded. “If I ever hear different, I’ll pin your ears back.”
I wrinkled my brow. When the judge was young, body piercings were wick. But his tone now seemed punitive.
“Sir, why did you do this for me?”
He shrugged. “If you got discharged, you would have been back on my docket. I hate a messy docket.”
“Oh.”
He stared into his coffee, then looked up and grinned. “No. I just thought you were a kid with potential who needed a push in the right direction. I still do.”
Just about now mat was the nicest thing anybody ever said to me. I shook my head. “Sir, that is such a coincidence that you served with the captain’s father. And that you and he, you know, smoked up.”
The judge poured from the glass sugar shaker into his coffee with his remaining hand. He set down the shaker, picked up a spoon, and stirred. “Son, there’s a saying among the criminal defendants who come before me. They think I don’t know it.”
“Sir?”
“If the truth won’t set you free, lie your ass off.”
He sipped coffee, shrugged, and watched my jaw drop. The mendacious old son of a bitch.
We sat and drank coffee for minutes.
The mess-hall door opened and Jacowicz’s orderly poked his head in. “Wander! Captain’s ready for you.”
I squeezed my cup tighter.
“Move your ass, man!” The orderly pulled his head back and let the door slam. I must’ve jumped a foot.
When we got back, Jacowicz shooed the judge out.
The captain rocked in his chair and steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “About that marijuana business. My father told me all about Colonel March. Dickie March was a good soldier but a rule-bender. They drank together but neither of them ever touched a joint.”
My blood chilled. Jacowicz had caught my defender in a lie that slandered Jacowicz’s dead father.
“Wander, do you know how Judge March won his Medal of Honor?”
I shook my head.
“During the Second Afghan War, my dad and Dickie March were the only survivors when a surface-to-air rocket knocked down a helicopter. My dad broke both legs. Major March’s arm was crushed and pinned by wreckage. The wreck caught fire. Dickie March used an entrenching tool and hacked off the tissue threads that attached his own arm so he could drag my dad out before the wreck exploded. Then he evaded enemy patrols for three days, carrying my dad on his back, until they were rescued.”
Jacowicz rocked back in his chair and fingered another frame, a holo of a pretty woman holding a baby. “I’d sacrifice anything for my wife and my son. But parents and children rarely actually have to make those sacrifices. Soldiers do. In combat, what we fight for isn’t God or country or even the people we love back home. We fight for the GI next to us. They’re more family to us than anyone else we’ll ever know.”
I swallowed. “Sir?”
“I owe Dickie March. My dad owed him. Dickie March is family. If Dickie March thinks you’re worth lying for, that’s enough for me. So don’t think you’re staying in the army because some naive West Pointer be-lieved a lame lie. You’re staying because somebody I care about believes you can make a difference.”
Staying. My heart leapt.
“Sir, I’ll be the best soldier—”
“Save it I hear promises of life-changing experience daily. I’m sure the judge does in his court, too. If you stay in, mis incident goes in your record jacket. You’ll be denied every decent assignment in the army.”
It couldn’t be worse than Basic. I just drifted with the moment while my heart fluttered.
“… make us bom late for graduation, Wander. I said “dismissed!’” He waved his hand.
I nearly forgot to salute as I spun an about-face. Basic was behind me! The worst mistake of my life was behind me!
Graduation was all the better because the judge stuck around and watched. Afterward, in the mess hall, we ate cookies and drank Beverage-Grape-Powdered and shook hands with everybody’s mothers and fathers. I tried to buy the judge a steak dinner over in Hershey, Pennsylvania, but he got the tab. We both cried as I put him on the train back to Colorado.
We all got two weeks’ leave after Basic. Most trainees had family to go home to. The closest person to me left on Earth was Metzger.
He flew out of Canaveral. With no commercial air, I had to deadhead a lift with a military truck convoy to Philadelphia, then hitch another lift with another convoy headed south.
The truck ride to Philly was bumpy and cold and gave me time to think. I thought about Walter, about the fate of the world, but mostly about what an idiot I had just been.
Jacowicz had said I could have walked away from the army.
Instead, I had fought my way back into a low-paying, dirty, dangerous job. A job where my screwups left me with no shot at advancing. Recruits like Druwan Parker, my broken-leg bunkmate with the high-ranking relative, might make a career in the army. Not me. The farther I got away from Indiantown Gap the more clearly I saw reality.
The freight depot in Philly was in a warehouse district. A big room with a supply sergeant behind a gray metal desk, vending machines on one wall, and a couple vinyl sofas, it smelled of wet cardboard. I had hours to kill before the southbound convoy left for Florida.
A couple civilians, guys near twenty, sat atop their luggage. Recruits, bound for Basic at Indiantown Gap with another convoy. Shaggy, impressed, smart-ass. In short, me a few months ago.
I sprawled across a sofa and watched the supply sergeant run inventory on his screen. His olive skin was acne-pocked, and a scar twisted along his jawline.
“Where you from, Sarge?”
“The Bronx.” His name tag read “Ochoa.” Regular noncommissioned officers weren’t like drills. Anybody could shoot the breeze with them.
“What you doin‘ there, Sarge?” I pointed at his screen.
“Entering paper goods inventory we got in this warehouse.”
“Like what?”
“Toilet paper. Wrapping paper.”
“Gotta keep ‘em separate, huh?”
He shrugged. “This is the army. Paper is paper.”
“You like your job?”
He shrugged. “I’m short. As in short-time-until-discharge. Never figured I’d get to retire.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve had my share of admins.”
As in administrative-punishment hearings. A resource!
“What for?”
“Bar fights, mostly. I was stationed on a navy base.” He spit tobacco juice into a bucket alongside his desk. “Who can drink with squids?”
Fair point
“It didn’t keep you from getting promoted.”
“The army takes care of its own.”
My chest swelled.
He shrugged. “Unless you got a drug incident in your record.”
My heart sank.
“You dope, no hope.”
“You mean coke addicts. What if somebody just did Prozac?”
He shook his head. “This is the army. Drugs is drugs.”
I stared at my low-cuts. A fat lot of good it had done me to learn how to keep a shine on my shoes. This guy was me in twenty years, even if I didn’t have a drug incident reported in my records.
I drifted outside the depot Across the street a storefront church offered meals. A line of bundled men stretched from its door to the end of the block. They weren’t homeless derelicts. They were responsible, respectable men from whom this war had stolen hope. I was made to melt into that line.
It would be easy just to disappear right now. Into the ranks of the homeless, the orphaned, the jobless. The army overflowed. Deserting would be a favor, making a spot for a new guy. The army couldn’t spare resources to pursue deserters.
I had a couple months’ pay on me and civvies in my duffel. I remember some comedian’s epitaph had been “Better here than in Philadelphia.” Philly was no prize, but it was big enough to get lost in.
I slipped back inside long enough to retrieve my duffel and hike it onto my shoulder. I’d find an alley down the block, change into civvies, and blend in.
Sergeant Ochoa looked up from his screen. “Your convoy to Canaveral rolls out at 0400. Don’t get lost, Specialist!”
I already was.
I pushed my palm on the swinging door and the door pushed back. A black man in civvies came through, suitcase in one hand, steadying himself with an aluminum cane in the other.
I dodged around him.
“Wander!”
I turned. Druwan Parker, broken leg and all, grinned at me.
He dropped his bag and stuck out his hand. “Look at you! Sharp and rock-steady! You made it through Basic!” He looked me up and down while he pumped my hand.
“What are you doing here?” I managed.
“Second chance.” He held out his arms and lifted his leg. “Pins came out a week ago. I’m getting recycled through Basic.”
“Still Infantry? Can’t your uncle get you a soft deal now that you got hurt?”
His grin faded. He looked at his feet. “I lied. I got one cousin who was an air force sergeant. I got no more life outside the army than you have. And this leg healed crooked. I’m probably gonna wash out of Basic, again. But you never know. My old man used to say 90 percent of life is just showing up.”
I had only known Parker for one day before he broke his leg. Then he had been an optimist. Now he was a realist. But he was going to show up.
He looked at me. “So where you headed, now that Basic’s over? You lucky son of a bitch.”
Lucky. Maybe. I shrugged, dropped my duffel to the floor, and sat down to wait for the convoy. “Wherever the army sends me.”
By the time I had wished Parker luck and ridden yet another diesel truck for a day and a half, my eyes were clogged with sleeplessness and the road grit of a half dozen states.
I tossed my duffel over the tailgate to the gray pavement skirting a warehouse complex. The buildings squatted at the edge of what was now known as United Nations Space Force Base Canaveral, Florida, USA. I followed my duffel and as my boots hit concrete, the earth shook.