The Hunting Trip (29 page)

“That's my wife, the former Brunhilde Wienerwald.”

“You got any rug rats?”

“No.”

“I don't suppose she's knocked up? The reason I ask is that if you don't have any rug rats and your better half is not knocked up, what you'll get for quarters is a trailer. If, however—”

“My Brunhilde is in the condition you describe.”

“Then you get a two-bedroom set of quarters in NCO Town, which is a good thing, because they come with a carport and I don't think that junk car of yours can stand many more nights out in the rain.”

He then picked up a telephone, and Phil heard one side of the conversation that followed, to wit:

“Master Sergeant Quigley for Master Sergeant Richardson.”

“How they hanging, you ol'
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?”

“And
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you, too, you
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. Let me tell you why I'm calling. I got a Tech Sergeant Williams here that just earned himself a spot on the USAAMU Junior Varsity.”

Master Sergeant Quigley then covered the microphone with his hand and said, “He expected you last week, and wondered where the
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you were.”

“We arrived at Fulton County Airport this morning at oh-seven-hundred and came directly here.”

“On a plane?”

Phil nodded.

Quigley uncovered the microphone on his telephone.

“Sergeant Williams must have been on that USAF Round-the-World Garbage Pickup Flight. He got into Fulton County today at oh-seven-hundred . . .

“Anyway, Big Dick, he's here . . .

“Yeah, I've seen his orders and those no-security-clearance things. He was a
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chaplain's assistant for
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sake. If you're a
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chaplain's assistant, you don't need no
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security clearance . . .

“The reason you didn't think of that is because you've got
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for brains . . .

“You know as well as I do that that
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NCO academy has more
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instructors now than they know
what to do with. They don't need one more, especially one who was a
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chaplain's assistant and I need him . . .

“Look, just cut some
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orders assigning him to the USAAMU, and then get on the
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horn to base housing and get him a house in NCO Town. He doesn't have any rug rats, but his wife is expecting a blessed
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event . . .

“Okay. I owe you one. Don't take any wooden
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nickels,” Master Sergeant Quigley said, hung up the phone, and turned to Phil. “Welcome to the Junior Varsity of the USAAMU, Sergeant Williams. Trust me. You pay attention to what I'm telling you, and in a year or two, you may get one of these for yourself.”

He patted the one-hundred-straight patches on his shooter's vest.

[ THREE ]

Quarters 103B

Bataan Death March Avenue

Fort Benning, Georgia

Tuesday, December 27, 1949

A
month later a truck delivered to Quarters 103B on Bataan Death March Avenue in NCO Town, where Technical Sergeant and Mrs. P. W. Williams were now living, the HG&PPL mentioned in his orders.

HG, he came to understand, meant Household Goods. In this instance, this meant the shoeshine kit he had left in his suite in the field grade bachelor officers' hotel, as well as partially used tubes of toothpaste, bars of soap, and things of that nature, and the two
alligator-skin cases containing his 12- and 16-bore Diamond Grade Brownings with full factory engraving, gold triggers, and selective ejectors.

As quickly as he could, he hid the shotguns under their mattress and told Brunhilde if she had any feelings for him at all, she would never tell anyone what he was hiding because if Master Sergeant Quigley ever learned about them he would be instantly sent over to the NCO Academy of the U.S. Army School of Infantry Excellence, where he would be subjected to rigid physical training eight or more hours a day, to the point of exhaustion, day after day, in the dark.

Brunhilde, surprising him, promised to keep her mouth shut.

And surprising him even more, she kept her promise.

PPL, he came to understand, meant Professional Papers Library. And in Phil's case, this meant the three volumes of The Daily Notes of CIC Administrator P. W. Williams.

These quickly joined the shotguns under the mattress.

[ FOUR ]

O
ver the next several months, things went well for Technical Sergeant and Mrs. Williams. Brunhilde complained every once in a while that she really missed her double Slivovitz with water on the side and her cigars, but understood that was the price she had to pay for having let her lust carry her away.

And she made some friends.

There were a number of other German-speaking women married to sergeants at Fort Benning and she had quickly met some of them. There were also a number of German-speaking women married to commissioned officers and gentlemen at Fort Benning, but they, of
course, did not associate socially with their sisters unfortunate enough to be married to common enlisted men. The German-speaking women married to commissioned officers who belonged to the Fort Benning Chapter of the West Point Protective Association of course spoke only to each other.

Brunhilde's new German-speaking women friends quickly began to explain in detail what horrors she could expect when she got to the delivery room of the Fort Benning Hospital Maternity Ward, but she said that whatever these horrors would be, they were the price she would have to pay because she had been unable to control her lust.

On his part, Phil was learning that there were things associated with having one's wife in the family way that he had never previously considered. For one thing, now that she was eating for two, so to speak, her appetite doubled. And what she hungered for was filet mignon and fresh oysters, that sort of thing, as opposed to hamburgers and breaded fish sticks.

And she required additions to her wardrobe, as she was getting a little thick in the midsection and all of her shoes had apparently shrunk as she could no longer slip—or jam—her feet into them.

All of this cost money.

Phil had a nice little nest egg after two years on
per diem
in lieu of rations and quarters plus hazardous duty pay and especially after he had learned he could charge restaurant and room service charges to the CIA. But that nest egg was shrinking, if eggs can be said to shrink.

He was perfectly prepared to take a second job, so to speak, as many members of the USAAMU Varsity Team did, as bartenders in the many officers' clubs in which the Fort Benning Officer Corps slaked their thirsts.

The Varsity members could hold such jobs, because they finished their shooting tours at about 1600, which gave them plenty of time to
shower and put on their bartender's uniforms and get to the officers' clubs in time for the 1700 rush hour.

The Junior Varsity, on the other hand, was required, when the Varsity quit shooting at 1600, to “police the area for expended brass and hulls.” This meant the spent casings of rifle and pistol cartridges and shotgun shells had to be picked up from the many ranges of the USAAMU, sorted by size, and then placed in boxes that then had to be loaded into Master Sergeant Quigley's Suburban.

Quigley generously took care of further disposal, which was whispered to be by selling them to the Columbus, Georgia, Reloader's Supply Company. Whether or not this was true, it was true that Master Sergeant Quigley had a Cadillac as well as the Suburban and had quite a reputation as a big spender at the Fort Benning NCO Club.

Policing the brass kept Phil at the USAAMU at least until 1730, which was too late to go to work at an officers' club bar, and almost too late to prepare whatever Brunhilde had found in the luxury foods section of the commissary for him to cook for her supper.

Phil was sorely tempted to get the hell off the Junior Varsity, which he could easily accomplish by going twenty-five straight, but feared that if he did so, Master Sergeant Percy J. Quigley would smell a rat about his suddenly improved marksmanship and ship him out to the NCO Academy of the U.S. Army School of Infantry Excellence, where he would undergo rigid physical training eight or more hours a day, to the point of exhaustion, day after day, in the dark.

So, as his nest egg shrunk by the day, he decided the best thing to do was stay with the Junior Varsity for a while.

[ FIVE ]

Quarters 103B

Bataan Death March Avenue

Fort Benning, Georgia

Thursday, March 9, 1950

A
month after his HG&PPL arrived, so did his personal mail.

This consisted entirely of alumni news bulletins. Having nothing better to do at the time—Brunhilde was out with the girls learning more about what horrors she could expect to experience in the maternity ward—he read them.

The front page of one of them, the one from Groton, caught his eye. There was a photograph of a distinguished Groton alumni handing the Groton headmaster, the Reverend Peabody Jones, D.D., a check. Phil knew the chap to be Cumings Bradshaw IV because they had been at Groton together.

The accompanying story said that ol' Cumings was now editor in chief of the Old American Library, which was not surprising when Phil thought about it since ol' Cumings had been editor in chief of the
Monthly Grotonian
and had told Phil that when he finished at Groton and then at Harvard, he was going to ask his father to buy him a publishing company, as he didn't want to follow his father into the hedge fund trade because of its crass commercialism.

An idea popped into Phil's mind that at first seemed insane, but after some thought he decided might not to be so insane after all. He had said more than once that his perusal of CIC agent reports
vis-à-vis
the sexual hanky-panky of field grade officers and their dependents for strikeovers, grammatical errors, and ambiguities had given him enough knowledge of such hanky-panky to write a book.

What the hell? What have I got to lose?
he thought aloud, and reached for the telephone.

Ol' Cumings wasn't at the Harvard Club, but Phil ran him to earth at the 21 Club at 21 West Fifty-second Street.

Cumings came on the line: “Phil, old boy! How the hell are you? I've always wondered what happened to you after you got the boot from our beloved Groton.”

“I went into the Army, Cumings, old chum, where I have had many experiences which I have been thinking of turning into a book. I wondered if you, as esteemed editor in chief of the Old American Library, might be interested in publishing it.”

“There is always a market, old chum Phil, for books about our brave men in uniform, just so long as the patriotism, devotion to duty, courage, et cetera, is liberally laced with sex, the more perverted the better.”

“Really?”

“I
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you not, old chum. So why don't you take a shot at it, so to speak, pop it into an envelope, and send it up here for me to peruse?”

Phil immediately, which means that very night, started work on what was to become his first published work,
Comfort Me With Love
, which is what a general's wife had ordered her husband's aide-de-camp to try to do.

The first passages of the work were written in pencil on a lined pad on the kitchen table of Quarters 103B on Bataan Death March Avenue in NCO Town, but the next day—and every day after that—Phil brought an Underwood typewriter home from the USAAMU and creatively wrote on that.

Brunhilde thought his creative writing was a
dumme
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Verschwendung von Zeit
, which means, “stupid
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waste of time,” but he persevered, and a month later, when he had finished, he popped the pages into an envelope and sent them off to ol' Cumings for his perusal.

A week later, a letter arrived:

It took Phil—who had, the reader with even a half-decent memory will remember, literally years of experience removing excess verbiage from draft reports—about six days to put excess verbiage into his first draft of
Comfort Me With Love
and pop it into an envelope to send it to ol' Cumings for his perusal.

Ten days later, he got the $500 “on acceptance” check, and immediately began work on Opus #2, to which he gave the tentative title
Comfort Me with Cucumbers
, which was what a lieutenant colonel of the female persuasion had asked her lady friend, a captain, to do.