Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (10 page)

Here, the chaplain paused just long enough to hear the word “shit” come drifting, slowly and distinctly, from somewhere in the back ranks. The major and the lieutenant swept the formation with fierce eyes, but the chaplain went on as if he hadn’t heard.

“Right now, as we stand gathered here in sacred fellowship to memorialize our departed comrades, they, these seven brave American boys, are in a much better place, filling out forms in that great gold and ivory replacement depot in Heaven.”

The chaplain pressed his palms together and beamed at this reassuring thought. He looked out at the men assembled in front of him and was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of fellowship that he hadn’t expected to feel for the Lurps after all the stories he’d heard about them. They were all dressed very neatly in regulation olive-drab American fatigues, with rank on their sleeves, patches on their shoulders, and nametags and cloth paratroop wings sewn over their breast pockets. They wore black baseball caps with the recondo arrowhead appliqué instead of the disreputable camouflage boonie hats they normally wore around the base camp and, the chaplain assumed, in the field. If he looked closely at the front rank, at Mopar, say, he could see an earring or two, but he was feeling expansive and tolerant, and wasn’t too offended by this unmilitary display. He was tempted for a second to step out from behind the podium, plant his feet wide like he’d seen the general do when addressing troops, and maybe put a little mild profanity into his sermon just to show that he wasn’t a prissy old goody-goody after all. But he remembered that this was a funeral service, and it was his duty to keep things serious and godly.

“I didn’t come here to read the Bible to you men. You all know where the chapel is, and anytime you’re in need of spiritual advice you can find me there. My door is always open, and I’ve got a case of New Testaments with me, here on my jeep, for any of you that need one after the formation.”

Smiling a cold smile from the middle of the formation, Wolverine tried to stare the chaplain down, but the chaplain avoided his eyes.

“While we are gathered here on this helicopter pad, far from the comfort and safety of home, each of us must remember never to forget our comrades who are not here with us today. We must never forget. But by the same token, we must each look to the future and think what may be in store. These seven brave young American boys—each had a loving family at home, and friends, just as we have. Just like each of us, they knew they were facing danger in this distant, inhospitable place. And yet… and yet each of these men went to his reward bravely, never a second thought, because they knew they were doing it in defense of the families and friends they left, so far away, at home.”

“No second thoughts at all,” Sergeant Johnson muttered and the men around him smiled. Nobody knew if any of them had had time for second thoughts, but there was no doubt that, given the time, all of the men, even J. D. and that crazy McKinney who’d died helping the Legs defend the firebase, would certainly have had them at the very end.

The chaplain didn’t hear Sergeant Johnson, but he saw the smiles and misunderstood them. He thought that the men around Sergeant Johnson were smiling in fond remembrance of their departed comrades, and so, encouraged, he went on.

“The Lord keeps a special place in Heaven for young men who have died for their country in just battle. And the Lord knows our battle is just.”

“Your battle? You fat-faced sissy!” Wolverine thought scornfully. “This puffy wimp couldn’t hold a congregation of old ladies back home. No doubt that’s why he came in the Army, the chairborne, straightleg cunt.”

“The Lord has a special place for our dear departed comrades.” The chaplain glanced again at the paper in his hand, abandoning discretion this time. He read the names once more, then paused for dramatic effect.

“They are with the Lord now, sitting at His feet in that great, high-vaulted cathedral of Heaven. They are feasting at His table, strolling in His gardens, part of the serenity and holiness of Heaven.”

In spite of himself, Wolverine was impressed. In all of his years traveling the revival circuit on the Full Gospel Bus, he’d never heard a preacher dwell so long on Heaven without mentioning Hell. Sergeant Johnson, on the other hand, was far from impressed. In his mother’s church, Heaven was described in much greater detail and with much greater enthusiasm than this pastyleg could muster. Sergeant Johnson nudged Wolverine with his elbow and smirked.

“That sounds like a load of bullshit to me,” he said out loud. “J. D. damn sure ain’t strumming no harp in no heavenly palace.”

There was an instant of stunned silence. The lieutenant looked crestfallen and angry, and the major looked embarrassed. The chaplain shook his head and smiled weakly.

“Let us pray,” he said, and folded his hands.

Every man in the formation looked down at the ground except Wolverine. Wolverine hadn’t prayed for two years now, not since that night in the mortar pit of a besieged Special Forces camp when he’d said a prayer—just for the cameras, just in case. He’d begged then to live until dawn. The next morning, trying to bend the stiffened arm of the new commo man so it would fit into a body bag, he swore never to say another prayer. He refused now to lower his eyes to be polite.

“I ain’t gonna pray to no bloodthirsty prick like Jehovah,” he said, just loud enough for Marvel Kim and maybe Sergeant Johnson to hear. “I ain’t even gonna vote for the fucker next time he runs!”

He looked up at Tiger, sunning himself like a lion on top of the operations bunker, and imagined him nodding in agreement. There wasn’t any more space in Jehovah’s Heaven for Tiger the Lurp Dog than there was for a bullheaded, fed-up, backsliding heathen Wolverine.

M
OPAR, MARVEL, WOLVERINE, AND
Gonzales all hoped the Two Shop would send them into J. D.’s last Recon Zone. Mopar didn’t want to spend his upcoming leave thinking about J. D. and the others out there dead and unrecovered in the jungle, and Marvel Kim was hot to pull a flawless, uncompromised mission in J. D.’s last Recon Zone in order to shake off the unlucky gloom before it grew into a fatal dread. To an extent, he believed that luck could be made and controlled. And it was time to make some good luck. And Gonzales was gnawing his traces to get out there and call in a couple hundred tons of, death and misery and napalm on the
comunistas
who had wasted his only real buddy—that crafty dude, that crazy nigger, J. D.

Wolverine took a more practical tack. He went to Pappy Stagg and pleaded for a mission. He pounded on the commo desk to bolster his argument and threw in a little bogus reasoning for good measure.

“For Chrissake, Pappy—those Legs in Casualty Resolution won’t list our boys as KIA until we come up with some bodies. Figure it out: There’s at least sixty thousand dollars’ worth of insurance at stake! Tell that sorry-ass major we’re gonna commandeer a slick and insert ourselves—without support, if we have to! Tell him anything. But tell him we want those families to get their insurance money. And the only way to get it is to come up with some body parts or equipment. Ain’t a major in the Army who doesn’t care about insurance. And if you play up the good old family bit—hell’s bells, Top! That’s enough to scare the shit out of any major!”

Pappy Stagg frowned and looked over his shoulder to make sure the lieutenant was gone. He’d already run Mopar and Marvel and Gonzales out of the operations bunker, and now he and Wolverine were alone and could talk freely.

“You got some evidence all hocked up for this? Is that it? You’ve already got their ID cards out of their footlockers, thrown together some torn up web gear and tiger pants, and maybe smeared them all up with beef blood or something, and now you’re all set to go out and make a find—is that it, Sergeant Wolverine? A find—a needle outa a hostile haystack—maybe snatch a prisoner or two while you’re there … show ’em what you can do, eh?”

Wolverine started to protest, started to say something more about insurance money and the Legs in Casualty Resolution, but he dropped it all in midsentence and fessed up with a grin and a shrug, because he knew that Pappy Stagg saw through his bullshit about duty and honor and insurance.

“Sure, Top! There is a war on, isn’t there? So why not fight it with a little enthusiasm?”

Pappy Stagg stood up and stretched. He threw his long, ropey arms back and took a deep breath, then brought his hands forward slowly and exhaled, cleaning his pipes and clearing his head. He was wearing tiger pants and a black Ranger tee-shirt, and when he brought his hands forward, Wolverine could see the top of the parachute canopy he’d had tattooed on his chest many years before. Pappy Stagg had a famous tattoo. His entire pectoral area was decorated with an enormous set of parachute wings, and the joke around Fort Bragg’s Smoke Bomb Hill when Wolverine had first run across him was that Pappy Stagg was going to update the wings on his chest and bring them to par with the Master Parachutist wings he’d earned since getting the tattoo. The star and wreath on top of the parachute canopy of a set of masterblaster wings would have nestled neatly just beneath the hollow of his throat, but surely would’ve hurt like hell to have done, so it was probably a good thing that he hadn’t ever gotten around to updating his tattoo. Still, Wolverine couldn’t help thinking how much more impressive he’d look with a star and wreath showing over his tee-shirt.

“It’s a war, Sergeant Wolverine, not a vendetta. And not a fucking talent show. We follow orders and go where we’re told. I don’t know what’s got into you. You’re a professional soldier, a Staff Sergeant E-6 in the United States Army, not some goddamn prima donna. So start acting the part. Is that clear?”

Wolverine played with his coffee cup, sloshing the dark coffee back and forth, seeing how close to the rim he could get without spilling any.

“Clear, Top.” He put down his coffee cup and looked up at Pappy Stagg with a determined gleam in his eyes and a cynical half-smile on his lips.

“But you gotta admit one thing, Top, and that’s this: Out there where J. D. went under, anything less than a Mike Force company, and anything more than a four-man recon team, is the wrong force for the job. Four men, Top—you know how quiet four men can move.”

Pappy Stagg sighed and massaged his forehead with the heels of his hands.

“Wolverine, Wolverine,” he said, making a great show of his sorely tried patience and sounding every one of his forty-seven hard years, “when are you going to face the fact that you’re not in SOG anymore? I know, I know …” He put up his hand to wave away any protests on Wolverine’s part. “These Lurps are good in the field. They’re all volunteers, three or four times over, and they could probably put a jack-o’-lantern on Ho Chi Minh’s pillow if someone gave them the mission. But they’re still a bunch of kids—Mopar, Marvel, the only reason they’re running recon for Lurps instead of Project Delta is that they’re too damn young to get in Group.” The minimum age for a Special Forces assignment was twenty, and both Mopar and Marvel were still months short of that. “They’re just kids, Sergeant Wolverine. How do you think the mothers of America gonna react if they find out some nasty old master sergeant’s been begging Higher to send their nineteen-year-old darlings out on four-man recon teams, when the established Tactical Organization and Equipment schedule for a Lurp team calls for six men? I couldn’t do it if I wanted to—you’ve been in the Army long enough to know that! What do you think? Do you think I can just tell that major what I think we oughta do in the way of missions and he’ll lock his heels, give me that good old ‘Clear, Sergeant! Airborne!’, and bend to the paperwork? Come on, Wolverine. Start thinking like a staff sergeant and not a Spec Four!”

“Yeah, Top, but it sounds kinda chickenshit to me. These guys are Airborne Ranger Long-Range Recon men, not a bunch of goddamn Girl Scouts, for chrissake! They’re good! All they need is a mission worth their while. And you know I’m right about a four-man team.”

Pappy Stagg shrugged and poured himself a cup of coffee. It was going to be a long night, what with Two-Two out in the Aloe Valley and Two-Three on an ambush in the Game Preserve.

“Right?” He washed the word out of his mouth with a long slug of coffee. “What the fuck are you using that kind of terminology around here for? Being right and being ten feet tall might get you on the basketball team, Sergeant Wolverine. But just being right ain’t gonna get you nowhere. So I don’t want to hear no more about it. Is that clear?”

Wolverine swallowed hard, ashamed of himself for talking like a preacher’s kid, pulling words like “right” out of his hand and slapping them down on the table for Pappy Stagg to mock.

“Clear, Top.” He drained his cup of coffee and got up for a refill. “All we can do is hope the major comes to his senses before the bodies disappear and the gooks move on.”

Pappy Stagg smiled and reached for his pipe. “Hope in one hand and shit in the other,” he said, “then come back and tell me which hand fills up first.”

Three days after the memorial service, Two-Four and two men from commo section who wanted a little field time to stave off those radio relay auxiliary blues went out to find a radio site—an enemy radio relay—that according to Red Agent reports had recently moved to a hilltop in the southeast corner of the Aloe Valley map-sheet. All of the men, particularly the two from commo section, who hadn’t been on a mission for more than a month, were stocked up and ready to bust a few caps, to ice a few gooks, and capture an impressive collection of Russian radios and NVA codebooks. But they weren’t so lucky. They walked the ridges and climbed the mountains and combed every bit of high ground in the whole Recon Zone without finding a radio site, a radio, or a living soul that hadn’t inserted as part of the team. Mopar found a long-abandoned thatch and bamboo hootch, and then, not far away, he found a chipped rice bowl and part of a human spine. But there was no sign of recent habitation, or even recent passage, and the mission turned out to be another disappointing bearfuck. Shortly after the team was extracted at the end of five fruitless days, a wall of stormy clouds moved in and settled low over J. D.’s last Recon Zone, so that even if the major had ordered up the mission Lurp Team Two-Four really wanted, there would have been no way to insert them and no way to maintain commo, because the whole works was socked in and souped over, and lay under a thick wet blanket of clouds.