Tiger the Lurp Dog: A Novel (14 page)

Whistling happily, he went back to the bench where he’d left his AWOL bag and the rest of his uniform and began to dress out his jacket. First he pinned his brass to the lapels. Then he fastened his jump wings and their cloth background to the flap of his left breast pocket. Above his jump wings he attached his ribbon bars, and above the ribbon bars his Combat Infantry Badge. There was a Presidential Unit Citation in his AWOL bag, but he decided not to wear it because it had been awarded to the entire brigade, rather than the Lurp platoon alone, and really didn’t mean a damn thing, since almost every brigade-size unit in the war had been awarded one.

After a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching, he put on his poplin shirt, tied his tie, and slipped into his jacket. He cocked his cunt-cap on his head and styled it with the edge of his hand as he stepped back in front of the mirror. There was no doubt about it, he was looking good.

He turned to the left and admired himself from that side, then turned to the right and admired himself some more. He straightened the knot of his tie, adjusted his cunt-cap so that the glider patch was low and jaunty over his eye, then flashed himself a cavalier smile and stepped away from the mirror. He picked up his AWOL bag and shrugged to get the blood flowing in his rucksack muscles, even though he had left his rucksack in the rear, ten thousand miles away.

“Well, this is it,” he said aloud. And with a determined sigh he started out for his leave.

By the time he made the main gate where the taxis were waiting, his Airborne spirit was at a peak. He was striding and strutting and looking
Strac,
and he couldn’t help breaking out with a verse or two of the Lurp song as he walked.

“Merry men are we, we’re rough and wild and free—hey!

There’s none so fair that they can compare—

To the Airborne L-R-P!”

He didn’t care who heard him. He didn’t even care when the taxi drivers gathered there to wait for fares snickered and looked over their shoulders at him like he was some sort of stoned-out weirdo. They were just taxi drivers, just a bunch of lardass civilian Legs, and what did they know of spirit?

T
HERE WAS NO CLERK
in the Lurp platoon. Before the Two Shop major wrested full operational control away from the major in command of Headquarters Company there had been a clerk assigned to the platoon, but he wasn’t even a paratrooper, and since he was a Leg, the Lurps treated him with such scornful condescension that he put in a transfer for the infantry and got himself killed in a firefight.

Now, with the platoon under the Two Shop, the Two Shop’s clerks took care of most of the Lurp’s administrative paperwork, and Pappy Stagg, Sergeant Johnson, and the lieutenant saw to the rest. Occasionally when there was typing to be done, when the lieutenant had to write a letter to someone’s next of kin or wanted to write someone up for a medal, Marvel Kim helped out because he was the only man in the platoon who knew touch typing. But Pappy Stagg was a competent hunt-and-peck typist, and as he was familiar with most of the normal forms, he took care of the day-to-day paperwork.

Early one drizzly afternoon, a day or two after Marvel Kim left for Recondo School, Pappy Stagg was sitting at the operations desk in the bunker filling out combat equipment loss forms for the weapons and radios lost with J.D.’s team. It was tedious and boring work, full of small print and cramped lines, and Pappy was wearing his glasses while he double-checked the tiny serial numbers on the supply sheets. Suddenly Sergeant Johnson came running down the sandbagged ramp into the bunker, his face a dark mask of pent-up anger.

Pappy Stagg took off his glasses, slid them under one of the forms, and looked up from his desk.

“What’s wrong, Johnson? You look upset about something.”

“Upset?” Sergeant Johnson lit a Kool and pinched the match out between his thumb and forefinger. “Damn right I’m upset, Top. I just come back from trash run, and you ain’t gonna believe what I saw at the dump. You remember that monkey they got over at the engineer company?”

Pappy Stagg nodded. He liked monkeys. When he was with 46th Special Forces Company in Thailand he’d had a monkey of his own.

“You know that little squash-faced dog down at personnel? Fifi?”

Again Pappy Stagg nodded. “Yeah. So what do they got to do with anything?”

“Nothing anymore, Top. They’re dead. MPs grabbed them this morning and dragged them down to the dump and blew their brains out. They shot the Awards and Decorations Section’s cat, and they’ll be coming for Tiger as soon as they get the time. The general’s got a fly up his ass about rabies. Losing too many manpower days to animals. So he wants them all shot—the chickenshit motherfucker!”

Pappy Stagg’s calm expression turned into a frown. “All right, Johnson, can that stuff about the general. And don’t ever let me hear you talk that way about a commissioned officer of the United States Army again.” He stood up and walked over to the commo desk and began to adjust the frequency dial of one of the radios.

“Nobody’s sent any orders down here about pets, so I think we can take care of this without breaking any orders. Or bad-mouthing the brigade commander.”

Sergeant Johnson started to sit down, but Pappy Stagg held up his hand to stop him. “Don’t you have to do some coordination for Two-Two’s mission tomorrow?”

Sergeant Johnson nodded.

“All right then, get to it. And while you’re at it, have Wolverine police up Tiger and get down here with him on the double.”

Sergeant Johnson smiled. “Right, Top. I knew you’d come up with something.”

Pappy Stagg groaned and picked up the headset to the radio he’d just adjusted. “One of these days,” he thought, “these young staff sergeants are gonna have to learn how to get things done in this man’s army. They ain’t always gonna have old Stagg around to pull their nuts out of the fire.”

From the road the perimeter of the Louc Ma Special Forces Camp looked downright deadly—and it was, in fact, every bit as deadly as it looked. Right next to the shoulder of the road there was a barbed-wire fence as high as a tall man’s chest, and on every post was a rectangular wooden sign saying
DANGER MINES
in English, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Chinese. Beyond the fence was a barren strip of ground that obviously concealed at least a few of these mines, and twenty meters from the road was the first of many lines of concertina wire on which were huge empty cans and trip flares. Between each line of concertina wire, the ground bristled with jagged steel stakes and sharpened bamboo punji sticks. Some of these were angled in toward the camp and some pointed straight up at the gray, overcast sky. But most of them were angled out so that anyone lucky enough to make it through the minefield, but clumsy enough to set off a trip flare or rattle a can, would have a choice of staying on his feet to be shot or throwing himself down to die slowly, impaled on the stakes.

Beyond the concertina wire was another barren strip of land—another minefield—and then an ankle-high grid of charged wire that crackled ominously in the moist air.

A few meters beyond this grid were at least a hundred Claymore mines. Some of them were set up at ground level, standing free. Some were backed against sandbags or mounds of hard-packed dirt, and yet others were mounted, gut high, on wooden posts. Behind the Claymores was another row of concertina and trip flares, then a thick rampart of solid earth reinforced with concrete. Beyond this was a stockade wall of logs and sandbags, topped with barbed wire and dotted with concrete firing positions.

At every corner of the perimeter there was a watchtower equipped with high-intensity floodlights, machine guns, and night-vision scopes. These watchtowers were manned twenty-four hours a day by Nung Chinese guards, each of whom dearly hoped to win a month’s bonus pay for being the first to spot and kill any unauthorized intruder.

Pappy Stagg had Wolverine stop the jeep before turning onto the camp’s access drive. “Now
that,”
he declared, “is a real work of art. Old Nick Hogg designed it himself. Then, just as he was getting settled in as team sergeant here, he got promoted and they made him a battalion sergeant major in the 173rd Airborne.” He held the squirming Tiger down with one hand and waved expansively with the other.

“Put yourself in the other guy’s boots for a second and try to imagine breaking through a perimeter like that. Kinda makes you glad you was born an American, eh?”

Wolverine grunted noncommittally and turned onto the access drive. He drove slowly over the lump where a fougas bomb was buried and paused while one of the Nungs swung the gate open for them and stepped back to wave them on. Just inside the gate there was a thirty-caliber machine-gun position, and behind that a sign saying Remember the Alamo!

Wolverine took a left and drove past the Nung barracks and a mortar pit. There was another sign here: Remember the Maine!

They passed the dispensary and a short, dug-in firing range where an American in tiger fatigues and green beret was inspecting a platoon of Strikers before sending them out on patrol. There was another sign here, between the dispensary and firing range: Remember Termopoly!

Wolverine sighed and drove on past the ramshackle hootches where the Montagnards lived. He slowed the jeep and honked at some chickens pecking on the roadway, and although the chickens weren’t impressed with his horn, a wizened old Montagnard woman with enormous ears and a broad, toothless witch’s smile came running out of her shack to wave at the jeep as it crept by.

“Pull over there on the right,” Pappy Stagg directed, and Wolverine brought the jeep to a halt next to a very small plywood sign that begged the visitor, Forget About Louc Ma A-566.

They’d had almost the same series of signs, running like an old-time Burma Shave ad, along the access drive to the last “A” Camp Wolverine had served in. But the signs there hadn’t done any good. The damn place had almost been overrun, and Wolverine knew he’d never forget Thuan Dien, “A-517.”

Wolverine got out of the jeep and waited for Pappy Stagg to calm Tiger. Tiger was sniffing furiously, taking in all the new smells. His tail was curled up against his belly and his ears lay flat against his head. He’d never smelled so many gooks together, and it was all Pappy Stagg could manage to keep him from twisting free and racing back toward the camp gate.

“Calm down, boy. Calm down.” Pappy tied a length of nylon cord to Tiger’s collar and put him on the ground. “Calm down, boy. You’re too damn ugly for these people to eat. You’ll be all right if you calm down.”

As soon as Pappy put him down, Tiger slipped his collar and crawled under the jeep.

“Fucking contrary little mutt!” Wolverine muttered. He went down on his knees in the mud and pulled Tiger out from between the front wheels.

“You’d think he was born in Kansas or some goddamn place, Top, the way the smell of a few indigenous personnel spooks him.” Tiger twisted and squirmed and tried to push Wolverine away with his back feet. “Come on, Tiger! Stop fighting me, goddamn it! No one’s gonna let any of these Strikers eat you, for chrissake! Relax!”

Tiger was trembling so violently Wolverine had to pick him up and carry him into the team house.

The Special Forces team house had once been a tax office, and before that it had been a French schoolhouse. It still had most of its original roofing tiles, and where the tiles had cracked or crumbled, they had been replaced by sheets of perforated steel planking and mounds of gray sandbags that blended surprisingly well with the faded orange tiles. The windows had long been sealed, and there were sandbags chest high and five feet thick around the outside walls, but the words
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
were still visible, mossy, weathered, and nowhere near as inspiring as they once might have been, in stone relief above the entrance.

Pappy Stagg and Wolverine pushed open the screen door and stepped inside. Immediately Tiger began to sneeze as the odor of cigarette smoke and bug spray hit his nose. Wolverine put him down on the cool concrete floor but kept a tight grip on his leash.

Just inside the door were two rows of cots and a folding card table behind which sat a short, barrel-chested master sergeant with a flat-top haircut and a most unmilitary paunch. When he heard the screen door slam shut he looked up, grumpy as a troll, but when he recognized Pappy Stagg he leapt to his feet and almost knocked over the card table.

“I’ll be double damned and shot from a cannon! I couldn’t believe it when the radio watch said you was coming, but here you are, ugly as ever, you old buzzard! Tom Stagg! Sit down and take a load off your mind, you sorry old straphanger, you!”

Pappy Stagg and Wolverine pulled up a couple of chairs and sat down, and while Pappy’s old buddy rummaged around in a footlocker for something to drink, Wolverine tied Tiger’s leash to the leg of his chair.

“Who’s your sidekick there?” The team sergeant put a fifth of Jim Beam and three canteen cups down on the card table. “Not the staff sergeant—I’ve seen him around somewhere. I mean your other sidekick, the four-legged troop in the dirty tiger fatigues. He one of your Airborne hippies from that Lurp platoon?”

Pappy Stagg nodded. “Sure is.” He bent down to scratch Tiger’s ear. “This here is our number-one relief pointman, Tiger the Lurp Dog. Tiger, this overweight ape here is Cubby Cardiff.”

Somewhat relieved to be surrounded by the familiar American scents of the team house, Tiger was no longer trembling. The tip of his tail twitched slightly at mention of his name, and he snuggled up close to Wolverine’s boot. He peered up suspiciously at the team sergeant, then sneezed indignantly and looked away.

The team sergeant passed around the canteen cups and the fifth of Jim Beam.

“Go on, pour yourself a man-sized drink. It’s the captain’s bottle, but he’s out on patrol, so we may as well kill it for him.”

Pappy Stagg shook his head fondly and poured himself a stiff shot, then passed the bottle on to Wolverine. Cubby Cardiff always had been a larcenous ape, and it was good to know he was still up to his old ways, being generous with someone else’s whiskey and bragging about it to show there was no harm meant.