One to Count Cadence Read Online Free Page B

recovered from my injuries, probably self-inflicted, and I could come visit his friends and he in their stockade. I snarled again, snapped like a hungry hound. He leaned solicitously over me, smiled clean teeth, and pleasantly intoned, “Tough guy.” His baton captured my attention as he rapped me gently in the crotch, almost tenderly. Then a bit harder, and the ripe, spreading pain and nausea began to flow, in, then out, leaving a great hollowness in my guts. “One more time,” he murmured.
    Doctor Gallard came later, came with his portable X-ray and his concern.
    “How’s the leg?” he asked as the technicians laid sheets of lead covering on my chest. He asked only about the leg. “I came as soon as I heard… about the incident. You didn’t hurt that leg, did you? Surely hate to go back in there.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Why is your nose bleeding?”
    “Lt. Hewitt popped me one this morning when I made what she called advances toward her.”
    “It shouldn’t still be bleeding.”
    “I sneezed.”
    Gallard glanced at the AP, then back at me as if to say I probably deserved worse than I had received. “Go ask the nurse for some ice and a cloth, corporal.”
    “I’m supposed to guard him, sir,” he said, nodding at me. Like all warders, caged men frightened him more than free ones.
    “I think I can prevent him from biting me, corporal. Go on.”
    “I don’t know, sir. He’s a mean one, he is.” He chuckled.
    “Don’t mock your betters,” I said to him, “lest they notice you.”
    “You guys never learn, do you?” He stepped toward the bed.
    “The ice, corporal.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Gallard did not speak while the AP was gone, and made him wait outside when he came back. “You feel it’s your right to rape and pillage?” he asked, cradling the back of my neck with the ice.
    “Achilles called rear-guard soldiers wine sacks with dogs’ eyes and deers’ hearts.”
    “So what? You haven’t seen enough war to even know what it’s about, and yet here you are raising more hell than a regiment of Marines.”
    “I knew, now I know. Besides, small things lead to bigger ones without anyone’s help. Acorns and oaks and all that crap. I wanted a drink. This came of only that. Takes two to make war. Things grow in this crazy world.”
    “Of course,” he said, digging his hands into his hair as if searching for something very small and incredibly important. “So?”
    “Not an excuse. Just what happened, that’s all. It was my fault, but I’m not going to say I’m sorry, or say I won’t do it again. I want to be left alone, and I will manage to be left alone.”
    “Victim of an undeclared war, huh? Fighter for right and humanity? Killer of small, hungry men.”
    “I was raised for a warrior. What else would you have me do?”
    “That’s your problem, not mine.”
    But you want it to be, I thought, And it will.
    He finished with his business and went away.
    I sang softly into the afternoon, sang to the green grass and sky, to the bright, burning haze of the sun, “Joe Morning, Joe Morning, where have we come?”

1
Base
    “This is a strange outfit, Sgt. Krummel,” 1/Sgt. Tetrick said on that morning I first arrived in the Philippines in the late summer of 1962. “Unusual. Different. We’re a small outfit, less than seventy men. It really ought to be good duty, but somehow it ain’t. The work’s too easy, and these kids get bored, and when they’re not bored, they’re pissed off. Their bowels jam up or run like crazy because of the work schedule, and their sleep is always screwed up.” Tetrick stood and shuffled his way over to the trick schedules. His feet were still tender from a case of jungle-rot he caught in Burma during the war. He was careful never to put a foot down any harder than necessary. He explained that the 721st Communications Security Detachment had only an Operations Section and a small Headquarters Section of cooks and clerks since most of the administration