Honor and Duty (64 page)

I had thirty days’ leave. Before DI Academy, I had flown to Benning. Near the towers and the cinder-block buildings of TIS, The Infantry School, I met the deputy commandant of the Airborne School. Jump School trainees ran their miles with the Black Hats, chanting jodies full of hopeful pride and tired air.

“You just flunked out of the Point? You got Surgeon General waivers on a bad body, you have no orders to be here, and you want to be Airborne? Forget it, Sergeant!”

I hung around, the cat after the canary, until he relented. He would grant my wish and let the Black Hat cadre kill me.

The first jump was the worst. As stick leader, I stood in the windblown open door of a C-130 to confront my raging acrophobia. The aircraft shook as seven cabin lights turned from red to green, the jump master shouted, “GO!” and, against all my refined judgment and my inflated fears, I leaped from the Hercules into the harsh, gyrating prop wash. I was blown horizontally, jerked by the canopy, floated, fell like a rock, and landed like a sack of wet crap, shaken, rattled, and rolled, but breathing in great bellowing hoots. After six jumps, the Black Hats congratulated us, punching shiny Airborne wings through our fatigue blouses into the skin of our chests. After the fear of falling, it didn’t hurt.

“Blood wings,” said Sergeant Malo Gomez. “Wear ’em proud.”

Jump School was three tough weeks. Ranger School is nine very hard weeks. I debussed with my duffel bag outside Benning at the old barracks of Harmony Church, HQ, Ranger School, my heart slugging as if I were about to jump again.

The deputy commandant told me to go fly a kite. “Heard what you did in Jump School. You and your lousy vision don’t belong here. Should be in
Finance.
You lose your glasses in the glade, you’ll drown your patrol. You’re a blind man lookin’ for a place to crash. You’re a year of paperwork, waiting for a date. Ever hear of orders? Unass my AO, Sergeant. Dismissed.”

I returned to New York for unfinished business, arriving, with impeccable timing, in an August heat wave. The street vendors cursed, stockbrokers elbowed, the taxis played tag with death and fares while the concrete perspired and the heat arrived in wet, angry droves. I entered the cool Waldorf and sat on the green sofa where I had met Cathy Pearl Yee. I was reading C. S. Forester’s
The Happy Return.

Someone lighter than a cadet sat down. She wore a short sheath dress that was the same color as her name and no doubt the equivalent of half a year of sergeant’s pay. The long hair wrapped above her head, and the matching heels made her seem even taller. I stood and took both of her hands, her fingers warm and alive.

“What do I do with them?” I asked, and she laughed. I happily
studied her large, bright, knowing eyes, and elegant eyebrow raised for me, her strong nose, her perfect mouth, her strong, able jaw. I brought her right hand up and kissed it. Her skin was cool and smooth. The tip of her tongue came out and ran the perimeter of her fine, even teeth. She withdrew her hand and sat, patting the sofa.

“I love you in civilian clothing,” she said in her clear voice. “It makes you look free and independent.” She sighed. “I missed you. Ding Kai, where did you go?”

“Fort Benning,” I said. As I told her, her eyes traveled over my face, as if she were trying to memorize me. “I’ve never seen your hair so short. What are your plans?”

“I’m going to Ord, as ordered.”

“What about us?” she asked.

“Can’t beat your father,” I said.

“Why not?”

I looked down. “Pearl. I—flunked out.”

“So? He knows. He was surprised, but he prefers men without outside allegiances. Kai, it’s not a big deal. It means nothing,” she said, angling her head. It was a lovely head.

“It means everything,” I said.

“It doesn’t have to. I know more about you than you think. I know about your eyesight and your bad back. Arch told me. You don’t even have to be in the Army—that, really, you
shouldn’t
be in the Army. Remember Pearl’s First Rule: Follow only orders you must. Get out of the Army, Ding Kai. Do you know how lucky you are? You’re alive and you’re not going to Vietnam, where you would kill others and see others die and maybe get killed yourself.” She squirmed on the sofa.

“Stay here, with me. Enroll in Columbia or audit classes. Find a career. Find two of them. Money’s no problem.” She raised the eyebrow again, smiling. “We’d have each other, and all the Chinese restaurants in New York and the Lims’ cooking. You’ve worked very hard, Ding Kai. This is your deserved rest.”

I looked at her, aching. “Not good enough,” I said.

“Okay, what would make it good enough?” she asked.

“
I’m
not good enough.” I was rubbing my ring finger. She had done that on this sofa. Janie had rubbed her ring. I stopped.

“You mean you’re not good enough for me?” she asked. I nodded. “Screwed up so bad.” I shook my head. “I don’t deserve. I have bad
yeh.
” I had to redeem myself. I had to
serve my exile. I had to do something worthy. I had no idea what that would be. It had been so clear and bright as I had walked up the river road with my bag three years, and a lifetime, ago.

“I don’t believe in Buddhist karma,” she said.

“I do,” I said. There was a logic to my life.

“Kai, is there someone else?”

“You mean, like, another girl?”

She nodded, frowning, her lips parted.

“No,” I said. “No girl. Just my worthless life.”

She sighed. “I have a room here,” she said softly. “How long are you staying?”

“I’m manifested on a 2300-hours flight from McGuire.”

Silence.

“Can you change the flight?” she asked.

I had four days to kill. For a moment I considered lying by saying no. I wasn’t a member of the Corps. I wasn’t subject to the Code. I had daydreamed about being with Pearl in the Waldorf, before I had been separated from the Academy. I knew there was nothing wrong with her, or with the Code, or with the Waldorf. Only me.

“Yes, but I don’t want to.”

She closed her eyes. “Are you breaking up with me?” she asked, her voice different.

“I’ll always care for you,” I said.

She crossed her long legs, and then her arms, leaning forward to watch her suspended high-heeled foot jiggling to a rhythm far faster than the pace of my heart. The pain had only begun, and already I was growing numb. She uncrossed her arms, reached into her bag, and gave me a small black velvet box. “This is yours,” she said. Her eyes were wet.

Inside was a very close replica of my Academy class ring. My mother’s initials were on the inside of the white gold and onyx ring bright with the American eagle and the numerals “68.” I looked at it for a long time. I wanted it badly, but I couldn’t wear it. A drill sergeant with an Academy ring. There was no way to explain it. I looked at her.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “But it’s not mine.”

“Undeserving, huh,” she said in a thick voice.

I nodded and gave it back to her.

“Hold me, Ding Kai,” she said, and I did.

“Goodbye, Pearl,” I said.

I wore the three yellow chevrons of a buck sergeant, the crossed rifles of an eleven-bravo infantryman, the silver wings of a paratrooper. I had no Academy ring or bright yellow Ranger tab. I downed a pack of Cēpacol sore-throat tablets a day to lubricate my voice while yelling, encouraging, and singing West Point jodies (“Left my baby in New Orleans / Twenty-four babies and a can of beans / Sound off”) to my troops. Some of them were college graduates with more education than I, but most came from ghettos, barrios, and the projects, and were not accustomed to reading map contours, magnetic declinations, rifle battle sights, defense perimeters, or Army English.

At night after a long day of running in the dunes, I asked them about themselves, to tell their stories. At first, there was uneasy silence. I asked questions. Where’s home? How many brothers and sisters? Ages, names? Where’d your family come from? What would you be doing now if you weren’t in the green? I wanted the troops to become people to each other. I missed Spanner, McFee, Parthes, Zerl, Caleb, Irkson, Quint, and Schmidt.

The demands of an eccentric Chinese DI led white cryptobigots to speak in the company of blacks, angry black separatists to speak in front of sullen whites, and Hispanics and Jews to speak in front of everyone. I paired whites who died on the obstacle course with blacks who needed help with KP, yellow men who cleaned weapons poorly with brown men who made messy bunks, and rotated them, becoming a Matisse of people, creating mosaics of color, blends of cooperation and unity. Everyone was in
my
Army, and everyone was the color of olive drab.

Nights were filled with the same dream of reinstatement at the Academy. At times the dream was so vivid that when I awoke I could not accept the reality of my barracks room, blinking again and again in an effort to change the view. In the first moments I had thought it was Camp Buckner, knowing that Deke, Bob, Arch, Sonny, Mike, and Billy Bader were just outside the door. I missed Mike’s rapscallion smile and personality insights, Sonny’s New Jersey patter and generosity, Bob’s ability to throw people out of wrestling clusters, Arch’s wit, Deke’s steady presence, the roar of the crowd. I even missed Moon’s maniacal obsession with Buck Owens and the Buckaroos, whose tragic songs never sounded sad.

In the squad bays snored my platoon with the snorts and
unsyncopated rhythms of boys of all colors sleeping under a commonly unfamiliar roof. I opened the barracks door. Company A-3 was not in the street. I wasn’t at West Point. I never would be.

The fire guard stiffened. “Yes, Drill Sergeant?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said, my mouth aching with the word.

Ord was the Sahara, far from my past and removed from the presence and minds of those I had injured or disappointed. The winds blew the sand, the cycles of trainees arrived and left, time slowed, I ran and mongered iron, and I was recovering a confidence that had been absent for what seemed a very long time. My conscious battle with mathematics as a test of my humanity and my worth had ended. I had dropped the rock of
shiao
, filial piety, and watched it roll down the hill, and I could face west, my back to the Hudson and Boethius’s principles, and look at the sea when I was lonely.

“Mr. Ting,” said the admissions clerk, “we have a problem.” UC was not inclined to admit me after my academic failure in a major East Coast college. I had an acceptable GPA, but they were confused by my academic disqualification resulting from failing one class and by the number of units earned. After UC had cast out a good number of my Academy courses because no equivalents existed in its catalog—or anywhere else—they gave me 177 quarter-units. I needed only three more to graduate.

“You failed a course,” she said, “obviously, because you took too many classes. You could’ve graduated in junior year. But we can’t take you unless someone from engineering recommends you. Your reference sources are humanities and letters. You’re not going to study engineering here, but that was your major at that … other place.” It was 1967. No one in California liked West Point.

I wrote to the Bear, asking for a letter of recommendation. The letter from Major H. Norman Schwarzhedd arrived that week. As his father had helped my father, the son had helped me.

With the new year of 1968, I purchased a slightly dented, mildly blue ’55 Chevy for three hundred dollars from a sergeant first class bound for Nam. I was filled with raucous affection for this four-wheeled machine with a radio. I drove up and down the coast with the windows down, visiting San Simeon, William Randolph Hearst’s castle, and became a permanent diner at China Moon Cafe in Seaside. I felt an abiding loneliness, which even black-bean chicken
chowfun
and the comfort of the Chevy could not alleviate. I looked at elegant women in Carmel, missing the days when full-dress cadet gray could make me look like I belonged in the upper tier of society. I had possessed a chance to know young women and to be a West Pointer, and realized that I had seen the best days of my life. I thought of Momma LaRue. I imagined hugging her.