MATT HELM: The War Years (2 page)

Certainly I fit the basic profile.  I had been a hunter before the war.  Mac liked to get men who'd done some hunting; it was the first thing he looked for in a prospective candidate.  It wasn't that you couldn't train city boys to be just as efficient, as far as the mechanics of the job were concerned, he explained to me once, but they tended to lack the balance of men who were accustomed to going out once a year to shoot something specific, under definite legal restrictions.  A city kid, turned loose with a gun, either took death too seriously and made a great moral issue of the whole business - and generally finished by cracking up under a load of self-imposed guilt - or, finding himself free of restraint for the first time in his life, turned into a crazed butcher.  What criterion Mac used for the women - yes, we had some - I don't know.

Another reason Mac may have been interested in me was a different skill, one less common than marksmanship or hunting.  As a kid I'd been interested in all kinds of weapons, but particularly in the edged ones.  My parents were Scandinavian and I was a red-hot Viking aficionado as a kid.  I read every gory old Norse saga I could get my hands on.  I was crazy about the old battle-axe.  I particularly liked H. Rider Haggard, who specialized in African adventure tales.  His best-known book is probably
King Solomon's Mines
, but I read them all; and the one I remember best was called
Allan Quartermain
.  Allan was the wise white hunter, and his native sidekick was the great Zulu warrior Umslopogaas, one of my favorite fictional characters at that youthful time.  Umslopogaas carried an outsized battle-axe and died nobly, shattered axe in hand, holding a palace stairway against overwhelming odds.  The inhabitants of Umslopogaas's home village were known as the People of the Axe.  I guess it's the Viking in me.  Guns are fine, but I'm an old sword-and-dagger man at heart.  All through college, I'd been on the fencing team, and a few of us played around after classes with throwing knives.  During Officers' training, I was one of the best with the bayonet.  I enjoyed shooting, and my marksmanship scores were high in the expert range, but I looked forward with more anticipation to bayonet classes.

However, there are still an awful lot of people to choose from who are expert with both guns and knives of one sort or the other.  Personally, I think Mac had a spy in the Army's Officer Training School, one of the instructors, who recommended me.

Like many young men of my age, I joined the Army a few months after Pearl Harbor.  For me, it was a matter of conscience.  Although born here, I was first generation.  My parents had immigrated from Sweden, changing their name in the process.  It was originally Stjernhjelm, but my father shortened it to Helm, chopping it down to something Yankees could pronounce when he got to America.  From the time I was born - well, actually I'm not sure of that, but at least from the time I could understand speech - my parents spoke English around the house.  Maybe they spoke Swedish in the privacy of their bedroom, but all I heard was English until I was old enough that it was my primary language, then they taught me some Swedish.  They had very firm ideas of loyalty.  We were now Americans, this was our country and we would speak and act as everybody else did.  Of course they never entirely got rid of the accent, but they made damned sure it didn't rub off on me.  I think my dad was a bigger patriot than most of those born in America, an attitude he shared with a large percentage of immigrants, and it must have been passed on to me.  Call it loyalty, call it patriotism, but my country was at war and my duty was clear.

Thanks to a degree in journalism, acquired shortly before my parents died, I was considered officer material and sent to OTS.  Although I was a journalist of sorts, having got a job with a camera on a newspaper in Santa Fe, New Mexico after graduation, and then working for some other New Mexico newspapers, the last being in Albuquerque, I requested infantry training rather than accepting a position in Public Relations.  My drill instructor, a grizzled veteran named March - as in the month - approved and seemed to take a liking to me.

One day, I got into a fight.  Well, it wasn't much of a fight as fights go.  I'd never been sold on fists as a way to settle anything.  First of all, you can't do much damage that way - at least I can't - and second, you often leave someone very mad at you, someone you haven't damaged enough to stop from getting revenge.  There's a third reason; when you hit someone in the mouth with your fist, damn it, it hurts!

Although the instructors tried to keep it to a minimum, there were always fights getting started.  After all, we were at war.  We were going to go kill us some Nazis and the adrenaline was flowing.  Put that together with a bunch of young, eager new recruits and something has to explode occasionally.  Mine started the way they usually do.  His name, as I remember, was Cameron.  He was a hell of a big man, not quite my height - very few are - but much wider and heavier with the craggy face of the professional muscleman.  His nose had been broken many years ago.  It could have happened in college football, but somehow I didn't think so.  You know the type.  There's something tight about the mouth and eyes, something contemptuous and condescending, and he didn't like me a bit.  I don't know if it was jealousy - I had beaten him badly in both bayonet and judo classes - or if he just disapproved of my loner attitude.  I don't make friends easily and have never been much for team sports.  I'd refused his offer to join the baseball team they'd organized when off-duty.

Whatever it was, he'd decided to take me down a peg right after rifle practice.  He said something nasty by way of preamble.  I ignored him and turned away and he made the mistake of grabbing my arm and spinning me around.  As I turned, I saw his fist cocked to hit me.  I was amazed.  After all, I was still holding my rifle; grabbing and threatening someone holding a firearm doesn't come under the heading of the brightest - or safest - idea in the world.  Of course, he was one of the muscle boys, the type who always thinks first of using his hands.  It never occurs to them that someone else might think otherwise.  I briefly considered shooting him, but the rifle was a little out of position and he was too close.  I won't pretend that the idea that the Army would take a dim view of one recruit shooting another didn't play a part in my decision, but it wasn't an overriding concern.  Besides, I didn't need to shoot him to win.  I simply brought up the rifle and broke his jaw with the butt.

With an innocent look on my face, I bent over him and said loudly, "Hey man, I'm sorry.  Are you all right?"  It was wasted on him; he was out cold.  I got a couple of fellow recruits to help me carry him to the infirmary.  When I came out, my instructor, March, pulled me off to the canteen for a beer.

Once we were seated with our beers - I don't really like the stuff, but hard liquor was prohibited during training - March asked me, "Why didn't you shoot?"

I looked at him contemplatively for a moment before discarding the idea of playing innocent.  He knew better.  I simply replied, "It wasn't necessary."

"You thought about it, though.  I could tell.  I saw the look in your eyes and thought he was dead.  You stopped the impulse in time, which showed good sense, but why hit him with the butt?  Why not just fight it out like the others do?"

"I don't fight for fun and he's too big to take with my bare hands.  That judo stuff we've been practicing is fine when both people observe the rules, but I don't think he'd play fair.  He'd just beat the hell out of me."  I let out a pent-up breath.  The anger was beginning to subside, the anger I always feel when I come up against the attitude that Cameron represented.  I don't know why, but I felt I had to explain myself to this old warrior.

"Look, I'm tired of people who think they are so tough that they can do whatever they want and the rest of us should just lay down and take it.  I won't take it and I refuse to play by the rules.  All anybody's ever had to do to stay perfectly safe and healthy in my neighborhood is to leave me alone.  If someone chooses not to and opens the gate, I figure I am at liberty to walk as far in as I choose."

"How old are you, Helm - 22, maybe 23?"  I nodded.  "How does someone that young develop that attitude?"  He wasn't criticizing, I saw.  He was actually curious, in an approving sort of way.  Well, he'd been around the block and survived.  Maybe he'd understand.

"I got that way in college, the first college I went to, a real gung-ho place.  It had a kind of ornamental pool, called the Lily Pond, although it was mostly muck and weeds.  The upper classmen, if they disapproved of the behavior of a lower classman, had the cute habit of descending on him in force, dragging him out to this glorified mud puddle, and heaving him in.  It was kind of an old school tradition.

"Well, one day the grapevine let me know I was next on the dunking list.  I'd been expecting it.  I'd been planning on upholding the school honor in such individual sports as fencing and rifle-shooting, but the seniors had decided I ought to go out for basketball because of my height.  I'd told them frankly that if there was anything that turned my stomach, it was team sports of any kind, particularly the ones that became college religions.  That hadn't gone over real big, if you know what I mean.  Well, I just didn't feel like an involuntary bath that evening, so I laid out a hunting knife and wedged a chair under the doorknob of my room.  It was a fairly feeble old chair and the back was cracked, but nobody knew that but me.  I just wanted some evidence that they'd actually broken in.  There weren't any locks in that dormitory that worked.  It was a real togetherness institution.  You weren't supposed to want privacy, ever.  That was considered antisocial and un-American.

"Well, they came.  There was the usual loudmouthed, beery mob.  They yelled at me to open the door.  I called back that I hadn't invited them, and if they wanted in, they knew what to do.  They did it.  The first one inside after they'd smashed the door open was the big school-spirit expert who'd given me the pep talk about how I didn't want to let the college and the basketball team down.  He was very brave.  He told me not to be silly, I wasn't really going to use that knife, just put it down.   I told him if he put a hand on me, I'd cut it off.  So he did; and I did.  Well, not all the way off.  I understand they sewed it back together and he got some use out of it eventually.  Nevertheless, the immediate result was a lot of groans and gore, very spectacular.  I told the rest it was a sample, and I had plenty more if anybody wanted it.  Nobody did."

"Wasn't that just a tad drastic?" March asked.

"I know, they were boys who were obviously just tight and having a little fun.  And they could have gone and had their tight little fun anywhere they damned well pleased, except in my room at my expense.  I made that quite clear to them before the action started.  They chose to ignore the warning.  That made it open hunting season by my way of reckoning.  I figured - then and now - that anybody who invaded my domicile by force is mine if I can take him. Anybody who lays hands on me without my permission is fair and legal game.  Anybody who opens the door to violence has simply got no legitimate beef if a little more violence walks in than he bargained for.  As far as I'm concerned, people can either stick to polite, civilized conduct, or I'll give them jungle all the way."

"What happened after that - legally, I mean?"

"Hell, the school authorities couldn't do anything to
me
.  I was the aggrieved party, wasn't I, the victim of unprovoked aggression?  I mean, there I was in my room, studying hard and minding my own business like a good little freshman.  A bunch of hoodlums breaks in and, outnumbered though I am, I defended myself bravely.  Wouldn't you think I'd be in line for a hero medal, or something?  They said I didn't have to use a
knife
, and I said of course I had to use a knife.  Or a gun.  What was I supposed to do, beat up a dozen older boys, including some outsized football types, with my bare fists?  Superman, I'm not.  To stop them, without actually killing anybody, I had to do something swift and bloody and dramatic to show I meant business right at the start.  I did just about the least drastic thing that could get my point across. They threw me out of that school, of course.  Having a weapon in my room was the official excuse.  The broken chair, proving they'd forced their way in, saved me from being sued or arrested for assault, but nobody ever did anything about any of the others besides a sort of token reprimand.  And at that point, I realized I was just a little out of step with the rest of the world, a world where you're supposed to let people heave you into fishponds any time they happen to feel like it.  I decided I'd better look around, once I'd finished getting my degree elsewhere, and see if I couldn't find at least a few characters marching to my kind of music.  I still haven't found them yet.  I kind of hoped to find them here, but it's the same old thing."

I stopped to take a breath, waiting for his reaction.  I still often find the old anger coming back that always hits me when I meet that kind of guy; the kind that broke into my room that night, the kind that's always pushing people around and always gets terribly, terribly shocked and self-righteous when he runs into somebody who's willing to die, or kill, rather than put up with his overbearing nonsense.