Defense of Hill 781 Read Free Page A

an icy vise, his breath escaped him, and for a moment he thought his knees would buckle. Could it be the worst had happened? What had he done to deserve it? Hadn’t he always made the morning run with his troops? Never once did he tamper with a readiness report. And the annual general inspections—he had always pulled those off pretty well without undue harassment of the soldiers; well, at least without
extreme
undue harassment of the soldiers. And all the social events. Sure, he never liked them, but he had gone, behaved himself reasonably well, complimented his hostess on something or other in every case, and always tried really hard to make that one brilliant statement that would indelibly imprint itself on the minds of his superiors for later recall.
    “Just what is it you mean by ‘down here,’ if I may ask?”
    “Yes, sir, you certainly may. This is kind of a touchy subject for an enlisted man to be telling an officer, but the fact is, Colonel, you didn’t quite make it into heaven.”
    As Always blanched at the words, the command sergeant major picked up his mood and quickly went on. “Now don’t go jumping to any hasty conclusions. It’s not as bad as you’re thinking. If you didn’t make it to heaven, you didn’t quite end up in hell either.” A sense of déjà vu hit the colonel as he remembered his last efficiency report. “The truth of the matteris that you’ve made it into Purgatory, which is what the National Training Center is used for. You see, sir, you didn’t quite have an unblemished record in the army, so the System has arranged this little stopover for you until you can make it up. Just how long that takes is up to you.”
    Although the news was disconcerting, Always felt it was futile to resist it, afraid he might be left behind in the rush should he fight the logic of the words. The sergeant major was not being harsh, just straightforward. In that, Always found solace. There was something comforting about the noncommissioned officer, so respectful, so knowing, seemingly so in charge. It occurred to him that that was the way it had always been for him with sergeants major. It was a marvel how they could show deference to an officer, yet at the same time be so much on top of things.
    Swallowing his pride, Always asked the burning question. “What did I do to deserve this? I mean Purgatory and all.”
    “Well, sir, I figured that would be one of the first things you might want to know, so I checked with the Chief before I came down here, and although many of these things are beyond me, I did get a feel for your particular situation. Again sir, meaning no disrespect, it had to do with believing your own propaganda, so to speak.”
    “Excuse me, Sergeant Major, did you say
propaganda?”
Always was clearly irritated at the pejorative term.
    “Yes, sir, I did, but of course that’s just my own word for it, and I can see it might not have been the best one. Maybe I can explain it like this. You know that army recruiting theme we adopted in the 1980s—‘Be all that you can be!’—well, you started really believing that you had a corner on that market. Not that being infantry, and airborne, and a ranger weren’t good things. In fact, that helped your ledger a great deal. But after a while you started thumping on that stuff a little too much, and, well, you kind of put a whole bunch of other people downwhile you were doing it, and when that happened, well, you just didn’t let them think that they were being all they could be, and if they were, it just wasn’t anything to write home about.”
    For all his faults, Lieutenant Colonel Always was an honest man, and even as the sergeant spoke he reflected on all of his disparaging comments about soft staff officers, “legs” (nonparatrooper qualified soldiers), support branch personnel (“remfs,” “wimps,” “pukes,” et cetera). It was true. How much he had coveted his senior parachutist wings! How heroic it had been to posture