The Enemy

“Exactly,” he said. “Like in the Navy, when the big battleships were superseded by aircraft carriers. The end of one era, the beginning of the next. The Abrams tanks are like battleships. They’re magnificent, but they’re out-of- date. About the only way we can use them is down custom-built roads in directions we’ve already planned to go.”

“They’re mobile,” Summer said. “Like any tank.”

“Not very mobile,” Simon said. “Where is the next fight going to be?”

I shrugged. I wished Joe was there. He was good at all the geopolitical stuff.

“The Middle East?” I said. “Iran or Iraq, maybe. They’ve both gotten their breath back, they’ll be looking for the next thing to do.”

“Or the Balkans,” Swan said. “When the Soviets finally collapse, there’s a forty-five-year-old pressure cooker waiting for the lid to come off.”

“OK,” Simon said. “Look at the Balkans, for instance. Yugoslavia, maybe. That’ll be the first place anything happens, for sure. Right now they’re just waiting for the starting gun. What do we do?”

“Send in the Airborne,” Swan said.

“OK,” Simon said again. “We send in the 82nd and the 101st. Lightly armed, we might get three battalions there inside a week. But what do we do after we get there? We’re speed bumps, that’s all, nothing more. We have to wait for the heavy units. And that’s the first problem. An Abrams tank weighs seventy tons. Can’t airlift it. Got to put it on a train, and then put it on a ship. And that’s the good news. Because you don’t just ship the tank. For every ton of tank, you have to ship four tons of fuel and other equipment. These suckers get a half-mile to the gallon. And you need spare engines, ammunition, huge maintenance crews. The logistics tail is a mile long. Like moving an iron mountain. To ship enough tank brigades to make a worthwhile difference, you’re looking at a six- month buildup, minimum, and that’s working right around the clock.”

“During which time the Airborne troops are deep in the shit,” I said.

“Tell me about it,” Simon said. “And those are my boys, and I worry about them. Lightly armed paratroops against any kind of foreign armor, we’d get slaughtered. It would be a very, very anxious six months. And it gets worse. Because what happens when the heavy brigades eventually get there? What happens is, they roll off the ships and they get bogged down two blocks later. Roads aren’t wide enough, bridges aren’t strong enough, they never make it out of the port area. They sit there stuck in the mud and watch the infantry getting killed far away in the distance.”

Nobody spoke.

“Or take the Middle East,” Simon said. “We all know Iraq wants Kuwait back. Suppose they go there? Long term, it’s an easy win for us, because the open desert is pretty much the same for tanks as the steppes in Europe, except it’s a little hotter and dustier. But the war plans we’ve got will work out just fine. But do we even get that far? We’ve got the infantry sitting there like tiny little speed bumps for six whole months. Who says the Iraqis won’t roll right over them in the first two weeks?”

“Air power,” Summer said. “Attack helicopters.”

“I wish,” Simon said. “Planes and whirlybirds are sexy as hell, but they don’t win anything on their own. Never have, never will. Boots on the ground is what wins things.”

I smiled. Part of that was a combat infantryman’s standard-issue pride. But part of it was true too.

“So what’s going to happen?” I asked.

“Same thing as happened with the Navy in 1941,” Simon said. “Overnight, battleships were history and carriers were the new thing. So for us, now, we need to integrate. We need to understand that our light units are too vulnerable and our heavy units are too slow. We need to ditch the whole light-heavy split. We need integrated rapid-response brigades with armored vehicles lighter than twenty tons and small enough to fit in the belly of a C- 130. We need to get places faster and fight smarter. No more planning for set-piece battles between herds of dinosaurs.”

Then he smiled.

“Basically we’ll have to put the infantry in charge,” he said.

“You ever talk to people like Marshall about this kind of stuff?”

“Their planners? No way.”

“What do they think about the future?”

“I have no idea. And I don’t care. The future belongs to the infantry.”

Dessert was apple pie, and then we had coffee. It was the usual excellent brew. We slid back from the future into present-day small talk. The stewards moved around, silently. Just another evening, in an Officers’ Club four thousand miles from the last one.

“Marshall will be back at dawn,” Swan told me. “Look for a scout car at the rear of the first incoming column.”

I nodded. Figured dawn in January in Frankfurt would be about 0700 hours. I set my mental alarm for six. Lieutenant Colonel Simon said good night and wandered off. Summer pushed her chair back and sprawled in it, as much as a tiny person can sprawl. Swan sat forward with his elbows on the table.

“You think they get much dope on this post?” I asked him.

“You want some?” he said.

“Brown heroin,” I said. “Not for my personal use.”

Swan nodded. “Guys here say there are Turkish guest workers in Germany who could get you some. One of the speed dealers could supply it, I’m sure.”

“You ever met a guy called Willard?” I asked him.

“The new boss?” he said. “I got the memo. Never met him. But some of the guys here know him. He was an intelligence wonk, something to do with Armor.”

“He wrote algorithms,” I said.

“For what?”

“Soviet T-80 fuel consumption, I think. Told us what kind of training they were doing.”

“And now he’s running the 110th?”

I nodded.

“I know,” I said. “Bizarre.”

“How did he do that?”

“Obviously someone liked him.”

“We should find out who. Start sending hate mail.”

I nodded again. Nearly a million men in the army, hundreds of billions of dollars, and it all came down to who liked who. Hey, what can you do?

“I’m going to bed,” I said.

My VOQ room was so generic I lost track of where I was within a minute of closing my door. I hung my uniform in the closet and washed up and crawled between the sheets. They smelled of the same detergent the army uses everywhere. I thought of my mother in Paris and Joe in D.C. My mother was already in bed, probably. Joe would still be working, at whatever it was he did. I said six A.M. to myself and closed my eyes.

Dawn broke at 0650, by which time I was standing next to Summer at XII Corps’ east road gate. We had mugs of coffee in our hands. The ground was frozen and there was mist in the air. The sky was gray and the landscape was a shade of pastel green. It was low and undulating and unexciting, like a lot of Europe. There were stands of small neat trees here and there. Dormant winter earth, giving off cold organic smells. It was very quiet.

The road ran through the gate and then turned and headed east and a little north, into the fog, toward Russia. It was wide and straight, made from reinforced concrete. The curbstones were nicked here and there by tank tracks. Big wedge-shaped chunks had been knocked out of them. A tank is a difficult thing to steer.

We waited. Still quiet.

Then we heard them.

What is the twentieth century’s signature sound? You could have a debate about it. Some might say the slow