At the final note of Taps, Top called the battalion to parade rest and she did something I’d never expected. She began to speak.
“Captain Phillip Covington and I,” she said, her voice carried over the speakers to the depths of the cavernous tent, “served together for four years, nine months, twenty-seven days. In a day when most of us can expect to live two or three hundred years, if we’re lucky, that doesn’t seem so long. An eyeblink. A heartbeat. But in the military, it’s an eternity. For some people, it’s half a career. For us, it was the better part of this war. I knew him as a Marine better than anyone I’ve encountered in a very long life, better than some of the children I’ve borne. He was as dependable as the tide, a man who would do the right thing even when no one else saw it for what it was, a man who stuck by his principles even when it would cost his career. Because he didn’t care about being a colonel, wouldn’t hear of being a major.
“Captains fight wars, Top. That was what he would tell me. He would never let them promote him off the battlefield, out of combat, not because he loved it, though he might have, but because it was what he did best. He could see the flux of the battle, see who would break and who wouldn’t, knew by instinct who to put where. It’s a rare gift, and one tied, I think, to the bedrock of his conscience, to his instinctive knowledge of what was right. He could see it in others and valued it over all the ooh-rah bullshit and bravado. If you wanted to impress Phillip Covington as a Marine or as a person, you had to be willing to stand up for the right.
“When the time came…,” she said, and her gruff, harsh voice finally broke. She didn’t sob, and if there were any tears, they were hidden beneath the brim of her cover. “When the time came to make a choice between letting himself be saved or accomplishing the mission, Captain Covington made the only choice he could, the only one that fit with his unmovable conscience. He sacrificed himself not just to accomplish the objective but so his Marines wouldn’t die trying to save him, because he valued their lives over his own.”
She paused and sucked in a deep breath.
“The greatest memorial we could give such a man is to follow his example, and to lead by it. And the greatest honor we could give him now, at the end, is simply to say that this man, Phillip Covington, was a Marine.”
We hadn’t planned it, hadn’t rehearsed it, but we said it in chorus as if we had.
“Ooh-rah!”
It was, I thought, the perfect eulogy, and she was the perfect person to give it. If Voss had lived, she would have insisted on giving it and while we all would still have honored the Skipper’s memory, this was more fitting.
“Battalion, attention!”
I marched forward, ready to take over and say a few words of my own, but before I even had the chance to salute, Greg Cronje burst through the tent flap, his face red, his eyes wide. My first thought was that he’d brought a weapon and I made ready to either run or fight depending on what he did, but he was unarmed and when he lunged for Top, it was only to grab the mic on the stand beside her.
“I respected Phil Covington!” he insisted, his slurring words amplified across the tent. I could smell alcohol on him and I wondered where he’d gotten it. Any personal stash he might have had would have been destroyed with the Iwo, so he had to have bought it, or paid to have it made for him. “Honestly, I did! I would never have done anything to hurt him! It wasn’t my fault. I had no choice but to….”
I’d heard enough. Maybe Top would have been right if the bastard had stayed away, had kept his head down and tried not to make waves, but to show up drunk for the Skipper’s memorial…. I took a step toward him, full intent on turning him into hamburger.
But Top was closer. And I’ll be damned if she wasn’t faster, too. I didn’t even see her knee rise up between Cronje’s legs, but everyone heard the wheeze of breath leaving him as he doubled over. He didn’t drop the mic then, miraculously, holding onto it as if by instinct. When the right cross smashed his nose, though, his fingers went slack and the microphone fell with a thump that came through the speakers, and the impact of the captain’s back beside the mic came through as well despite his attempt to drown it out with a choked cry of pain.
There was no sound. Everyone had been at attention, and with the position came an inertial resistance to moving or speaking that lasted a few seconds into the event. And of course, there was the shock and disbelief, not that Top was capable of violence, but more that Cronje had dishonored the memorial. But the shock evaporated into outrage and concern, as embodied in the persons of Captain Geiger and Lt. Freddy Kodjoe rushing toward the front.
Top moved not a centimeter, hands at her sides, fists clenching and unclenching, as if she were trying to decide whether Cronje deserved to be hit again.
“Did you fucking see that?” Cronje was whining, rolling to his side, blood gushing out of his smashed nose. “She struck a superior officer! I’m fucking filing charges!”
“Greg,” Geiger growled, “you have
