He slid my sleeve up, I smelled alcohol, and felt a needle prick my forearm. “This will calm you down, man.”
“Thanks.”
“You may not thank me later.”
Things got fuzzy.
The next thing I remember was the infirmary ceiling. White-painted boards strung with naked lightbulbs. A plastic IV sack full of clear liquid hung beside me and connected to my forearm with a tube. I lay in a room as white as the ceiling, rowed with a half dozen empty beds.
Double swinging doors at the ward’s end were half-paned in frosted glass. Two silhouettes moved gray beyond the glass.
“You should have washed him out weeks ago, Art!” The speaker had Captain Jacowicz’s square-jawed profile.
“He’s bright, sir. He was coming around.” Ord.
“He was an accident waiting to happen!”
“Sir, they’re all accidents waiting to happen. It’s our job to make them soldiers, not wash them out.”
“And Lorenzen? What kind of soldier will he make, now?”
The silhouettes didn’t move.
“You’re right, sir. It’s my responsibility, not the trainee’s.”
“Bullshit, Art! You’re too good a soldier to bust your career because a druggie disobeyed standing orders. With your age and record you should have been a division sergeant major driving a desk years ago.”
“I prefer field assignments, sir.”
“Well, I prefer to lay blame where it’s deserved. And that’s not on you. Even if you did fuck up. You know the procedure. He gets admin or a court. You know I’ll keep an open mind. But if he chooses administrative punishment in front of me, I’m presently inclined to take it to the maximum. That’s still a lot better deal than he’d get in a court-martial, if I’m giving odds.”
“Sir, a court would require presentation of evidence—”
“Evidence? He told the medic he was on drugs!”
More silence.
“I never expected you of all people to have trouble understanding an order, Sergeant. Explain his options to him as soon as he’s coherent.”
I watched my IV drip.
“Yes, sir,” Ord said.
Boot clicks faded away down the hall, and one silhouette remained on the frosted glass. Ord bent his head forward, removed his Smokey Bear hat, seemed to look down into it, and sighed.
I felt myself drift away again. I smiled. I had to be dreaming. I might have believed it was real, but Jacowicz said Ord had fucked up, which was impossible.
They released me from the infirmary two days later.
When I got back to barracks, it was tomb-quiet. Mattresses lay rolled up across wire bed springs. Packed duffels piled on the buffed floor waited to be carried off. Third Platoon graduated today. My boots echoed in the empty bay as I walked to Qrd’s office.
I saw him through his open doorway, seated at his desk, writing on paper with a pen.
I swallowed, then knocked.
“Come!”
“Trainee Wander reports, Drill Sergeant.”
He looked up and put down the pen. “You’re well?”
“The doctor says well enough, Drill Sergeant.”
He nodded. “Wander, was the standing order regarding drugs unclear?”
I read upside down. It was becoming a habit when I visited Ord. Qrd’s letter was addressed in cursive handwriting to Mrs. Lillian Lorenzen. It began, “Your son was a fine young man and a fine soldier.” That was as far as Ord had gotten. Three balled-paper sheets nested in his wastebasket.
Tears burned my eyes. I swallowed.
“It was clear, Drill Sergeant. I made a horrible choice. But it was my choice, nobody else’s.”
He nodded, again. “Whether I agree or not, you have two options, now. You can elect a trial by court-martial on charges or you can elect administrative punishment. The first means you will be defended by a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps in a trial before a jury. You choose whether the jury’s noncommissioned or commissioned officers. Most enlisted men choose commissioned officers. The conventional wisdom is noncoms are hard asses.”
“Surely not, Drill Sergeant.”
He nearly smiled. “The second option is administrative punishment by your commanding officer. No appeal if you don’t like what he dishes out A crapshoot. But the conventional wisdom is that admin is the way to go because you just have to persuade one guy who knows you, not a bunch of strangers.”
“That commanding officer would be Captain Jaco-wicz?” Jacowicz hadn’t sounded sympathetic outside the infirmary door.
“It’s true Captain Jacowicz goes by the book—”
My future was on the line. No time for tact. “Goes by it? The guys say he rams a fresh copy up his butt every morning to make himself stand stiffer!”
Ord looked down, covered his mouth with his hand, coughed, then said, “Be mat as it may, Captain Jacowicz is a fair man. He comes from a distinguished line of soldiers. I served under General Jacowicz in the Second Afghan War.”
Captain Jacowicz was the same guy who had lectured mat we would be shot for abusing enemy prisoners, when the human race had about as much chance of taking prisoners as I had of flying to the moon. Throw myself on Jacowicz’s tender mercies or get court-martialed. Fat chance or no chance. “What’s the worst I could get?”
“Worst? Stockade time, likely less than a year, and a dishonorable discharge.”
“I can do time. Just so I can stay in.”
He frowned. “The likely result is the other way around, Wander.”
My heart sank. Ord was right. I’d heard Jacowicz say outside the infirmary that he would kick me out.
“I want to stay in. I have to stay in.”
He covered his letter with his hand. “Son, that result may not be in the cards.”
“Walter was all I had in the world, Drill Sergeant. Now the army is all I have.” Until the words rattled out I hadn’t realized what Walter and the army had come to mean to me. But I had just told the truth. If Jacowicz wouldn’t save me, I’d take a chance. “I want a court-martial.”
Ord drummed his ringers. He looked down at the letter under his palm. He shook his head and looked me in the eye. “Son, you pick a court, you’re out. I’ve seen enough of them to know.”
My throat swelled shut, and I tried to blink back tears. One squeezed out anyway and ran hot down my cheek. Ord put a hand on my shoulder. “You’ll get through this, son. We all will.”
I looked down at Ord’s letter. Walter wouldn’t get through it. I might as well put the army behind me. Get out of Ord’s hair, out of this mess.
“If I just want out on a DD, would Captain Jacowicz let me skip the admin hearing and duck stockade time?”
“Likely. But…”
That was it, then. Quit. Take my discharge, then take my chances with Judge March and prison or civilian life. “Okay. Just tell the captain I want out on a DD.”
“Or… graduation is in two hours. You could make your own case to the captain in a hearing in one. Nothing to lose.”
I shook my head and felt the cord around my neck. “Does the Drill Sergeant want his toothbrush back?” I wouldn’t need it back in civilian life. I reached up to strip it off.
Ord cleared his throat. “I generally ask for it back after graduation. Nobody I’ve given it to’s ever… quit before. Maybe that was the real you that first day, after all. A no-guts joker.”
