Mortal Allies

“Uh, Specialist Fiori,” I finished.

She seemed to like that a lot. Her gum slipped back into the chewing position and her jaw started chomping again. She coyly asked, “There something I can do for you?”

“Well, maybe. Did you know Captain Whitehall?”

“Yes sir.”

“Did you know him well?”

“I’d guess so. I was his clerk before… you know, everything happened.”

“So, you what? You worked directly for him?”

She nodded and chewed her gum even more vigorously.

“How long?”

“Seven months. I sat right in his outer office. I was, uh, his girl Thursday. That’s what he always called me.”

“Thursday?” I said, scratching my head. “You mean Friday?”

“Uh, yeah. Whatever,” she replied with a ditzy look.

Very foolishly, I said, “See, it’s from this novel called Robinson Crusoe. Maybe you read that when you were young?”

“Nah,” she said, chewing even harder. “Reading wasn’t never my thing.”

No, it probably wasn’t.

I leaned up against her desk and got comfortable. So she leaned up against her desk and got even more comfortable – a little too much so, maybe. She ended up about six inches from me.

I said, “Did you like him?”

Her eyes started searching my face, like maybe she was wondering how to answer that. If she was looking for a clue, I didn’t give her any.

She sucked on her tongue a moment, then said, “Okay, yeah, I liked him. A lot.”

“Why’d you like him?”

“He was just a swell guy. Everybody liked him. At least, everybody respected him.”

Amazing, I thought – almost word for word how Ernie Walters had phrased it.

“Okay,” I said, “could you tell me why everybody liked, or at least respected him?”

“He was a good officer. Y’know, you work in a headquarters company like this, you see scads of officers. I mean, there’s probably two hundred on our roll. No offense or nothin’, but most of them are either jerks or wimps.”

“That bad, huh? And I always thought officers were the creme de la creme.”

“Huh?”

“You know, the pick of the litter,” I said, and she still looked perplexed. “The best of the crop,” I tried again, and her befuddled look only deepened.

Not only did she not read much, but her knowledge of French, hogs, and farming was sorely lacking.

“Yeah, whatever,” she finally mumbled, like, Why was I torturing her with these complex issues? “Anyway, Captain Whitehall was different. He was real smart, y’know.”

I couldn’t escape the thought that this woman considered anybody who could tie their own shoes stratospherically intelligent.

Then after a thoughtful pause, she said, “And fair. He was always real fair.”

“Now, you’re sure you’re not just saying that because you were his clerk?”

“No way. You wanta know the truth? Word’s been put out not to say anything nice about the captain.”

I pulled back and gave her a shocked look. “Really? No kidding? Who’d put out something like that?”

“Well, y’know, nobody ever announced it or anything. I mean, there’s nothing official. It’s what I hear, though. Y’know?”

Yes, I knew.

The Army, like most big organizations, has two channels of communications, and this clearly wasn’t one of those instances where the first sergeant could simply draw all the troops into a formation and scream, “The first one of you jerk-offs who mutters a single nice thing about Whitehall will be cleaning the shitters for the rest of your Army career!” A more subtle method was used. They simply whispered the same message into the right sergeant’s ear, and in seconds flat it was the talk of the latrine.

Anyway, I said, “But you thought he was a pretty good commander?”

“Hey, it isn’t just me saying so,” she insisted, pointing toward a tall trophy rack in the corner.

I looked over and there were some very old, badly corroded antiques neatly positioned on the two top shelves, and six gleaming, brand-spanking-new trophies near the bottom.

In peacetime, you can’t win any battles – there aren’t any – so the Army channels all that dormant martial energy into having units compete against one another for various distinctions. The competitions get pretty fierce and bloodthirsty, since they’re the only way the overambitious can outshine their peers and get noticed doing it.

I was staring at six months’ worth of trophies declaring Headquarters Company, Yongsan Garrison, to be the top unit in all of Korea.

Thomas Whitehall, it appeared, was a singularly energetic and competent officer. Of course, he’d told me he was the first time I’d met him. But you learn to discount that kind of stuff, because if there’s one thing most officers get pretty good at, it’s spit-shining their own asses.

I turned back to Specialist Fiori, who, while I wasn’t looking, had somehow gotten herself fully up on top of her desk and into this strangely contorted position where her hips were twisted sideways, and her shoulders were slung back, and her breasts bulged tightly against her battle dress. If she were wearing a bikini, it would’ve been a glorious sight. Even in camouflage battle dress it had its righteous qualities.

And that’s when I realized what a sly dog Tommy Whitehall really was. No wonder he’d planted her in his outer office. If she wasn’t a full-blown nymphomaniac, she sure pulled off a lavish impersonation. That slick devil. She was the replacement for that girl’s picture he’d kept on his desk back at West Point; his latest piece of camouflage.

I smiled at Specialist Fiori and thanked her for her honesty. She sucked in her lower lip, fluttered her eyelashes, and swiveled her shoulders in this sideways, provocative, swaying motion that made her uptoppers undulate like a couple of humongous sand dunes in a windstorm. She’d seen a few too many Marilyn Monroe movies, if you ask me.

“So, you’re a lawyer?” she asked, licking her lips.

“Yep, that’s right.”

“Does that mean you get paid more than other officers?”

“Nope,” I told her, making my way steadily toward the door. She only had time to give me one more sizzling glance before I made it to the safety of the hallway.

I rushed straight back to the hotel to see if there were any messages. But the moment I walked into the lobby, I ran smack into the middle of a large gaggle of men. They were mostly in line, getting checked in. There were probably fifty in all; some wore black-and-white collars and some didn’t. By their noisy chatter, they sounded like a convention of southern rednecks. How very curious, I said to myself.

I artfully worked my way to the end of the line and stood behind a fleshy older gent, tall and rotund, who had nothing but some frizzy fuzz left on his big head. He looked like a big walking peach, nudging his bags forward with the tip of his foot as he inched up in line.

I bumped up against him and he spun around.

I winced and said, “Uh, gee, sorry. I hope that didn’t hurt.”

“Not at all, son,” he responded in a syrupy, deep southern drawl that made it sound like “not’all, sun.”

I grinned. “Well, welcome to Korea. This your first time here?”

“Actually, nope. I was here in ’52, as a private, during the war.”

“Place has sure changed, hasn’t it?” I asked.

This was always a surefire opener to use with old Korean War vets. The last time they laid eyes on Korea it was nothing but shell-pocked farming fields that reeked literally of shit, and countless tiny, drab villages composed of thatched huts, and miserable, squalling people who couldn’t rub two nickels together. Now it was cluttered with