Shaftoe picks one man from each color group so that the operation as a whole will not be disrupted. The sun is stunningly powerful here, but in that cavern, with a cool maritime breeze easing through, it’s not really that bad. The sharp smell of petroleum distillates comes off all of those warm painted surfaces. To Bobby Shaftoe, it is a comforting smell, because you never paint stuff when you’re in combat. But the smell also makes him a little tingly, because you frequently paint stuff just before you go into combat.
Shaftoe is about to brief his three handpicked Marines on what is to come when the private with black paint on his hands, Daniels, looks past him and smirks. “What’s the lieutenant looking for now do you suppose, Sarge?” he says.
Shaftoe and Privates Nathan (green paint) and Branph (white) look over to see that Ethridge has gotten sidetracked. He is going through the wastebaskets again.
“We have all noticed that Lieutenant Ethridge seems to think it is his mission in life to go through wastebaskets,” Sergeant Shaftoe says in a low, authoritative voice. “He is an Annapolis graduate.”
Ethridge straightens up and, in the most accusatory way possible, holds up a fistful of pierced and perforated oaktag. “Sergeant! Would you identify this material?”
“Sir! It is general issue military stencils, Sir!”
“Sergeant! How many letters are there in the alphabet?”
“Twenty-six, sir!” responds Shaftoe crisply.
Privates Daniels, Nathan, and Branph whistle coolly at each other—this Sergeant Shaftoe is sharp as a tack.
“Now, how many numerals?”
“Ten, sir!”
“And of the thirty-six letters and numerals, how many of them are represented by unused stencils in this wastebasket?”
“Thirty-five, sir! All except for the numeral 2, which is the only one we need to carry out your orders, sir!”
“Have you forgotten the second part of my order, Sergeant?”
“Sir, yes, sir!” No point in lying about it. Officers actually like it when you forget their orders because it reminds them of how much smarter they are than you. It makes them feel needed.
“The second part of my order was to take strict measures to leave behind no trace of the changeover!”
“Sir, yes, I do remember that now, sir!”
Lieutenant Ethridge, who was just a bit huffy first, has now calmed down quite a bit, which speaks well of him and is duly, silently noted by all of the men, who have known him for less than six hours. He is now speaking calmly and conversationally, like a friendly high school teacher. He is wearing the heavy-rimmed black military eyeglasses known in the trade as RPGs, or Rape Prevention Glasses. They are strapped to his head by a hunk of black elastic. They make him look like a mental retard. “If some enemy agent were to go through the contents of this wastebasket, as enemy agents have been known to do, what would he find?”
“Stencils, sir!”
“And if he were to count the numerals and letters, would he notice anything unusual?”
“Sir! All of them would be clean except for the numeral twos which would be missing or covered with paint, sir!”
Lieutenant Ethridge says nothing for a few minutes, allowing his message to sink in. In reality no one knows what the fuck he is talking about. The atmosphere becomes tinderlike until finally, Sergeant Shaftoe makes a desperate stab. He turns away from Ethridge and towards the men. “I want you Marines to get paint on all of those goddamn stencils!” he barks.
The Marines charge the wastebaskets as if they were Nip pillboxes, and Lieutenant Ethridge seems mollified. Bobby Shaftoe, having scored massive points, leads Privates Daniels, Nathan, and Branph out into the street before Lieutenant Ethridge figures out that he was just guessing. They head for the meat locker up on the ridge, double-time.
These Marines are all lethal combat veterans or else they never would have gotten into a mess this bad—trapped on a gratuitously dangerous continent (Africa) surrounded by the enemy (United States Army troops). Still, when they get into that locker and take their first gander at PFC Hott, a hush comes over them.
Private Branph clasps his hands, rubbing them together surreptitiously. “Dear Lord—”
“Shut up, Private!” Shaftoe says, “I already did that.”
“Okay, Sarge.”
“Go find a meat saw!” Shaftoe says to Private Nathan.
The privates all gasp.
“For the fucking pig!” Shaftoe clarifies. Then he turns to Private Daniels, who is carrying a featureless bundle, and says, “Open it up!”
The bundle (which was issued by Ethridge to Shaftoe) turns out to contain a black wetsuit. Nothing GI; some kind of European model. Shaftoe unfolds it and examines its various parts while Privates Nathan and Branph dismember Frosty the Pig with vigorous strokes of an enormous bucksaw.
They are all working away silently when a new voice interrupts. “Dear Lord,” the voice begins, as they all look up to see a man standing nearby, hands clasped prayerfully. His words, sacramentally condensed into an outward and visible cloud of steam, veil his face. His uniform and rank are obscured by an Army blanket thrown over his shoulders. He’d look like a camel-riding Holy Land prophet if he were not clean-shaven and wearing Rape Prevention Glasses.
“Goddamn it!” Shaftoe says. “I already said a fucking prayer.”
“But are we praying for Private Hott, or for ourselves?” the man says.
This is a poser. Everything becomes quiet as the meat saw stops moving. Shaftoe drops the wetsuit and stands up. Blanket Man’s got very short grizzly hair, or maybe that’s frost coalescing on his scalp. His ice-colored eyes meet Shaftoe’s through the mile-thick lenses of his RPGs, as if he’s really expecting an answer. Shaftoe takes a step closer and realizes that the man is wearing a clerical collar.
“You tell me, Rev,” Shaftoe says.
Then he recognizes Blanket Man. He’s about to let fly with a lusty What in the fuck are you doing here, but something makes him hold back. The chaplain’s eyes make a sideways dart so small and so fast that only Shaftoe, who’s practically rubbing noses with him, could possibly see it. The message being: Shut up, Bobby, we’ll talk later.
“Private Hott is with God now—or wherever people go after they die,” says Enoch “You can call me Brother” Root.
“What kind of an attitude is that!? Course he’s with God. Jesus Christ! ‘Wherever they go when they die.’ What kind of a chaplain are you?”
“I guess I’m a Detachment 2702 kind of chaplain,” the chaplain says. Lieutenant Enoch Root finally breaks eye contact with Shaftoe and turns his gaze to where the action is. “As you were, fellows,” he says. “Looks like bacon tonight, huh?”
The men chuckle nervously and resume sawing.
Once they get the pig’s carcass disentangled from Hott’s, each of the Marines grabs a limb. They carry Hott out into the butcher shop, which has been temporarily evacuated for purposes of this operation, so that Hott’s former comrades-in-shanks will not spread rumors.
Hasty evacuation of a butcher shop after one of its workers has been found dead on the floor could spawn a few rumors in and of itself. So the cover story du jour, freshly spun by Lieutenant Ethridge, is that Detachment 2702 is (contrary to all outward appearances) an elite, crack medical team concerned that Hott had been struck down by a rare new form of North African food poisoning. Maybe even something deliberately left behind by the French, who are, by accounts, a little irritable about having their battleship sunk. Anyway, the whole shop (the story goes) has to be shut down for the day and gone over with a nit comb. Hott’s corpse will be cremated before being sent back to the family, just to make sure that the dreaded affliction does not spread into Chicago—the planetary abbatoir capital—where its incalculable consequences could alter the outcome of the war.
There is a GI coffin laid out on the floor, just to preserve the fiction. Shaftoe and his men ignore it completely and begin dressing the body, first in an appalling pair of swim trunk
s, then various components of the wetsuit.
“Hey!” Ethridge says. “I thought you were going to do the gloves last.”
“Sir, we’re doing them first, by your leave, sir!” Bobby Shaftoe says. “On account of his fingers will thaw out first and once that happens we are screwed, sir!”
“Well, slap this on him first,” Ethridge says, and hands over a wristwatch. Shaftoe hefts it and whistles. It’s a beaut: a Swiss chronometer in solid uranium, its jewel-laden movement throbbing away like the heartbeat of a small mammal. He swings it on the end of its wristband, made in cunningly joined armor plates. It is heavy enough to stun a muskellunge.
“Nice,” Shaftoe says, “but it doesn’t tell time too good.”
“In the time zone where we are going,” Ethridge says, “it does.”
The chastened Shaftoe sets about his work. Meanwhile, Lieutenants Ethridge and Root are making themselves useful. They carry the crudely sawed remains of Frosty the Pig into the butcher shop and throw them on a gigantic scale. They add up to some thirty kilograms, whatever the fuck that means. Enoch Root, showing an appetite for physical labor that is duly and silently noted by the men, hauls in another pig carcass, stiff as a Radio Flyer, and dumps it onto the scale, bringing the total up to seventy. Ethridge does the breaststroke through clouds of flies to gather up all the cuts of meat that were on the chopping blocks when the place was evacuated. He throws them on the scale and the needle swings up to near the one-hundred mark. From that point they are able to bring it up to one-thirty by ferrying hams and roasts in from the freezer one at a time. Enoch Root—who seems to be conversant with exotic systems of measurement—has made a calculation, and checked it twice, establishing that the weight of Gerald Hott, converted into kilograms, is one hundred and thirty.
All the meat goes into the coffin. Ethridge slams the lid shut, trapping some flies who have no idea what they are in for. Root goes around with a clawhammer, driving in sixteen-penny nails with sure, powerful, Carpenter-of-Nazareth-like strokes. Meanwhile, Ethridge has taken a GI manual out of his briefcase. Shaftoe is close enough to read the title, printed in block letters on its olive drab cover:
COFFIN SEALING PROCEDURES
PART III: TROPICAL ENVIRONMENTS
VOL. II: HIGH DISEASE RISK SITUATIONS (BUBONIC PLAGUE, ETC.)
The two lieutenants devote a good hour to following the instructions in that manual. The instructions are not that complicated, but Enoch Root keeps noticing syntactical ambiguities and wants to explore their ramifications. First this rattles Ethridge, then his emotions tend towards impatience and, finally, extreme pragmatism. To make the chaplain shut up, Ethridge confiscates the manual and starts Root on stenciling Hott’s name on the coffin and pasting it up with red stickers printed with medical warnings so appalling that the topic headings alone induce faint nausea. By the time Root is finished, the only person who can legally open this coffin is General George C. Marshall himself, and even he would have to first get special permission from the Surgeon General and evacuate all living things within a hundred-mile radius.
“Chaplain talks kind of funny,” says Private Nathan at one point, listening, slackjawed, to one of these Root/Ethridge debates.
“Yeah!” exclaims Private Branph, as if the accent took a really keen listener to notice. “What kind of an accent is that anyway?”
All eyes turn to Bobby Shaftoe, who pretends to listen for a bit and then says, “Well, fellas, I would guess that this Enoch Root is the offspring of a long line of Dutch and possibly German missionaries in the South Sea Islands, interbred with Aussies. And furthermore, I would guess that—being as how he grew up in territories controlled by the British—that he carries a British passport and was drafted into their military when the war started and is now part of ANZAC.”
“Haw!” roars Private Daniels, “if you got all of that right, I’ll give you five bucks.”
“Deal,” Shaftoe says.
Ethridge and Root finish sealing the coffin at about the same time Shaftoe and his Marines are wrestling the last bits of the wetsuit into place. It takes a shitload of talcum powder, but they get it done. Ethridge supplies them with the talcum powder, which is not GI talc; it is from somewhere in Europe. Some of the letters on the label have pairs of dots over them, which Shaftoe knows to be a characteristic of the German language.
A truck backs up to the loading dock, smelling of the fresh paint (it is a Detachment 2702 truck). In go the sealed coffin and the now-vulcanized dead butcher.
“I’m going to stay behind and check the wastebaskets,” Lieutenant Ethridge tells Shaftoe. “I’ll meet you at the airfield in one hour.”
Shaftoe imagines one hour in the back of a hot truck with this cargo. “You want me to keep him on ice, sir?” he asks.
Ethridge has to think about this one for a while. He sucks his teeth, checks his watch, hems and haws. But when he finally answers, he sounds definite. “Negative. It is imperative, for purposes of this mission, that we now get him into a thawed mode.”
PFC Gerald Hott and his meat-laden coffin occupy the center of the truck’s bed. The Marines sit to the sides, arranged like pallbearers. Shaftoe finds himself staring across the carnage into the face of Enoch Root, which is wearing an expression of forced nonchalance.
Shaftoe knows he ought to wait, but he just can’t stand it. “What are you doing here?” he finally says.
“The detachment is relocating,” the Rev says. “Closer to the front.”
“We just got off the fucking boat,” Shaftoe says. “Of course we’re going closer to the goddamn front—we can’t go any farther unless we swim.”
“As long as we’re pulling up stakes,” Root says coolly, “I’ll be coming along for the ride.”
“I don’t mean that,” Bobby Shaftoe says. “I mean, why should the detachment have a chaplain?”
“You know the military,” Root says. “Every unit has to have one.”
“It’s bad luck.”
“It’s bad luck to have a chaplain? Why?”
“It means the waffle-butts are expecting a lot of funerals, is why.”
“So you are taking the position that the only thing a cleric can do is to preside over funerals? Interesting.”
“And weddings and baptisms,” Shaftoe says. All of the other Marines chortle.
“Could it be you’re feeling a little anxious about the unusual nature of Detachment 2702’s first mission?” Root inquires, casting a significant glance at the late Hott, then staring directly into Shaftoe’s eyes.
“Anxious? Listen, Rev, I done some things on Guadalcanal that make this look like Emily Fucking Post.”
All of the other Marines think this is a great line, but Root is undeterred.
“Did you know why you were doing those things on Guadalcanal?”
“Sure! To stay alive.”
“Do you know why you’re doing this?”
“Fuck no.”
“Doesn’t that irritate you a little bit? Or are you too much of a stupid jarhead to care?”
“Well, you kind of backed me into a corner there, Rev,” Shaftoe says. After a pause he goes on, “I’ll admit to being a little curious.”
“If there were someone in Detachment 2702 who could help answer your questions about why, would that be useful?”
“I guess so,” Shaftoe grumbles. “It just seems weird to have a chaplain.”
“Why does it seem weird?”
“Because of what kind of unit this is.”
“What kind of unit is it?” Root asks. He asks it with a certain sadistic pleasure.
“We’re not supposed to talk about it,” Shaftoe says. “And anyway, we don’t know.”
Down the hill, immense zigzagging ramps descend pompously over rows of tiger-striped arches to the strand of ramifying railway lines that feed the port from the south. “It’s like standing in the drain of a fucking pinball machine,” says B. Shaftoe, looking up at the way they have just come, thinking about what might come ro
lling down out of the Casbah. They head south along those railway lines and come into a zone of ore dumps and coal heaps and smokestacks, clearly recognizable to Great Lakes Eagle Scout Shaftoe, but here operated through some kind of cross-cultured gear train about a million meshings deep. They pull up in front of the Société Algérienne d’Éclairage et de Force, a double-smokestacked behemoth with the biggest coal-pile of all. They’re in the middle of nowhere, but it’s obvious that they are expected. Here—as everywhere else that Detachment 2702 goes—a strange Rank Inflation Effect is taking place. The coffin is carried into the SAEF by two lieutenants, a captain, and a major, overseen by a colonel! There is not a single enlisted man in sight, and Bobby Shaftoe, a mere sergeant, worries about what sort of work they’ll find for him. There is also a Paperwork Negation Effect going on here; whenever Shaftoe expects to be stalled by the usual half an hour’s worth of red tape, an anxious officer runs up and waves his hands furiously and he is allowed to proceed.
An Arab, wearing what appears to be a red coffee can on his head, hauls an iron door open; flames lunge at him and he beats them back with a blackened iron stick. The pallbearers center the head of the coffin in the opening and then shove it through, like ramming a big shell home into a sixteen-inch gun, and the man with the can on his head clangs the door shut, a tassel on the top of his can whipping around crazily. Before he’s even got it latched he’s yodeling just like those guys up in the Casbah. The officers all stand around agreeing with each other and signing their names on clipboards.
So with a dearth of complications that can only strike combat veteran Bobby Shaftoe as eerie, the truck leaves the Société Algérienne d’Éclairage et de Force behind and heads back up those damn ramps into Algiers. The climb’s steep—a first-gear project all the way. Vendors with pushcarts loaded with boiling oil are not only keeping up with them but cooking fritters along the way. Three-legged dogs run and fight underneath the actual drive train of the truck. Detachment 2702 is also dogged by coffee-can-wearing natives threatening to play guitars made of jerry cans, and by orange vendors and snake charmers, and a few blue-eyed burnoose wearers holding up lumps of unwrapped and unlabelled dark stuff. Like hailstones, these may be classified by analogy to fruits and sporting goods. Typically they range from grape to baseball. At one point, the chaplain impulsively trades a Hershey bar for a golf ball of the stuff.