One to Count Cadence Read Online Free PDF Page A

and personnel work was handled on Okinawa. The men in Operations, “Ops,” were divided into four tricks of ten men. Each trick worked six days, 0700 to 1600, then had a seventy-two hour break; six swings, 1600 to 2400, then a forty-eight hour break; and then six mids and another seventy-two hour break.
    “Your trick is on break now,” he said, “and they’re all in Town — that’s what they call Angeles — drinking and whoring and anything else they can think of to get in trouble. Town is bad. Three-fourths of it is off-limits forever, two-thirds of it after 1800, and all of it after 2400. But will they be back before curfew? Shit, no. They got to run and hide from the APs and laugh about how much fun it is. And if they can get knived by a calesa driver or run over by a jeepny or drown in a sewer for all I know — or care.” He shrugged, sighed, then walked back to his desk and continued, “But somehow all the bastards will get back in one piece just in time to wash off the crud, shave, brush their teeth maybe, and get to the three-quarter before it leaves for the Ops Building.” He shook his head and folded his long arms, then stared at the rain beyond the half-screened passageway. “It rains all the goddamned time, too.”
    1/Sgt. Tetrick, ex-marauder, twenty-two years service — the last twelve as a first-shirt — was of medium height, but because of his heavy, sloping shoulders and long arms, seemed much shorter. A little hair adorned his head, a gratuitous bit of sun-bleached fuzz circling from ear to ear and no more. This too was another small reminder of Burma, but he wore his baldness as if it were dictated by military expediency. A golf tan, his single vice, didn’t cover the rich ocher-yellow malaria stain on his skin.
    “But they’re a good bunch, damnit,” he said quickly, out of his reverie as if the distant bugle he heard had stopped. “And it’s our job to keep them out of the stockade — damned Air Force calls it the Confinement Facility — and the hospital so they can do their work.” He glanced back at the rain and shook his shining head again. “You just can’t run an Army outfit on an air base anyway. Damned airmen don’t blouse their boots and wear baseball caps and bus-driver uniforms. Shit.” He shuffled behind his desk. “You were in an infantry outfit on your last hitch?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
    “Six years ago.”
    “Long time to stay out. How come you came back in?”
    “Like you said: it’s a long time.”
    He dropped it. “Don’t expect this to be like a line outfit. Not at all.”
    “I didn’t.”
    “I don’t know what it is,” he said, “but it ain’t soldiering.”
    Tetrick continued explaining the 721st Com Sec Det as he deftly handled my paperwork. His voice was roughly concerned, even irritated, but still tender as he spoke of the outfit; like a Nebraska farmer whose four grown sons had left the land for the cement and money of the city, leaving only his swollen hands to toil in the land of his father: he could not understand, but his dust-thickened voice kept whispering, “God love ‘em. God love ‘em.” The Army had not issued Tetrick a wife, as the saying goes, but it had these sons. And me too, for that matter. Everything I needed from the supply room — bunk, mattress, field gear — had already been carried to my quarters on the second floor. Tetrick apologized for not having any regular NCO quarters, then added that he liked for his trick chiefs to bunk with the men. I was pleasantly surprised when I was assigned a houseboy, a young Filipino who, for five pesos a week, would clean my quarters, take care of my laundry and shine my boots, etc. Enlisted men also were allowed houseboys and even the KP was pulled by Filipino workers. It all seemed very British, darkly faithful Indian batman and all that, but the houseboys were all hard-core finger-popping black-marketeers, already more Western than Oriental. Tetrick then took