Dragon Bait
Based on the author's first-hand experience, Dragon Bait is a fictional account of the Viet Nam War and other diverse worldwide locations experiences of the soldiers of the U.S. Army Security Agency (ASA), an intelligence entity that no longer exists. It is the second volume of a planned trilogy.
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Preview
From Chapter 3 “FTA” of Dragon Bait, Book II in
The ASA Trilogy. This scene is set in Asmara, Eritrea (Ethiopia): 1960-1961
The long rainy season was past, the little wet three months away. Banks of clouds, mere false threats, hovered along the escarpment rim. Where the plateau crumbled away toward the flats about Zula—becoming in one final, half-serious effort the shores of the Red Sea—the threat seemed imminent. But it had not rained for days. The ditch was dry where the soldier lay.
You wanna get up, Mac” Winter called.
"Naw, he don’t. Can’t you tell when a man’s in his element?” Harry Spruance spoke with a firmness grounded in experience.
"Get up, Mac!"
"Leave ’im alone. Least he ain’t pukin’ in the squadbay.”
"We can’t leave him out here. First Sergeant’ll have his ass. And the goats’ll eat his clothes.”
The myth of the voracious goats—ubiquitous, omnipresent when least desired—was learned early-on during a tour in Asmara, and never forgotten. No one dared ignore the sad tale of Sergeant DeMaione.
“You got a terminal case of empathy, Dave. Or just plain dumbass. Goat wouldn’t touch Ratty Mac’s clothes, doncha know. Anyhow, didn’t you never see ’im like this before? Hell, he looks natural in goat shit.”
The object of this early morning discourse moved in halting mimicry of a live being, one hand clawing feebly at the dry, red soil in the streetside drainage ditch. Tiny puffs of dust arose from his efforts. like vapor from a miniature volcano rising from a fissure in the earth’s bowels. His fingers twitched in spasm, clutching at something present only in his muddled mind. The twitch reminded Winter of a pianist’s finger exercises.
“Get up, you silly shit. Day Trick’s making formation. Bus’ll be here soon.”
There was a desperate, almost disbelieving quality to Winter’s urging.
“Jesus, Dave, ain’t you got no sense of propriety? Man’s found a fuckin’ home. Leave him be,” Spruance insisted. He probed a boot into the scrabble at the roadside, nudging loose pebbles and dirt in a small avalanche that cascaded into the ditch.
Winter heard a whoop and looked up. Teklai stood on the third floor balcony of Operations Company barracks with two other houseboys. The three of them were laughing and pointing, chattering in what served them as language.
“Hell, Harry. He’s disgracing us in front of the goddamned Ethis. Let’s get him out of there.”
Harry Spruance’s disdain was clear. “Teklai’s been in the ditches,” he said. Winter was too new at Kagnew Station to credit the non sequitur.
Ratty Mac flailed at the sides of the ditch, going down for the third time. Waves of red dust closed over his sinking body until he became suddenly still.
“Who’s that?” rose from the peremptory grave.
“Get up, Mac. It’s Dave Winter. Give me your hand.”
“You can’t drink for shit, Mac,” Spruance scoffed.
“Harr-r-ry? That you?” Ratty Mac turned his head grotesquely far in an arc toward the sound, burrowing his nose into dust and rock chips. “Where am I?”
“In front of the company. Get up outta the ditch, Mac.”
“Yeah. Near the company. Missed by tha-a-a-t much,” Spruance chided, holding his thumb and forefinger a quarter-inch apart before Mac’s unseeing eyes. Harry held no brief for losers, and he would cut Ratty Mac no more slack now than he would in a poker game in Club 31.
MacGantree had struggled onto his back, and his hands pawed pitifully, futilely at the high, fast-moving clouds that would be over Somalia in an hour.
“Harry . . . Dave! Are my eyes open?” he croaked.
“No, you simple asshole. You’re drunk.”
“Thank God,” the prostrate soldier said, shuddering deeply. “I thought I was blind.”
There was a screech of brakes behind them in the street, the sound a worn, tired alarm. Spruance and Winter turned to watch the Military Police advancing on the ditch.
* * *
From Chapter 8 of Dragon Bait, Book II of “The ASA Trilogy,”
This scene is set in Rothwesten, Germany: 1966
In early autumn, Headquarters, Army Security Agency, seeking success through reorganization, invoked the “Shazam Shuffle” among those operational units in the Hesse District responsible for intelligence on the East German border and immediate surrounds. The 184th US ASA Operations Company at Rothwesten segued into the 319th USASA Battalion and became instantly dormant; the personnel were transferred to the equally newly defined 17th USASA Field Station and took on the 184th’s forsaken role. The common belief that this was a good thing—that of becoming a strategic asset and foregoing the pain-in-the-ass drudgery of tactical operations within the five-kilometer zone—was not immediately borne out by results.
Assets had been used interchangeably among the 184th and its sister tactical elements along the border over many years. Radios, generators, 292 operations vans, antennas, trucks, and AB-105 towers were shipped indiscriminately from one unit to another as needs dictated. Accountability did not accompany the equipments: there were no records.
When 17th Field Station set about its lawful assigns, created as it were out of whole cloth, its newly denoted commanders, logistics shufflers, and bean counters unrealistically asked with what were they to do their job. By extrapolation within the TO&E, equipments that should now be their own, were missing. They likely could have been found in the hands of other newly crafted Field Stations—the 18th at Bad Aibling, the 16th at Herzo-Genaurach and their subordinate border sites, all strategic assets—or the remains of the 319th, extant. But no one looked. Meanwhile, equipments in hand belonged to other, currently unidentified units who were in the same dilemma, vis-à-vis accountability.
Into this confusion and mythic state of presumptive compliance, Headquarters ASA at Arlington Hall, Virginia, promptly added an unsettling element in the form of the dreaded IG inspection. Under the guise of regular, annual harassment, The Hall sent the Inspector General team to ferret out all problems, as well as millions of dollars of mislaid, lost, stolen, and otherwise unaccountable and unaccounted-for equipment.
While troops wandered homeless and confused from dilapidated work spaces to ancient billets on the old German Luftwaffe base at Rothwesten, newly appointed officers and NCOs were thrust into bureaucratic harm’s way in more ways than they could imagine. It was anticipated that inspection would unveil the depths of disorganization, the lack of command and control in the European tactical elements, and would expose the ennui and disinterest rampant among the border troops. But it was equally expected that logical inspectors would recognize the chaos as temporary, and not use it as a God-sent opportunity to abuse the troops.
But then, that would be logical inspectors . . .
First Sergeant (Acting) Arthur A. Abbot—a Sergeant First Class by rights, banished from Operations for technical ineptitude, who made top soldier in A Company as a punishment of sorts—was visited with a penultimate mandate: get this one right, or your next review leads directly to a second and final pass-over, a condition having nothing to do with religious observances. This was a not-unusual state-of-affairs within the Army’s new promotion policies.
Imposing his inflated authority, eager to demonstrate his grasp of military responsibilities, Abbot was hopeful he could flim-flam his way to retention. But, upon reflection, and had Abbot been playing with a full deck, he would have realized that in his bid to stay in the game, ASA troops might have been the worst cards he could have drawn to.
The enlisted men’s barracks had not been upgraded since the Kaiser first dedicated Rothwesten as an imperial Flughafen fifty-two years before, when tenant aircraft were Spads— biplanes and triplanes of the Imperial German air forces. The most obvious area of lingering malcontent lay with the latrines, where huge white, porcelain toilets had held their own for too many years. It was up to local national —in this case, German— maintenance workers to keep these ancient jakes functioning. And so they did. But to the Deutsche plumber, called out from his snuggery during a snowstorm to bring a toilet back on line, appearance was not of critical concern. The toilets functioned, but they bore the evidence of many years’ urine stains, present as dull orange, high-water marks on the porcelain bowls. Nothing would remove these stains, neither bleach, scouring powder, nor various abrasive or astringent cleaners. One enterprising PFC had resorted to fingernail polish remover; another to gasoline—the resultant explosion so minor it did not even crack the porcelain—but without positive effect.
As the IG executed his witch hunt upon the fledgling field station with glee, it was inevitable he would take exception to the persistent evidence of generations of the passing of German and American beer in the toilets. It had become quasi-policy, reconfirmed by every IG who passed through the ancient Wehrmacht indoor outhouses in USAEUR, that toilet stains inevitably produced demerits. So common was the problem of “yellow peril” in Seventh Corps that it was a presumptive Gotcha! for every IG team, even against those units maintaining otherwise exemplary conditions.
Knowing this, First Sergeant Abbot sought divine intervention, irrationally hoping to find a treatment, a miracle that would set him above all previous victims of inspector irascibility.
Abbot assigned Specialist Four Harvey (no middle initial) Broadbent, a day-worker from the antenna maintenance crew, to devise a solution to the IG’s persnickety ways. Specialist Broadlbent, though no standout as a soldier, had a reputation for creativity and persistence in menial tasks. “BB” set his mind to the task upon assignment to the toilets.
In the following days Broadbent could be found, dextrously applying ineffective abrasives and scouring agents, followed by liquid soaps, soft cloths, ammonia water, and alcohol with little or no positive results. On the day of the pre-IG walk-through he was up early, and when the ongoing day trick had shaved, showered, shit, shined, and shoved off, he put the latrine OFF LIMITS and went through the motions again. His efforts, if not resulting in banishment of the stains, were an assurance of clinically sanitary bowls.
After hours of waiting—a common affliction with IGs—a bull colonel led into the suspect latrine a gaggle of associate malcontents. These hand-picked ball-busters, all similarly inclined unreasonably to pick at nits, found their attentions never devoted to practical, effective matters contributing to military readiness, but merely to harassment of soldiers of all ranks as a result of the inspectors’ own personal insecurity and chicken-shit personalities. The team had only just come from busting Captain McCall’s chops over his newfound company’s physical plant, a thing McCall dismissed in his mind, attributing the poor showing to The New Order during the Austrian Corporal’s reign. No amount of military smartness was sufficient; every facet of preparedness in Alpha Company was for naught.
When First Sergeant Abbot led the IG team into the second floor latrine, a place for ablutions of the Linguist Platoon, all known as devil-may-care reactionaries, he realized he had not put Broadbent through a rehearsal. What the hell! Everything else had gone so badly this morning, he thought, the SP4's efforts must no doubt have resulted in some degree of improved readiness.
Broadbent was standing by in a stiff brace, greens pressed and lint free, his glossy dress shoes locked at an angle of forty-five degrees, heels precisely six inches from the base of the first toilet in the gleaming row of potties. He snapped to attention, his taps cracking loudly in the echoing silence of the stone chamber, and snapped an admirably crisp salute. “Sir, Specialist Broadbent reports latrines of First Platoon ready for inspection.”
The colonel, slightly taken aback by the soldier’s enthusiasm, never returned the salute, but harrumph-ed, hmm-ed, and mumbled, then stepped past Broadbent and leaned over the first toilet. As an old hand at IG-ing, he was entirely familiar with the problematic, ochre-colored bowls, and though a stupid man, a waste of space as an officer, he understood: the stains were forever. But as the IG, he felt he had to break balls. And he didn’t like this Sergeant Abbot either. An SFC! First Sergeant, indeed.
“What the hell is this, Specialist?” the colonel roared, straightening with a malevolent glare blending anger and disgust.
“You reported this latrine ready for inspection.”
He pointed a regal finger toward the bowl. “Do you call this ready for inspection? These toilets have obviously not been cleaned. They’ve not been touched. They are filthy! Just look at those urine stains,” he demanded, fully aware and approving as the USAEUR Sergeant Major wrote up the malingering Alpha Company’s First Sergeant. “Do you not see what I’m talking about, Specialist?” the colonel bellowed at Broadbent’s silence.
The unruffled specialist looked intently at the toilet, bent forward, ran his finger around the inside rim of the bowl, licked his very clean finger, and said, “Why, no, Sir. That crapper isn’t even salty!”
First Sergeant Abbott did not continue to seek service retention, but abandoned his servitude along with any hope of making E-8. He reported an elevated glucose level in his blood and water, previously undiscovered, and took medical retirement at 19 years.
His replacement assumed the elusive and fruitless dream of accounting for all missing equipment on the field station’s inventories. When the IG and (Acting) First Sergeant Abbott were finished with Alpha Company in their various ways, things fell back into routine.
