Coe Review

We took our cue from the other Nam vets. They never asked for any
special treatment—as I said, they rarely even talked about Nam—and they'd
been as irritated and repulsed by Howard's body odor and night terrors as
the rest of us. But now they backed off and simply watched with curiosity
or respect or awe—I don't know what to call it. Maybe it was the way the
rest of us, covertly at least, saw them. They'd been there—Nam—and we
hadn't. They'd been there but hadn't been through hell. Probably most
of them had never even experienced combat. Howard had. So we all just
watched, and waited.
As it turned out, we didn't have to do anything about Howard Reese.
Only a few days after our meeting with Sergeant Reynolds, Howard
disappeared.
It'd happen all the time that somebody would be late coming back from
a three-day pass. These were nineteen, twenty-year-olds we're talking about
here, farm boys who'd never been out of the county they were born in before
and tough-talking city boys who at home still had their mama cutting up
their meat for them. They had a hell of a time with those train schedules,
inconveniently written in German. Nor was it unheard of for a guy to go
AWOL for a week or two—generally when his wife or girlfriend came over
for a visit and the CO, the bastard, wouldn't give him leave. But this was
different. This time the CID was called in, the NCOs were questioned, and
so were a few of us who bunked near Howard. No one knew a thing. What
was going on?
The army being the proving ground for shit-house rumors, theories
were varied and imaginative. Howard was in cahoots with a drug ring in
Pirmasens, and he'd been bumped off. Howard was in cahoots with a drug
ring in Pirmasens, and he'd bumped off someone else and was on the run.
He'd stolen a box of M-16s from the armory and had sold them to . . .
fill in the blank. He'd sold secrets about the ordnance we guarded out in
the security areas to the Commies. Etc., etc. Most of the speculation was
farcical with the exception of the drug-ring scenarios. There were a lot
of drugs around the depot. It had to be bought and sold. Somebody was
making a ton of money on it. Where there was money, there was potential
for bad shit happening.
We were convinced that bad shit of some sort had happened when the
whole company was rousted out of our bunks one night, given flashlights,
and led out into the woods surrounding the depot. We formed into one
long rank and began to make our way slowly through the trees. We were not
told by anyone in authority to look for Howard Reese, specifically. "Keep
an eye out for anything suspicious," was all the CO said. At a certain point
the word went up and down the line that we should look for something that
20 Old Wars