Roger Crossland - Red Ice

“Whoo-eee, I think you’ve really gone off the deep end this time, Fraze.”

The air was heavy with humidity and my camouflage shirt stuck uncomfortably to the seat back.

“Glad I’m not part of this one. If the VC don’t ventilate your bod’, the regional general will fry it. Maybe leave it out in the hot sun ’til it gets nice and crispy-like,” he said, nudging me in the ribs with more force than necessary.

Thomas Alderson Ackert III, a big blond-headed charmer and natural athlete, had graduated from the Academy, a first-class ticket puncher and had ever since been collecting career-enhancing billets. With Ackert’s tight, winning, and even-toothed smile it was inevitable people were more impressed than they ought to have been. As a onetime starting lineman for the Academy, he found the rigors of basic training for the Navy’s elite Sea/Air/Land (SEAL) Teams trying and occasionally an inconvenience. But the prestige that accompanied the role of frogman-commando would surely ease along his career. Shrewd and capable, he got his ticket punched at all the right stops. What he did at each stop didn’t matter as long as he didn’t make waves.

Someone had once described him as that thoroughly treacherous golden bastard who knew all the rules of the game, had mastered them with great fanfare, but hadn’t the remotest idea why the game was played in the first place. He was fond of all the current buzz words like “systems supportive” and “middle-tier management,” which he sprinkled generously into a honeyed “good ol’ boy” pap. First to “get on board” questionable programs of high origin, he sported an array of staff awards, which he had cleverly harvested as a “bombproof” in rear areas. Each of these attributes viewed individually might seem fairly harmless, but examined in concert they were the unmistakable symptoms of a deep and dangerous pathology. And he himself was a symptom of a still greater pathology.

It began to rain in warm, heavy sheets. Ackert smiled to himself with the satisfaction drawn from the prospect of someone else’s risk taking and probable doom. I kept my eyes straight ahead.

Maximum glory and minimum inconvenience were the goals that guided his every action. It was evident in the way he led a platoon. It had been evident to some from the very beginning of training.

The high-water mark of our basic training had been Hell Week. The week was an endless marathon of exhausting physical competition under stress between boat crews for twenty-one hours each day. Between fifty and seventy percent of a training class melted away during that one week. Sleep became an obsessively precious commodity and during slack periods a few men always managed to crawl away to hide and sneak a mind-preserving nap. Everyone did it at some point, though naps were risky. Some fell into deep sleep and could not be awakened until their bodies had restored themselves. By that time they had been dropped from training.

In Ackert’s boat crew there had been a petty officer who had become known as “the Rock.” Unshakable, he virtually carried his crew through every event. His endurance was phenomenal. The force of his character pulled weaker men along in his slipstream, and only in the last days did he begin to fade. His self-sacrifice had strained even his strength to its limits. A benign Sisyphus, he only rolled his boulder faster.

During one interval he, too, crawled behind a sand dune—after he had been sure to tell Ackert where to find him. Not long afterward, an instructor called for an immediate muster. Ackert could have saved the Rock, but only by drawing additional harassment upon himself. He didn’t. There was only room for one star in Ackert’s boat crew.

Things seemed to happen to people around Ackert, and oddly the outcome always seemed to make Ackert look better. The men called him “the Golden One,” and it was not meant as a compliment. More than once his rushes to “get on board” had placed them in jeopardy.

“You haven’t cleared this with the regional general, have you? You’re not bein’ smart, Fraze-buddy. Fella’s gotta look out for himself. Hell, you’d never catch Ol’ Ackert trying a fool stunt like that.”

“Sure, I haven’t cleared it. You know why? The red tape has been made thick; too thick and stretched to protect too many people. Takes too damn long. That’s why no one’s been able to pull a successful POW op yet. Those guys would rot before we could save them.” The hard edge of frustration slipped into my voice.

Clearing a POW rescue operation through the IV Corps military region’s commanding general took days. Intelligence on the location of POWs in the Mekong Delta was only good for hours. The Viet Cong kept POWs in ones and twos moving from camp to camp. In the delta there was no central POW stronghold like the Hanoi Hilton much farther north. And the triple-canopy jungle hid all.

I swerved to avoid a Viet family on its way to the river market in the downpour. It wasn’t their fault Ackert was in my jeep.

“Ackert, why don’t you fly to Saigon and kiss up to someone career enhancing? Seems a nice fellow like you ought to be sipping highballs with some NAVFORV armchair raiders at the Continental.”

He drummed his fingers contentedly on the dash.

“Yeah. Sure, sport, maybe I ought to. Leave the olive-drab-and-camouflage crusades to you. Wouldn’t want to hazard this beautifully bronzed body on any of the famous Quillon Frazer missions. You’ve done too well for too long. Anyway, too many ladies would never forgive me. You know how it is.”

He paused.

“So you’re going to just trip over those POWs accidental like? Cute, real cute,” he added.

Under the circumstances, Saigon would indeed be a safe, comfortable place to be. A blown rescue operation would be bad press, and the whiz-kid managerial types who gave the regional general his orders didn’t want any bad press. Bad press tarnished their shiny, newly minted images.

On the other hand, a Viet Cong POW camp was an unsafe, uncomfortable place to be. A camp dictated death by millimeters, from disease or malnutrition. A month after capture, a prisoner became a mosquito bite-blotched skeleton in Viet Cong boxer shorts with barely the strength to swallow.

From out of nowhere a Honda 50 carrying a man and three children passed the right side of the jeep.

Ackert scratched his golden head and yawned. “So you’re going to gamble everything on the story of some greasy, bucktoothed gook defector. I always did figure you for a gook lover. Too bad, thought you knew better than to trust those apes.”

This was meant to rankle. It was well known in the detachment that the word gook was forbidden in my platoon. How could you attempt to conduct a counter-guerrilla war in a country and at the same time degrade the most essential element to your success with the term gooks ?

“They don’t speak English, drink much beer, or play football, so what good are they? Well… I’d trust him farther than any tidewater ticket puncher with big ambitions. And less integrity than our platoon’s pet boa constrictor.”

“Now talk nice to ol’ Ackert, hear?” He whispered venomously. “Kind of touchy, aren’t we? Wait ’til old IV Corps hands you your head once he’s found out you led a deliberate rescue mission without letting him give the whiz kids a chance to take first bows.”

“And who’s going to tell him?”

“I don’t know…,” he said with his best year-book smile. “Maybe me.”

The jeep stopped with a jerk.

It would be a good fight: in this corner, the rawboned Quillon Frazer in the celebrated and foredoomed tradition of his Highland ancestors… and in the opposite corner, Thomas Alderson Ackert III, golden-haired tidewater Goliath, destined to insinuate himself to the mastheads of naval power.