Roger Crossland - Red Ice

“Beauty queen name! I carry my own weight. Miss Kosong Perimeter. Korean name. Big joke, very funny.”

“Now, Kei-chan,” I began, trying to smooth things over.

“I carry my own weight around here, don’ I?”

“From where we all stand, you carry it quite well, Kei-chan.”

“Ha, you’ll see. Not just pretty face. Walrus face, Wick’sham, you’ll all see. You should know better.”

She turned and rushed off.

Kruger and Wickersham looked scared.

There was a tension to being part of the group but not participating in the main event.

After supper I took a walk around the complex. I found Chief Puckins at the perimeter fence looking down into the valley.

“You can see lights down there, Skipper. I reckon it’s a real village.” The Texan rubbed his freckled nose with the back of his mitten. “Kids down there, too.

“Don’t really know how I can tell…. I just kind of know. Sometimes I think I can hear them laugh… on the wind, sort of. Sure, that’s a village down there by the creek. Villages always have children.”

“Seems likely,” I replied. There weren’t that many lights. We were fairly close to the DMZ. It might not be a village.

“Some of the Korean kids look kind of like my half-Viet kids.”

His strawlike hair flickered in the cold northerly wind. Children meant a great deal to Puckins. In theory they stood for hope, renewal, a reaffirmation of the larger plan. In practice, they were a very personal touchstone for energy and life.

“Funny, when I’m with my own kids I always know I’m going to have to ship out again, and that doesn’t bother me. It’s just something that’s gotta be done. If I didn’t do it someone else would have to. But I’d do it better because I understand. My kids wouldn’t be anywhere if I hadn’t gone to Vietnam.

“Did I say it didn’t tug at me shipping out all the time? I’m glad they’ve got a strong old lady. They all hold up pretty well. All and all.”

He patted his pocket. “I should have worked up a pretty good passel of magic tricks to show them when we get back. It’ll take some practice.”

We just stood there for a while, until the lights went out.

The next morning spotted Wickersham preparing to go through the house-to-house pop-up range on his own time.

I climbed into the range tower, where Chamonix, unsmiling as usual, was manipulating the target silhouettes.

This was the other Wickersham—quiet, intense, exacting. Extra hours spent to make it look easy. Extra hours spent to be sure.

I focused my binoculars on Wickersham. It was snowing gently and Wickersham was halfway through the course. As he rounded a comer, a single gray silhouette popped up with a puff of snow.

I watched his lips move silently, “Two to the body, one to the head….’”

It dropped back.

Another gray silhouette appeared in a window.

The triple tap of bullets occurred once more. “Two to the body, one to the head….”

The second silhouette dropped.

Quiet, intense, exacting—this was the other Wickersham, the second Wickersham who rarely showed himself. The first Wickersham, the more visible Wickersham, clowned as a defense.

Four silhouettes rose: two black, two gray. He peppered the two gray silhouettes, making a little polka step as he shifted his muscular frame to fire from one target to the other. The gray targets were guards. The black targets were prisoners, zeks . I read “two to the body, one to the head” on his moving lips again.

To Wickersham, dealing in life and death was as heavy and ponderous as surgery. It had to be lightened somehow. The warrior should not act too proud or self-important . A trace of Anglo-Saxon fear tinted his view, fear that success and elation brought punishment by the gods. At the banquet, after the slaying of the Grendel and the Grendel’s mother, Beowulf is praised but also warned that conspicuous skill and pride can bring ill luck. The fact that Wickersham had never heard of the Old English tribes or their beliefs did not matter, because a similar manner of living, the same requirements for survival, and a kindred collection of values caused him to arrive at comparable conclusions.

Pride internalized made a good fighter; pride externalized brought bad luck. Since death came so easily on trifles, above all, a man needed luck.

Three gray silhouettes appeared above a courtyard wall. Nine rounds expended and they were down.

“Two to the body, and one to the head/better be sure the rascal’s dead.”

Wickersham’s various business enterprises basically served as a variation to the clowning. The Wisconsinite played bazaar merchant for comic relief. Yet understanding Wickersham wasn’t that straightforward. He did derive secondary satisfaction from making a profit, winning another kind of contest—and creating laughter—which had a way of smoothing over so many rough spots in his travails. Essentially, however, Wickersham did not rest easy with the high stakes of his vocation.

Two silhouettes popped up in the doors on either side of him. They rested on opposite edges of his peripheral vision. He knocked both down with two short bursts.

An alarm went off on the range and Wickersham’s broad shoulders drooped. He sat down in the snow and looked at his AK-47.

“Which one?” I asked Chamonix. The Frenchman flicked the switch on his right with a dour look.

The silhouette on Wickersham’s right rose slowly. It was black with a blowup of Vyshinsky’s picture pasted on its head. Pallbearer’s eyes . The pictures was perforated. One to the head.

“One error equals failure,” Chamonix stated calmly over the range mike.

“ Tant pis . Let’s run it one more time.”

In the seclusion of our new training area, we were able to combine live firing with movement on skis. Each man carried an AK-47, except Wickersham, who carried the Type 67 machine gun, and Chamonix, who carried the Russian-made, but Chinese-modified sniper rifle. With us we towed two ahkio sledges. These oblong curved-bottom sledges, when towed by several skiers, could carry a man, or up to two hundred pounds of equipment. We modified both ahkios along the lines of a Norwegian pulk . They were shortened and fitted with tubular towing braces. Once these changes were made, the ahkios could be towed and controlled by just two men. In the ahkios we carried food, tents, and ammunition, but most important, a single Chinese 57-millimeter recoilless rifle. Ironically, the 57-millimeter recoilless had been copied from the American version by the Chinese during the Korean War. It had been discounted as a U.S. weapon only recently. Now the pirated weapon was going to change hands again.

Daily, Dravit conducted classes on anti-skier booby traps. Using token amounts of explosive, he showed us how to lay out the charges and trigger mechanisms. Then he showed us how to conceal them. Finally, from a distance, he’d slide a weighted ski over the booby trap to demonstrate its effect. Near the end of the third day, one charge didn’t go off. He slid several old skis over it, but it just wouldn’t detonate.

“Bloody spring must have ice in it. Have to blow it in place.”

The meticulous operation of disarming a booby trap was an unnecessarily risky procedure. The more prudent course of action was to set another charge alongside the dud and in detonating the second charge, sympathetically blow the first “in place.”

Dravit skied gingerly to where the booby trap had been set. It was a pressure-, not trip-wire-activated assembly. Near a small tree—about two yards from where it should have been—the charge went off under Dravit’s right ski. It flung the ski up violently and twisted his ankle at a bad angle. Surprisingly, Dravit managed to keep his balance. He coasted backward a yard, then fell over to one side, cursing venomously.