Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

“So what?”

“It’s not so what,” her mother said. “You’re a good girl. A beautiful smart girl. You really are. And your brother is going to need someone who can give him rules. Here, take this, will you hold these for me?”

These were the blue books that her mother had pulled from the suitcase. They were embossed in gold: PASSPORT. The first showed a picture of Emma at age six. The second was Harris as an apple-cheeked four-year-old.

“I want to go with you,” Fowler said. “I don’t want to stay with Harris and Daddy. I want to leave.”

“Oh, no, honey, really — trust me — you’re much better here.”

“I don’t want to stay here. I don’t want to. I won’t do it.”

“Yes, you will,” her mother said brusquely as she opened the door. “That’s just who you are. That’s what you’ll do.”

Fowler was thinking about this as she listened to Captain Hartz lead a discussion of Colonel Hal Moore and his efforts in the Ia Drang Valley. It was Hartz’s view that officers must be noble, that they must care deeply for their soldiers, that they must never complain down the ranks, that they should never ask their soldiers to do anything they wouldn’t do themselves. Since nobody but Pulowski would’ve argued this, Hartz ran the leadership seminar as something of a film and literature appreciation course, a gut in which the best traits of an officer could be confirmed by film clips, passages from the field manual, information from Petraeus’s counterinsurgency manual, object lessons taken from previous deployments, pamphlets on the rules of engagement.

During most of the fall, Fowler had kept her mouth shut. The seasons had changed outside the wooden casements of the battalion’s briefing room, which was where they’d held their class. But on this, the final day of lecture, Hartz had cued the movie We Were Soldiers to the scene where Hal Moore addresses his troops as they depart for the Ia Drang Valley, and then settled down in his rolling chair behind his desk and gave the class a very long and knowing stare — or at least a stare that Fowler believed was meant to appear knowing, while twiddling a pencil in his small, neat hands.

“Every damn Hollywood movie got the Vietnam War wrong,” Hartz said. “That’s what the real Colonel Moore said before he made this movie. Why did they get it wrong? What did they get wrong? Why should it matter to you that four hundred Americans held out against four thousand Vietnamese soldiers one November day in the Ia Drang Valley, on a mountain that was of no clear military value? And more than that, why did so many people see this movie?”

Fowler knew the answer to this question. Everybody in the room did. The answer was that Hal Moore represented all the good qualities in an officer: he loved his wife, he prayed with his kids, he refused to abandon his troops in the heat of the battle, he swore and promised that he would never leave anyone behind, and he was always the first one off the helicopter. Anderson, an infantry lieutenant from Delta Company, raised his hand and said, “Because he’s a badass, sir?”

There was laughter here, some snickering; all along, during the entire fall, there had been an undercurrent of resistance to the class, a consensus that the good-hearted and noble points that Hartz had been assigned to make were so boring and so preordained that the only interesting thing for anyone to do was to make fun of them.

“You think that’s it?” Hartz said. Since they’d watched the movie, Hartz had taken to emphasizing his Oklahoma accent, in imitation of the actor who’d played Mel Gibson’s loyal sergeant major before going on to narrate The Big Lebowski . “You think that the thing that makes an officer great is being a badass?”

“It was pretty sweet when he shot that dude who was coming at him with a bayonet,” Anderson put in, grinning thickly for the benefit of the room.

Her guess was that Anderson imagined himself as the fierce and courageous sergeant, who’d buried himself in the ground and saved his lost platoon.

“That was luck,” Hartz said. “I’m looking for principles.”

“He was nice to that one guy,” said Lieutenant Weazer, a whey-haired lieutenant in Delta, who was the youngest of the group.

“Which guy was that, Weazer?”

Weazer stuttered and flushed. He was shy, she knew, and religious — and married, with a five-year-old kid — though he was also, at the same time, sleeping with Shoemaker. She’d already guessed the character that Weazer had identified with. “The guy he prayed with,” Weazer said. “In the church that time.”

“Yes, well…,” Hartz said.

“You mean the guy who got his face shot off in the end,” said Anderson. “The principle there is don’t be a fucking weak-ass.”

Fowler faded out from the discussion at that point — or tried to, anyway. She glanced at Pulowski, who was sitting in the back, with his laptop open. He’d convinced Hartz that he took notes that way, but Fowler knew for a fact that he generally gamed. She’d slept with him the night before and now she imagined his penis, how unguarded it had looked when she wrapped her hand around it, or when it flopped back against his belly on the bed. There hadn’t been any shots of Mel Gibson like that.

“I think people like the movie,” she said, “because it makes them feel better that there’s someone perfect around like Mel Gibson to fix everything.”

“Sorry? What’s that, Fowler? Did you say something?”

Instead of imaging herself as Mel Gibson, worried and obsessed with duty, poring over pictures of Custer at his dining room table, she tried imagining herself and Pulowski someplace else entirely, doing something completely frivolous … Skiing. In the French Alps. But the vision wouldn’t jell completely. “I’m just saying that Colonel Moore lost a bunch of men in that battle,” Fowler said. “So if I’d been in a battle like that, and lost that many people, I wouldn’t write a book about it.”

“Are you saying that he did something wrong tactically?”

The movie involved four hundred men fighting to hold a single clearing on a mountaintop against four thousand well-armed fighters, who were living underground in a fortified position. Tactically, it was about as useful to her as learning Chinese. “Sir, I guess I’m going to leave the tactical assessment to the big boys like Anderson here,” she said. “I was thinking that we were watching the film more as an instruction manual for how an officer should act, and I’m just saying that it’s interesting to me that Colonel Moore wrote the book and he comes off as being pretty perfect, generally. If he’d really been all the things he says he was, he wouldn’t have needed to, I think.”

“That doesn’t even make sense, Fowler,” Hartz said. “He either did those things or he didn’t. Are you denying that he stayed with his men? He never lied to them. He risked his life to bring the bodies of his men back. Or are you saying those aren’t good examples of how to lead?”

She thought of the nice clapboard house with a big screen porch that Mel Gibson and his hot wife had lived in during the movie. This time, she imagined Pulowski in a nightgown coming in to pet her cheek, while she stared at Custer’s massacre. Pulowski having tea for Waldorf’s and Dykstra’s wives. These daydreams were funny and arousing, good dreams, far more interesting to her than anything she’d seen in a movie. “Actually,” she said, “I don’t see why everybody seems to think he’s just a badass. I mean, who the hell doesn’t know that you’re not supposed to abandon your men? Or that you ought to be the first in, first out? It’s not exactly rocket-science principles of leadership, sir.” She riffled through her notebook of Hartz’s handouts. “You gave them to us on the first day of class. Besides, if you asked his wife how to take care of his kids, she probably would have said the same thing. What I’m saying is that he seems conceited to me, sir. He says he cares about his men, but if that was true, then his men would’ve been the subject of the movie. Instead, we get all this stuff about how he went to Harvard, and how many books he has, and how nice and sweet he is to all his children — I mean, I don’t know about you, sir, but if I had a commanding officer telling me how perfect he was all the time, I’d get a little bit tired of that, don’t you think?”