Chapter 49: Bachelor Life

The 82^nd was unique in its structure, which was organized around its equally unique readiness system. Alone among all the divisions in the Army, the 82^nd was tasked with being able to send troops anywhere on the planet within 24 hours. The average division could take weeks to get ready to move. We did it in hours.

The heart of the division consisted of three brigade combat teams; each brigade basically consisted of three battalions of parachute infantry plus an Airborne field artillery battalion. Each battalion had three parachute infantry companies plus a battery assigned from the artillery battalion. There were also a variety of other outfits attached, such as engineers, medics, transport, and even a few chaplains who jumped in with us. Technically most of the assets, including the artillery, belonged to the division and not the brigade, but that was the way it worked.

The division operated on an 18-week cycle, with each of the three brigades somewhere on a six-week element of the cycle. When I arrived, 3^rd Brigade was in the six weeks of ready cycle, which was unusual. Normally people transferred in and out during the support cycle. Support was the goof-off time, when things were relaxed. People took leaves, officers and men transferred in and out, it was low pressure. It was like being in the regular army, with regular hours and duties.

After support, you went into a six-week training cycle. That became a lot tougher. You were shooting the guns, maybe doing a jump or two, getting stuff ready to go, and working a lot longer hours. Forget about taking leave, but you’d probably still be able to sleep at home, and you might have to work some weekends.

After training you went to the six-week ready cycle. You were ready to go to war. Forget about leave. Kiss the wife or girlfriend good-bye. Within the brigade, it got even tougher. During the ready cycle of six weeks, each infantry battalion and its artillery battery were on two-week cycles of readiness. You could go home, but you couldn’t leave the area, and a lot of the guys stayed on the base anyway. During that period, you couldn’t be more than two hours away from going to war. In theory, when the shit hit the fan, they just wanted to issue you the ammo and load you on the airplane. You had two hours to get assembled and go. All the equipment, ammo, rations, and whatever were pre-packaged and pre-positioned out at the ramps at all times. The other two battalions weren’t much better, with four- and six-hour readiness periods. There were usually readiness drills and exercises to check to see if we were ready to go.

If the President decided that Lower Slobbovia needed to be taught a lesson, the ready battalion loaded onto their planes and was airborne in two hours. No excuses. The rest of the brigade would be airborne in either four or six hours, and most likely the support elements would be gone inside a day. The training brigade would get moved up to the ready brigade; the support brigade supported this and got ready to move out itself. Leaves were cancelled, and all hell broke loose. Lower Slobbovia was about to be visited by a shitload of teenagers with guns who just had their weekend plans trashed. Lower Slobbovia would wish they hadn’t been visited!

You could make the cycle your friend, but don’t ever try to buck the cycle. The cycle would always win.

On the other hand, it was very easy to make plans for anything short of war. We had calendars with six-week blocks drawn on them, and you could make plans. For instance, my first week in the battery I discussed my impending nuptials with the captain and could tell Marilyn when we could get married. I figured I would need two-weeks’ leave, starting in the middle of the week. The wedding would be on a Saturday, so if I got off duty on a Wednesday before that, I could travel to Utica, do whatever I needed to do on Thursday or Friday, get married, have a week of honeymoon, and then be able to get Marilyn down to Fayetteville by Tuesday after getting back. Since I needed to do it during a support cycle that limited us to a wedding between July 2 and July 30 of that year. If we missed that window, we would have to wait 18 weeks for the cycle to repeat, putting us into November.

I wasn’t all that hopeful. It all relied on Marilyn being organized enough to be able to get things taken care of in six months. Marilyn couldn’t organize a church cake sale, let alone a wedding. The last time we did this, she postponed the wedding from June to September. Furthermore, she had to get used to the idea that the Army wasn’t just going to let me take a weekend off to help. When Maggie got married, Marilyn tried to help and managed to lose, within 24 hours, all the lists and spreadsheets she had asked me to print out. Maggie ended up having me run the wedding. I didn’t think it was all that difficult. Pick a date, find a church, find a reception hall, pick a budget. After that, it’s just a matter of money. There were lots of banquet halls around Utica, lots of places to buy a dress, lots of limo companies. Just make a list and get it done!

Marilyn wasn’t too pleased by my attitude, nor by the fact that I wouldn’t be able to come up and help. How was I supposed to participate in pre-wedding counseling? I flat out told her I was a thousand miles away, and the last guy on the planet I was going to listen to about getting married was a guy who wasn’t allowed to get married. If her priest required it, she could find another priest. She wanted to know if I was having any of her brothers be in my wedding party; I said I wasn’t even having my own brother in it, so I didn’t see any need to balance things out. She didn’t push that one. I did promise to take some leave during the cycle before the wedding to visit, and we could see the priest then for some of the details.

I did manage to get her to set a date of July 2. The night after I got the schedule from the Captain, I had her call her priest and reserve the date. That date, and most of the others in the window were already taken, but not July 2. That was the date we selected.

After running that last Friday morning of January, Captain Harris got a phone call and summoned me into his office. “Buckman, I told battalion about your paper yesterday afternoon, and they booted it to division. You’re to report to the G-2 at division at 1400.”

I stared at the captain for a second. “Sir, it’s just a report on mathematical techniques!”

“Well, I don’t think that you’re in trouble, but you need to go over there and find out. I won’t let them shoot you without a few last words and a cigarette. My word on it!”

“Yes, sir.” Oh, shit, now what! It was just a paper on math! The paper had already been accepted into the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, which I had joined, and which the professor was a long-time member of. Furthermore, they were having their Eastern Seaboard Regional Meeting in February, and the professor was scheduled to deliver the lecture during a session on discrete mathematics.

At 1400 I found myself standing at attention in a colonel’s office, while he and some captain quizzed me about the paper. How the hell do you explain discrete mathematics, information loss and entropy, and computer networking to people who never learned what a derivative or an integral was? (Okay, that was a bit extreme. They all had taken Calculus I, but by then they had all forgotten it.)

“Excuse me, sir, permission to ask a question?”

“Granted.”

“What’s going on, sir? Am I in some sort of trouble? This was my thesis, from before I took the oath,” I asked.

The colonel smiled. “You’re not in any trouble, Lieutenant, far from it in fact.”

“Sir?”

“Captain Summers here is from the Public Information Office. We don’t get too many mathematical doctors around here and he wants to talk to you. This comes down from on high, too, so it would behoove you to cooperate.”

“Cooperate, sir? With what?”

“Captain Summers will explain. Dismissed.”

Both the PIO captain and I snapped to attention and saluted, and then left. Captain Summers dragged me back to his office and explained. Nobody seemed to mind the paper, and nobody in G-2, Intelligence, had flagged the paper because it was letting loose the nuclear secrets. Instead, it was a human-interest piece for the post newspaper and probably the Army newspaper, the Army Times, the 22-year-old PhD mathematician in the Airborne artillery.

My first thought was, “You’re kidding me, right?”

No, it got better. Somebody got the bright idea that it was a really good idea for me, in my uniform, to attend the conference in February, in Washington no less, and have pictures of me being mathematical.

“Please, God, tell me you’re kidding!” I reiterated. “I’m just a soldier, for God’s sake!”

My attitude didn’t impress the PIO officer. Astonishingly enough, this joker had gone through jump school, just like everybody else in the division. I guess if we ever needed a press release from inside a hot LZ, he would be there to write it for us. In fact, he picked up a phone, and used his authorization code to order up a long-distance phone call and had me call Professor Rhineburg. They really wanted this done! I didn’t know if they had somebody sitting in the professor’s office, but he was there and not only giving me permission to attend, he wanted me to give the lecture, with him in the audience, and not the other way around. As the Navy says, somebody had greased the ways!

I went back to the battery is a state of shock. I sat down with Captain Harris and explained what had happened. Surprisingly, he wasn’t all that surprised.

“Carl, you’re pretty unusual. You’re a 22-year-old kid who has three degrees in math and jumps out of airplanes. That ain’t exactly normal. Don’t be surprised when somebody notices.”

“Sir, I am about the most boring guy on the planet. I’m just trying to do my job.”

“Well, the Army seems to think your job is going to include doing something with these scientists, so don’t try to fight it. You should have some fun with it.”

“Sir?” Fun? This sounded like a monumental pain in the ass!

“When is this thing?” I gave him the dates of the conference, the last week in February. “And who’s going? Besides you, I mean.”

I shrugged. “No idea. I guess this publicity guy, Captain Summers. Know anything about him?”

“Not a lick. So, you’re going to DC, have some fun. It’s not going against your leave, so take a few days. They want you there, have them lay on a plane or fly you there. Get separate rooms and have some fun. There’s no lectures at night, are there?”

“I wouldn’t imagine so.”

“Lots of time after hours for some wine, women, and song,” he replied.

“Sir, I’m engaged!”

“So, I won’t tell her if you don’t. You’re a paratrooper. Just act like you’re behind enemy lines and stay out of sight. Hell, if you have to, invite her along,” he said with a grin.

I opened my mouth to protest, and then shut it. I hadn’t seen Marilyn very much since graduation, and the juices, so to speak, were backing up. She had flown out to Sill right before going back to school in the fall and that was it. I wasn’t sure where we would be, but I’d spring for the room service! “You think we could?”

“L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace! Now, get lost, I have work to do!”

I thought about what he said. Before the day was over, I contacted the publicity guy and asked him some details about where we would stay (two separate rooms, the Hilton near Dupont Circle) and transportation (he’d see about laying on a flight) and Marilyn (yes, she can come; no, I don’t want to know about her rooming arrangements). That night I called Marilyn to see if she could attend. It would be in the middle of the semester, but a few days in a luxury hotel might sway her mind, especially if I paid for the ticket.

And so it was that on the third Monday in February, after getting laughed at by Captain Harris and Lieutenant Brimley, and ignored by Lieutenant Goldstein, and being joked at in the cadence during our morning run, I found myself in an Air Force turboprop flying out of Pope Airfield at Bragg to Andrews in DC, along with my dress uniforms and Captain Summers. He was in the process of writing my acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Mathematics already, and I had to gently let him know that Alfred Nobel’s wife had cheated on him with a mathematician, and as a result Nobel hated mathematicians, and thus there was no Nobel Prize in Mathematics. I’ve heard that this is somewhat apocryphal, but it was considered common knowledge in the math business.

Marilyn was flying down at the end of classes and would take a fair bit longer to get to Washington than I did. She would fly to New York and then catch the hourly Eastern shuttle to DC. Fortunately, that landed at National, which was downtown, and not out at Dulles, at least a half hour further away. When she landed she was to call me and then take a cab in. I would meet her at the door and pay off the cabbie. It was still almost eight in the evening before she got there, looking somewhat bedraggled.

I gave her a big, long kiss, and said, “God, you look great!”

She looked in a mirror in the lobby and ran a hand through her hair. “I most certainly do not!”

“Are you hungry? Want some dinner?”

“Yes, but not until after I clean up. I think that was the dirtiest airplane I’ve ever been on!”

“You should try a Herky Bird flying out of a dirt strip,” I replied.

“I don’t know what that means, and I don’t care. I want a shower.”

“Might I suggest something from room service?” I asked, waggling my eyebrows.

“That sounds delightful, but I’ll probably fall asleep.” I didn’t know if that was a yes or no, so I grabbed her two suitcases (we were only going to be there three nights, but she packed two large suitcases) and carried them to the elevator bank. Once in our room, I asked her about room service again, and showed her the menu, and she picked out a small steak. I insisted she unpack, and then called in our orders (two small steaks, medium rare, asparagus with Hollandaise sauce, bottle of champagne, chilled.) I then cleaned up the bedroom, put her empty suitcases in the back of the closet, and laid out something for her to wear to dinner.

I had the lights dimmed appropriately when Marilyn came back out. She had taken her time, too. I had heard the water shut off, but it had been at least ten or fifteen minutes since then before she appeared. She came out of the bedroom with a demure smile and asked, “I assume you wanted me to wear this?”