I can get their attention, that’s likely to get them killed.”
He pushed himself off the stairs.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll need some help, and I think Thomas—who is about as good a noncom as I’ve ever known— is going to set a speed record out there and back.”
He led Jack into one of the tarpaper-roofed buildings. There was a huge refrigerator in one room, and a huge freezer sat beside it. The doors to both were locked shut with heavy chains through their handles, and secured with massive padlocks.
Lunsford opened both.
He pointed to two galvanized iron washtubs.
“I load,” he said. “You chop the ice.”
The freezer held huge blocks of ice, and the refrigerators cases of beer, as well as food.
There were ice tongs in the freezer, and Jack picked them up. “Shit!” he proclaimed. They had frozen to his hand.
“You don’t look that stupid,” Lunsford said, and hurried him to a water spigot and got him unfrozen after a moment.
“I don’t think you’ll have to write this down, Lieutenant, having had a painful lesson, which caught your attention, but metal at forty degrees below zero sticks to the hand.”
“I feel like a fucking fool,” Jack said, examining his angry red fingers. “I knew better than that.”
“Feeling like a fucking fool is the first step to acquiring—more important, remembering—knowledge,” Lunsford said unctuously. “Can I trust you with the ice pick, or will you stab yourself in the hand with it?”
Jack picked up one of the blocks of ice, put it into the galvanized tub, and began hacking at it.
“After you ram knowledge down the throats of the unwilling to learn, it is necessary to pat them on the head,” Lunsford said. “It’s something like giving a dog a bone. Unfortunately, the Army doesn’t recognize this universal truth, and officers have to pay for the beer themselves.”
When there were three cases of beer covered with ice in the tubs, Lunsford carefully chained the refrigerator and freezer doors again.
“Now we go outside, and act as if we haven’t moved, until our reluctant students show up, huffing and puffing and feeling sorry for themselves,” he said.
With Thomas leading the column, the men trotted up to them five minutes later.
Master Sergeant Thomas saluted.
“Sir, the detail is formed,” he said.
Lunsford returned the salute casually. He did not get up.
“Put the men at at ease, please, Sergeant,” Lunsford said.
Thomas executed an about-face movement and bellowed, “At ease!”
The men relaxed, and put their hands behind their backs.
“As Sergeant Thomas may have told you,” Lunsford said. “Lieutenant Portet will now critique our little operation. Lieutenant, will you please stand up and face the men?”
Jack, feeling very awkward, got to his feet and looked at fifteen black, scornful, unfriendly faces.
“We are now going to play truth or consequences,” Lunsford said. “And we will start with Lieutenant Portet. Lieutenant, what is the first thing you think of when you hear Sergeant Thomas attempt to speak Swahili?”
Jack looked at Thomas and was horrified to hear himself blurt, “He sounds like a white man.”
That was too much for Master Sergeant Thomas.
“With all respect, Lieutenant, I think I learned my Swahili the same way you learned yours, from a missionary.”
“At the Presidio, you mean, Sergeant Thomas?” Lunsford asked sympathetically.
The Army Language School was at the Presidio, in San Francisco, California.
“Yes, sir,” Thomas said righteously. “The instructor told us he learned Swahili as a missionary in the Congo.”
“All those who remember what I said to you the first time we met about ‘never trust anyone,’ and ‘always remember that things are very seldom what they first appear to be,’ raise your hands,” Lunsford said.
One by one, fourteen soldiers, feeling like schoolchildren, raised their hands.
“You don’t remember me saying that, Sergeant Thomas?” Lunsford asked.
Sergeant Thomas raised his hand.
“You may now lower your hands,” Lunsford said.
There were some smiles as they did so.
“Since you all obviously need it, I will now prove that you should never trust anyone,” Lunsford said. “I told Sergeant Thomas that Lieutenant Portet was studying to be a missionary, and that he learned how to speak Swahili in the Florida Baptist College. I lied.”
He let that sink in a moment.
“He is not, in other words, what he appears to be. I happen to know his teacher, and she assures me that Lieutenant Portet speaks Swahili, and several other Congolese dialects, as well as anyone born and raised there. Lieutenant Portet wasn’t born there, but he was raised there. He learned how to speak Swahili at the knee of the toughest black lady I