The Liberators Read online

  “Uh-huh, Nick, you just go ahead; go right on hearing stuff that nobody said and the only Special Marine Unit you’re gonna see is the kind of unit where they strap you down on your bed for your own safety.”

  “Ahhh,” I said then, turning on him with a crazy wide grin and crazier wide arms like I was about to give him one of those big hugs of mine that he always said he never wanted. I knew better, though.

  “Stop it, you,” the big bruiser said, backing away from me, like a bear afraid of a squirrel.

  So I did, I stopped advancing just like he told me to. And he stopped retreating. He didn’t stop eying me suspiciously, though.

  “You’re still grinning at me kind of nutty, Nicky, and like you know something I don’t know and probably don’t want to know.”

  I had to laugh. The guy could just always somehow make me laugh at any situation.

  “No,” he said firmly. “I know what you’re thinking and the answer is no, so don’t even waste your breath saying it. The regular Marines is going to be hard enough and dangerous enough without us needing to go join some extra crazy daredevil version that they’re apparently just now making up, out of nowhere.”

  “It’s not out of nowhere; it’s from the top guys, it’s all over the announcement. You can just about smell the danger and thrill right off the poster. You wanna know where nowhere is, that’s Ypsilanti, Michigan. That, my dear Klecko, is nowhere. Which, by the way, I rescued you from and am still patiently awaiting my thank-you for.”

  Now I’d gone and done it. I’d turned the bear back into a bear, and I had to shake my furry tail quick to squirrel out of range of his lunge.

  “Rescued?” He growled as convincingly as any bear I’d ever meet. “Nardini, you kidnapped me. Right out of a whole complete life that I had with a great job and the best girl and everything. You are the only reason I am this far into the danger zone, and now you wanna talk me into going further?”

  He hadn’t said one untrue or unfair thing. He never did, ever, as a matter of fact. There was no decent response to his argument.

  He huff-chuff-sighed, like a steam locomotive pulling into a station.

  “Why, Nicky? Tell me that, huh? Why?”

  “Because, Zacky, you know just as well as I do that you and me always did this. Exactly this. Remember? If there was a higher, a tougher, a bigger, a further —”

  “A morer,” he said solemnly.

  “Of course, you remember. All-out, every time, that was us.”

  “Until the day I couldn’t cut it anymore, Nick.”

  “That was us,” I say, talking over him. “And now it’s gonna be us again. Whatever special force the Marines have in mind, we already know they mean us. We are a special force already, you and me. They are in for the fight and so are we. And if you’re in a fight … well, I don’t gotta tell you.”

  “When you’re in a fight you take it to ’em, you don’t wait on them.”

  “And, when you’re in a fight …?”

  “You don’t stop, until there is no fight.”

  “Buddy, I think you just defined the United States Marine Corps.”

  There was an odd, funny minute of silence between us then, and for once I couldn’t read my old pal so clearly.

  “I didn’t mean that,” he finally said in a gravelly sort of whisper.

  “What? Didn’t mean what?”

  “The whole kidnapping bit. It’s not like that.”

  “Ah, yeah, Kleck, I know. I mean, for one thing, look at the size of you.”

  “Ha,” he said, still seeming too serious a fellow to convince me otherwise with any kind of half laugh. “Listen, I gotta go over to the rec hall. Feel like I need to punch the heavy bag for a little while.”

  “Sure,” I said, “that sounds like a good idea.”

  Without saying anything more he did a quick and militarily sound heel-pivot and marched briskly out the exit.

  It was about fifteen seconds later when he presented his big cranium just inside the halfway-opened door. “Aren’t you coming?” he asked, sounding almost like he’d gotten lost. “Who’s supposed to hold the bag for me otherwise? I thought you enjoyed holding the bag for me.”

  He certainly seemed to believe he was involved in some kind of debate or other.

  “I do,” I said, following him out the doorway.

  It was a quick walk to the rec hall, and I let him set the pace. He was rolling out his patented Klecko silent treatment, eyes forward and mouth shut, but I could sense the sourness of his mood begin to lift. We were, after all, closer to his comfort zone with every step we took toward punching stuff.

  The silence, though.

  Silence was maybe my least favorite thing in the world. Give me noise any day. Any minute of every day. I expected to encounter a lot of horrifying things once I got to the war. But I was still betting that when I came out again, silence was going to remain right up there at the top of the list of unbearables.

  This, of course, was well known to my best friend, who was giving me a whole bath in the silence stuff.

  “So it’s a yes, then?” I blurted, just a bit too loud to not sound nutty, once we’d stepped into the rec hall.

  He stopped short, and as he did, my nose left its impression in the back of his khaki green T-shirt. Then he rammed a bam of his elbow into my ribs, just to put a bit of distance between us.

  He was already popping lightly at the bag by the time I made my wounded, winded, hunched-over way to him.

  More silence. I didn’t like it.

  And then the lug spoke.

  “You know my answer, Nicky. It’s the same answer as last time, and the time before that, and so on all the way back.”

  He spoke real soft, but he made well sure that at least the bag got his message emphatically.

  It hurt my ribs to laugh, but I laughed. It hurt my ribs to hold the bag while he savaged it, but I held the bag.

  The buddy system. Who said it wasn’t a real thing, huh?

  I don’t know why I ever even doubted it. He almost had me convinced on the flat feet problem. But of course they welcomed Klecko and me with open arms into the Marine Parachute Battalion specialist training program. We were as fit and ready as anybody — which, as it turns out, wasn’t entirely fit or entirely ready. Because basic training at Parris Island hadn’t, in reality, gotten us into the superb physical condition we had thought.

  What basic had done was get us into condition to get into condition. Paramarine-style condition.

  Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, is where we go to jump school. Over sixteen further-intensified weeks of training, we do in fact learn to jump. And to run. And to climb and to fall and to navigate and to starve and to broil and to sweat such a sweat that I cannot believe it is coming out of my own pores. I could swear it is actual, honest-to-goodness USMC green, the stuff that oozes out of me. They push us so hard to see what we are capable of physically — and find out where our weaknesses might be psychologically — I am sure that if this were anywhere else but the Corps, then much of it would be illegal. Maybe it is anyway.

  I do all right. Never end one day with an ounce of anything left in my tank, but also never fail to answer the call to roll out of the sack in the morning and take on whatever new challenge they want to throw at us.

  It changes a guy, no question about it. The Marines know what they’re doing, especially the special services training like this. It might look like they’re just in it to see if they can kill a guy within the allotted sixteen weeks that they get a shot at him. But of course it’s not that way at all. It’s exactly the opposite. They want to make the guy unkillable. And make him a killer elite while they’re at it.

  And I wouldn’t guess they’ve ever done this with greater success than they have with Zachary Klecko of Sandusky, Ohio.

  “How is this possible?” I ask, breathless from both shock and exertion as I reach the top of the jump tower. It’s one of the instructor’s favorite conditioning skill drills, having guys
race two at a time up to the platform — not to jump, but to race back down again. Klecko has gotten to the top a good five seconds before me.

  “I don’t know,” he says evenly, without even offering a little courtesy wheeze to spare my feelings. “But it’s about to happen again.”

  The instructor’s whistle shreds the air, signaling the start of the race to the bottom.

  It can be more dangerous going down than going up. They have stressed this to us more than once and insisted how much more careful we need to take it on the down run if we don’t want to wind up broken leathernecks.

  I must still be twenty feet from the finish when I start hearing my good buddy’s distinctive crunchy-snorty chuckle, the one that sounds like he’s trying to force dry saltine crackers out through his nose. “That’s right,” he adds for extra encouragement, “you be good and careful there, now.”

  I approach him where he’s standing next to the instructor, who’s slapping him on the back and nodding, just a dog biscuit and a scratch behind the ear short of the full “good boy” treatment. Behind them another dozen guys are lined up waiting for their turn to go head-to-head in the same drill. I try to suppress my heavy breathing, and show Klecko upturned palms meant to be interpreted as What’s so funny?

  I finally ask him, raspy but dignified, “Did I miss something?”

  Klecko checks his watch with this big, sweeping gesture, rotating his arm like the reverse windup motion of the biggest jerk pitchers in the Eastern Shore League.

  “Yeah, lunch, I think,” he says, to the tremendous appreciation of twelve jumping green jerks of the USMC, all of ’em laughing, clapping.

  It so happens that I did not miss lunch, and everyone knows it, because we were all told beforehand that we could head straight over for chow once we were done with our drill. Klecko certainly knows it, and he’s still grinning away as he lays his muscley arm across my shoulders and leads me in the direction of the mess hall.

  “That was fun, eh, Nick?” he says, meaning every bit of it without managing to cover himself in fink at the same time. Probably another gift nobody has but him.

  “Fun?” I say like I am distracted by something else, though nothing else interests me at all just now. “Oh, I guess I didn’t notice the fun part.”

  “Ah, don’t be such a drip. C’mon, you played for the Centreville Red Sox, for cryin’ out loud. You played in front of crowds; people knew your name and screamed when you belted one out of the park or gunned somebody down at the plate with a perfect strike from the deepest part of the outfield …”

  “Well, I do have a good arm. Not a lot of left fielders —”

  “Right. And that, Nick, was the first time anybody’s clapped for me. Since high school at least. And even that time it was —”

  “For when you got thrown out at first after bashing a ball off the wall.”

  I put my arm up and around his big dumb shoulders, too.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Y’know, I’m doing pretty good here, a lot better than I did when we were playing ball together. I’m getting along great, with mostly a great bunch of guys. And I’m starting to feel it, y’know, Nick, about getting into this thing, getting into action and fighting whoever has it coming to ’em, y’know? And I’m ready. I’m so ready …”

  “Yeah, what is that? No offense, I knew you’d find a way to be good at whatever we had to do, but I wasn’t expecting you to turn into the star of the Marine paratroop program. How did all this happen? I mean, you didn’t even used to do so good with heights, now all of a sudden you turn into one of the great apes.”

  “Love,” he says, happily, seriously.

  “Love,” I repeat as we push through the swinging double doors into the noisy mess. “Love made you bigger, stronger, faster, leaner, fearless …”

  “Yup,” he says, without raising his voice, but still managing to make himself heard effortlessly over the hundred chattering, clattering marines eating with their mouths open and their tin utensils beating out no rhythm at all. “Love, and a year in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Built camps up in the mountains, planted thousands of trees. They made me a lumberjack, man, how do you like that. Me, way up in these trees sawing away, making the forests all right. Thank you, CCC, is all I got to say. Did I never tell you about that, Nicky?”

  “Ah, no, Zack, I don’t think you did.”

  “Oh, right, y’know, that might have been your big-shot year. Remember, first year of pro ball, thought you were the golden boy and you were kind of a rat. I think that was the year, and you weren’t in touch at all and that’s how you didn’t get told.”

  “Zack? You were up a tree. How was I supposed to be in contact?”

  We are at the halfway point in the line and I can see him, the big baboon. He’s playing with me now, acting like I’m way down on his list of interests, somewhere the other side of the succotash and Spam they seem to be slinging at us today.

  “You didn’t know I was up a tree,” he says wearily. “And my ma said there were no calls or letters from you.”

  I am fast running out of dark corners to hide my guilt.

  “Ah, your ma. How’s she doin’, Zack?”

  “She’s great. She was askin’ about you. Askin’ if you were still a bighead stuck-up rat and all that.”

  “Your ma never said that about me.”

  “She’s too polite. She was thinking it, though. I know her very well.”

  This, apparently, is a thing with him, a real thing that bothers him, that I had not even noticed — which automatically means that I’m guilty. I am about to try to redeem myself — how, I don’t know — when he cuts me off just before getting to the head of the line.

  “I want to thank you, Nick. For bringing me here. You did me a big favor.”

  That big looping curveball catches me looking. He gets served his slop just like that, what with there being no choices to make and all. I get slopped in right behind him and we find a couple seats opposite each other at the end of a long table.

  “You’re welcome,” I say. “Bet your ma doesn’t feel that way about it, though, am I right?”

  “Oh yeah, you’re right about that one. And she wasn’t even polite about it.”

  “And we’re not even killed yet.”

  “What did I say about that, Nicky? I mean it.” He manages to sound both helpless and menacing.

  “All right, all right, I won’t talk about our deaths anymore. And I’ll steer clear of your ma for a while, huh?”

  “Two years, minimum. Oh, and Rosie, too. Turns out you were way off there. She did not agree with you about this, and said if she saw you now she’d pop a line of rivets straight across your forehead. I’ve seen her work that rivet gun, too, Nick.”

  “Starting to sound like I’ll be safer overseas.”

  The final week is almost overwhelming, all kinds of sensations weaving in and out of each other and binding up to make every bit of it that much stronger. The physical challenges, forced marches, nearly vertical terrain grappling with no equipment but a pair of marine boots and a pair of marine hands to get the job done. That forty percent figure that was estimated based on US Army paratroop training and the one battalion of paramarines who went through just ahead of us was no joke and it was no boast. Seems to me like it might even have been an underestimate.

  So we have a lot more elbow room as we near the finish than we had at the start. Mental exhaustion is catching up on physical exhaustion and you can see it on faces everywhere. There is the anxiety around what is to come next, and then one more completely unexpected twist.

  “Are you gonna miss it here?” Klecko says to me as we line up for the final physical test before the last jump.

  “Yeah?” I say, surprised to hear it myself. It’s one of those questions you would never think about, for sure never ask yourself, unless somebody brought it up. Or unless you were a guy like Klecko. (So, if you were Klecko. Since there’s nobody like Klecko.)

  “We’re with a lot of goo
d men here, Nick,” he says.

  “We are,” I say. “Which is a good thing, because wherever we’re going, we’re all going together. Second Marine Parachute Battalion.”

  “Yeah, good thing, then. I guess all the jerks washed out with the forty percent.”

  “That’d be my guess.”

  The diabolically piercing whistle, which I am not going to miss very much, calls us to the line for the start of the drill. The instructor reels off the names of the pairs and the running order for each of them to take on the “bring ’em back alive” challenge. It’s a timed obstacle course, modified for a lot more marching up steep inclines and negotiating barbed wire and booby traps than you’d normally see in one of these things. On the bright side, there is less climbing involved, and less sprinting.

  Only fair, since you have to do the whole thing with your buddy draped over your shoulder in a fireman’s carry the whole way. And then you switch places, and your buddy has to carry you.

  I would not say I’m looking forward to this one. I would say I’m the only person in the whole camp who isn’t looking forward to it.

  Not looking forward to my turn at it, that is. There are even bets going around, having nothing to do with my estimated time, but with whether I will die, or faint, or break a bone. Betting was so hot on my nose turning out to be the money bone — when I inevitably fell on my face with a full Klecko pack on my back — that they had to take it off the board. My spine then became quite popular.

  Six pairs across the whole camp have been selected for the field, which is an honor in itself for sure. Of the six, the team of Klecko and Nardini is slotted … well, now. Sixth. It is a kind of honor. It certainly isn’t due to random names out of a hat. The show needs a big finale, and if not superb athletic accomplishment, then a train wreck will do.

  Zack has his arm draped hard over my shoulders as the first pairing goes off. He really squeezes, as if he thinks I might try and take a powder before I’m mashed into one. It’s a warm and brotherly kind of embrace, in the midst of the crowd of cheering, hollering paramarines who are about to ship off to someplace nasty, together, like a giant family of skyjumping lunatics. But even through the excitement and the roaring and the fraternity of the moment, I can feel the rumble of Klecko’s laughter through his rib cage. Then, another jump school joker walks up and makes the gimme-gimme motion with his hand at Klecko. Money is exchanged, laughter is shared, and the guy moves on.