Crane Dee - Iron bravo: hearts, minds, and sergeants in the U.S. Army

Am I ready?

Did they teach me enough? Did they tell me the truth about fighting? Was my training any damn good at all? Are my officers any good? Will Logistics screw up again? Will my .50 jam when I need it most?

If I get popped, will they get me out? Will the fast-movers blow me out of my shorts by mistake? Do the bosses have their heads shoved up their butts? Does anybody here really know what the hell theyre doing? Do I know what the hell Im doing? Will I choke? Will I fuck up beyond all recognition?

Will I die out here?

This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

IRON BRAVO
A Bantam Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published March 1995
Bantam paperback edition/April 1996

All rights reserved.
Copyright 1995 by Mair Stroud and Associates.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 94-22187

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

eISBN: 978-0-307-81526-2

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v3.1

CONTENTS

Fighting Joe Hooker
once said
with that tart unbridled tongue of his
that made so many needless enemies
Who ever saw a dead cavalryman
the phrase stings
with a needle sharpness
just or not
but even he was never heard to say
Who ever saw a dead congressman
and yet he was a man
with a sharp tongue.

S TEPHEN V INCENT B ENET
commenting on the dead at the First Battle of Bull Run in the poem The Congressmen

CHAPTER ONE

CRANE

Crane lived alone.

Every night he did sets of military fifties with his feet propped up on the ladder-back chair beside his bed, his hands braced on the hardwood floor, cranking them out in fast sets of five, puffing and huffing through the count. He could feel the bones in his body like bamboo machinery within a casing of blood and flesh, feel his muscles tug and stretch, eyes fixed on the worn wooden planks, on one peg in one single board, his mind empty, watching but not seeing the wooden slats of the floor come at him and pull back and then come up again, as if someone was opening and closing a coffin lid to make sure the guy was still dead.

When Crane could do no more of these, say two hundred or some nights it was threesome nights it was only fiftythen hed let go and hed slam, shaking and boneless, onto the wooden floor and then hed roll over and stare up at the ceiling of his apartment.

Hed stare at the fan going around, an old wooden-blade fan like the one that lifer assassin in Apocalypse Now had been staring atan inside joke for Craneand hed lie there for a moment, trying to keep his mind blank, which was sort of like trying to drive with your eyes closed, but sooner or later hed realize he was starting to think about the unit and then hed realize he was already thinking about the unit so it was time for crunches.

Crunches were hard the way Crane did themhands behind the neck and lifting the shoulders with the belly muscleschin jerking down toward his flexed knees, not a big move, but hard still, especially if youre forty-nine.

Crane did these in bursts of five, until the pain in the belly was serious pain, like a muscle was about to rip, or when the light in the room got slightly pink in color from the blood that was pounding through his head.

Crunches done, Crane would lie back again, chest heaving and his breath raw in the back of his throat, watching that fan go around, hearing the muted beating of the blades, and the sound of the wind in the trees like a river running past.

After a while his lungs would stop burning and hed crawl up on the side of the bed, sit there for a minute, head pounding, and then hed reach under the bed and push the .45 out of the way and tug out the easy-curl bar.

Hed rest his elbows on the tops of his knees and curl the bar with sixty pounds on it, roll it out and wind it back in, again and again, watching the machinery workall upper-body stuff because that was where the mind was and you had to tire the mind out somehow, otherwise it would give you trouble.

Behind him the empty bed was like a huge snow-covered field and he tried not to think about it. Carla used to ask him, Dee, why the hell dont you come to bed? And Crane would try that, stop working out, come in and lie down with her, cuddle up, try to get to sleep.

That part was very sweet, nothing about sex or trying to make something happen, but just being there in the bed with someone he loved and who was a good person too.

It was sweet, very sweet, so of course it didnt last. What would happen, not every night, but most, was Crane would have one of thosenot a dream, really, because it wasnt anything in his dreams that bothered him. Crane didnt have dreams. Not ones that he could remember. But most nights, something would snap him up and, well, Carla found it hard to deal with, and she was a girl who needed her sleep.

It seemed to Crane that it wasnt ever the big things that killed his friendships with women, it was the small stuff, the day-to-day. No matter how hard he tried, there was just something about him, something rocky inside that made him hard to take. So Crane understood that Carla needed her sleep and that what was happening to him was tough on her.

Hell, Crane needed his sleep too, but he understood.

He understood completely.

But the thing was there, and after a while Carla went back to staying at her place. They still saw each otherCarla was a receptionist in a doctors office, and she worked part-time at Harrys Uptown on Poyntzbut Carla was really too young to understand how some things had no solution, some things just had to be handled any way you could handle them, and working out late like Crane did, well, that was the way he handled it.

Crane knew a lot of guys who had handled it very, very differently, put it out of the way big-time, so this looked pretty reasonable to him.

But Carla, working for a doctor, thought that there werent too many things that couldnt be fixed by medicine or doctors or having a positive attitude. Carla had read a couple of magazine articles about Cranes problemhis dysfunction was what she called itand she had a theory that Crane was in something called deep denial and was suffering from hypervigilance and was not confronting effectively, and more along those lines. Carla had her doctor all primed up and was talking about something called Prozac or Pronzac or something like that. Whatever it was, there was no way Crane was going to take any of it, and no way he was going to sit around, chat with the docs about why he was having trouble or even