Chapter 8 - The Stand at Gate Four
By 0600 on Friday morning, the rain had turned into a steady, freezing mist that hung over the Kentucky-Tennessee border like a wet wool blanket.
Gate Four at Fort Campbell is the main commercial entrance. It’s six lanes of reinforced concrete, guarded by hydraulic vehicle barriers, chain-link fences topped with razor wire, and guard shacks manned by military police with rifles slung across their chests.
The wind was coming out of the north, cold enough to turn the breath into white puffs that vanished into the gray dawn.
I sat in the front seat of my Buick, parked in the gravel turnaround fifty yards outside the federal boundary line, where the state highway begins.
Beside me, sitting in the passenger seat with a thermos of hot peppermint tea on his lap, was Frank Miller. His crutches were laid across the back seat, alongside three cardboard boxes packed with four hundred photocopies of the Ripcord radio transcripts that Donald Mercer’s daughter had spent all night running off at a twenty-four-hour print shop in Clarksville.
"Your heater core is leaking, Quinn," Frank said, sniffing the sweet, metallic scent of warm antifreeze coming through the vents.
"I know," I said. "Arthur said he’d fix it back in ninety-eight. He didn't get around to it before he had his stroke, and I never found a mechanic who didn't try to charge me eight hundred dollars for a fifty-dollar brass valve."
"It smells like an old tractor," Frank muttered, but he pulled his wool collar tighter and smiled.
Across the highway, parked along the shoulder of the state road, four pickup trucks had pulled up in the dark.
They weren't active-duty vehicles. They were old F-150s, rusted at the wheel wells, carrying bumper stickers from the American Legion, the VFW, and the Vietnam Veterans of America.
Men were getting out of the cabs. Old men. Men with silver ponytails, men with ballcaps displaying embroidered ribbons from the A Shau, the Ia Drang, and the Iron Triangle. Some walked with canes. Some wore their old field jackets, the olive fabric washed out to the color of sage.
They didn't carry picket signs. They didn't shout slogans.
They simply walked across the wet gravel, took boxes of the photocopies out of my back seat, and stood along the edge of the access lane, handing the white papers to the drivers of every supply truck, delivery van, and civilian commuter waiting to clear the gate.
"Word travels fast when an old woman gets mad," Frank said softly, watching three more trucks pull into the turnaround.
"Soldiers have big mouths, Frank," I said. "Especially when they think somebody’s trying to steal their lunch."
At 0715, a convoy of three black government Suburbans turned off the state highway, their amber warning lights flashing, heading toward the priority access lane for the dedication ceremony.
Inside the second vehicle, clearly visible through the rain-streaked tinted glass, was the gray-haired form of Arthur Vance, sitting beside a two-star general from the Department of the Army Protocol Office.
The lead Suburban slowed as it reached the gate.
Standing in the center of the lane, directly beneath the flashing yellow caution light of the barrier, was Staff Sergeant Marcus Reese.
He was in his service dress blues. The gold stripes on his sleeves were crisp, his jump boots polished until they shone like mirrors, the blue infantry cord looped over his right shoulder. Pinned above his medals was a single, tarnished brass crest—the one with the two deep scratches across the raptor's wing.
The Suburban tapped its horn. A short, sharp blast.
Marcus didn't move.
He stood at the position of attention, his eyes locked on the horizon, his hands flat against the seams of his trousers.
The driver’s side window of the lead vehicle rolled down. A captain from the provost marshal’s office stuck his head out into the mist.
"Staff Sergeant, what are you doing in the travel lane? Clear the approach!"
Marcus didn't turn his head. He raised his voice, the parade-ground thunder of an NCO carrying across the wet concrete:
"Captain! Under the provisions of Army Regulation six-hundred dash twenty, paragraph four dash three, I am reporting an unresolved safety hazard affecting the primary route of the official party!"
"What hazard, Sergeant?" the Captain barked, stepping out into the rain.
May you like
Marcus pointed his white-gloved hand toward the side of the road, where forty old men in olive-drab jackets stood in the mist, holding white sheets of paper in their scarred hands.
"The truth, sir," Marcus shouted, his voice echoing off the concrete barriers. "And it doesn't have a visitor's pass."
