The Scummers

Thirty-Nine

221 Thirty-Nine North Depot Activity Romulus, New York September 1961 No one ever asked me about the deer. After we got off guard duty that morning, Kraus held the platoon outside the barracks on the pavement in the bright morning sunshine. He wanted to know if anyone knew how the deer got there. Hell, I didn’t know how the deer got there, but I knew who put it there. But Kraus didn’t ask me that. And I wouldn’t have told him if he had. Screw him. Kraus kept up the questioning for two weeks. Kraus dismissed the platoon and we went back to the barracks and turned our weapons into the armory, another room, like the guard mount room, built to repel the Communists. We shoved our weapons through the opening in the heavy wire mesh of the window, the armory guys checking each one as they put the guns on their racks. No one on NDA, except MPs on guard duty, was allowed to carry a weapon, to have a weapon in his possession, or to be in possession of live ammunition. The armory guys counted each round of ammunition turned in by each MP. I wondered about the variety of the weapons. Seems as though we had a few of just about everything the army was using at the time, or didn’t have any other use for: .45 caliber pistols, our standard sidearm; stubby 12-guage riot-type shotguns with thick stocks and bayonet mounts; short little .30 caliber carbines; .30 caliber M1 Garands , left over from World War II and Korea; even some .45 caliber “grease guns,” short, chunky little submachine guns that had a habit of misfiring, or parts falling off in your hands. Our patrol trucks had 222 heavy, waist-high machine gun mounts on the back, welded in the middle of the bed. The mounts were for .30 caliber machine guns. There were no .30 caliber machine guns at NDA. To have an unauthorized weapon was a security violation. At NDA, every fucking thing could be made into a security violation, and the punishment would fit the crime. Open the wrong door— maybe a reprimand, maybe confined to the post. Have an unauthorized weapon—go to the stockade. It was Kraus’s favorite game, trying to catch his own men in security violations. It was what he lived for. I only hoped it would be what he eventually died for. And the funny thing was, we did not have a stockade at NDA. If they really wanted to lock your ass up, they had to send you to some other place. Or maybe all of NDA was a stockade. Made sense to me. The routine of the depot, at least what we MPs knew of it, was as dull as the guard duty. The whole idea of the depot was to remain as unobtrusive as possible, to be quiet, to have no incidents of any kind, to hide from everybody—right there in the middle of the Finger Lakes in beautiful Upstate New York. And that was the routine of the MPs. They wanted us to stay low, stay quiet, no incidents. And that is what we tried to do, most of us, anyway. Me included. All I wanted was to stay clear of Starker, and to keep Kraus from finding some way to put my ass in jail. Every morning there was guard mount for the MPs and an hour or so later the civilians arrived to work, most of them driving in from Geneva, eight or nine miles away, and from other small communities . A few of the top people on the depot were civilians, but, 223 mostly, they were just grunts like us, doing jobs that MPs or ordinance people were not trained to do. They seemed to come and go like ghosts, driving their cars slowly along the depot’s one main road, never making a wrong move, driving or walking past the guard posts, flashing their security badges, seldom looking the MPs in the eye. The depot was like a funeral; the civilians were the mourners. Once the mourners arrived at the funeral, the depot was quiet as a tomb. As MPs, we never paid much attention to the civilians. I guess, during the time I was there, I looked at their security badges thousands of times as they passed in and...