The Enemy

“Six-four or six-five,” I said. “Are you prepared to go to bat on that?”

“In court?”

“It was a training accident,” I said. “We’re not going to court. This is just between you and me. Am I wasting my time looking at people less than six feet four inches tall?”

The doctor breathed in, breathed out.

“Six-three,” he said. “To be on the safe side. To allow a margin for experimental error. I’d go to bat on six-three. Count on it.”

“OK,” I said.

He shooed me out the door and hit the lights and locked up again.

Summer was sitting behind my desk when I got back, doing nothing. She was through with the gender analysis. It hadn’t taken her long. The strength lists were comprehensive and accurate and alphabetical, like most army paperwork.

“Thirty-three men,” she told me. “Twenty-three enlisted, ten officers.”

“Who are they?”

“A little bit of everything. Delta and Ranger leave was completely canceled, but they had evening passes. Carbone himself was in and out on the first, obviously.”

“We can cross him off.”

“OK, thirty-two men,” she said. “The pathologist is one of them.”

“We can take him out too.”

“Thirty-one, then,” she said. “And Vassell and Coomer are still in there. In and out on the first and in again on the fourth at seven o’clock.”

“Take them out,” I said. “They were eating dinner. Fish, and steak.”

“Twenty-nine,” she said. “Twenty-two enlisted, seven officers.”

“OK,” I said. “Now go to Post HQ and pull their medical records.”

“Why?”

“To find out how tall they are.”

“Can’t do that for the driver Vassell and Coomer had on New Year’s Day. Major Marshall. He was a visitor. His records won’t be here.”

“He wasn’t here the night Carbone died,” I said. “So you can take him out, too.”

“Twenty-eight.”

“So go pull twenty-eight sets of records,” I said.

She slid me a slip of white paper. I picked it up. It was the one I had written 973 on. Our original suspect pool.

“We’re making progress,” she said.

I nodded. She smiled and stood up. Walked out the door. I took her place behind the desk. The chair was warm from her body. I savored the feeling, until it went away. Then I picked up the phone. Asked my sergeant to get the post quartermaster on the line. It took her a few minutes to find him. I figured she had to drag him out of the mess hall. I figured I had just ruined his dinner too, as well as the pathologist’s. But then, I hadn’t eaten anything yet myself.

“Yes, sir?” the guy said. He sounded a little annoyed.

“I’ve got a question, Chief,” I said. “Something only you will know.”

“Like what?”

“Average height and weight for a male U.S. Army soldier.”

The guy said nothing, but I felt his annoyance fade away. The Quartermaster Corps buys millions of uniforms a year, and twice as many boots, all on a budget, so you can bet it knows the tale of the tape to the nearest half-inch and the nearest half-ounce. It can’t afford not to, literally. And it loves to show off its specialized knowledge.

“No problem,” the guy said. “Male adult population aged twenty to fifty as a whole in America goes five-nine and a half, and one seventy-eight. We’re overrepresented with Hispanics by comparison with the nation as a whole, which brings our median height down one whole inch to five-eight and a half. We train pretty hard, which brings our median weight up three pounds to one eighty-one, muscle being generally heavier than fat.”

“Those are this year’s figures?”

“Last year’s,” he said. “This year is only a few days old.”

“What’s the spread in height?”

“What are you looking for?”

“How many guys have we got six-three or better?”

“One in ten,” he said. “In the army as a whole, maybe ninety thousand. Call it a Super Bowl crowd. On a post this size, maybe a hundred and twenty. Call it a half-empty airplane.”

“OK, Chief,” I said. “Thanks.”

I hung up. One in ten. Summer was going to come back with twenty-eight medical charts. Nine out of ten of them were going to be for guys too small to worry about. So out of twenty-eight, if we were lucky, only two of them would need looking at. Three, if we were unlucky. Two or three, down from nine hundred seventy-three. Making progress. I looked at the clock. Eight-thirty. I smiled to myself. Shit happens, Willard, I thought.

Shit happened, for sure, but it happened to us, not Willard. Averages and medians played their little arithmetic tricks and Summer came back with twenty-eight charts and all twenty-eight of them were for short guys. Tallest among them was a marginal six-foot-one, and he was a reed-thin one hundred sixty pounds, and he was a padre.