Running Down Smell'um

I ran over the car, just like that, ran over it with my tank. The front end compacted, blasting out debris like an overstuffed pipe bomb. Fenders, rubber, chrome trim, headlight bezels, hoses, safety glass shards and engine segments all burst into the sunny sky of that small, agrarian West German town. I noticed a brief but vigorous flash of fire, a spurt of smoke, then a noxious, chemical-smelling cloud of steam. My M-1 tank had squashed an Audi 100 flat from windshield wipers to front license plate, total elapsed time: two seconds.

 But the time crawled for me. I stood in the tank commander's hatch, ten feet off the ground. I watched with fascination the trajectories of Audi offal, watched twisted metal ricochet off the half-timbered walls of the close-in buildings, watched nameless bits of car particulate ring against the red tiled roofs across the street, the bits visible only when they reflected the mid-day sun. The car's windshield shattered in its buckled frame and the shards took off like a storm of angry bees. I clearly saw the driver, saw the shock and horror on his face. It, all of it, was a beautiful sight.

 My loader had ducked into the turret and just now peeked above the rim of his hatch. The way a tank is arranged, with the tracked, land-driving hull below and the free-traversing turret on top, the poor guy hadn't known it was coming. The turret was traversed with the long cannon turned over the tank's back deck, which put me closest to the mangled car. I could lean to my left and see everything. My loader was almost an arm's length to my right. He could see nothing but flying wreckage; he had no idea what belched it out. I reached over and rapped the top of his tank crewman's helmet. "Call the CO," I said over intercom. "Tell him we got the bastard good."

 "Yessir, wilco," my loader responded, and flinched at the clatter of metal fragments against the turret roof.

 I removed my helmet and hung it on the machine gun mounted to the front of my station. Then I boosted myself out through the hatch and scuttled across the flat turret roof while extracting my pistol from its holster. I half-climbed, half-jumped from turret to hull to the street, landing in antifreeze and oil right by the Audi's driver side window. I must have been a sight to the occupant, if only he still had the wits to notice. I was all camouflage, flak vest, sweat, and dirt from three days of training in rural West Germany. A fat gas mask hung under one arm, the now vacant holster beneath the other. I glanced over the driver, another second or so, to see if he were seriously hurt. From his short military haircut and clean-shaven face to his button-down shirt, neat slacks and polished black shoes, no blood was on him that I could see, no crushed body parts, either. The man's clothes were so fussily arranged that he still looked neat despite his patina of glass shards, rubber dust, antifreeze and transmission fluid. It was surreal enough to almost be funny.

 The man was just getting back to himself. He worked his body through the shock, attempting to grasp the car's door handle. I slapped at his shoulder with my left hand (to focus his attention on the fact that I was there) and, with my other hand, shoved the pistol into his sight. I yelled in the best bad German I had: "Halt, oder ich schiesse ihres Kopf ab!" I had just threatened to blow off his head. That was good for total cooperation.

 "The CO's on the way!" my loader yelled from the turret above. "MPs, too. ETA five minutes!"

 "Thanks! Get Williams down here!" Williams was my gunner, black as a blind man's glasses, thick-muscled, athletic, with a resting murder face. He was eternally submerged in the turret, looking at nothing but white and gray metal hour after hour. He sometimes got tantalizing peeks of the world through his three combat periscopes, but these were rare and as rewarding as peering down a paper towel roll. Williams appreciated any excuse to reintroduce himself to the sun. He was out of the turret in no time and climbing down to where I stood.

 "Hey, lieutenant!" my tank driver yelled. He peeked from his hatch at the front of the hull. There wasn't much space to elevate his head with the thick back portion of the turret overhanging the tank's front deck. Since only the tank front crouched atop the car, the driver was no more than four feet from me. "You want me to pull off the car, lieutenant? So's you can get him out?"

 "No! No telling what might happen! Your tread isn't more than inches from his legs!"

 A tank is built to destroy, and it doesn't much care what. Backing up or pulling forward, it could grab a portion of vehicle and just roll it up, driver and all. I didn't want any human burritos. To tell the truth, I hadn't wanted to squash the car at all, just present it a wall to run into. We had listened to the radio reports and had heard the vehicle zooming toward us up the street. We'd been around a corner. Others had tried to block the car off, but the driver had out-maneuvered them. His Audi was much more agile than a tank. We couldn't let him escape, as we were sure the man had been taking pictures.

 He was SMLM, Soviet Military Liaison Mission, a sanctioned spy in the bizarre cold war politics of Europe. His home government wanted information on this radical new tank in the NATO arsenal. You have to understand this was more than thirty years ago. Hard as it is to imagine, the Russians were not our friends then. They were implacable enemies.

 Since 1947, the Russians had exchanged military liaisons with America and all the big NATO powers. The idea was to ensure communication, to prevent misunderstandings that could possibly lead to war. The Russian liaisons were called SMLM (pronounced Smell'um) and were stationed in Frankfurt near the US Fifth Corps headquarters. They worked closely with the generals there -- the program really did work -- but they also took the opportunity, handed to them by the politics of need, to do as much spying as they possibly could. They weren't evil for it, don't get me wrong. Our guys in East Germany, called USMLM (You Smell'um?), did exactly the same thing.

 For most of this arrangement, the Russians enjoyed a significant military advantage in Europe. Their equipment and troops were substandard compared to ours, but they had such a shipload of them, outnumbering us everywhere at least two-to-one. We worried about the prospect of war. That changed with the M-1's advent. Twice as fast as the Russians' best armor, far more accurate when sending out fire, and difficult to kill with any tank weaponry, the M-1 scared the Russians to death. They wanted to know what it was about. They wanted pictures, and specs, and observations from the field. That's what our friend in the car had been doing when a tank crew had spotted him half an hour before he met my treads.

 "What you want me to do, lieutenant?" Williams asked as he dropped to the street.

 "Watch this guy. If he flinches, shoot him." I handed Williams my pistol.

 "But, lieutenant—"

 "Shut up, Williams, and do as I say!" I didn't want him broadcasting that there weren't any bullets in the pistol. We had come packed for training, not for war. Only the Russians carried bullets into training.

 Just a minute later, Captain Cummings pulled up in his jeep, stopping his driver a good twenty yards from the wreck. We met each other midway between the vehicles. Cummings was my CO — my company commander. Mine was one of fourteen tanks under his control. He was smaller and skinnier than I, which is saying quite a bit, but he gave the impression of wiry strength, a man who had known adversity. He had served as a cavalryman in Vietnam and Germany. He often claimed Germany was the tougher tour, with its migraine-tight politics that constrained and confused a soldier. Vietnam had been a calculated risk. You did your job and kept your head down and maybe in a year you went back to the States. Germany was a card game you played for three years, but the Russian dealer played both his hand and yours, and you never got to call for a fresh, unmarked deck. But Germany was better for tanks. You could run flat out and never lose firm ground under your treads. That was Cummings's speech to new lieutenants. Now he looked over the nearby wreck while his balding, too-old face showed tired lines and fatalistic eyes. "You run a red light, LT?" he asked. "No, I guess not. Don't see no light."

 "SMLM guy, sir. The one second platoon saw."

 "You sure you had to run him over? Big time international incident there."

 "It got the job done, sir. I heard on the radio he was taking pictures."

 The commander nodded and lit himself a cigarette. "Lousy lieutenants will force me to early retirement. Prioritize, LT. The pictures were bad, but this could be worse." He started walking toward the wreck, round-shouldered and a little slumped. I followed.

 I wasn't good at judging the CO's moods. He could crack jokes, tell stories, slap backs and whistle southern battle anthems whenever the temper struck him, but he could also, in the same mood, pull the wings off "lousy lieutenants." Regardless, he maintained that same sagging weight, that Eeyore look, that aspect of sighing at approaching doom. He chain smoked. He drank like the husband of a screaming shrew. He hated Germany and every second in it. That was him in a good mood. When a funk struck him, he was a rank, dark hole writhing with anxious snakes and scorpions. But the blackness often hid beneath his usual weary bearing, at least until the snakes lashed out, propelling forth scorpions as their slashing, stinging vanguard. Gauging the CO was no easy matter. Deadpan circumspection was best with Cummings's mood in doubt.

 "You tried to block him in?" he asked, walking the wreck from bumper to tread. For the moment, he ignored the SMLM.

 "Yes, sir."

 "Looks like you tried to cut it close, cut off his options for turning around."

 "Yes, sir. You could say that."

 "I just did." He smiled a shark's predatory smile. He knew exactly what I had tried. That smile hardly left his face the rest of the time he was there. "Sergeant Williams, how you doing? Ain't this a bitch of a mess?"

 Williams kept his eyes on the car and its now calmed driver. "I'm on top of it, Captain," he said. "And it's as big a mess as I ever seen."

 The commander squatted at the head of the tread to peer beneath the tank. "Think your lousy lieutenant messed up?"

 "I was inside, but I reckon he did all right."

 "Kicked ass, sir!" the loader yelled from above.

 The commander laughed. "Yeah, he did that. He did that indeed. And I think you're right, Sergeant Williams. When all the political pissing is over, I think he'll have done all right. That pissing, though. It'll fill a good sized lake."

 I kept quiet, though I felt a little taller. Cummings only offered back door compliments, and those rarely.

 Two jeeps of MPs sputtered around the front of my tank. One stopped just behind the commander, who ignored it. The other scurried toward the company jeep.

 "Damn," Cummings called. "Lousy lieutenant, take a look at this." He still squatted, but leaned forward onto one hand, his head beneath the tank's front deck as he peered around to the inside tread. I leaned way over to see what he meant. "See that there? Look at that. The headlights still work."

 Sure as we held a gun with no bullets on a SMLM with no wheels, the Audi's two headlights, thrown upon the street beneath my tank, still shone with a bluish glare. I couldn't even see how they connected to the car.

 "I gotta get me a vehicle like this," the commander said as he stood.

 He exchanged greetings with the MPs and we all answered questions they put to us. During that time, a good five minutes, Williams held my gun on the SMLM and the SMLM sat in his glass and oils, motionless as a frigid reptile. The commander finally stepped to Williams. He flicked his cigarette onto the car's warped top. The MPs and I flinched at the action. We all stood in oil and God knew what.

 "Stand down, son," Cummings directed Williams. "Get rid of the weapon and take your station. The gendarmes have control now."

 Williams did as ordered, passing the gun to me before climbing up on the tank. He didn't, however, return to his station. He lay on top of the turret to sun.

 Cummings jerked open the Audi's door. The MPs wrestled the driver out, onto his feet, and against the back of the car. They didn't have to wrestle much. The man was meek as a paper-swatted puppy.

 "Well, Ivan," Cummings jeered. "You in a world o' hurt now, ain'tcha?"

 "I am major in the Soviet military liaison, Frankfurt. I have a right to be here."

 "Wrong, son. You are scapegoat on your way back to Moscow, where you might earn a right to shovel snow in Siberia." The commander snapped two fingers at the man. "Camera, please."

 "It is in the back. It belongs to the Soviet military liaison--"

 "It belongs to the US Army, dipstick."

 The MPs confiscated the camera and every scrap of paper in the car. They took it all to one jeep and the SMLM to another. After a few more questions and some forms to fill out, they climbed in their vehicles and pulled away.

 "What'll happen to him?" I asked.

 Cummings lit another cigarette. He seemed oblivious to the oil in the street."I don't know. Who gives a damn. But I'll tell you this, lousy lieutenant. The Russians don't care to be embarrassed by their officers. Mr. Cool Major of the Soviet Mission will wet his pants when the State Department hands him a ticket home." He tilted back his head and blew smoke into the sky.

 "What about the car?" I asked.

 Cummings shrugged. "They'll send a wrecker. Don't bust a tread getting off the damned thing." With that, he turned away toward his jeep. I was turning back to my tank when he stopped, looked around, and called over his shoulder. "Check it out. Quiet here. These Germans are so predictable."

 He started once more toward his Jeep, never having glanced my direction.

 I spent the next several minutes ground guiding my driver. I stood in front of him and across the street while directing him with hand signals as to how to move the tank. The task was tricky if not difficult, releasing our hull from the Audi without damaging a tread. We twisted a good deal more of the car before backing the tank onto clear pavement. I was too involved in the small operation to wonder much at my CO's words, but once we were free and at our stations, me once more in the commander's hatch, I thought about the oddity that had framed our adventure.

 Here we were in a German town, approximate population two or three thousand. We had just disentangled from a car we had crushed. We had taken the driver away as a prisoner. Guns had been brandished with plenty of shouting. But not one German had shown his face.

 Not one German, not even a curious kid.

 What did this mean? I asked myself as I strapped on my communications helmet. The crowds always gathered where tanks were about. Stop for five minutes and the groupies converge. They gathered to look at the great machines, to see Americans close at hand, to trade bits of German for bits of English. They gathered as crowds always gather when tempted by the new and provocative.

 And now they were nowhere. Why?

 I thought about incidents similar to today's. There was certainly no shortage of accidents with tanks. A year earlier, misdirected by traffic MPs, we had convoyed into streets too narrow for tanks. Our fenders had scraped the walls of 19th century buildings. We had crumbled sidewalks and pulverized stoops. When we found our way blocked by the town well, a circular medieval cap of stone with a jack-handled pump affixed to one side, we shouldered past it with ruinous effect. Its stone wall shattered and its workings ruptured, heaving a geyser into the air. We had no choice. We couldn't back out through those narrow streets. The only escape was forward. But the locals disgorged from the buildings and streets, accosting our tanks in red-faced fury. It took the police to get us out of that one. Maneuvering through medieval streets and fountains is easier than going through mobs.

 Then there was that incident with the biker. He had been weaving up through a convoy, darting around tanks whenever oncoming traffic allowed. Germans are generally impatient with the snail's pace of military vehicles, but this guy had taken that impatience to extremes. When he found himself trapped for an intolerable several seconds, tanks ahead and behind, Mercedeses and Simcas across the yellow line, he attempted to pass on the shoulder to the right. Tanks are close to blind along their flanks. Unaware of the biker's intent, the driver edged right to allow more room for the oncoming cars. The biker panicked. He stuck out a leg to kick the tank away. His foot caught in the drive sprocket, that steel cog wheel at the back of the track that grabs and moves the tread.  When he brought back his leg the foot was gone, chewed clean off at the ankle.

 The few hours after were a chaos of medics, the German police, an American medevac helicopter pounding down in wind and thrumming rotors, and the inevitable crowd. The mob was all the more impressive because the accident happened on a rural stretch of road at least ten miles from the nearest town. They converged on the scene like moths to a fire, virulent right wing anti-Americans, virulent left wing anti-Americans, frustrated centrists tired of defending us, and gawkers with nothing better to do.  Who can say how they learned of the incident. This was before the cell phone age.

 So, where was it now, that ubiquitous mob? What had Cummings said? These Germans are so predictable.

 "You up there, lieutenant?" the driver called over intercom. He was the only one outside the turret. He was isolated in his own compartment tunneled out of the M-1's hull.

 "Umm, yeah, I'm here. Need something?"

 "I was wondering where we were going, sir…"

 "Oh, sorry. Daydreaming. Turn right, up the street and out of this town. Move out when ready."

 "That's a roger, LT." The tank lurched immediately into gear.

 I stood in my commander's station, still worrying the social bone of the mob. I heard no sound beyond the creaking of my treads and the whine of the M-1's engine. It was as if the town had been struck mute. Where was its voice in this matter?

 "Williams," I said over intercom, "did you hear what the CO said back there before he took off?"

 "I don't eavesdrop on officers, lieutenant."

 "He said the Germans were so predictable. You've been here longer than I. Any idea what he meant?"

 The pause was long. It ballooned with awkwardness, and with irritation, too. Williams, as an enlisted man, didn't like nosing in the concerns of officers. "I reckon, sir, he meant the crowd."

 "I figured as much, but I don't see why."

 "Well, there wasn't a crowd," Williams continued. "There's always a crowd, except in crap like today."

 "That's what I don't understand, man. What's so different about today?"

 "The Russian, sir. That's what's different."

 That sounded odd, something I never would have considered. "I don't—"

 "Have you looked around, sir? Look in the windows, right now."

 I did. I saw nothing odd, just window after window as the tank rolled down the street, some casement style, some a single frame pivoting style, like tiny French doors, curtains pulled across the openings…

 "The curtains are closed. It's a sunny day and the curtains are closed. The Germans like their natural light."

 "Yes, sir. It's the Russian. They're scared of him. Nobody comes around when the Russians are involved."

 I noticed an anomaly in the repetition of closed-off windows: one slanted crack in a single set of drapes, as if held a bit aside by an unseen hand. "That doesn't make any sense," I complained, having forgotten that my intercom was open. "The Russians are just crew cuts in cars. With all the havoc we cause around here, it's us they should be afraid of."

 Williams's snort was a blast of static in my ears. (Lousy lieutenant!) "We're their friends, sir. We mess up, sure, but they see us as the country bumpkins come to help raise the barn. They got no reason to be scared of us. The Russians, they want to kill these people. You ran down a SMLM, you think that gives you power? Shit, that Russian had power you could never touch."

 Yes, I thought grudgingly, that made sense. That power was fear, and it had hung over Germany for decades. One day the Russians would come, and everything would be gone. The neat half-timbered houses, the perfect asphalt roads, the convenient stores, generous health care, short workweeks and manifest consumerism, all those things would fail and be crushed. The Audis, BMWs, Porsches and Volkswagens would vanish from streets filled with armored cars and tanks.  The quaint, steepled Lutheran churches would blow apart from artillery fire, for all of them were pre-targeted as reference points for Russian guns. All of it made perfect sense. The SMLM was a harbinger of violent change.

 But the M-1 was a dam against terror. I thought this with conviction, and it threw off sudden melancholy. To destroy all these people and crush their way of life, the Russians first had to get through me, get through me and thousands like me. They had to get through infantry in Bradley fighting vehicles, aviators in Apache helicopter gunships, pilots in F-18 fighters and the German home guard in their Leopard tanks, the Germans who could not run for they had nowhere to go. I couldn't believe the Russians up to that task with their conscripted troops of low motivation, their poorly trained officers and their outmoded weapons. They had us in numbers, that couldn't be argued, but sometimes numbers did not assure ascendancy. Sometimes, numbers were smothered by heart.

 The loader tugged at my camouflaged sleeve. "The CO's on the company freq,” he said over the intercom. "He says to go back to the assembly area, that they've called the exercise because of the SMLM."

 I looked at him hard. Called off maneuvers? Had the Russians won a tiny cold war battle? After a moment, I nodded, then flicked my helmet frequency to find my other three tanks. "Bravo 3, this is Bravo 36. Consolidate at Check Point Bravo 3 for convoy into Assembly Area Lion. Acknowledge, over."

 "32, roger."

 "33, roger."

 "34, roger."

 I leaned back in my commander's station, my back braced against my locked-open, armored hatch cover. "Driver," I said, feeling very tired, "increase speed to thirty. Let's go home."