In the eagerly anticipated follow-up to his first novel, Dress Gray, Truscott turns his attention to the Vietnam War and delivers a suspenseful, sprawling court-martial drama set in Saigon in 1969.
At twenty-three, platoon leader Lt. Matthew Nelson Blue is the youngest member of an army family; his father is a colonel and his grandfather a profane, cantankerous retired general. Shortly after one of his men is killed by friendly fire while on routine patrol, Blue is arrested and charged with desertion in the face of the enemy. Arriving in Vietnam, his father and grandfather end their long estrangement and join forces to clear the young soldier's name. Truscott's plot offers less than initially meets the eye; the nature of the conspiracy and cover-up that nearly destroy Blue is fairly easy to predict, as is the disillusionment about Vietnam that eventually befalls his seniors.
The author's intimate portrayal of the texture of army life gives his narrative a more deeply felt sense of anger and regret than others in its genre, and makes its final revelations more powerful than they might otherwise have been.
In the eagerly anticipated follow-up to his first novel, Dress Gray, Truscott turns his attention to the Vietnam War and delivers a suspenseful, sprawling court-martial drama set in Saigon in 1969.
At twenty-three, platoon leader Lt. Matthew Nelson Blue is the youngest member of an army family; his father is a colonel and his grandfather a profane, cantankerous retired general. Shortly after one of his men is killed by friendly fire while on routine patrol, Blue is arrested and charged with desertion in the face of the enemy. Arriving in Vietnam, his father and grandfather end their long estrangement and join forces to clear the young soldier's name. Truscott's plot offers less than initially meets the eye; the nature of the conspiracy and cover-up that nearly destroy Blue is fairly easy to predict, as is the disillusionment about Vietnam that eventually befalls his seniors.
The author's intimate portrayal of the texture of army life gives his narrative a more deeply felt sense of anger and regret than others in its genre, and makes its final revelations more powerful than they might otherwise have been.
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Overview
In the eagerly anticipated follow-up to his first novel, Dress Gray, Truscott turns his attention to the Vietnam War and delivers a suspenseful, sprawling court-martial drama set in Saigon in 1969.
At twenty-three, platoon leader Lt. Matthew Nelson Blue is the youngest member of an army family; his father is a colonel and his grandfather a profane, cantankerous retired general. Shortly after one of his men is killed by friendly fire while on routine patrol, Blue is arrested and charged with desertion in the face of the enemy. Arriving in Vietnam, his father and grandfather end their long estrangement and join forces to clear the young soldier's name. Truscott's plot offers less than initially meets the eye; the nature of the conspiracy and cover-up that nearly destroy Blue is fairly easy to predict, as is the disillusionment about Vietnam that eventually befalls his seniors.
The author's intimate portrayal of the texture of army life gives his narrative a more deeply felt sense of anger and regret than others in its genre, and makes its final revelations more powerful than they might otherwise have been.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497663497 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media Mystery & Thriller |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 412 |
| File size: | 984 KB |
About the Author
Truscott grew up in the army, living over the years in more than ten states, four foreign countries, and twenty-seven different houses or apartments by the time he was eighteen. In 1965, he entered West Point via an appointment from Patsy T. Mink, Democrat of Hawaii, where the family had long ago established residency. He graduated after what might be called a checkered career. In May 1970, he found himself in a dispute with the army over an article he wrote for the Village Voice about the rampant yet un-acknowledged problem of heroin abuse in the army—specifically, in the Fifth Mechanized Infantry Division at Ft. Carson. The army refused permission to publish the article, and Truscott refused to withdraw it from publication. What they used to call in the army a "flap" ensued, and resignation from the army came soon thereafter.
In August 1970, Truscott went to work as a staff writer for the Village Voice. He has written for many major magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Esquire, the Nation, Harper's, Rolling Stone, Harper's Weekly, Playboy, Penthouse, Metropolitan Home, Saveur, and many others.
In 1976, Truscott wrote and published the bestselling novel Dress Gray, which was later produced as an NBC miniseries, scripted by Gore Vidal, in 1986. After Dress Gray, Truscott wrote the bestseller Army Blue and published a third novel, Rules of the Road, in 1990. Truscott's fourth novel, Heart of War, was published in June 1997. His fifth novel, Full Dress Gray, published in July 1998, is the long-awaited sequel to his first novel.
Truscott grew up in the army, living over the years in more than ten states, four foreign countries, and twenty-seven different houses or apartments by the time he was eighteen. In 1965, he entered West Point via an appointment from Patsy T. Mink, Democrat of Hawaii, where the family had long ago established residency. He graduated after what might be called a checkered career. In May 1970, he found himself in a dispute with the army over an article he wrote for the Village Voice about the rampant yet un-acknowledged problem of heroin abuse in the army—specifically, in the Fifth Mechanized Infantry Division at Ft. Carson. The army refused permission to publish the article, and Truscott refused to withdraw it from publication. What they used to call in the army a “flap” ensued, and resignation from the army came soon thereafter.
In August 1970, Truscott went to work as a staff writer for the Village Voice. He has written for many major magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Esquire, the Nation, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Harper’s Weekly, Playboy, Penthouse, Metropolitan Home, Saveur, and many others.
In 1976, Truscott wrote and published the bestselling novel Dress Gray, which was later produced as an NBC miniseries, scripted by Gore Vidal, in 1986. After Dress Gray, Truscott wrote the bestseller Army Blue and published a third novel, Rules of the Road, in 1990. Truscott’s fourth novel, Heart of War, was published in June 1997. His fifth novel, Full Dress Gray, published in July 1998, is the long-awaited sequel to his first novel.
Read an Excerpt
Army Blue
By Lucian K. Truscott IV
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1989 Lucian K. Truscott IVAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-6349-7
CHAPTER 1
The day he got the phone call that would change his life forever began the same way nearly every other day of his life had begun. It was five-thirty in the morning, and Colonel Matthew Nelson Blue III was driving to work at the Infantry School.
Five-thirty in the morning on Monday was not many people's favorite time of day or day of the week, but it was Colonel Blue's. He was driving down Victory Boulevard, the main drag outside the gate of Fort Benning, Georgia, and with the sun low on the horizon out the left window of his 1955 Ford sedan, he had a view of familiar surroundings uncluttered by outsiders, nonbelievers, or civilians. He was alone on the road, driving to his battalion headquarters, and nothing was in his way.
He stopped for a red light. Used-car lots occupied three of the four corners of the intersection. They were festooned with yellow and blue and green and red triangular flags hanging from lines crisscrossing the dusty clay fields of cars. Many of the cars, the Colonel knew, had been repossessed from the families of GIs who had missed payments because Dad was a corporal ten thousand miles away in Vietnam, and the family was having a hard time making ends meet on $245 a month, $135 of which was the base amount paid to an Army corporal, and $110 of which was "hazardous duty pay," a sum set by Congress to compensate a soldier for his services overseas under fire during time of war.
Next to each of the used-car lots, a row of trailers stood below signs advertising automobile and life insurance. Car insurance sold on the strip outside Fort Benning was twice the cost of insurance available just a mile away, in downtown Columbus, Georgia, and life insurance policies offered to GIs inside the trailers did not cover death in combat. The Colonel shook his head. He wondered when the communities that sat outside the gates of Army posts around the country would start backing up their conservative voting habits with attitudes that treated GIs as people instead of prey.
Colonel Blue drove by the barrackslike Camellia Apartments and passed through the stone gates of Fort Benning. The commercial strip came to an abrupt halt and was replaced by a road of pastoral tranquility. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He wished that it weren't so, but every morning he reacted the same way to the long drive down the Benning strip. Lately, the topless go-go bars and tattoo parlors were being joined by bevies of fast-food joints, all-night convenience stores, and miniature-golf courses, but these latest additions to the landscape did little to soften the overall tawdriness of the scene. When he got to the headquarters of his unit, he knew the pile of paper on his desk would contain at least one repossession order against one of his men, and a half-dozen notices of arrest from the local gendarmerie, who seemed to consider arresting GIs for minor infractions of the law as much a sport as a duty. This kind of crap didn't go on during World War II, the Colonel remembered. In those days the Army uniform had commanded respect, not derision. What was it about the war in a little country so far away that permitted people back home the illusion that nothing had changed, that everything was normal, that no allowances need be made for the fact that young men were losing their lives every single day of the week in defense of democracy and liberty? Had the nation gone stark raving mad?
The Colonel shook his head and whistled through his teeth. Ahead, the brick buildings and manicured lawns of the main post beckoned reassuringly. At least here the madness had not yet intruded. At least here the blue Fort Benning stickers on the front and rear bumpers of the Ford drew a salute instead of unwanted extra attention from the traffic cops downtown. At least here on Fort Benning, Army life was comfortably predictable, the rocks were painted white, the picket fences ran straight and true, the cigarette butts were policed up every morning at reveille, the fatigues were starched olive drab, the boots sported spit-shines, the haircuts showed white sidewalls above the ears, and the phones were answered with a crisp "Yes, sir."
And here beneath the branches of the great live oaks, under lawns trimmed as short and neat as a recruit's hair, the dead were laid to rest with a twenty-one-gun salute and the mournful bugle call of taps, and the war was not ten thousand miles away, it was right here among us: in the eyes of the boys fresh off the farm and green from the ghetto, who snapped salutes with uncallused hands; in faces glowing so young and new they were kissable; in the chanted cadence of a platoon passing on a reveille run; in the neat rows of jeeps and three-quarters and deuce-and-a-halfs in the motor pool, in the sweet scent of gun oil in the weapons room, in the cough of the Sergeant Major's "Mornin', sir," affectionate and knowing and assertive and tired, in the smell of bacon and coffee wafting down from the mess hall through the battalion area. The war was the Army and the Army was the war, and forever the twain would meet amid the dust and the dirt and the clay and the sand under the pines and elms and oaks of Fort Benning, Georgia, as the Colonel trained yet more young men to go to war.
"Mornin', sir," said Sergeant Major Armstrong Clinton as the Colonel eased open the orderly room door. Sergeant Major Clinton thrust a mug of coffee at the Colonel without looking up. With his other hand he was filling another cup. He blew into the cup and peered at the Colonel beneath eyebrows the size and color of small rats. His face had the ruddy complexion of one who had spent half his life outside in the hot sun and the other half inside the cool, dark recesses of the NCO Club. He had a bulbous nose and a cleft chin, he stood five feet four inches tall and was just about as wide at the shoulders. He reminded those who liked him of Jimmy Cagney and those who didn't of Joe Stalin. In truth, he had a little of both of them packed somewhere on his stubby frame. But the thing that set him apart was the fact that Sergeant Major Clinton was probably the only man on Fort Benning who had bribed his way into the Army, having slipped a five-dollar bill to the man who measured his height at the recruiting station on Whitehall Street in New York City the day after Pearl Harbor. The recruiter measured five-four, but he wrote down five feet six inches, and Sergeant Major Clinton signed up for the Infantry, where, he reasoned, anybody stupid enough to pay for the dubious privilege of humping a pack and a rifle as a dogface would be excused for having volunteered for it.
He was right, of course. Sergeant Major Clinton was right about a lot of things. He was right, for example, about the Colonel.
Colonel Matthew Nelson Blue was considered by many too nice to be a Colonel, too considerate to be a commander. It was right there in his face, at forty-five "as smooth as a baby's ass," as Sergeant Major Clinton once described it to an old Army buddy over one too many beers at the NCO Club.
"You should see the old man, Zeke," said Sergeant Major Clinton. Sergeants major have called their colonels "the old man" since Attila the Hun swept across the plains of Asia.
"Born with a silver spoon in his teeth and a golf club in his mitt, he was. Got a fine howdy-do and a smile for every swingin' dick diddly-boppin' his ass through the battalion area. He was any happier in this man's Army, you'd think there was somethin' wrong with the Army, stead'a him. Makes you wonder, the old man does. Even knowin' he comes from a fine old Army family and a fine old Virginia family at that, what on God's green earth keeps a man so up as him in a damn outfit so down as this one? You'd think he'd be sick of grinnin', the way shit is goin' these days. But not the Colonel. Old man Blue's about as blue as a damn Kansas sunflower growin' in grade-A pigshit. I seen some sunny dispositions in my day, Zeke, but this one ain't sunny, it's nuclear."
There were those who would quarrel with Sergeant Major Clinton's description of his Colonel, but you'd find few of them in the 196th Infantry Brigade, the One-Nine-Six as the troops called it. The Colonel wasn't exactly a giant at five feet ten inches, but his slender build made him appear taller than he was. He wore a set of fatigues the way some men wear a Savile Row suit, as if baggy trousers and a roomy shirt had been designed and tailored for him and him alone. His face was unlined, but it wasn't undistinguished. He had a hockey scar over one eyebrow, and a kick from a polo pony when he was a boy had curved a shiny depression in his left cheekbone. The scars hadn't left him with boyish good looks, but neither had they given his face the grim cast of a wounded and angry man, which is what he was. You had to look in his eyes to glimpse the darkness within. You had to get to know the Colonel even to guess at what lay beneath his calm surface, and he was not an easy man to get to know. The countenance of the good-looking, easygoing Colonel was pure camouflage. He may have followed in his father's footsteps, but he looked just like his mother, a patrician Virginia lady of fine-boned breeding and demure stature who charmed everyone she came in contact with, even as she plotted how to have her way with them. The Colonel's was a handsome ease that concealed a steely resolve, which, in his case, had survived four decades of angry battle with a father who resembled him not at all in appearance, demeanor, or rank.
His father was General Matthew Nelson Blue, Jr., a bulldog of a man the size of Sergeant Major Clinton, who had the temper of a mule skinner, the ambition and drive of a rat on steroids, and an enviable political appointment as the nation's only ambassador-at-large. Neither man had asked for the other, not the father for the son, or the son for the father, and perhaps that was the point. They were stuck with each other, stuck in the same family, in the same Army, in the same country. They had hated each other for forty years. The Colonel had bitterly resented growing up in the long shadow cast by his father. His career in the Army had been eclipsed from its beginning by that of his father, a commander of divisions, corps, and armies, and a hero of monumental proportions during World War II. And the General had resented from the day his son was born the competition for his wife's affections that the boy represented. They had fought savagely until ten years ago, when the two men had simply stopped communicating. It seemed as if the planet wasn't big enough for the two of them, so they ignored the existence of one another. It was a battle fought not with words but from within a terrible conspiracy of silence that had taken its toll on both men. The son had twice developed a bleeding ulcer during their cold war. His father had in turn suffered a heart attack. They had watched each other's suffering from afar, but neither man had wavered. Such was the depth of their resentment and the strength of their hatred for one another.
Colonel Blue took the mug of coffee from Sergeant Major Clinton and stood in the orderly room watching the men line up for reveille through the open door.
"Going to be a nice day, Sarenmajor," said the Colonel. Colonels had called sergeants major "Sarenmajor" since Hannibal's day.
"You got that right, sir," said Sergeant Major Clinton. "Not too hot. Only gonna be eighty-five today, sir."
"Is that right? That what the weather says?"
"S'what I say, sir," said Sergeant Major Clinton. He sipped his coffee and glanced at the Colonel over the lip of his cup. The old man was smiling up a storm.
The Colonel picked up the newspaper and walked into his office at the end of the orderly room. The brigade was located in the last area of World War II temporary barracks still standing at Fort Benning, and the headquarters was a long, single-story building in the middle of four clusters of barracks, one for each company in the brigade. They weren't the finest accommodations a nation had ever erected for an Army, but Colonel Blue had specifically requested the aging clapboard structures, preferring them over the dormitory-like brick barracks that had gone up during the 1950s. He thought the older barracks were, well, more intimate. They were two-story wooden buildings painted a sickly pale green color, one platoon to a building, one bay to a floor. In the middle of each company area there was a small one-story building that served as company headquarters and weapons room. Next to it was a similar building that housed the company mess hall. The way the old World War II wooden barracks were arranged gave each company a sense of identity. You could look out a window in any of the barracks and see the rest of the Battalion gathered around you. You weren't just in the Army, you were in C Company, or A Company, or B Company, or Headquarters Company, and those men you could see through the windows next door weren't just another bunch of swingin' dicks, they were your swingin' dicks. They weren't just a gaggle of young men in funny green outfits, they were a unit.
You woke them up in the morning and you fed them and you gave them a rifle and you marched them off somewhere and you pointed them in the right direction and they would kill for you. Then you fed them again and you put them to bed and the next morning they would do it all over again. Once a month you paid them about what workers in fast-food restaurants made, and occasionally you went downtown and collected them from some dingy jail. You helped some of them balance their checkbooks, and for others you wrote letters home and read the replies when they came in the mail. You taught them to clean and polish and to fire their weapons. You learned their names, and the names of their wives and their children if they had any, and you remembered that which made each man an individual—this one was an all-state football player, that one a champion pool hustler, that one over there an assistant professor of English at Columbia, and the shy one with the yellow hair and perpetually dirty hands was a pig farmer back in Tennessee.
You did these seemingly minor, basic things for them, and when you asked them, they would go forth and kill for you. It was amazing, just plain amazing, when you actually sat down and thought about it, which the Colonel had done many times and at great length. No explanation accounted for the behavior of men in the Infantry. Ironically, the best line the Colonel had ever heard about the Army was one delivered by his father. Another man, a General under whom the Colonel had once served, had been there when his father delivered it, and told the Colonel the story years later.
The two men were in London, just before the United States declared war and became involved in the land war in Europe. They were at a dinner party at 10 Downing Street, and Clare Boothe Luce, who had invaded Europe as a correspondent for her husband's magazine, Life, had somehow wangled herself an invitation. In fact, she was the only woman at a table that included General Blue, Field Marshal Montgomery, and several other, lesser generals.
Near the end of the meal, Mrs. Luce tapped the edge of her water goblet with her knife and, having secured the attention of every man at the table, engaged them in a kind of parlor game. She posed a question: What did the gentlemen think was the most perfect thing in the world? They went around the table, each man expounding at length on why he thought a Rolls-Royce, or a Gainsborough, or a custom-made shotgun, or a trout stream in Scotland was the most perfect thing in the world. Finally the question was posed by Mrs. Luce to General Blue. He took a drag on his cigarette and looked her in the eye.
"An Infantry Battalion."
"And why is that, General Blue?" Mrs. Luce asked with a thin smile.
"Because an Infantry Battalion will do any goddamned thing you tell it to do," said the General. The rest of the military men at the table broke into applause.
"I'm surprised no one championed a woman as the most perfect thing in the world," said Mrs. Luce. "Especially you, General Blue. I thought you might be the one to make a case for us."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Army Blue by Lucian K. Truscott IV. Copyright © 1989 Lucian K. Truscott IV. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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