The Sergeant Who Wouldn't Give Up His Table
"My table, old timer. Move along."
Corporal Vince Draper's flat hand comes down on the tabletop an inch from Howard Krenshaw's lunch tray, and a fork jumps off the plate onto the floor of the Fort Riley mess hall. It is mid-morning, 1962, and every soldier in the room has turned to watch a thirty-four-year-old squad leader in a pressed olive uniform take a table away from a sixty-eight-year-old man in a faded field jacket.
Krenshaw can lose his last day on this base. He came back to eat one meal where he once served, and now he is being sent to sit by the trash cans in front of two hundred men who are deciding, quietly, what kind of man he is.
Draper does not stop at the table. He looks Krenshaw up and down first, the way a man checks a price tag, and lets his eyes rest on the scuffed leather boots. Then he laughs in short loud bursts and sweeps one arm toward the tall windows, as if the sunlight on the polished floor belongs to him personally. His friend Specialist Ray Hollis, sandy hair slicked flat with pomade and a tarnished belt buckle, grins sideways and says nothing at all. He never says anything above a murmur. That is his whole job in this room.
"Do you know how many men would fight for this seat?" Draper asks the hall, not the man.
Krenshaw sets his tray down anyway. He is lean and tanned, silver crew cut, deep crow's feet at the corners of his eyes, and he moves slowly, like a man who has spent decades not hurrying. Above his left jacket pocket sits a small silver badge. Its edges are scratched, its shine is worn smooth, and when he sits he touches it once with his thumb without seeming to notice he has done it.
Draper notices. He leans over the badge like a jeweler examining a fake.
"Where'd you dig that up, a pawn shop? You trying to be somebody, old timer?"
The room laughs because the room is supposed to. Krenshaw picks up his plastic cup, drinks, and puts it down. He does not look at Hollis. He does not look at the two hundred faces. He looks at Corporal Vince Draper the way a man looks at weather he has already survived four times.
"You say it is yours?" Krenshaw asks.
The table. He means the table. He asks it quietly, in a voice so steady it makes Draper's laugh come out half a beat late.
"Of course. Whose else would it be?" Draper says, and now he is performing for the hall again, chin up, brass catching the window light. "I run this squad. This is my table. Now get away from it before you dirty it."
Krenshaw stands. He lifts his tray with both hands — plate, plastic cup, cutlery laid neatly — and walks the length of the mess hall to the small table beside the trash cans, where he sits down alone and begins to eat, slowly, one bite at a time, while the room watches him do it.
Two tables back, Corporal Marcus Webb has stopped chewing. He is twenty-four, close-cut black hair, compact, sleeves buttoned, and he has spent his whole meal keeping his eyes down. Now he cannot keep them down. The badge, the scratches on it, the way the old man's thumb found it without looking — Webb's grandfather told him about a man like that. About a certain scratched badge. About a citation number stamped on the back.
Webb sets his fork on his plate very carefully, as if it might make a noise the whole hall would hear.
Draper is still talking, louder now, mocking the room, mocking the jacket, mocking the boots again. Then he turns his head and catches Webb staring at him. Not at him. Past him. At the man by the trash cans.
"Something wrong with your food, Webb?"
Webb's mouth opens. Nothing comes out. Hollis stops grinning.
"Webb," Draper says, slower. "What are you looking at?"
And on the other side of the hall, Howard Krenshaw lifts his fork, chews, and watches the two corporals out of the corner of one eye with the smallest possible smile.
What is on that badge? Whose name is engraved on the back of it, and what did it cost him? The first comment has the answer — and the video has Draper's face when he learns it.
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