After we convoyed back from Pittsburgh , the battalion commander gave us a day off. Most people slept. I went to the day room and discovered books. Not Chip-books. Paper books.
Every company area has a day room. It’s a lounge for soldiers to spend their free time. Of which there normally is none in Basic. I think the army named it because an hour there feels like a day.
Ours had a manual Foosball table with one of the little men broken off, a tray of yesterday’s mess-hall cookies, coffee, and ancient orange furniture covered in the skin of animals so extinct I’d never heard of them. Really. I read the labels. “Naugahyde.”
Shelved books lined the walls, the way libraries used to be. Not exactly the New York Times most-downloaded list, of course. There were yellowed field manuals on everything from first aid to the ever-popular FM-22-5 Drill and Ceremony. Better were The Art of War by Sun
Tzu and General Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe . Whole shelves held histories of the campaigns of Napoleon, Robert E. Lee, and Alexander the Great, complete with color maps that folded out just like a wide-screen you could actually touch.
Books aren’t like chips. You feel them and smell their age.
Some have a life of their own. Inside one’s cover was handwritten, “DaNang, Vietnam, May 2, 1966— To a short-timer who won’t have to study war no more.” Another read, “Tor Captain A. R. Johns, KIA Normandy, France, July 9, 1944.” It didn’t say if he had a family. He could have been orphaned, like me. But he had an outfit forever. The First Infantry Division.
I devoured the books shelf by shelf and just made it back to barracks by lights-out. I persuaded myself my obsession was just because I was starved for intellectual stimulation after Basic’s moribund mud. The alternative was that Ord and Judge March foresaw that the army and I were a predestined match, a notion too bent and knobby to contemplate. I snuck Benton’s The Sino-Indian Conflict: Winter Campaign 2022 back with me and skimmed it while my free hand scrubbed commodes with Ord’s brush.
The nights that followed, for me, were stolen moments to read the day-room library. The days we spent in the woods learning small-unit tactics.
The Reformed Me enjoyed small-unit tactics. You see, one soldier with a rifle is just a serial killer with a hunting license.
But even a squad of twelve can multiply its combat power if it’s properly coordinated and armed. The mission succeeds, and fewer GIs come home in bags.
Our instructors said stuff like “Today you will become familiar with the force-multiplying capacity of crew-served weapons integral to the Infantry platoon.” In other words, why a machine gun was good even though it took two soldiers to carry it.
Our training now involved more field maneuver and specialized-weapons familiarization. Firing the M-60 Model 2017 was even grander than humping all forty-five pounds of the machine gun cross-country. The loader has it even worse because the ammo’s even heavier. For the rest of tactical training, I carried the machine gun. My offers to let others share the fun fell on deaf ears. Esprit de corps went just so far. I shut up and got used to it.
After a few weeks Walter whispered during noon chow, “One of the guys said you were okay, Jason.”
We were eating in the field, seated backs against trees amid dead piled leaves in the perpetual twilight draped over Pennsylvania—and Earth—by stratospheric dust. By the calendar, it was summer, now, but felt like dry winter. I missed green leaves.
I squeezed brown glop from a foil pouch into my mouth and swallowed. The slightly less antique successors to C-rations were MREs, Meals-Ready-to-Eat. Three lies for the price of one. “I already know I’m okay, Walter.”
“But it’s the first time I’ve heard anybody else say it I think that’s good.”
So did I. Good or not, the world worsened.
The pancake-flat stock market stayed that way, so retirees like my short-term foster parents, the Ryans, couldn’t five off their investments. The Armed Services maxed out in taking new recruits like us. There were only so many holes soldiers could dig just to fill them up again.
For all our bitching, GIs were eating okay, and the enemy had left humanity with fewer mouths to feed. Civilian fresh food was rationed, supermarket prices were sky-high and going higher, and there was an active black market in things like apples and coffee. Even in places that hadn’t suffered like Pittsburgh.
It looked like my machine gun’s principal utility after training ended would be dispersing food rioters. An M-60 Model 2017 was a Vietnam-era blunderbuss sleeked up in post-Afghan neoplast. But it could turn a rioting crowd into a Dumpsterful of guts. Pulling that trigger didn’t bear thinking about.
Still, I figured to graduate in two weeks. They’d given us each a pack of old-fashioned postcards engraved with the Infantry crest. Graduation ceremony announcements to mail out to our loved ones. Refreshments immediately following in the mess hall. Maybe goodies would be ham and limas and everybody’s mom would have to hand-walk the horizontal ladder to get in.
At first I cried, being short of loved ones. Then I sucked it up and sent a card to Druwan Parker. I’d only known him a day before he broke his leg, but he was the next best thing to family. I mailed one to Metzger for grins. He had made captain, deflected two Projectiles while flying in space between Earth and the moon. His smiling face and chestful of medals made the People homepage. I sent a third announcement to Judge March. I figured it might make the old boy smile before he clapped some other delinquent in irons.
An M-60 gunner—I had become quite the dead-eye— was a specialist fourth class. After Basic, I’d be assigned to a line unit.
I might even live dormitory-style with a roommate and regular heat and a John with a door. After Basic Training, that sounded like promotion to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
A few months ago I was a homeless orphan looking at jail time. Today, I was collecting a paycheck I didn’t even have time to spend, learning about things I hadn’t even known existed. I had three hots and a cot and belonged to an extended family the size of the US army.
Life was sweet.
I thought.