Gone to the Woods: Part V

He was not exactly certain when it appeared to him that the military was any kind of a solution to his problems. The decision defied sensible reasoning, which at best was convoluted and at worst—which was the norm; it seemed for a long time that all his reasoning turned out to be the worst—incredibly tangled.

In time, his problems went still further, became antagonistic. He’d run and they’d come after him, with the law at times, trying harder and harder to get him to be something he felt he could never be, force him to fit in.

He’d roamed the dark streets of Manila hundreds and hundreds of nights where there were soldiers and night women, and he’d seen and heard them too many times to feel anything akin to romance when he was with school girls.

He thought all sports were silly: You see a kid run to a fence and try to climb it to raid a soldiers’ camp just so he has something to eat and he gets cut in half right there in front of God and the world by machine-gun fire, and basketball seems inane.

In particular, he read a book about Napoleon and his soldiers and their insane, abortive attempt to invade Russia, which nearly wiped out the whole army as thousands of men starved and many more froze to death in the unbelievably cold Russian winters.

And Tucker showed him how to work the clutch on the Tilt-A-Whirl to suck change out of the pockets of the rubes wearing loose pocket bib overalls. Rubes were even better targets than the drunks in the Northern Lights saloon in terms of taking their money.

So, since the way it’s going, you’re going to flunk out of school, the state has this new program they’re starting for people who have trouble with regular school. They call it vocational training school. That way you can learn a trade even if conventional school doesn’t fit you.

There are two versions—you can either become an automobile mechanic or a television repair man. You pick. The school will pass you into the twelfth grade, and instead of going to normal school, you will attend one of the two vocational schools five days a week.

When he was about to flunk out of the eleventh grade, the state stepped in and he was passed to twelfth grade with the “proviso” (their word, not his) that he was to pay attention and really try to learn a vocation as a television repair man and not be a “burden to society.”

He could never quite catch up with all he had to do each day, and every night, after the long hard days, he’d fall into his easy chair in the basement or crawl in the back seat of the car in a dead stupor.

With him were two corporals and one private first class, and all four of them, Sergeant Grim, Corporals Fitz and Jackson, and Private First Class Yello, were also not quite human.

All of them, it seemed, were cut from the same cloth. The fabric of which made them appear—the boy had trouble coming to an identification—“impervious.”

They seemed to be structured from some material that made them immune to anything even remotely human, from feeling pain, joy, affection, pathos.

There were forty men on the train, perhaps half of them two-year draftees who most emphatically did not want to be there, and the other half, like the boy, enlistees who had signed up for three years.

They graduated him from high school, considering the vocational school segment as a wide kind of credit, handed him a diploma—his parents weren’t there and nobody cared about him or applauded him—and, aside from becoming adept at electronics and able to troubleshoot and repair television sets, school had meant nothing to him.

Some of them—perhaps because they had angered their draft boards, or were outright criminals and allowed to be drafted rather than go to prison—were downright mutinous.

It was called, in broken letters crudely painted on a gray board, THE LOADING CHUTE, and when one of the draftees made a break for it and went into the bar, he was—literally—thrown clear of the front door and was very grateful to get back to the railcar in one piece.

When the mistake was at last realized, late on the third day after two nights, they were hooked to a passenger train and—treated like lepers and forbidden to leave the car they were in lest it make the other passengers ill—taken nonstop to Colorado Springs where they arrived at two in the morning stinking, roiling, in the thick and cloying odor of excrement and vomit, and aching with a driven thirst and starving hunger.

To be greeted by the sergeant and cadre who were not quite human.

The procedure for incoming recruits, which was never seen by nor understood by civilians, was to systematically attempt to destroy every vestige of their previous civilian status and life, and rebuild it with military thinking, living, existing.

After the short bus ride to Fort Carson, they were pushed into one of the older wooden barracks filled with sixty bunks made of wire springs and bare tick mattresses at four in the morning.

All the while, the cadre stood over them explaining it was a crime to waste food in the army, and if the tray was not scraped with the spoon and then wiped with the toast so that all remnants were eaten, everything would then have to be licked clean.

Then another supply shack where they were provided uniform clothing, stacked arm-over-head high, and given two minutes to get into underwear and fatigues—all massively too large.

Run to the mess hall for a sloppy joe burger that one man swore tasted like fried cat, with four (count them) burnt french fried potatoes that tasted as if they had been violated by rancid lard, and more of the dark watery applesauce for dessert and the ubiquitous black coffee, all of which must be eaten and drunk in four minutes, scraped or licked clean.

And if, because of entirely logical exhaustion, you fell asleep—several men toppled over into the dirt completely out—you had to get up and run around the group of men in the dirt to keep you awake while learning the mysteries of soldier etiquette.

Four the next morning up with slam-rattling Coke bottle in the garbage can, four minutes to dress, four more to finish ablutions, then meet on company street in fatigues and heavy combat boots for the first one-mile run.

Then outside in formation to run to a field to undergo an hour of calisthenics—a series of jumps, squats, push-ups, sit-ups, overlapping one to the next after which, impossible by now to believe, a break.

Class over, run to another field, one hour of something euphemistically called close-order drill. Marching—again, staggering—learning left from right in case they had forgotten, which some apparently had, and more marching back and forth, physically jammed into formation when they strayed, and, when it was done, run.

Then run back to the field for more close-order-drill stagger-marching, then run back to yet another building where—wonder of wonders—they were made to file in, sit at desks, and begin army aptitude testing.

He knew that he had changed and was not and would never again be what he had been in the town where he set pins and dodged bullies and found a measure of sanity and sanctuary in the library.