by James Jones
“She has to marry a man,” Georgette, who knew Alma’s plans, explained to Prew, “who is above suspicion and has so much position and prestige that it would be impossible for his wife to have ever been a whore. Its a shame, isnt it? You can see why she cant marry a soldier, even a general. Isnt it a shame?” Georgette started to cry again and mixed herself another drink.
It was a very fine celebration and it lasted almost all night. He told them all about Harlan Kentucky. Alma told them all about her little town in Oregon. Georgette, who was born and raised in Springfield Illinois, told them all about the State House and the Governor’s Mansion and Lincoln’s Mausoleum that some people still suspected had been mysteriously robbed of its glorious remains.
It was also a very apt celebration because he did not see either of them again for quite some time, although none of the three of them suspected that at the time.
When he got back to the Company, still hung over, in time for Reveille, he found field orders had been posted on the bulletin board. They were going into the field on one of the new sabotage problems for two weeks. They were going to Hickam Field to guard the plane revetments. There had been rumors in the Regiment that a sabotage problem was coming up but nobody had known just when it would come. He did not mind two weeks so much. He liked living in the field better than in garrison. Two weeks in the field would have been fine, if it was not that he could not get away to go to Maunalani Hts.
He managed to get away in the confusion of the packing and slip over to Choy’s to the pay phone and call her reversing the charges. Alma was not there, but Georgette took the call and said she would give her the message and wished him luck in the field. He told her two weeks was not so long. He did not know then of course that it would be longer than two weeks, much longer than two weeks, three months in the Stockade longer than two weeks. If he had he would probably have sent Alma a different message, but he thought he had all that taken care of. He thought he could get along with The Treatment almost indefinitely, now that he had this sanctuary down town. And he could have. As it happened, The Treatment had nothing at all to do with it. As The Warden would have said, it was just about his speed, what happened. Irony pursued him, or he pursued it.
The long string of big two and a half ton trucks from the motor pool pulled lumberingly rumblingly into the quad and parked in front of the 2nd Battalion, and there was a final great bustle of crablike confusion on the floor as everybody unmade full field packs to stick in a Handy oiler or a bore brush they had forgotten and then rolled full field packs again. Wall lockers banged tinnily as they got into the field uniform of OD wool shirt open at the neck and CKC slacks stuffed into leggins, and the little go-to-hell caps with the robin’s-egg-blue piping of the Infantry that you could stuff in your pocket when you had to wear the soup plate helmet. They swarmed downstairs and fell in and were counted off and assigned to trucks and then clambered up onto the tailgates and the tailgates were shut and latched behind them and the big trucks moved out belching exhaustively. That was the kind of soldiering Prewitt liked.
Chapter 30
IT WAS WHILE THEY were at Hickam Field on this problem that they wrote the Re-enlistment Blues.
It was to be the original, the real, the one and only, Army blues; when they got it written. They had talked about it a long time. They had never done it. Probably they never would have. But with Bloom gone to NCO School and Maggio in the Stockade and no chance for Prew to go to Maunalani Heights, he and Anderson and Friday Clark suddenly found themselves thrown back together for a little while with nothing else to do. The Re-enlistment Blues came out of that.
They had moved in and made their bivouac at the foot of an old abandoned railroad embankment that jutted up nudely out of the scrubby liana and keawe jungle a couple of hundred yards inside the fence. It was on the Field side, hidden from the Pearl Harbor-Hickam Highway, in a low grove in the tangle where the ground was open and thick-dusty smooth as if once occupied by feeding cattle, under the gnarled close-fitting branches that had kept the undergrowth from growing back and provided cover. Then they had strung three hundred yards of double apron wire and laid out a chain of staggered interlocking posts founded on the Hickam Main Gate to the north, and they were home. It was a fine place except for the mosquitoes. They settled into the regulated ebb and flow of two hours on and four hours off around the clock.
Only two-thirds of the Company was here. The other third was over on Kamehameha Highway five miles east, guarding an electric substation from sabotage as the two-thirds here were guarding planes from sabotage. It was strictly a sabotage problem. Over there they were even using ready-rolled accordion wire instead of double apron. The boxing squad had stayed in Schofield, to train for Company Smokers.
Capt Holmes had set up his CP over there, where the mosquitoes were not so bad. Stark set up his kitchen here, where the most men were. Stark had been willing to let Capt Holmes have two cooks and one of his field stoves, if he would furnish his own KPs, but that had been as far as Stark would budge. It worked out fine, for the men on post at Hickam. They did not mind having the mosquitoes. Stark always had one cook or KP up all night with hot coffee and hot sandwiches for them. Andy, who as company bugler had to go with the CP, would ride over every night with his guitar from the CP in the light truck that brought the lieutenant to inspect the posts. The lieutenant always made a beeline for the kitchen. Andy did most of his eating then. The cooks would always feed him if he was with the lieutenant. Stark would always feed anybody anytime. Then while Lt Culpepper was off on foot with Old Ike and the corporal on duty, checking the posts, they would climb to the top of the embankment with the guitars where they could catch the breeze off Pearl Channel that helped keep the mosquitoes down, for an hour, just the three of them, and the guitars, or maybe just two of them, if either Prew or Friday happened to be on post.
Prew’s post was along the top of the embankment, two hundred yards down the other way, toward the Main Gate. He would roll up out of three or four hours sleep and back into the wadded blankets to the accompaniment of a hand shaking his foot through the mosquito bar, his mind rising slowly-dreamlike like a rubber ball under the water and then popping up out of the surface, into full alerted wakefulness to find Old Ike or The Chief cursing him monotonously in tempo to the shaking foot.
“Wake up. Wake up goddam it Prewitt. Wake up. Come on wake up. Your relief is on wake up.”
“Okay, I’m awake,” huskily sleepily. “Let go my goddam foot I’m awake.”
“You sure you’re awake?” still shaking. “Come on get up.”
“Let go my foot. I’m awake, I tell you,” sitting up to prove it and bumping his head mellowly against the canted, drumhead of the puptent wall, trying to rub the novocaine of sleep out of his paralyzed face muscles. Then fighting his way out of the blankets and mosquito bar carrying the shoes rolled up in his pants that had been his pillow and crawling out bareassed so he could stand up to put them on, squeezing past the tent pole trying not to wake Friday who was on the third relief, but always unable to keep from half-waking him, as Friday was always unable to keep from half-waking him when he went on post. Then standing barefooted in the thick dust of the clearing, the mosquitoes shrilling triumphantly over this new bonanza of bare rump while he hurried struggling into the pants and socks and shoes to save himself as many stabbings as he could, and reaching back inside the clutter for the wool OD shirt that felt thick prickly warm in the chilliness of night, putting it on gratefully over the T shirt he would not take off but maybe once during the whole two weeks. Protected now, he could take more time with the hook-and-lace intricacies of the leggins in the darkness. Then the web rifle belt to coil turgid pythonlike around the waist, and working the rifle out under the mosquito bar from among the blankets where it was protected from the dust and dew, somewhat protected anyway, then the helmet lying on the ground outside and damp-rusty with the dew, and stumbling heavy-footed under full equipment, irritably half-sleepily across the rootwebbe
d moondappled clearing under the always faintly sighing branches toward the light of the Coleman lantern in the cook tent showing dimly dull brown through the canvas.
And in the cook tent, the relief huddling silently gratefully around the gasoline field stove that was always warm for them by Stark’s order, drinking the scalding coffee with its coconut flavor of canned milk as if gulping spiritual inspiration, and munching between gulps on the Stark Specials of hot fried Spam and toasted cheese that the accusing cook (who held them, not Stark, responsible for his loss of sleep) fixed grudgingly for them, and that were as different to the belly from the cold Spam and cheese on untoasted bread of normal mess sergeants, as hot coffee was from cold.
The can of milk with its top sliced open by a cleaver butt. The thick white, dripping out past the congealed yellow of past pourings that had almost sealed the gash, into his canteen cup. A dipper of the rainbow-oil-spotted coffee out of the kettle black-waterfalling in on top of it. And then cupping the whole steamheat of it in his hands like a private hearth, sucking the coffee out gratefully without touching his lips to the blistering cup edge, and then one of the good greasy hot fried meat-cheese toasted sandwiches and standing huddled dumbly like about-to-be-slaughtered sheep with the others around the stove, while The Chief looked at them blandly sympathetically.
“Lets hurry it up now. Them men on post is waitin to come in. Two hours from now you guys be waitin to come in, and bitchin like hell if you relief’s a minute late, so get a move on now and lets get it over with.”
And then filling the cup one more time to carry with him and an extra sandwich, wrapping it in the waxed paper Stark insisted the cooks leave out for them (which normal mess sergeants also never furnished), buttoning it down in the pocket of the OD shirt warm against the chest, to leave the disgusted sleepy cook who believed fervently that they were being coddled, The Chief staying sensibly in the kitchen with the coffee, to climb the steep path behind the cook tent to the top of the embankment.
Maybe a little of the Re-enlistment Blues also came out of that.
And he would stand, after the relief was made, and from the suspended animation that is guard duty in the field at night he would watch the headlights passing on the highway beyond the fence to turn in at the brightly lighted Main Gate to the north, slow for the Air Corps’ guards inspection, and then move off toward the concentration of cloud-reflected light that was Hickam Field, a mile to the west inside. And he would watch them then, feeling the sleepiness run down out of him like water, with the rapt absorption of a cougar or a deer or bear standing on a mountainside at night studying with wonder the brilliant moving trains that brought the hunters for the opening of the season without realizing their significance, him watching, not as a man, but as an unseparated part of nature and the intuitive night itself, as if two hours alone in the silence of it had finally driven him, forced him, back, out of himself and into the great awareness he had convinced himself he did not believe in any more.
And he could see then, at those times momentarily, how the deer and other game might also love the hunters who would kill them, just as he could see then that the hunters loved the game they tried so hard to kill, far more than any SPCA humane society would ever love it. And he would not, if he could, have had it any other way. Because he was a soldier, and because he could see it all then, in the easily shattered crystal clarity of the thin glass goblet of the silence that is guard duty in the field at night the last half hour before you are relieved.
Maybe the Re-enlistment Blues also came out of that.
He heard his relief, before he saw him, coming down the top of the embankment. Then Readall Treadwell hove into view, following his own footfalls into life, looking like a walking Woolworth’s under full equipment and slapping at mosquitoes. “Friday said to tell you he be down along the bob wire to the south,” Readall Treadwell said.
“What the hells he doin way down there?”
“How the hell should I know? I’m just tellin you what he tole me.”
“Okay,” he grinned. He cleared his throat. He always cleared his throat. After two hours on post he always felt his vocal cords might not work. “I must of woke him up when I came on,” he said.
“Yeah? Too goddam bad. Has the goddam lieutenant been around yet?”
“Nope, not yet.” He would get Friday and they would get the guitar and come up and wait for Andy.
“Then I’ll catch him sure,” Readall Treadwell said bitterly. “That son of a bitch never comes around after eleven. No sleep again tonight.”
“Yeah? Too goddam bad,” Prew grinned. “You can always go down and talk to one of the other posts and sneak a cigaret.”
“Piss on that noise,” Readall Treadwell said. “Sleep is what I need. And sleep is what I never get. You tell Big Chief to send a man around when he sees the truck,” Reedy called after him, “if he wants this post to be awake.”
Chief Choate was lying placidly on his back in his puptent among the messy blankets, his bulk seeming to bulge the sides, reading a comic book inside his mosquito bar by the light of a candle stuck to his helmet. The Chief bunked by himself, there was hardly room for Choate, let alone a partner, in a regulation shelter tent; and when he went in the field, which was seldom, he packed two shelterhalves instead of one, ever since the time when Leva the supply clerk had had to bunk with him once.
“Reedy said to tell you to send a man around if the lootenant comes.”
“This aint my relief,” the Chief protested. “I aint on duty.”
“I’m only tellin you what I was told to tell you.”
“That lazy son of a bitch,” the Chief said mildly, letting the book fall open like a postage stamp upon his chest. He stretched. “Build a fahr under him and he would holler for somebody to come put it out. Okay,” he said, “I’ll fix it,” and went back absorbedly into the adventures of Dick Tracy.
Friday was a full hundred and fifty yards down along the big loose curve of the double apron, through the stumbling root-tripping darkness. He was talking across the wire to the Air Corps night sentry from the Field junk yard across the road. Down here, where the wire cut back sharply from the gravel road to the flank that rested on one of the brackish ponds that became the swamp below where the mosquitoes bred, they were worse than fierce. They were fierce back at the bivouac.
“What the hell are you doing way off down here?” Prew said as he came up, slapping at the whirling spinning cutting knives that hovered thirstily around his ears.
“Me and this guy arguing the Army,” Friday grinned.
“Well you dont have to stand in this goddamned swamp to do it, do you? God damn these mosquitoes!” They hung in kaleidoscope-shifting phantom clouds, frenzied buzzsaws never quite in his ears, wheeling and darting and as untouchable as fighting Indians on horseback.
“He got to stay close. His post is right over there,” Friday nodded at the road. He grinned. “He says the Air Corps is the worst and I claim the Infantry’s the worst. What do you think?”
“They none of them worth a damn,” Prew said, slapping at mosquitoes. “You ask me.”
“You dont mean that!” the Air Corps man said in a shocked, startled voice.
“I don’t?” Prew said, startled himself. “Why dont I?”
“I was only kidding,” Friday explained.
“Because—” the Air Corps man began.
“This is my buddy Prewitt,” Friday grinned at him, “that I was telling you about.”
“Oh,” the Air Corps man said. “Thats different. I didn’t know.”
“You dont want to pay any attention to what he says,” Friday grinned. “He’s a thirdy year man in the Infantry. He loves it. He can tell you all you want to know about it.”
“Swell,” the Air Corps man said eagerly; he stepped up and put his hand formally across the fence. “Sure glad to know you, Prewitt. My name is Slade.”
“All he wants to know about what?” Prew said, taking the hand.
“He
wants to transfer to the Infantry,” Friday said.
“To the Infantry!”
“Yeah. To the Compny. Our Compny.”
“Not our Compny! What the hell for?”
“What for!” the Air Corps man Slade said excitedly. “Because I joined the Army to be a soldier, not a goddam gardener, thats why.”
Prew looked at him closer. “Most the guys I know are trying to get into the Air Corps.”
“Well, if they do they’ll sure regret it,” Slade said, waving indifferently at the swooping hordes around his head. “Unless they like being gardeners, that is.”
“Gardeners?” Prew said. “I thought everybody in the Air Corps went to a School.”
“Ha,” Slade said. “Sure. Join the Air Corps and learn a trade. Thats what my dad thought.”
“Your dad,” Prew said.
“Yes, when he got me to enlist in the Air Corps.”
“Oh,” Prew said.
“If I’d had any sense I’d have enlisted in the Infantry right then, like I wanted to do in the first place.”
“I told him you’d know how,” Friday said.
“How what?”
“How to go about transferring to the Compny.”
“Oh,” Prew said. “Sure. All you have to do is go up to Schofield and see the Compny Commander after we get back in garrison and——”
“In garrison,” Slade said enthusiastically. “That’s a good phrase, you know it? That sounds like soldiering.”
“Yeah?” Prew said. “It does? Well, you see the CC and get his permission to put in for transfer to his compny and then you see your First Sergeant and give him the letter from the CC and put in for it. Thats all.”
“Is that all there is to it?” Slade said. “I thought it would be hard. You know what I mean, complicated.”
