Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

  And the plebe is YESSIR—YESSIR—YESSIR—YESSIRing up a storm, the squad leader is standing an inch away yelling in his ear, and the whole world is falling, falling right down around the plebe’s ears, the whole thing is gonna stop, the whole goddamn place is gonna crack—it’s all become too goddamn much, too much to handle.

  It could be equally bad for the squad leader, maybe even worse. He’s got eleven guys to take care of, eleven goddamn plebes, eleven separate walking duffel bags of problems. This one’s got bad teeth, gotta get them fixed. That one can’t swim a stroke, he’s never been in water in his life. He’s gotta be coached and coached so he’ll make it through Plebe Orientation Swimming, so he’ll make it through Beast and at least get a shot at takin’ swimming in Plebe PE during the regular year.

  And that one over there, the one with the ears sticking out from the sides of his head like a couple of big oak leaves, the one with the nose, looks like somebody yanked at it with a pair of vice grips, the one whose arms are so long his hands are hanging down around his knees—yeah, that one—he’s a fuckin’ case, a textbook case, lemme tell you. You talk about your fuck-ups—well, this kid’s created a whole new area of fuckin’ up, staked it out all by himself. You know the kid in your high school, always used to carry a briefcase to school, wore glasses, always walking down the halls, gazing around, bumping into people, never seemed like he was, you know, present? Well, this bean makes a guy like him look like Joe fuckin’ Namath, his shit is in such a state of total flap. Tell you what. Don’t know where they’re digging up these smacks any more. Just don’t fuckin’ know. They gotta be comin’ from someplace, but damned if you can figure where….

  The squad leader has a whole squad, eleven plebes, eleven beans, eleven smacks, every one of them different, and yet every one of them the same, because they’re all beans when it comes right down to it. Plebes. Sorry-ass excuses for American humanity, a bunch of goddamn accidents looking for a place to happen, and they had to happen here, in this squad, all at once, like a human chain-reaction pile-up….

  Beast cut through the bullshit, shattering the mirror of cadet narcissism. Beast had a soft underbelly. You ended up learning as much about yourself as you learned about that thing they called leadership. Being one of the bad guys for a month taught you that self and other were inversely proportional. Early on, it was clear you had to yield something. Racktime. Movies. Attention to the girl in your life. Usually, it added up to about eighteen hours a day, every goddamn day. And you had to care about those eleven plebes. You couldn’t fake it. Plebes knew. You knew that they knew, because you’d been a plebe, too. The shared experience brought squad leader and squad close together.

  Beast was West Point’s most overt usage of one’s innate inhumanity to others for the academy’s own purposes. Every squad leader was shooting in the dark, and each of them, though they wouldn’t admit it, had this feeling he could kill—metaphorically, psychologically, even for real—hell, they didn’t know, and it didn’t really matter. The feeling was what counted. And each of them sure as hell felt the anxiety he’d inherited from a long gray line of hellish, bottomless tradition. So Slaight did what most twenty-one-year-olds would do. He went along, up to a point.

  He figured West Point was probably better at “teaching” leadership than anyplace in the nation. After all, the place had been at it with a vengeance since 1802. But Slaight had always held that leadership was at least 50 per cent acting ability—what he called “the John Wayne quotient.” There came a time, however, when Slaight learned what it was all about.

  The lesson Slaight learned was ironic, for “playing the game,” the eternal diversion of most cadets and upon which Slaight looked down with derision, became all-important to him. Slaight was forced to negotiate step by painful step all the traps designed into the “game” in order to come to grips with West Point’s special secret. War was indeed the reason the Military Academy existed, and by extension, its purpose was to teach young men to kill. But there was a corollary to the academy’s mission, unmentioned by West Point officialdom. You had to be willing to die, not for duty, honor, or country, but for your own men.

  That was leadership, the thing West Point had to offer. And there was its secret. The system counted subliminally but necessarily on human imponderables. West Point knew you’d end up loving those whom you were trained to despise and abuse—in this case, your own plebes. The twist was as frightening as it was effective. While the academy supplied you the drum of ego and urged you to beat on it with vigor, ever so subtly was planted a seed of self-sacrifice. Not until he was a squad leader in Beast did “all that gibberish about leadership,” as Slaight called it, make sense. Suddenly, it counted. Eleven young men depended on him.

  Slaight, lying awake in bed at night, thinking to himself, the only time he’s got all to himself, really—when he thinks about it—actually gets down and goddamn thinks about it—he loves those beans. Every last sorry-assed one of them. He loves them because they’re his. He loves them because they’re beans. He loves them because they depend on him, like some kind of father or mother—something anyway. He loves them because down deep, way deep inside, they’re him. He was a bean. He was a plebe. He was a fuck-up and a dullard and a crot and a worthless no-good-for-nothin’ piece of shit, and goddamn if he doesn’t remember what it was like! He remembers what it felt like, Beast Barracks, every last one of those hellish days in July and August, and how he loved his goddamn squad leaders, loved them and hated them both. They were always jumping in his shit, coming down on him like goddamn jackhammers, but somehow, when it was all over, he had turned out okay. September came, he got into his regular company, Beast was over, and damned if he didn’t discover that he could cope! That was what it had all been about—about coping. A squad leader taught you how to cope. He taught you about life, stuff you’d never forget as long as you lived. When you were finished with Beast, after you’d waded through the muck and the shit they tossed at you, you were a goddamn cadet, a regular guy, full-fledged and everything, and you could fuckin’ cope.

  They were a responsibility, those beans, those eleven young American men. One fuck of a big responsibility. And the guy who was directly responsible for them—responsible for whether or not they took their salt pills and wrote home to Mommy and Daddy and took at least a couple of craps each week—the guy who was responsible for every minute of their miserable little lives was the squad leader. All around him, first-classmen and officers, tacs and lieutenant colonels and majors and staff officers and even old Hedges, the Beast C.O., all around him these other guys stood, watching—just watching and waiting. They were waiting for him, for the squad leader, to fuck up, is what they were doing. Waiting to see if one of his guys dropped out of a reveille run. Waiting for Saturday Morning Inspection, to see if his squad was looking Up To Snuff. Waiting for the inevitable, one of the plebes wanting to see the tac, wanting to resign. All those firsties and officers just stood around waiting for the squad leader to fuck up, and just like with the plebes, it took only one, just one little fuck-up, and it was All Over….

  Beast Barracks hung together like a fifty-dollar jalopy limping along on retreads, a quart of oil every hundred miles, six out of eight cylinders firing, brakes just this much short of needing new drums, the pedal going down within an inch of the floor, everything bucking and jerking and screeching but somehow still rolling—and you knew, just knew, if one little piece blew, the whole goddamn thing would grind to a halt and you’d be stuck. It was the way of Beast Barracks.

  So David Hand wasn’t just a wild card. He was trouble. The kid from New Orleans was a plague on the squad, hell, on the whole platoon of forty-four plebes. It was a question of morale. Everybody knew what had happened. Everybody knew Crolius was the only guy who’d even come close to being a friend of Hand’s … when Hand turned him in on an honor violation, and they all saw Crolius get it … they all saw him take gas for something they called quibbling, but which looked to the rest of the plebes
like a pile of trumped-up crap … when they’d seen what happened to Crolius and how Hand just kept lording it over them, beating them at all the diddlyshit stuff plebes were supposed to do every day … they cracked, broke wide open, a goddamn wound opened in the squad, in the platoon, a wound that was bleeding and bleeding and bleeding and just would not fuckin’ stop….

  That was when Slaight knew he’d have to do something about Hand. He saw it in the faces of the other plebes. You looked at them, and something in their eyes was pleading, begging, yearning—for what? For release? For help? Slaight didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. All he knew was, Hand had to be dealt with, and dealt with now or the whole goddamn squad was going to up and quit, fall apart, consume itself with self-pity and agony and sorrow at the memory of poor Crolius. Because they were his responsibility, Slaight knew the whole thing was his fault. But the more he studied the thing, the more he knew—just knew—the answer. He’d have to break Hand. Break him open and grind up the worm inside of him, open the smart-ass fucker up so the rest of them could glimpse the truth that Hand was, after all, human.

  It was the first time in his life Slaight had felt the surge of power, the twinge, the juice that rushed up your backbone once you’d made up your mind you were going to do something, and you knew you were going to do it right. No, it was the second time. The first time had been when he’d learned at age fifteen that he could shoot pool—he was a shooter, nobody could beat him, he could hustle pool. But this business with Hand was different. Hustling pool was just betting money against skill, when you got right down to it. Dealing with David Hand would be gambling with another man’s life. So Slaight set up and he took his shot.

  From the start, he complemented an overall plan with certain tactics of harassment and interdiction. He took command of Hand’s time, orchestrating every moment of his day, from the time he awoke in the morning to the instant he climbed into bed at night. Slaight was there. He didn’t supervise Hand, he controlled him. Hand wasn’t permitted to make a single move which was not in some way directed by Ry Slaight or by Leroy Buck, Slaight’s friend and fellow squad leader who had taken a similar interest in “the punk from New Orleans,” as Buck called him.

  To Leroy Buck, Hand was just an animal. Back home on the farm in Indiana, he’d have gone after such a creature with his .22 rifle or maybe a sixteen-gauge shotgun. Buck’s reaction to Hand’s special breed of arrogance was not all that far-fetched in the army of 1967. In Basic Training, an army drill sergeant would have simply run Hand ragged, worn him down physically until he either collapsed and was hospitalized or died. To a drill sergeant, it didn’t really matter.

  As an enlisted man in a regular army unit, Hand would have been cut out of the platoon and tortured in the vicious, petty ways caged men go at one another. Maybe his platoon mates would have dragged him into the showers and scrubbed him with latrine brushes until his skin bled from head to toe. Maybe they’d have starved him, totally deprived him of food during a lengthy field exercise. Maybe they’d simply take him out in a car late at night, run it up to sixty or seventy miles an hour, and push him out the door. Kill the bastard. When it came to the army, there was no way of telling what men would have done to a guy like David Hand.

  But at West Point, the process was elusive, more refined: the ways of Beast Barracks were hidden from the eye and the ear. It wasn’t physical, it was psychological, a game played with wits and patience. For always West Pointers had been taught the lessons of bureaucracy, taught to believe that time was on the side of the man willing to do the waiting. Time was an elegant weapon.

  So they waited, Slaight and Buck, and they tossed David Hand between them like a badminton birdie. They sent him on little crummy mission after little crummy mission, carrying messages between the two squad leaders’ rooms, visiting other upperclassmen of known ugly disposition. Always the results were the same. David Hand was on time. He was neat. He got things straight. He never missed a beat. Every time he reported to either Slaight or Buck, even when he had run halfway across the area of barracks and returned out of breath, he reported expertly, without a single mistake. At first it was maddening, watching this plebe run circles around every design of Slaight and Buck, who figured they could nail Hand in a matter of a few days. It would be only a short time before he cracked. Then they knew. It was going to take time. They settled into a comfortable—for them, anyway—routine.

  Hand was kept extremely busy. He had no free time. Zero. He lived his entire life at the behest of Slaight and Buck, who combined their energies expertly. For more than a week, the routine remained the same: Hand running, reporting, delivering, shining, running, reporting, spouting plebe poop, running, shining, running, reporting, bracing against walls, running, more running, more bracing, more reporting, more bracing—and on and on and on, endless variations on the same theme. They thought they’d wear him down. But it wasn’t working. Hand was perfect. Perfect. It was impossible to make him fuck up. Then one night, three days before the last day of the First Detail of Beast Barracks, three days before Slaight would be out of Hand’s life for good, Slaight got an idea. What was the lone weapon he still had in his arsenal? The last goddamn thing he could use on Hand? The only thing he hadn’t pulled out and thrown at him so far?

  It was 9:35 P.M., the time when plebe mail carriers came to the rooms of upperclassmen to collect mail which would go out early the next morning. Naturally, David Hand was the mail carrier for his squad leader, Slaight. He reported to Slaight’s room. Slaight looked up from his desk and signaled for Hand to enter. Hand stood the proper four feet from the front of Slaight’s desk and waited, as Slaight finished addressing an envelope. Then he handed the envelope to the plebe. It was addressed to Samantha Hand, Vassar College—Hand’s sister. His eyes flared when he saw the name. It was a tiny, fleeting loss of composure. Coming from another plebe, Slaight would have written it off as one more glimmer of emotion in a huge spectrum he had watched his squad go through during the past four weeks—everything from elation, the adrenaline of plebe euphoria when a job had been well done, to utter resignation and defeat, the way they looked right now. With David Hand there had been only one emotion the entire four weeks: superiority. Self-confidence. Ego. Even when Hand had thrust forward his fist, admitting at the manhood session that he hadn’t “gotten any” from his girl friend back home, he had done so proudly. Slaight had to admire him for that. The kid had guts.

  But now Hand had flickered, ever so slightly, opening the secret door to which Ry Slaight held the key. Slaight just sat there pretending to go through some papers on his desk. He didn’t look up at Hand’s face, for he knew Hand was standing still, staring at the spot on the wall above his head, awaiting further instruction. Slaight glanced at the letter. Hand gripped the envelope so tightly it was crumpled. His hand had unconsciously formed a fist, and the letter was wrinkled like a piece of cloth. This wasn’t David Hand, the perfect David Hand who had beaten the Beast Barracks system at its own game. This was a scared kid. Slaight knew he had him.

  Slaight continued to shuffle his papers, waiting for Hand to tumble the possibilities around in his mind. He waited, giving Hand the chance to consider every possible scenario. It was quiet in the room. There were twenty-five minutes until taps, until Hand had to return to his room down the hall. Slaight knew he had the time. He told Hand to step around the desk next to the wall, and to relax. They had talked informally before. Now Slaight made it seem like he was giving up, like Hand had won. He asked Hand about new Orleans, about his high school, what it was like down South, what his father did for a living. Hand mumbled unenthusiastic answers.

  Slaight pretended not to notice, rambled on about Kansas, about going to high school in Leavenworth, about a girl friend he had back home. He was treating Hand like one of the guys, pulling him inside. He explained to Hand the ways of West Point, how lots of guys had a girl friend back home, and another parked somewhere nearby, one of the local colleges maybe, a girl in the city, a stewardess or a
secretary, any old girl. He told Hand that’s the way he’d worked it. Kept the girl back home happy on leaves, then had all the local skirt he wanted, what a good deal it was. Slaight told Hand if he played his cards right, maybe he could work the same kind of deal. Hand nodded, as if to say yes, sir. Slaight babbled on, as if he hadn’t noticed the slip in protocol. Then he paused and shuffled through the papers on his desk. He pulled out another envelope, this one addressed to Betty Jane Soah, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He gave it to Hand. He winced this time. Slaight leaned back in his chair, let the whole thing sink in. Here was Slaight, telling David Hand all about what a good deal he’d had for the last couple of years … a girl friend back home … a girl friend somewhere nearby, getting ass in both places. Hand was standing there, holding both envelopes and listening.

  He was sweating now, water pouring down his forehead, soaking his shirt collar, pouring down his arms. The knees of his khaki trousers were soaked dark brown with sweat. The envelopes, crinkled in his left hand, were wet. Slaight watched Hand from the corner of his eyes. He was blinking beads of sweat off his eyelashes, water running down his face in a river. Slaight leaned back in his chair, put his hands on his desk, spun slowly around, and looked straight at Hand. It was time.

  “You know something Hand?” Slaight asked. “I’ve gotten a lot of ass in the last couple of years, but the best piece of ass I ever fucked was your sister.”

  Hand swiveled on his heel and faced Slaight, sweat pouring from every inch of skin on his body.

  “That sister of yours fucks like a goddamn bunny, do it in the fuckin’ road, she would. Never seen anyone like her. A regular fuckin’ maniac, that goddamn Samantha.”