make high rank and die gloriously and I’ll read about it and say proudly, ‘I knew him when. Why, I used to lend him money — we were corporals together.’ Well?”
“I’ve never thought about it,” I said slowly. “I just meant to serve my term.”
He grinned sourly. “Do you see any term enrollees being paid off today? You expect to make it on two years?”
He had a point. As long as the war continued, a “term” didn’t end — at least not for cap troopers. It was mostly a difference in attitude, at least for the present. Those of us on “term” could at least feel like short-timers; we could talk about: “When this flea-bitten war is over.” A career man didn’t say that; he wasn’t going anywhere, short of retirement — or buying it.
On the other hand, neither were we. But if you went “career” and then didn’t finish twenty … well, they could be pretty sticky about your franchise even though they wouldn’t keep a man who didn’t want to stay.
“Maybe not a two-year term,” I admitted. “But the war won’t last forever.”
“It won’t?”
“How can it?”
“Blessed if I know. They don’t tell me these things. But I know that’s not what is troubling you, Johnnie. You got a girl waiting?”
“No. Well, I had,” I answered slowly, “but she ‘Dear-Johned’ me.” As a lie, this was no more than a mild decoration, which I tucked in because Ace seemed to expect it. Carmen wasn’t my girl and she never waited for anybody — but she
Ace nodded wisely. “They’ll do it every time. They’d rather marry civilians and have somebody around to chew out when they feel like it. Never you mind, son — you’ll find plenty of them more than willing to marry when you’re retired … and you’ll be better able to handle one at that age. Marriage is a young man’s disaster and an old man’s comfort.” He looked at my glass. “It nauseates me to see you drinking that slop.”
“I feel the same way about the stuff you drink,” I told him.
He shrugged. “As I say, it takes all kinds. You think it over.”
“I will.”
Ace got into a card game shortly after, and lent me some money and I went for a walk; I needed to think.
Go career? Quite aside from that noise about a commission, did I want to go career? Why, I had gone through all this to get my franchise, hadn’t I?—and if I went career, I was just as far away from the privilege of voting as if I had never enrolled … because as long as you were still in uniform you weren’t entitled to vote. Which was the way it should be, of course — why, if they let the Roughnecks vote the idiots might vote not to make a drop. Can’t have that.
Nevertheless I had signed up in order to win a vote.
Or had I?
Had I ever cared about voting? No, it was the prestige, the pride, the status … of being a citizen.
Or was it?
I couldn’t to save my life remember
Anyhow, it wasn’t the process of voting that made a citizen — the Lieutenant had been a citizen in the truest sense of the word, even though he had not lived long enough ever to cast a ballot. He had “voted” every time he made a drop.
And so had I!
I could hear Colonel Dubois in my mind: “Citizenship is an attitude, a state of mind, an emotional conviction that the whole is greater than the part … and that the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.”
I still didn’t know whether I yearned to place my one-and-only body “between my loved home and the war’s desolation”—I still got the shakes every drop and that “desolation” could be pretty desolate. But nevertheless I knew at last what Colonel Dubois had been talking about. The M.I. was mine and I was theirs. If that was what the M.I. did to break the monotony, then that was what I did. Patriotism was a bit esoteric for me, too large-scale to see. But the M.I. was my gang, I belonged. They were all the family I had left; they were the brothers I had never had, closer than Carl had ever been. If I left them, I’d be lost.
So why shouldn’t I go career?
All right, all right — but how about this nonsense of greasing for a commission? That was something else again. I could see myself putting in twenty years and then taking it easy, the way Ace had described, with ribbons on my chest and carpet slippers on my feet … or evenings down at the Veterans Hall, rehashing old times with others who belonged. But O.C.S.? I could hear Al Jenkins, in one of the bull sessions we had about such things: “I’m a private! I’m going to stay a private! When you’re a private they don’t expect anything of you. Who wants to be an officer? Or even a sergeant? You’re breathing the same air, aren’t you? Eating the same food. Going the same places, making the same drops. But no worries.”
Al had a point. What had chevrons ever gotten me?—aside from lumps.
Nevertheless I knew I would take sergeant if it was ever offered to me. You don’t refuse, a cap trooper doesn’t refuse anything; he steps up and takes a swing at it. Commission, too, I supposed.
Not that it would happen. Who was I to think that I could ever be what Lieutenant Rasczak had been?
My walk had taken me close to the candidates’ school, though I don’t believe I intended to come that way. A company of cadets were out on their parade ground, drilling at trot, looking for all the world like boots in Basic. The sun was hot and it looked not nearly as comfortable as a bull session in the drop room of the
I watched them a bit, sweating through their uniforms; I heard them being chewed out — by sergeants, too. Old Home Week. I shook my head and walked away from there—
—went back to the accommodation barracks, over to the B.O.Q. wing, found Jelly’s room.
He was in it, his feet up on a table and reading a magazine. I knocked on the frame of the door. He looked up and growled, “Yeah?”
“Sarge — I mean, Lieutenant—”
“Spit it out!”
“Sir, I want to go career.”
He dropped his feet to the desk. “Put up your right hand.”
He swore me, reached into the drawer of the table and pulled out papers.
He had my papers already made out, waiting for me ready to sign. And I hadn’t even told Ace. How about that?
12
It is by no means enough that an officer should be capable… . He should be as well a gentleman of liberal education, refined manners, punctilious courtesy, and the nicest sense of personal honor… . No meritorious act of a subordinate should escape his attention, even if the reward be only one word of approval. Conversely, he should not be blind to a single fault in any subordinate.
True as may be the political principles for which we are now contending … the ships themselves must be ruled under a system of absolute despotism.
I trust that I have now made clear to you the tremendous responsibilities… . We must do the best we can with what we have.
The
