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.
Chapter Nine
We should never have even been at the hand-grenade range on the training cycle’s last day. But there we sat in bleachers, while Ord lectured up front. Behind him a trench maze zigzagged down to a line of four sandbagged pits.
We would soon waddle through those trenches to the pits, from which we would hurl live grenades. Ten yards downrange beyond the pits, splintered, dead tree trunks stood. A grenade exploded into four hundred shards of metal shrapnel. If the trees weren’t reminder enough that this was live fire, at our backs idled an ambulance, medics dangling their feet over the tailgate.
Would the medics give me oxygen if I told them I couldn’t breathe? Every one of us trainees was tight about this. But for me it was worse. All I could see was Arnold Rudawitz’s fingernail, cherry-bombed and dangling bloody from his index finger as he ran screaming to his mom while she barbecued Fourth of July chicken.
Normally, Basic Training climaxed by playing war out in the boonies for a couple days, sleeping in tents and foxholes, and eating only rations we carried. Kind of a doctoral thesis of dirt grubbing.
But one Basic Training rite of passage is to throw a live hand grenade. We hadn’t. The army was supposed to have sent Indiantown Gap live grenades long ago. For twelve weeks the grenades were expected momentarily, like the Russian coal that arrived late and the physical-training gym shoes that arrived never.
So we had already completed our final field exercise, and we had the last day to kill. I can’t believe I just wrote that
Everybody wore helmets. Except the drills, of course. They swaggered around in their Smokey Bears, as if a felt hat would intimidate a short-fused grenade. They dragged rope-handled wooden boxes of grenades forward into the pits, then returned.
Walter whispered, “A guy last cycle got one with an instantaneous fuse. He was lucky. It only blew his arm off.”
A guy behind us said, “I heard the primers are so old there are lots of short fuses.”
My heart battered my ribs as I saw again Rudawitz’s bloody finger.
I felt Walter’s shoulder warm against mine. Goofy as he was, I had come to depend on Walter. He was always there, and I always knew what he was thinking, like Metzger and me. I suppose to people who grew up with siblings that’s normal. To me it was amazing.
A drill demonstrated grenade-throwing. The grenade top has a spring-loaded hammer in it that’s held back by a lever that curves along the grenade’s body. A pin hoick the lever down. You pull the pin while you hold the lever with your thumb. When you throw, the lever flies off, the hammer snaps like a mousetrap and sets off the primer. Four seconds or so later, the primer detonates the main explosive. Wire wrapped inside and the ball-shaped metal casing blow to pieces. They gut everything for a five-meter radius.
My vision blurred. All I could see was blood and severed fingernails.
I had done many new, scary things in Basic. But I couldn’t throw that live grenade. Yet I had to or fail to graduate.
“Jason? You’re shaking. Are you alright?”
“Yeah.” Until about a minute from now, when I’d puke.
Against my shoulder, Walter shook. “I know how you feel. About now it would be nice to have Prozac.”
Yeah. I slipped my hand into my trouser pocket and touched two pellets. I had worn these fatigues the first training day. My two leftover Prozac lIs still lay in there. I fingered them. Flattened by countless launderings but still potent inside their indestructible plastic wrap, they defied the zero-drug-tolerance regs.
My hands trembled. I’d drop the fucking grenade right at my own feet. If my hands would just stop shaking for twenty minutes, though, I’d be okay. I’d waltz through the trench lineup, into the throw pit, march back out and back to barracks to brush down my Class-A uniform for graduation.
The drill showed how the exercise would work while the breeze twitched his hat brim. He held the grenade in one hand with his thumb pinning that lever down like his life depended on it. Because it did.
He stuck the finger of his nonthrowing hand through the ring that was attached to the pin that held down the lever.
The drill said, “Short fuses are extremely rare. A bigger problem is trainees dropping the weapon. Don’t!”
Easy for him to say. I truly could not breathe. The drill stood in a throw pit and jerked his grenade’s pin.
While everybody concentrated on him, I skinned the plastic off the ‘Zacs and smeared a hand across my face. I gagged them down, dry.
The drill threw. We all ducked and covered while he dropped behind the sandbag wall.
Nothing happened.
Well, nothing happened for the longest four seconds you ever heard.
Boom!
Dirt and spent shrapnel rained on those of us forward in the trench.
Up ahead, the drill stood and dusted himself off.
I smiled as the Prozacs’ tingling glow spread through me.
Ahead, the first trainee in line stepped forward into the sandbagged pit with a drill smack on his elbow. The drill unwrapped a grenade from a cardboard sleeve, talked the guy through everything while he looked him in the eye, then handed him the grenade.
Somebody behind us shouted, “Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!” We all ducked and covered
