It was what you’d call a nice day since the war started. The haze was almost bright, and it was a windless thirty degrees or so. Then something in the air went funny.
Of course, it was overpressure. As everybody knows now, a Projectile is so big that it piles air in front of it when it plows into the atmosphere at thirty thousand miles per hour.
Walter spun his head toward me, brow knit beneath his Kevlar pot. “Do you feel—”
We saw it before we heard it. I never want to again.
Sun-bright light boiled in a streak that seemed as wide as the sky and a hundred feet above us. It was actually twenty miles up. The noise and shock wave as it roared by knocked us all flat. Then the impact-flash bloom blinded me like an old film-camera flashbulb, even half a state away.
The ground rolled underneath us, like a bedsheet snapped over a mattress, then we all tumbled and fell back onto the road. It knocked the wind out of me, and I saw stars.
Somebody said, “Holy shit!”
Then the blast wind swept across us, whipping house-tall, bare trees like goldenrod straw in a breeze.
For too long nobody moved, just lay and breathed.
Ord was first up. It was the first time I’d seen him even faintly impressed. His eyes seemed wide, and he stood close enough that I heard him whisper, “Holy Mother of God!”
He dusted his uniform off, straightened his hat, and called out, “On your feet! Third Platoon, sound off!”
Everybody was up, rattling off names by squad. Nobody admitted being hurt. He had us marching before we could think.
We all stared west, toward the impact flash.
Somebody whispered, “What’s over there?”
“Pittsburgh. Was.”
I teared up, and my throat swelled.
I’d have thought Ord would call off training. We had just witnessed people die. Stunningly. Horribly. Massively. But he kept marching like something else mattered. Nobody sang the rest of the way to the range.
The M-16 is no marksman’s weapon. It’s short-barreled. The bullet wobbles, the better to tear through flesh once it strikes. The bullet is small, so a GI can carry more ammunition. But those characteristics reduce accuracy. At ranges beyond 300 meters without telescopic sights you might as well throw rocks at the target. Which didn’t stop the army in its wisdom from setting the farthest rank of range targets at Indiantown Gap out at 460 meters.
Lorenzen stood chest deep in one of a firing-line row of foxholes, popping away with his ’16.1 sat cross-legged on the ground beside him, serving as his “coach” and marking his scorecard. The shooter-coach pairing was repeated up and down the line. I scored using an antique lead pencil and sniffed drifting cordite.
“Did I hit that last one, Jason?”
How the hell did I know? The close-in targets were easy to shoot, but I couldn’t even see the far row through the dust-dimmed twilight. I checked off Walter’s card. “You nailed that mother!”
“Wow! A perfect score!”
Nobody talked about it, but if an infantryman scored less than expert, his coach’s pencil failed, not his marksmanship.
Everybody switched places, me and the other coaches now hunkered in the foxholes, plinking away. I whacked the close-in targets, then sighted on the far row.
Walter squinted downrange. “I think you missed that one Jason.”
“Nah.”
Walter shook his head. “Maybe you need to bear down more. Like I did.”
I exhaled. “Christ, Walter! Just mark them hits!”
He shook his head again. His helmet misfit him so his head moved while his pot sat still. “That would be cheating.”
Ord strolled by behind us. I shut up and shot.
Later the drills sat around a wood outdoor table adding scorecards while the rest of us eyed three deuce- and-a-halfs parked behind them. The old, internal-combustion-engine kind that ran on diesel fuel. As heavy as they were, battery power wasn’t an option. One truck had litters and a medic aboard. A makeshift ambulance. Anytime we practiced live fire the army made sure we had plenty of Band-Aids close by.
The sight moved me near tears. Not with emotion at the army’s concern for our well-being, but at the realization that there were three trucks. Four platoons. Lowest-scoring platoon was going to walk six miles home with full pack.
Ord stood and read from a Chipboard. “In first place, Second Platoon.”
Those dicks whooped and piled into a truck.
Ord watched them go, then said, “First Platoon also achieved perfect scores across the board. Most impressive!”
Everybody perfect? I got a sick feeling. Maybe the other drills had tipped their platoons off about the creative scoring system. Ord had left us to figure it out for ourselves, and at least Walter hadn’t. We were screwed.
Fifteen minutes later Third Platoon trudged toward the post, six miles away. Ahead of us the last truck disappeared, leaving us to eat Fourth Platoon’s dust. At least we didn’t have to listen to them hoot and make sucking sounds at us over the tailgate anymore.
“Nice work, Wander! The only guy in the company who scored less than perfect!”
If I said a word about how it happened, Third Platoon would kill Walter. Even the stress of field-stripping his rifle made his hands shake. If the other guys crapped on him for this, he’d crumble. They already hated my guts. I could take it.
But still, as I marched alongside Walter, the injustice of it all made my hand quiver as it clutched my rifle sling.
“Jeez, Jason. If you’d asked me I would have helped you practice. I bet you could learn to shoot just as good as me.”
I don’t know what happened. Maybe it was Pittsburgh. Maybe it was that Ord and this idiotic, insensitive army kept us playing target practice when all those people had died. I just grabbed Walter by his scrawny fucking neck and choked him. His helmet popped off and rocked on the ground.
“You ignorant, four-eyed toad! Get a clue!” We fell and rolled in the road while the rest of the platoon gaped.
“At ease!”
My fist froze midway to Walter’s nose. Ord’s voice could stop a falling piano thirty stories up. He dragged us to our feet by our field-jacket collars.
A blood string trailed from Walter’s left nostril. He peered at me through cracked glasses, with hurt-puppy eyes.
Ord frowned at me. “Wander, when will you learn that you will all get through this together or you will all fail separately?”
Me? I was Mr. Teamwork here. These other assholes were the problem.
Ord moved the platoon out, and as we marched, he walked alongside me, and said, “Wander, after you have cleaned your weapon and returned it to the armorer and attended to tomorrow’s uniform requirements and your policing duties you will report to my office.”
“Yes, Drill Sergeant.” My heart sank. But at least the rest of the platoon wasn’t getting screwed for my fuck- up.
“Oh. That’s right. I should be sure you get back early enough to get all that done, Wander.”
Forty-nine pairs of boots crunched Pennsylvania’s frozen earth. What could be worse than six more miles of this drudgery with full pack?
“Platoon! Port arms .”
My heart shot into my throat. When you walk with a rifle, you carry it over your shoulder. You carry it across your body, at port arms, when you double-time .
Ord was going to run us all six miles back to camp. As a favor to me.
I should change my name from Mr. Teamwork to Mr. Popularity. Nobody had breath to curse me, so it was a quiet six miles.
