Lights were out when I stepped up to the wedge of light that spilled from Ord’s open office door. He sat behind a gray metal desk, hat alongside him. How his uniform looked morning-fresh off the hanger at 2200 hours I couldn’t fathom. I rapped on the doorjamb.
He didn’t look up. “Come! And close the door behind you.”
Oboy. I stepped in front of the desk and froze at attention. “Trainee Wander reports, Drill Sergeant.”
He was reading an old, paper greeting card. He slipped it and its envelope under his hat brim while I swallowed, blinked, and breathed.
I survived many a pop quiz by reading somebody else’s paper upside down. Ord’s card read “Happy Birthday, Son.”
The envelope’s return address was Pittsburgh.
My God. Ord had just lost his mother. When I lost Mom I beat the crap out of everyone who crossed my path. And here I stood in front of Ord. I clenched my jaw and braced for the worst.
Finally, Ord swallowed, then looked up. “Why are you here, Wander?”
Was this a trick question? “Because the drill sergeant told me to be.”
“I mean in the army.”
Because if I wasn’t here, Judge March would lock me up with the scum of the Earth until I was so old I creaked. “I want to be Infantry because Infantry leads the way, Drill Sergeant!”
“I don’t mean the bullshit answer. I know how you came to enlist. I know about your mother. And I am genuinely sorry.” His eyes were soft, almost liquid.
I wanted to tell him I knew. Knew what he had lost. Knew how he had suffered. But soldiers don’t do that. I thought.
“I don’t know, then.”
“Son.”
Now there was a word I thought was outside Ord’s vocabulary, until now.
He rocked back in his chair. “I’m not sure you belong here. This really is about working together, eye-rolling cynicism to the contrary.”
“Together? Those other assholes cheated at the range!”
He nodded. “Lorenzen scored you honestly at seventy-eight of eighty. I doubt anyone else in the company really broke sixty. I’ve seen lots of perfect scores, but only two trainees have actually hit seventy-eight targets in the last ten years.”
My jaw dropped. I should have realized that Ord knew about the scoring. Ord knew everything. And my chest swelled a little about the seventy-eight.
“Wander, your Mil-SAT math score was average, but your verbal pulled it up so your overall score is higher than Captain Jacowicz’s was. And he’s a West Pointer! Infantry seems like a lowest-common-denominator exercise to a bright guy like you, doesn’t it?”
Another underachiever lecture. I sighed loud enough that Ord heard.
“Mock foot-soldiering if you choose. But it’s really about the toughest thing men or women can discipline themselves to do.”
I swallowed. I wasn’t mocking. I understood the discipline that let Ord carry out ordered training even though he had just watched his mother die.
It wasn’t disrespect, but wonder, that made me roll my eyes.
But Ord didn’t know I knew, didn’t know I understood. Whatever softness had been in his eyes disappeared. “The world’s dying, Wander. I don’t know whether the Infantry is destined to reverse that. But I do know that it is my job to assure that every infantryman I train is ready if destiny calls. An infantryman who’s not part of the team isn’t just a pain in the ass. He’s dangerous to himself and to other soldiers. Would you like to quit?”
Like to? I’d love to. But I couldn’t, or I’d go to prison. I shook my head.
He sighed. “I can’t order you to quit. But I can make sure you consider carefully how badly you wish to stay.”
I swallowed. I didn’t wish to stay.
He bent, reached into a desk drawer, and came up with a plastic bag. From it he drew a purple, pencil-size object and displayed it between thumb and forefinger. A manual toothbrush strung on a cord loop. “Wander, do you know upon what you gaze?”
I squinted. “Toothbrush?” It was stained in that way that Mom would say you didn’t know where it had been.
“Toothbrush?” He exploded.
I stiffened. “Toothbrush, Drill Sergeant !”
He smiled and sauntered around his desk to stand in front of me. “No. No, no, no. Trainee Wander, you gaze upon the Third Platoon Memorial Nocturnal Hygiene Implement”
“Silly me.” Had I lost my mind?
Ord just kept smiling. He held his hands apart so the brush dangled between them on the spread string loop. “Once every few training cycles, a very special trainee earns this.” He lifted his hands above my head and lowered the little necklace onto my shoulders. The brush passed my nose. Now I knew exactly where it had been.
It was midnight when I crabbed sideways across the latrine floor to the third of six toilets and continued to scrub and swear. Ord said it was going to be a nightly exercise.
He said I had to wear the brash at all times. He said the reason was to give me time to think about my future.
Right. Usually, if you weren’t on KP or CQ or taking your hour wandering the barracks as fire guard, you got to sleep. Ord was royally fucking me over to make me quit.
Well, fuck him instead. I scrubbed harder.
If fifty guys in an open platoon bay was a bit un-private, the latrine was a living, breathing rape of the Fourth Amendment. The toilets sat in an open line facing the sink row six feet away. You crapped counting the hairs on somebody else’s bare butt while he shaved. The showers were at the end of the room, just as open.
If they ran a prison like that, we’d all get released on grounds it was cruel and unusual punishment.
The first few weeks people were so intimidated that they got up in the middle of the night to crap in relative privacy. Gradually most of us got desensitized. Not everybody, though.
“I’m sorry you have to do that, Jason.”
I looked up. Walter shivered in his field jacket, bare, pale legs spindling below the hem. They ended in sock- blobbed feet, so he seemed to wobble on a pair of Q-tips.
“You here to crap or talk?”
“Do I really look like a toad, Jason?”
“No.” Of course he did. I stared at the floor so he couldn’t see me smile.
He smiled, then frowned. “It should be me down there scrubbing. I’m the platoon’s biggest fuck-up.”
“No.” Of course he was. “The army’s just not for you.”
“It has to be.”
I scuttled sideways and massaged the next ivory throne. “Why?”
“You remember I said my grandpa won the Medal of Honor? He saved a man’s life. Everybody in my family served. My mother won’t be proud of me unless I win a medal.”
“That’s crap, Walter. People get medals when things go bad. Medals are just ways that armies hide mistakes. Nobody in my family ever served. Now they can’t” Tears blurred my vision, and I scrubbed harder. Somebody’s army killed Mom, for the crime of taking a trip to Indianapolis. It killed everyone in Pittsburgh. It even killed Ord’s mother. “It never ends. It’s wrong. What’s the point, anyway?”
“My grandpa was a hundred when he died. He served in World War n. He said the point was to make it stop.”
He rocked from sock to sock, and his intestines gurgled. Walter needed his privacy. Soon. But he was still too shy to ask even me for it. I stood and arched my back. “I need a break. I’m going outside a minute.”
I stepped out into the cold dark and looked up. Beyond the dust, constellations still shone. Somewhere up there star pilots like Metzger waged the battle to save the human race. I’d watched a million people in Pittsburgh die today. Did I really want to be just a smart-ass scrubbing toilets with a toothbrush?
I didn’t know who or what took Mom and my life away. I didn’t really want revenge because that wouldn’t
