Sympathy for the Devil

by Kent Anderson

  The room stank of sweat, farts, and fear. In the harsh light, the recruits, exhausted and frightened, looked like psychotics in the day room of an asylum.

  They lined up and filed past the table, dropping linoleum knives, hawkbills, case cutters, yellow-handled straight razors, chewing gum, paperback Westerns, Trojans, a ragged paperback with the title Coeds with Hot Pants.

  “Put it all on the table, gentlemen. Don’t take it out the door. We will find it and you’ll go to barbed-wire city. Think about it.”

  . . . half-pint bottles, pills and multicolor capsules, a pair of brass knuckles, marijuana cigarettes, a Polaroid photo of a skinny, naked girl with bad skin squatting on a motel bed, her knees parted to a hairy black pubis and dead-white thighs. The camera flash had turned her eyes into red points of light.

  A muscular, stocky kid with a tattoo of an impish red devil on his bicep, already drunk, finished off a half-pint of grain alcohol in a shaky show of bravado and dropped the empty bottle on the table. The DIs ran him around the building until he didn’t have anything left in his stomach to vomit up.

  The DIs kept up a running commentary as the contraband piled up. “Brass knuckles? What kind of recruit they sending us?”

  “Dig way down in those pockets. Get that last pill. You men gonna like it here, won’t be needing to take no dope.”

  “How long you been carrying that rubber around, boy?”

  “All right, another bottle of that Thunderbird wine. I heard that back on the block you people can still have a big night for a dollar, enough for a bottle of wine and a rubber.”

  “Goddamn. That girl is ugly. I mean she’s some kind of serious ugly. Look at that twat. Goddamn, man, anybody’d fuck that would fuck a dog. I’d sooner slam my dick in a car door than put it in that thing.”

  At 3 A.M. they were lined up outside still another buff-yellow wooden building, waiting to get their shots. Riley peeked around from behind Hanson at the line of recruits feeding into the brightly lit doorway.

  “How many do you think we’ll have to get?” he hissed.

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’ll give us all the stuff in one shot.”

  “No. It’ll be at least two, maybe three. They can’t mix some of those serums. Oh, damnit, probably three. I told them that my vaccinations were up to date. There’s no reason for me to have these shots. It’s on my record.”

  “Yeah,” Hanson said, “but it doesn’t seem like they’re set up to give much individual attention.”

  “They don’t care,” Riley went on, irritated by Hanson’s irony. “I mean, they don’t care about anybody. How hard would it be for them to just look at my records, verify what I told them, and excuse me from this. It’s a waste of vaccine. You know, if they’d treat us more as individuals, they’d get better results in the long run, the recruits would work that much harder…”

  The smell of antiseptic drifted out the open door and hung heavy and sweet in the warm night air.

  “This is senseless. Anybody with a brain can see that it’s counterproductive. But not them, no, they—”

  Riley’s anxious monologue suddenly stopped, and something soft and heavy hit the backs of Hanson’s legs.

  Riley’s head was bleeding where it had hit the concrete, and he was moaning softly. Hanson and another recruit took him under the arms and carried him to the door, his feet dragging behind him. They sat him in a chair, and a medic popped an ammonia capsule under his nose. Riley snorted and straightened up in the chair, saw blood dripping from his cheek and fainted again, toppling sideways and taking the chair over with him.

  “Fuck this,” the medic said. “He’s gonna give his life for his country right here. Fuckin’ blood donor is what we got.”

  Hanson went back out in line, and in a few minutes he saw Riley emerge, looking shaky and foolish with a pink Band-Aid on his forehead. His face was grim as he walked down the line to Hanson.

  “I’ve just about had it with them,” he whispered. “They can’t treat us like dogs. I mean, I expected some discipline, some harassment. That’s okay. I understand the need for it, and it would be kind of a challenge. But this is ridiculous. These people are completely out of line. The command people must not have any idea that we’re being treated like this. We’re individuals. Some of these people, maybe they need this kind of treatment, but we’re intelligent guys. Why do they want to humiliate us? What good does it do anyone? All they have to do is tell me what they want me to do, or show me, and I’ll do it. Why humiliate us?”

  “Looks like it’s all part of the process,” Hanson said.

  “I don’t know,” Riley said. “I think they’re jealous. No, suspicious of intelligent people, threatened by them. No, not intelligence so much, some of these guys are intelligent enough, in their own way. I mean, there’s a lot of mechanics and truck drivers and farmers who are smart people, who we could learn from. That’s one of the things I was looking forward to. Talking to people like that. No, what it is is education. It’s our education that threatens them.”

  The line had moved them to the outside of the door. Inside, the room was so bright that there didn’t seem to be any shadows, just various levels of glare. The medics were giving injections with little pneumatic pistols that literally blew the serum through the skin, popping each recruit in the arm like spot welders on an assembly line. Riley bared his arm and looked away, grimacing.

  “Don’t flinch,” the medic said. Then, as he was about to shoot the serum, Riley jerked his arm away.

  “Don’t flinch, or it’ll cut you,” the medic said, and jammed the serum gun against the arm as Riley stiffened. The gun went snap, and a bright patch of blood appeared on Riley’s arm, mixed with sweat, and ran down to the elbow.

  “Get him out of here,” the medic said to Hanson, “before he falls down again or bleeds to death. Do it outside. I don’t need the paperwork.”

  They were issued pillows and gray wool blankets, then marched to a transient barracks. The soiled mattress cover on Hanson’s bunk smelled like dirty feet. He could hear Billy crying into his pillow across the aisle. Outside, loudspeakers whistled and chattered until dawn.

  Three hours later they were marched to a mess hall where they waited in line for half an hour, then had five minutes to eat chipped beef on toast and watery scrambled eggs. Hanson forced himself to eat the warm, salty breakfast, and then they were marched to the barber shop.

  Five civilian barbers stood behind their chairs, ankle-deep in dull, dead hair of all colors and textures.

  “Here’s one for you,” one of the cadre said, and pointed Hanson to a chair. “He’ll be needing a little bit off the top there,” he said to the barber, who didn’t crack a smile. He drove the clippers deep into Hanson’s long hair, digging the hot metal into his scalp, pulling hair out as well as cutting it, driving the shears through, over and over. It was like sitting in a dentist’s chair while he drills, then pauses, drills, then pauses.

  Handfuls of his hair dropped softly on Hanson’s shoulders and thighs, and the shears kept digging in, their buzzing almost a roar in his ears, smelling of hot oil and electricity. He held the sides of the chair and tried not to think about killing the barber who twisted his head to one side and dug in, cocked it to another angle and dug in, gripping Hanson’s head with nicotine-stained fingers.

  “Next,” the barber said, and Hanson got out of the chair, turning to look the barber in the face, to look him in the eyes, let him know that someday he was going to pay for treating him the way he had. But the barber didn’t even notice that Hanson was looking at him. He was staring out the window, waiting for the next recruit.

  The recruits, too tired and intimidated to complain, were then marched to a warehouse and issued uniforms, T-shirts, boxer shorts, socks, fatigues, web belts, hats, helmets, and two pairs of black combat boots. A seedy civilian with slicked-back hair squinted through the smoke of his cigarette as he marked the hem in Hanson’s baggy dress uniform.

  The recruits were each
given a cardboard box and tape to package all their civilian clothes for shipment home.

  “And gentlemen,” one of the cadre told them, “if you have a high school ring, or a wedding ring, you ought to send it on home. Nobody cares where you went to high school, or if you got a wife. Nobody cares, gentlemen. I seen a recruit once jump on the back of a deuce an’ a half, and he caught his wedding ring on a wooden slat. Tore his finger off at the knuckle. Think about it, gentlemen.”

  Dressed now in stiff, wrinkled fatigues and heavy boots, they were marched to another building. It was a hot day, and the smell of sizing in the new fatigues was smothering.

  They had their photos taken and were issued laminated ID cards. Hanson looked at the bald, gaunt, hollow-eyed image of himself. He looked like a refugee, or like one of those stricken faces in a Civil War tintype. He recalled that aborigine tribesmen refused to let anyone photograph them, fearing that it would take their soul away. Hanson had never before felt so alone, so without any sense of who he was or who he should be.

  Hanson’s nose had blistered, peeled to pink skin, and blistered again. His whole body ached, and his head was throbbing. His eyes were gritty, the sun in his face.

  Riley had dropped out of the two-mile run again, and the two biggest recruits in the class were dragging him the rest of the way around the dirt track, dragging him by the legs at a fast walk while Riley moaned and drooled, his head and arms bouncing along the ground.

  The rest of the class was watching at attention while the captain strode back and forth in front of them. He was a short man with black hair and a face that was almost pretty.

  “Gentlemen,” he was saying, “when I accepted the responsibility of turning you into soldiers, I did not do so lightly. It is my job to see that every one of you, when you leave here, is ready for combat. That is my mission, and I will carry it out. It behooves each and every one of you individuals…”

  Out on the track behind the captain, Riley bounced along, leaving a faint cloud of red dust behind him. Sweat and dust had collected in Hanson’s eye, stinging it to tears that attracted more dust. He blinked the eye and twitched his cheek.

  And then he was face-to-face with the captain, who was saying, “What’s your problem, young man? Is it that hard for you to maintain a position of attention? Get that chin up!” he said, twisting Hanson’s head by the jaw. Then he walked back down the column, continuing his speech, already having forgotten Hanson.

  At that moment Hanson thought that if the captain, or anyone, laid hands on him again, he would quit. He’d walk out of the formation, sit down beneath a pine tree, and just go away, stop talking or responding for a week or a month until they declared him insane and discharged him. There seemed to be no other way out of the heat, humiliation, and, most of all, the brutal indifference.

  As he considered it, he noticed four soldiers walking on the far side of the parade ground, heat rippling from the sandy soil and eddying around their legs. They were wearing jump boots, the green and black patterned fatigues called tiger suits, and green berets. Special Forces soldiers from the school over on Smoke Bomb Hill. Their aviator sunglasses flashed in the sun as they laughed about something, one of them gesturing elaborately with his hands. Yet even while they laughed and clowned, they moved with absolute confidence, not the lock-step of the training cadre, but with the ease of professional athletes, or royalty. They were the first free men Hanson had seen since he had been sworn into the Army.

  “This, gentlemen,” the wiry black DI announced, “is the bayonet.” He held the bayonet-tipped M-14 rifle out at arm’s length.

  “This afternoon,” he continued, his voice as smooth as a radio announcer’s yet abrupt as an auctioneer’s, a hypnotic cadence, “you will have an opportunity to put what you have learned in bayonet practice to use.”

  As he spoke, the DI snapped the heavy rifle into different positions, holding each one until his sentence caught up to it, holding, then snapping into a new stance, his words following the movement.

  The sky was overcast, a huge pewter bowl, but it was hot. There was a hint of yellow in the sky, like an old bruise, a storm moving in. Hanson noticed how colors changed, very subtly, in the light beneath the moving clouds; the sand, scrub pine, and the faces of the men, their relationships and relative importance shifting in the greasy light. Only the DI, crouching and striking, seemed permanent, his cadence and inflection as precise as his movements, wheeling and striking, in the middle of the circle of men, beneath the silver-yellow sky.

  “This. Gentlemen. Is the on-guard position. A position you are all familiar with. The…

  “Buttstroke. Can be delivered in this manner. Or…in an upward movement. Catching the throat and chin. It is effective, gentlemen. It can ruin your opponent’s whole day, or,” he said quickly, moving forward, then backward, then spinning to face the opposite direction, “at the very least…fuck up his concentration. And. After repeated blows to the sideofhishead…lower his level of self-confidence. At which point, young troops, you jab. Jab! Jab! Taking him to…

  “The ground. Where you kill him some more…”

  Fat C-130 transport planes took off from the nearby airfield at regular intervals, endlessly, it seemed, the pitch of their engines rising as they lifted heavily from the runway like stunned bugs into the hot, thin air.

  One of the PT instructors for another class was shouting, “Eye gouge, groin chop. Eye gouge, groin chop.”

  Another training company was marching down a dirt access road calling cadence. “I picked her up—I threw her down—I stomped her face right in the ground. Left—left—left…” The voices were happy. They were marching well.

  “And this, ladies,” the DI shouted, “is what we call a pugil stick.” He held it out and began to turn slowly so that all the men in the circle around him could see. It was a thick wooden staff as long as the DI was tall, each end wrapped with heavy padding.

  As the DI turned, still speaking, he began to spin the staff like a baton, then snap it into the various striking positions.

  “As I said earlier today,” he went on, turning and striking like a dancer, “you are going to have an opportunity, to put into practice, what you have learned today.” He completed the circle and snapped the stick up to port arms, holding there at attention while the junior DI walked into the circle dragging an equipment bag.

  “All right then,” the junior DI shouted. “Since the Army doesn’t want any of its valuable young recruits injured or fucked up in any way, because they care about your safety, ladies, you will wear this protective equipment.

  “We want you to stay as pretty as you are,” he said, pulling a football helmet out of the bag. “And, we do not want you to hurt your fingers,” he said, pulling out a pair of heavily padded hockey gloves, which he threw at Riley. Riley flinched and dropped them, and the others in the circle groaned and laughed.

  “Where do they find these people?” he said, turning to the DI.

  “They out there,” the DI said. “Civilians walkin’ the streets.”

  The junior DI shook his head and reached back into the bag. “Now, some of you girls,” he said, holding a plastic groin cup above his head, smiling at Riley, “may not have any use for this. But the Army says that you will wear it anyway. For those of you individuals who do have anything between your legs to protect, we don’t want you to go home and disappoint little Susie, or little Fred, or whatever it is that makes you people happy back on the block.

  “You know what?” he said to the DI. “Some of these fat boys got tits. Just like a girl. Bigger ’n a lot of girls. Ain’t that some shit, now? To have tits hanging off your chest?”

  There was laughter around Riley as people goosed him.

  The DI threw the pugil stick at Riley who didn’t even manage to get his hands up before it bounced off his chest. “Riley,” the DI said, “get out here and put this shit on.”

  Riley was matched against Bobby Ray Corn, a mean little squad leader from Yazoo, Mississippi
. He was smaller than Riley, but all bone and muscle. Poor, white, and stupid, he found his pleasure in meanness. He liked to hurt people. It was the only kind of victory open to someone who seemed to fail at everything else. The DIs had spotted his potential immediately. He was a bully and he followed orders to the letter. He was made a squad leader. Just as there always seemed to be a fat-boy Riley in every company, there was always a Bobby Ray Corn.

  Corn had a tattoo of a cute, grinning little devil on his right bicep. He talked a lot about going back home, in uniform, driving a new car.

  Corn was a bully, but not a coward. He didn’t have enough imagination to be afraid. No one had ever hurt him enough to show him that there was anything to fear. The black DIs despised him as the kind of dumb cracker who used to make their lives difficult, but that didn’t stop them from using him like a training aid. Corn had written home about how nice the nigger drill sergeants treated him. Corn was as much a pawn as Riley, part of the performance the DIs directed to show the recruits that if you don’t fight back, you’re doomed. To demonstrate that a belief most of them had grown up with, the assumption that if you are nice to people, they will be nice to you, was a lie, to show them that force was the best response to force, to prepare them for the moment, a few months away, when people they didn’t even know would start trying to kill them.

  Riley entered the circle awkwardly in his equipment. Someone shoved him, he stumbled, and Corn was on him, hitting him at will. One of the first blows knocked Riley’s helmet askew so that he could only see out of one eye. Corn danced around his blind side, hurting and humiliating him. Finally Riley tripped over his own feet and refused to get up. The DI stopped the match, and when he pulled the helmet and face guard off Riley, everyone could see that he was crying, tears cutting furrows down the dirt on his cheeks.