D’Allessandro gave us a grin of nervous triumph and began to drink, pausing only to catch his breath with the water dribbling on his chest. “Drink it,” Reece would snap each time he stopped. It made us desperately thirsty to watch him, but we were beginning to get the idea. When the canteen was empty Reece told him to fill it up again. He did, still smiling but looking a little worried. “Now drink that,” Reece said. “Fast. Faster.” And when he was finished, gasping, with the empty canteen in his hand, Reece said, “Now get your helmet and rifle. See that barracks over there?” A white building shimmered in the distance, a couple of hundred yards away. “You’re gonna proceed on the double to that barracks, go around it and come back on the double. Meantime your buddies’re gonna be waitin’ here; ain’t none of ’em gonna get nothin’ to drink till yew get back. All right, now, move. Move. On the double.”
In loyalty to D’Allessandro none of us laughed, but he did look absurd trotting heavily out across the drill field, his helmet wobbling. Before he reached the barracks we saw him stop, crouch, and vomit up the water. Then he staggered on, a tiny figure in the faraway dust, disappeared around the building, and finally emerged at the other side to begin the long trip back. At last he arrived and fell exhausted on the ground. “Now,” Reece said softly. “Had enough to drink?” Only then were the rest of us allowed to use the Lister bag, two at a time. When we were all through, Reece squatted nimbly and drew half a canteen for himself without spilling a drop.
That was the kind of thing he did, every day, and if anyone had suggested he was only doing his job, our response would have been a long and unanimous Bronx cheer.
I think our first brief easing of hostility toward him occurred quite early in the training cycle, one morning when one of the instructors, a strapping first lieutenant, was trying to teach us the bayonet. We felt pretty sure that in the big, modern kind of war for which we were bound we probably would not be called on to fight with bayonets (and that if we ever were it wouldn’t make a hell of a lot of difference whether we’d mastered the finer points of parry and thrust), and so our lassitude that morning was even purer than usual. We let the instructor talk to us, then got up and fumbled through the various positions he had outlined.
The other platoons looked as bad as we did, and faced with such dreary incompetence on a company scale the instructor rubbed his mouth. “No,” he said. “No, no, you men haven’t got the idea at all. Fall back to your places and sit down. Sergeant Reece front and center, please.”
Reece had been sitting with the other platoon sergeants in their customary bored little circle, aloof from the lecture, but he rose promptly and came forward.
“Sergeant, I’d like you to show these people what a bayonet is all about,” the instructor said. And from the moment Reece hefted a bayoneted rifle in his hands we knew, grudgingly or not, that we were going to see something. It was the feeling you get at a ball game when a heavy hitter selects a bat. At the instructor’s commands he whipped smartly into each of the positions, freezing into a slim statue while the officer crouched and weaved around him, talking, pointing out the distribution of his weight and the angles of his limbs, explaining that this was how it should be done. Then, to climax the performance, the instructor sent Reece alone through the bayonet course. He went through it fast, never off balance and never wasting a motion, smashing blocks of wood off their wooden shoulders with his rifle butt, driving his blade deep into a shuddering torso of bundled sticks and ripping it out to bear down on the next one. He looked good. It would be too much to say that he kindled our admiration, but there is an automatic pleasure in watching a thing done well. The other platoons were clearly impressed, and although nobody in our platoon said anything, I think we were a little proud of him.
But the next period that day was close-order drill, at which the platoon sergeants had full command, and within half an hour Reece had nagged us into open resentment again. “What the hell’s he think,” Schacht muttered in the ranks, “he’s some kind of a big deal now, just because he’s a hotshot with that stupid bayonet?” And the rest of us felt a vague shame that we had so nearly been taken in.
When we eventually did change our minds about him, it did not seem due, specifically, to any act of his, but to an experience that changed our minds about the Army in general, and about ourselves. This was the rifle range, the only part of our training we thoroughly enjoyed. After so many hours of drill and calisthenics, of droning lectures in the sun and training films run off in sweltering clapboard buildings, the prospect of actually going out and shooting held considerable promise, and when the time came it proved to be fun. There was a keen pleasure in sprawling prone on the embankment of the firing line with a rifle stock nestled at your cheek and the oily, gleaming clips of ammunition close at hand; in squinting out across a great expanse of earth at your target and waiting for the signal from a measured voice on the loudspeaker. “Ready on the right. Ready on the left. Ready on the firing line. . . . The flag is up. The flag is waving. The flag is down. Commence—fire!” There would be a blast of many rifles in your ears, a breathless moment as you squeezed the trigger, and a sharp jolt as you fired. Then you’d relax and watch the target slide down in the distance, controlled by unseen hands in the pit beneath it. When it reappeared a moment later a colored disk would be thrust up with it, waved and withdrawn, signaling your score. The man kneeling behind you with the scorecard would mutter, “Nice going” or “Tough,” and you’d squirm in the sand and take aim again. Like nothing else we had found in the Army, this was something to rouse a competitive instinct, and when it took the form of wanting our platoon to make a better showing than the others, it brought us as close to a genuine esprit de corps as anything could.
We spent a week or so on the range, leaving early every morning and staying all day, taking our noon meal from a field kitchen that was in itself a refreshing change from the mess hall. Another good feature—at first it seemed the best of all—was that the range gave us a respite from Sergeant Reece. He marched us out there and back, and he supervised the cleaning of our rifles in the barracks, but for the bulk of the day he turned us over to the range staff, an impersonal, kindly crowd, much less concerned with petty discipline than with marksmanship.
Still, Reece had ample opportunity to bully us in the hours when he was in charge, but after a few days on the range we found he was easing up. When we counted cadence on the road now, for instance, he no longer made us do it over and over, louder each time, until our dry throats burned from yelling, “HUT, WHO, REEP, HOE!” He would quit after one or two counts like the other platoon sergeants, and at first we didn’t know what to make of it. “What’s the deal?” we asked each other, baffled, and I guess the deal was simply that we’d begun to do it right the first time, loud enough and in perfect unison. We were marching well, and this was Reece’s way of letting us know it.
The trip to the range was several miles, and a good share of it was through the part of camp where marching at attention was required—we were never given route step until after we’d cleared the last of the company streets and buildings. But with our new efficiency at marching we got so that we almost enjoyed it, and even responded with enthusiasm to Reece’s marching chant. It had always been his habit, after making us count cadence, to go through one of those traditional singsong chants calling for traditional shouts of reply, and we’d always resented it before. But now the chant seemed uniquely stirring, an authentic piece of folklore from older armies and older wars, with roots deep in the life we were just beginning to understand. He would begin by expanding his ordinary nasal “Left . . . left . . . left” into a mournful little tune: “Oh yew had a good home and yew left—” to which we would answer, “RIGHT!” as our right feet fell. We would go through several variations on this theme:
“Oh yew had a good job and yew left—”
“RIGHT!”
“Oh yew had a good gal and yew left—”
“RIGHT!”
And then h
e’d vary the tune a little: “Oh Jody rolled the bones when yew left—”
“RIGHT!” we’d yell in soldierly accord, and none of us had to wonder what the words meant. Jody was your faithless friend, the soft civilian to whom the dice-throw of chance had given everything you held dear; and the next verses, a series of taunting couplets, made it clear that he would always have the last laugh. You might march and shoot and learn to perfection your creed of disciplined force, but Jody was a force beyond control, and the fact had been faced by generations of proud, lonely men like this one, this splendid soldier who swung along beside our ranks in the sun and bawled the words from a twisted mouth: “Ain’t no use in goin’ home—Jody’s got your gal and gone. Sound off—”
“HUT, WHO!”
“Sound off—”
“REEP, HOE!”
“Ever’ time yew stand Retreat, Jody gets a piece of meat. Sound off—”
“HUT, WHO!”
“Sound off—”
“REEP, HOE!” It was almost a disappointment when he gave us route step on the outskirts of camp and we became individuals again, cocking back our helmets and slouching along out of step, with the fine unanimity of the chant left behind. When we returned from the range dusty and tired, our ears numb from the noise of fire, it was somehow bracing to swing into formal cadence again for the last leg of the journey, heads up, backs straight, and split the cooling air with our roars of response.
A good part of our evenings, after chow, would be spent cleaning our rifles with the painstaking care that Reece demanded. The barracks would fill with the sharp, good smells of bore cleaner and oil as we worked, and when the job had been done to Reece’s satisfaction we would usually drift out to the front steps for a smoke while we waited our turns at the showers. One night a group of us fingered there more quietly than usual, finding, I think, that the customary small talk of injustice and complaint was inadequate, unsuited to the strange well-being we had all begun to feel these last few days. Finally Fogarty put the mood into words. He was a small, serious boy, the runt of the platoon and something of a butt of jokes, and I guess he had nothing much to lose by letting his guard down. “Ah, I dunno,” he said, leaning back against the doorjamb with a sigh, “I dunno about you guys, but I like this—going out to the range, marching and all. Makes you feel like you’re really soldiering, you know what I mean?”
It was a dangerously naïve thing to say—“soldiering” was Reece’s favorite word—and we looked at him uncertainly for a second. But then D’Allessandro glanced deadpan around the group, defying anyone to laugh, and we relaxed. The idea of soldiering had become respectable, and because the idea as well as the word was inseparable in our minds from Sergeant Reece, he became respectable too.
Soon the change had come over the whole platoon. We were working with Reece now, instead of against him, trying instead of pretending to try. We wanted to be soldiers. The intensity of our effort must sometimes have been ludicrous, and might have caused a lesser man to suspect we were kidding—I remember earnest little choruses of “Okay, Sergeant” whenever he dispatched an order—but Reece took it all straight-faced, with that air of unlimited self-assurance that is the first requisite of good leadership. And he was as fair as he was strict, which must surely be the second requisite. In appointing provisional squad leaders, for example, he coolly passed over several men who had all but licked his shoes for recognition, and picked those he knew could hold our respect—D’Allessandro was one, and the others were equally well chosen. The rest of his formula was classically simple: he led by being excellent, at everything from cleaning a rifle to rolling a pair of socks, and we followed by trying to emulate him.
But if excellence is easy to admire it is hard to like, and Reece refused to make himself likable. It was his only failing, but it was a big one, for respect without affection can’t last long—not, at least, where the sentimentality of adolescent minds is involved. Reece rationed kindness the way he rationed water: we might cherish each drop out of all proportion to its worth, but we never got enough or anything like enough to slake our thirst. We were delighted when he suddenly began to get our names right at roll call and when we noticed that he was taking the edge of insult off most of his reprimands, for we knew these signs to be acknowledgments of our growth as soldiers, but somehow we felt a right to expect more.
We were delighted too at the discovery that our plump lieutenant was afraid of him; we could barely hide our pleasure at the condescending look that came over Reece’s face whenever the lieutenant appeared, or at the tone of the young officer’s voice—uneasy, almost apologetic—when he said, “All right, Sergeant.” It made us feel close to Reece in a proud soldierly alliance, and once or twice he granted us the keen compliment of a wink behind the lieutenant’s back, but only once or twice. We might imitate his walk and his squinting stare, get the shirts of our suntans tailored skintight like his and even adopt some of his habits of speech, Southern accent and all, but we could never quite consider him a Good Joe. He just wasn’t the type. Formal obedience, in working hours, was all he wanted, and we hardly knew him at all.
On the rare evenings when he stayed on the post he would sit either alone or in the unapproachable company of one or two other cadremen as taciturn as himself, drinking beer in the PX. Most nights and all weekends he disappeared into town. I’m sure none of us expected him to spend his free time with us—the thought would never have occurred to us, in fact—but the smallest glimpse into his personal life would have helped. If he had ever reminisced with us about his home, for instance, or related the conversations of his PX friends, or told us of a bar he liked in town, I think we would all have been touchingly grateful, but he never did. And what made it worse was that, unlike him, we had no real life outside the day’s routine. The town was a small, dusty maze of clapboard and neon, crawling with soldiers, and to most of us it yielded only loneliness, however we may have swaggered down its avenues. There wasn’t enough town to go around; whatever delights it held remained the secrets of those who had found them first, and if you were young, shy, and not precisely sure what you were looking for anyway, it was a dreary place. You could hang around the USO and perhaps get to dance with a girl long hardened against a callow advance; you could settle for the insipid pleasures of watermelon stands and penny arcades, or you could prowl aimlessly in groups through the dark back streets, where all you met as a rule were other groups of soldiers on the aimless prowl. “So whaddya wanna do?” we would ask each other impatiently, and the only answer was, “Ah, I dunno. Cruise around awhile, I guess.” Usually we’d drink enough beer to be drunk, or sick, on the bus back to camp, grateful for the promise of an orderly new day.
It was probably not surprising, then, that our emotional life became ingrown. Like frustrated suburban wives we fed on each other’s discontent; we became divided into mean little cliques and subdivided into jealously shifting pairs of buddies, and we pieced out our idleness with gossip. Most of the gossip was self-contained; for news from the extraplatoon world we relied largely on the company clerk, a friendly, sedentary man who liked to dispense rumors over a carefully balanced cup of coffee as he strolled from table to table in the mess hall. “I got this from Personnel,” he would say in preface to some improbable hearsay about the distant brass (the colonel had syphilis; the stockade commander had weaseled out of a combat assignment; the training program had been cut short and we’d all be overseas in a month). But one Saturday noon he had something less remote; he had gotten it from his own company orderly room, and it sounded plausible. For weeks, he told us, the plump lieutenant had been trying to get Reece transferred; now it appeared to be in the works, and next week might well be Reece’s last as a platoon sergeant. “His days are numbered,” the clerk said darkly.
“Whaddya mean, transferred?” D’Allessandro asked. “Transferred where?”
“Keep your voice down,” the clerk said, with an uneasy glance toward the noncoms’ table, where Reece bent stolidly over his
food. “I dunno. That part I dunno. Anyway, it’s a lousy deal. You kids got the best damn platoon sergeant on the post, if you wanna know something. He’s too damn good, in fact; that’s his trouble. Too good for a half-assed second lieutenant to handle. In the Army it never pays to be that good.”
“You’re right,” D’Allessandro said solemnly. “It never pays.”
“Yeah?” Schacht inquired, grinning. “Is that right, Squad Leader? Tell us about it, Squad Leader.” And the talk at our table degenerated into wisecracks. The clerk drifted away.
Reece must have heard the story about the same time we did; at any rate that weekend marked a sudden change in his behavior. He left for town with the tense look of a man methodically planning to get drunk, and on Monday morning he almost missed Reveille. He nearly always had a hangover on Monday mornings, but it had never before interfered with his day’s work; he had always been there to get us up and out with his angry tongue. This time, though, there was an odd silence in the barracks as we dressed. “Hey, he isn’t here,” somebody called from the door of Reece’s room near the stairs. “Reece isn’t here.” The squad leaders were admirably quick to take the initiative. They coaxed and prodded until we had all tumbled outside and into formation in the dark, very nearly as fast as we’d have done it under Reece’s supervision. But the night’s CQ, in making his rounds, had already discovered Reece’s absence and run off to rouse the lieutenant.
The company officers rarely stood Reveille, particularly on Mondays, but now as we stood leaderless in the company street our lieutenant came jogging around the side of the barracks. By the lights of the building we could see that his shirt was half buttoned and his hair wild; he looked puffy with sleep and badly confused. Still running, he called, “All right, you men, uh—”
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates Page 5