Solly turned upon the man and told him, “Mind your own damn business. I don’t need anybody to school me on my patriotism.”
But now the dream is ended.
The honeymoon is over.
Now I am a soldier. I’ll be the best damn soldier in the Army of the United States of North America.
CHAPTER 2
“Saunders, Solomon, Junior—”
He stood there with the rest of the new recruits in a sandy area surrounded by strange white double-decked buildings. His first hour really in the Army and still in his civilian clothes. The old soldiers laughing and jeering at them from the windows of the double-decker barracks. But he was back home with his Millie. His heart and soul and mind back home with Millie. She was in his nostrils, in the taste in his mouth, in his arms close up against him. All around him and amongst him.
“SAUNDERS, SOLOMON, JUNIOR!” He did not hear the sergeant call his name. He was smiling sweetly with his Millie.
“SAUNDERS, SOLOMON, JUNIOR!” The sergeant shouting now at the top of his booming voice.
Solly jumped forward out of his daydream. “Right here! I mean here I am, sir!” He was in the Army now. He had to stay alert and stop daydreaming.
“Goddammit, you better wake up and soldier, soldier,” the sergeant growled. “You been living long enough to know your name.” The old soldiers howled. Even new recruits laughed nervously. Let them laugh. It would not take Solly long to acclimate. He had the proper slant on everything. He knew where he was going.
A soldier yelled from a window in the barracks, “Old Saunders Solomon standing up there daydreaming about his old lady and Jody Grinder already. Ain’t even got on his Government Issue yet. After all, buddy boy, give the poor 4-F a break. Just remember he ain’t got good health like you got.” The old soldiers laughed and howled and hooted. Another one yelled, “I’ll give a 4-F a break all right. I’ll break Jody’s mother-loving neck. I catch him kicking in my stall, goddammit.”
“At ease, men!” A big black man with a stripe on his arm and a voice that sounded like coal sliding and tumbling down a coal shute stood before the new colored soldiers and started giving them orders. And they began to walk in a nightmare all day long in the blazing heat from place to place, and a shot in this arm and one in the other, six or seven times it seemed, and the biggest recruit of them all, Robert Lincoln, a six-foot-fiver, collapsed in a faint with the needle still in his arm. But that didn’t help him. Ten minutes later he was back with Solly and the rest of them, walking around from place to place with a soldier with two stripes in charge and a soldier with three stripes and some with no stripes at all. And it seemed to Solly that the fewer stripes one of the old soldiers wore, the tougher he was on the brand-new men, so that he began to think that the fewer stripes you wore, the higher your rank. And: “Come on, soldier, get the lead outa your ass. You ain’t on a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street now.”
That night he lay on his bunk less than a hundred miles from New York City in a strange new world of double-decked barracks and khaki uniformity and bars and stripes and follow-the-leader. He was too tired and excited to fall asleep. He heard the conversation of the other soldiers around him. “I don’t believe it’s going to be so bad. One sure thing, they feed you good.”
It really wasn’t as bad as he’d expected it might be. Solly felt a great relief that this was it, and he could make it easily.
“What I like about it,” another soldier said, “everything is so efficient. Know what I mean? The mess hall, the dispensary, the this and the that and everything jumping. Know what I mean?” He snapped his fingers. He was big roundish brown-skinned, chubby almost, about five feet eleven, brown eyes popping out of his big round head. His name was William Rogers and he had an overanxious personality. Solly smiled. Rogers wanted to make good in a great big hurry. Well, Rogers wasn’t by his lonesome. Solly had his own plans. For winning the Democratic War. Everything fitted into a groove—his attitude toward the war, his idealism, his qualifications, his over-all plans for moving ahead in this world. Past, present, future plans.
He sat up on the side of his bunk. A short squatty recruit across from him was reading in bed. Joe Taylor had been reading ever since he came into the Army, even on the train from New York and during the truck ride into Fort Dix from Trenton. Solly got some writing paper out of his bag and started to write a letter to Millie. He might as well write a letter. He couldn’t go to sleep.
Darling Millie:
“I miss you terribly . . . . ”
He paused and looked around him. How could he miss her terribly already? The Army had hardly given him time to have a comfortable bowel movement. Everything was done on the double. It was one mad scramble of efficiency. But he didn’t cross out “I miss you terribly.” It made him feel good to miss her terribly and it would make her feel even better.
One of the old soldiers walked noisily over to their side of the barracks.
“Howdy, men. Welcome to K Company. Glad to have you, yes indeed. Any loan sharks, crapshooters, or poker players in the crowd?” Nobody answered. “Anybody wanna get on any kind of time, want any kind of action, just look for me, Sergeant Kalloran. I’m the Action Kid.” Kalloran looked around from recruit to recruit. Rogers got up from his bunk and stood eagerly at attention as if the Chief of Staff were in his presence. The sergeant stared at the round-headed bug-eyed man for a moment and finally told him to stand at ease. Rogers said, “Yes, sir!” The sergeant’s devilish eyes shifted for a moment to Solly. “Dammit, soldier, you ain’t got here yet before you writing a letter home. Ain’t nobody move in on you that quick, I don’t reckon . . . . I mean, Cheese and Crackers! Give poor Jody a chance!”
Solly didn’t even look up at the sergeant, just kept staring at the letter he had started to write. The sergeant’s eyes left Solly, as he silently considered the rest of the new recruits. He laughed out loud. “I got anything a soldier could want. Week-end passes, furloughs, Section 8’s, discharges, brunettes and blondes and in-betweens. Is here all kinda girls. Fat girls, skinny girls, tall and short ones. Even got a few nice fat boys for them which taste runs in that direction. Know what I mean? Anything a poor Crute’s heart could desire.” A brutishly built contemptuous bastard, Solly thought, and hoped there were not many like him in the Army leadership. Kalloran laughed out loud at them and walked off toward the other end of the barracks. The new soldiers were tongue-tied for a moment.
Joe Taylor finally broke the silence. “Who let that mama-huncher loose?”
Rogers glared at Taylor. “You’re so smart—tell me one thing. Who the hell is this Jody joker everybody’s talking about?”
Joe Taylor looked up from his book. “Jody Grinder is a civilian—any lucky four-goddamn-F that’s laying up with your old lady and grinding her all night long while you away in the service. In other words, Jody is the poor unfortunate bad-health stud that’s doing your homework while you dying for your country.”
Solly said, “A greater love hath no man.” He liked the little husky soldier.
The brand-new soldiers laughed and chuckled, some of them uneasily. “Ain’t nobody gon do my homework,” Rogers said.
“Now there you go,” Taylor said. “Any old fool can stop a bullet, but how many men can grind like Jody Grinder? And I think it’s mighty nice of him to do a poor soldier’s homework for him. It must be mighty hard too. But yet and still, no matter how weary he is, he’s never too tired to take care of your old lady for you! I think we ought to give him a rising vote of thanks. It’s a back-breaking job and Jody don’t get no medals for it.”
The men were laughing openly now. “Aw screw you, Shorty,” Rogers said and walked away toward the stairway.
“Thatta be better pussy than you got back home,” the chunky soldier called after him.
The lights in the barracks went off promptly at eleven, but Solly lay on top of his bunk long after midnight, staring at the darkness, his nose sucking in the sharp strange barracks odors of Army b
lankets and tobacco breaths and sleeping men and broken dreams and broken winds all rolled into one big over-whelming unfamiliar smell. And old-timers coming in all night long, undressing in the dark and cussing softly, and a soft-spoken flashlighted poker game on the other side of the barracks. He closed his eyes and tried to go home again. He would never get used to blindly following the leader if they were all like Sergeant Kalloran (that’s why he had to be a leader himself damn quick), but it would take time for him to get used to having a B.M. in the chorus of six or seven other men, with still others waiting and standing over you laughing and chitchatting. Like today, he had had seven or eight B.M.s, with the latrine orderly standing there like he was giving church communion and every now and then chanting: “All right, soldier, let’s cut it short and keep it moving. As these depart, let others come.”
And yet somehow he really liked it. He was here, he was in the Army, and he especially liked the comradeship—he’d been lonely most of his life—and there was a war going on, and unlike World War I, this one was a Democratic War, and he would make the best of it. And he would aspire to be an officer and all the rest of it.
He fell asleep and went to New York to his Millie. They were taking a shower together, and he watched the water playing on her lovely sloping shoulders and on the very very softness and roundness and the nippled firmness of her breasts and dancing down her long supple body with the varying and varied shades and shadows of golden brown, warmly blending and clashing, and on the ample hips, and glistening like tiny icicles on the black triangle of curlish hair just beneath her belly, and he washing her back and she washing his, and back in the bedroom he put on his pajamas and went to bed and took them off again underneath the covers and lay there waiting impatiently for her, as she pinned up her brown hair and did all the other things that seemed so long and merciless and indifferent and overdramatic in the doing, and finally she came to bed to him and he reached out to her in a drunken ecstasy and . . .
It seemed that he had just fallen asleep when: “All right! All right! Every living ass! . . . Every living ass with a swinging dick!” He lay there at first, desperately trying to recapture his dream and reconstruct it. He sat up rubbing his eyes, wondering where the hell he was. And where was Millie? There were lights on all over the barracks, busy like Sixth Avenue and Twenty-third Street at five p.m., but outside the morning was still being muted by the stubborn darkness. And suddenly the big bulky sergeant came into hazy focus. “All right!” he yelled like a dozen foghorns blasting the mist. “Let me have it! Let me have it! Don’t look at me with your eyes all red . . . . I don’t want you, but release that bed!” And before Solly knew what was happening the cot had been upturned and he had been dumped onto the floor. “All right—all right—straighten your bed up, soldier. You must think you at home or some other junky place.” Solly jumped up from the floor and moved angrily toward the sergeant. Kalloran turned and walked across the floor toward the round-headed Rogers, whose bed already looked like it hadn’t been slept in and who had almost finished dressing. Rogers’s big round eyes were popping with alertness and anxiety.
“You really on the ball, soldier, goddammit, what’s your name?”
The soldier jumped to attention and saluted the sergeant, his eyelids batting like a bashful whore. “My name is Rogers, sir. William Thomas Rogers, Junior, sir.” Talked fast and proper with the faintest trace of an acquired West Indian accent.
The sergeant laughed. “All right, Corporal Willie. See that these men in your squad make up their beds, wash up, and get dressed, and be downstairs in the next five minutes.”
“Yes, sir!”
“You think you can do it, Corporal?”
“Yes, sir!”
The sergeant looked at his watch. “All right,” he said. “It’s exactly three and a half minutes to six. I want you to have every loving brother’s sister’s cousin’s child downstairs and standing at attention at six o’clock. When the man toots his whistle I don’t wanna see nothing but dust and statues. I want all of you moving your ass in double time and raising a cloud of dust when you come down these steps and out to the formation on the mother-loving two, and when the dust clears away I don’t wanna see a goddamn thing but statutes standing at attention. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir!” The sergeant walked away. Rogers turned toward the men screaming, “All right—all right—every living—every living! You, soldier, you, get the lead out your ass.”
Rogers had the right attitude, Solly thought, but he tended to overdo it, and he was too obvious. Solly would get farther faster and would be calm and would not kiss any Government Issue backsides. He would learn quickly and carry himself in such a way as to win respect of men and officers alike.
“All right! All right! You, soldier, you!”
The little book-reading soldier looked up from his bunk at Rogers. He was about five feet four or five, but built solid up from the ground and a heavyweight from shoulder to shoulder. “Get up off it, Rogers. You came into Sam’s Army the same minute I did. Don’t let the sergeant’s success go to your big ugly head. You ain’t no corporal. You ain’t even a private first-damn-class. You ain’t hardly a buck-ass private.”
Some men chuckled, some of them laughed.
The whistles blew and they ran and stumbled down the stairs half-dressed and stood in formation like sleepy-eyed soldiers were doing all over camp. It was still dark outside, but over in the east the sun was slowly getting up and building a fire as if it had also heard the whistles sleepily. Solly figured they were loud enough. And there was Roll Call and Reveille and Chow Time in the Mess Hall and back to the barracks and two minutes later fall out again and Roll Call again, and after a while he lost all sense of time and space and chronology. Marching all over the world, it seemed, and getting everywhere in a hurry, but still in their civilian clothes and especially the thin-soled civilian shoes (he was anxious to get into his soldier suit), and taking this test and this examination, and Showdown Inspection with all of your equipment spread out before you to be checked by the pink-cheeked officers. Solly felt painfully self-conscious at the Short-arm Inspection with a dayroom cram-filled with naked men, black-skinned, brown-skinned men, varying shades and sizes, passing in review before a baldheaded pink-faced lieutenant with a placid face, and the sharp sweaty smell of the nervous bodies, and the loud angry odors of agitated maleness, and the serious faces and shamefaced faces. “All right, son,” the lieutenant from the medics chided Rogers. “That’s enough. You aren’t supposed to play with it. You’re a big boy now. Put your clothes back on.” . . . ”Yes, sir!” Rogers said, as the other soldiers howled with laughter.
And then there were aptitude tests and classifications and drilling all day long in the merciless sunlight. It was like something that went on and on without rhyme or rhythm and never ending. Solly’s feet felt as if they were throbbing with a mouth crammed full of aching teeth. At about four o’clock on the second day they got their soldier suits and kissed their civilian clothes good-bye. And he was happy as they marched back toward their barracks, feeling a strange kind of anonymous security. No one could tell now whether they were raw recruits or just sloppy old-timers. They were really in the Army now.
That night at the Post Exchange, Solly met a fellow who used to live on his block back in the city, and he came to the barracks with Solly and sat on the side of his cot laughing and talking to the new recruits about Army life. “Man,” Jim Jackson said to Solly, with some of the new men gathered around Solly’s bunk, “you didn’t know when you had it good. You shoulda stayed in law school. Sam’s Army is just about the most.”
“It isn’t bad at all,” Solly said. “I can make it standing on my head.”
Rogers said seriously, “I think I’m going to like it too.”
“That’s cause you’re in with the sergeant,” the sawed-off soldier said. The men had already nicknamed him “Bookworm” Taylor. “You Sergeant Kalloran’s right-hand ass-kisser.”
“You
better watch it, soldier,” Rogers said. He was hot with anger. “I’ll take you outside and kick your ass! I ain’t playing!”
Jim Jackson laughed. “Sergeant Kalloran? Jesse Kalloran ain’t no sergeant.”
“What is he?” Rogers asked uneasily.
“He isn’t anything but a buck private, just like the rest of us. He just came into the Army two or three weeks ago. He’s bucking for sergeant or something all right, but he ain’t nothing but a bullshitting buck private. Some of these studs are bucking just to stay at the Reception Center. Think they can B.S. around for the whole damn duration. Keep from going overseas.”
All the men laughed now and Bookworm put his book aside and turned to Rogers. “If he ain’t no sergeant you sure ain’t no corporal, so get up off it, you bubble-eyed punk.”
“Everybody’s bucking around here,” Jim told them. “You ought to see them cats stationed here permanently at the Reception Center. The privates are bucking for Pfc, the Pfc’s bucking to be corporals to be sergeants and so forth and so on right up to the general. White and colored, everybody’s nose is the same damn color.”
Bookworm said, “My man here been brown-nosing ever since he got inside the gate. That’s how come his breath smells so bad. I don’t know what he’s bucking for, but he’s the original sepia Buck-damn-Rogers.” All of the men were laughing excepting Bookworm and Rogers.
“Lay off that shit,” Rogers told him, “before I fatten your lips for you.”
“You sure ain’t got them buck eyes for nothing,” Book-worm said unsmilingly.
Solly said, “There’ll be plenty of fighting where the man’s going to send us. Don’t waste your energy on each other.”
“You got your big baby-blue eyes stuck in that goddamn Army book every chance you get,” Rogers told the Bookworm. “You ain’t doing that ‘cause you like to read good literature. You getting ready to buck like a jackass.”
And Then We Heard the Thunder Page 3