Basic Training of the Heart

by Jaycie Morrison

  A discerning expression crossed Issacson’s face and her voice softened. She glanced down at some paperwork on her desk. “All right, Rains. I understand. I was going to call you in anyway. Crowley’s transfer came through. His last day here will be…October sixth, graduation day. I’ll be informing him this Friday.”

  Rains nodded. She wondered if Lutz knew.

  “So don’t let this girl get to your head,” Issacson said, by way of dismissal. “Just give her some extra KP again or have her run some more laps or something and she’ll snap to, won’t she? You’ve got less than ten days and then she’s someone else’s problem.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.” Rains saluted. Walking toward her quarters, Rains thought wryly, She’s not only in my head, she sees my spirit.

  Then the image of Crowley touching Bett’s face rose in Rains’s mind. She felt the familiar rage uncoil deep inside as she remembered finding Crowley with Jennifer Lutz that night she had come back late from an unsanctioned visit to Sweetie’s. Jenny’s life had been sheltered, and she joined the WAC to have some freedom and some fun. Although completely inexperienced, she tended to act a bit wild, and her brother knew it. Because she was the little sister of a popular MP, it wasn’t unusual for officers to look the other way at her occasional infractions. Even though she was in Webber’s squad, he’d asked Rains to keep an eye on her. When Rains heard Webber complaining that Private Lutz had missed CQ again, she’d gone to the guardhouse. Crowley had Jenny in a chair with her blouse half undone, and his hand across her mouth told Rains that his other hand between her legs was not her idea, as he had later claimed. Rains had stormed in and punched Crowley in the side of the head so hard that she cracked two bones in her hand. She couldn’t get Jenny to rise before he recovered enough to turn on her with an animal fierceness and would have done some serious damage had she not pulled her knife and held him off. In the series of accusations and counteraccusations that followed, Crowley and Rains were both put on probation, although both were allowed to continue in their jobs. Before Jenny Lutz got dismissed from observation the next day, she drank half a bottle of cleaning fluid from a cart outside her room and got sent home with a discharge other-than-honorable once she was well enough to travel.

  Having reached her quarters, Rain sat on her bed with her eyes closed, trying not to think about what would have happened if she had caught Crowley trying the same thing with Bett. She knew with complete certainty that she would have gladly killed him. She felt the wolf inside her growl.

  *

  Their morning rotation that next day was in the motor pool. Bett took an immediate dislike to the lieutenant in charge, although she couldn’t say why, exactly. She just didn’t understand why some of the officers had to be so arrogant and belittling. Their attitude reminded her of her father, Bett realized. She didn’t fare too well in assembling the greasy engine parts, but since she knew that working there was not her goal, she wasn’t concerned about it.

  Walking back to the barracks to get ready for lunch, Jo limped alongside her and asked, “Do you think I’d make a good drill instructor, Bett?” She was obviously thinking ahead. The commissioned and noncommissioned officers’ training was their afternoon rotation.

  “Why, Jo? Is that what you are thinking of doing?”

  Jo looked a little embarrassed. “Yeah, maybe. I read over that NCO manual that Sergeant Rains let me borrow and…I think I could do it. Plus, I kinda like the way Sergeant Rains handles herself…and us. I was thinkin’ that with a little practice maybe I could be like that.”

  “I think Sergeant Rains sets a fine example of leadership, Jo. You should talk to her about your interest. I’m sure she’d be glad to recommend you,” Bett said sincerely.

  “Aw, I don’t want to bug her.”

  “Not at all, Jo. I think Sergeant Rains is genuinely concerned with helping all of us find something that really appeals to us. And I think you’d make a fine NCO.” She squeezed Jo’s arm and added playfully, “Just don’t expect me to salute you.” Jo grinned. Then Bett thought of something else. “Jo, have you ever heard Sergeant Rains come in really late at night to check on us?”

  “”You mean after CQ, even?” Bett nodded. “Nah,” Jo said after a few seconds’ thought, “but I’m a pretty heavy sleeper. A tank could drive through the barracks and I probably wouldn’t wake up.”

  *

  Sergeant Rains was sitting off to one side at the front of the room during their officers’ training class but she was not a speaker. The class was held in a large presentation room and the entire platoon was present. Rains had changed into her deep olive-green dress uniform and looked very striking. Bett tried to keep from staring at her, but since she wasn’t particularly interested in the presentation, it was hard not to. Rains mostly kept her eyes down, occasionally nodding at something the presenter, Captain McGinnis, was saying, but Bett had a clear view of her profile. As always, she wondered if it was true what Teresa had once said, about Rains keeping a braid under that ever-present hat. She imagined tracing her fingers along those amazing cheekbones and that strong jaw, speculated again on how Rains’s mouth would taste. She envisioned how Rains’s hips flexed as she ran and wondered what it would be like to have those hips moving between her legs while feeling those long arms holding her again. Trying to tamp down the rush of her arousal, Bett regretfully acknowledged to herself that her failure to seduce Sergeant Rains was due to the fact that Rains’s character was too strong for her, and that was a first. Of course, that strength only made her more desirable. Once, when the sergeant cast a quick glance at her squad, Bett had to pretend to be taking notes for fear Rains would be able to read her thoughts.

  At the end of the presentation Captain McGinnis asked Rains to stand. “As many of you know, Sergeant Rains is rotating out of this duty. Eight days from now, after her squad graduates along with the rest of this platoon, she will assume new tasks and responsibilities…most of them a lot easier than working with new recruits, I would imagine.”

  Everyone chuckled appreciatively, but Bett was processing a thought: A little more than a week and I might never see Rains again. At the beginning of basic training, it had seemed as though eight weeks would take forever, but suddenly their time was almost up. Bett’s mind sifted through the many things she and Rains had talked about, and the way Rains always seemed to rescue her from her own foolishness or from others’ bad intentions. Wouldn’t she miss that as much as their almost nonexistent physical relationship? In her heart she knew, in spite of everything that the official Sergeant Rains kept telling her, that they had become friends…and they could be more.

  Then everyone was standing at attention as the base commander walked toward the front. She and Rains saluted each other and then Colonel Issacson added a ribbon to those that Rains was already wearing. They shook hands, and the colonel said something that only Rains could hear, getting a nod in return. Bett sensed a genuine affection between the two women who, from all appearances, couldn’t be more different. Rains’s squad could contain themselves no longer and cheering broke out. Jo yelled, “Speech!” and others picked it up. Rains shook her head but the cheers and calls continued. Finally Issacson got everyone seated and quiet and looked expectantly at Rains.

  Rains stood before them, staring at the floor for a moment. When she raised her head and began speaking her voice was quiet. “When I first came to the Army, I was lost. I had no vision for my life or any means to understand my place in the world. With the discipline of order in my daily routine, the Women’s Army Corps has helped me find direction inside myself. For that, I will always be grateful.” Rains nodded at Issacson, who smiled broadly. “But lately I have begun to observe that order, once incorporated into oneself, doesn’t always need to be the scale by which everything else is weighed.”

  She cleared her throat and her words became more certain. “Recently a friend said to me that the influence of women would change the United States Army forever, and I began to consider
if I believed that to be true.”

  A friend, Bett heard, surprised. That was me.

  Rains went on. “What can women bring to make a difference, if we have the same system of command, the same basic code of conduct, wear uniforms like the men—” Rains looked at her dress skirt and added, “Well, not exactly like, of course. But if we model our ways on the men’s Army, how can we influence any change?

  “I’m sure I speak for most of us here when I say that although I honor the system of leadership the Army provides, I am not a man and I do not aspire to be one. For what I have seen in my life is that the ruling men who have brought us to this place in time have done so with their desire to destroy and to conquer. I do not want to be led by those forces, nor do I wish to cultivate them in myself.

  “As a species, we live in this tension: societies need rules while individuals need freedom. For the last decades, we have leaned heavily on our rules to guide us through dark, uncertain times. It is my hope those times will soon be over, and we can be more willing to embrace the chaos of freedom, because that is where creation starts. So what will we create in the space that the vast death and destruction of our age has left behind?”

  There was total silence in the room. Even Colonel Issacson was transfixed. The sergeant’s voice grew in passion.

  “What most women know in our hearts, even if we never verbalize it, is that the best in us comes from our relationships. Women have such amazing capacity to nurture and grow, to create and to build up—in ourselves and in others—and we must not turn away from that power. We here came together from very different places and vastly dissimilar lives and formed bonds that will never be broken. We share this with our brothers in arms. So we must lead them to this lesson: the relationships that connect us throughout our brief lives are deeper and stronger than we can imagine, for truly all people are part of our family and the whole world is our neighbor. For those men who still wish to conquer, let them conquer their fear of seeing this truth; if they wish to destroy something, let them destroy the obstacles of injustice and need that separate us. All humanity is on the same journey. We must be able to greet each other along the way without fear. Our men will be at their best when they allow themselves to walk with us on this path.

  “These thoughts brought me to realize that changing the Army is not what we as women should aspire to do with our newly found influence…we should change the world.” Rains focused on the faces before her, and met each eye as she spoke slowly. “No matter how far your reach or how wide your grasp, each of you can offer the best gifts of life, every one of you can share the treasures of love, and all of us together can make a world of peace.”

  Bett’s eyes were filled with tears. She knew without looking that everyone else in the room felt the same way. Life, love, and peace. There isn’t really anything else that we could want, is there? In the silence, she heard Helen’s voice say with great emotion, “Amen, sister.”

  Then the platoon rose as one and began applauding. It was different, somehow, from a cheering, congratulatory applause. It was the applause of people who had felt something move in themselves, and who wanted to commit to continuing that movement.

  Sergeant Rains just looked at them for a moment. She blinked a few times, seeming just a bit confused at their reaction. Then her eyes cleared as they found Bett, and that now-familiar ghost of a smile crossed her face. Bett made a decision. I can go to Washington, DC or New York anytime. For now, I’ll work here, with the cryptographers in Des Moines. As soon as the thought became conscious it felt so right that she couldn’t wait to tell Rains. But by then half the platoon was standing around her, so Bett slipped outside through a side door, waiting between the classroom and Rains’s quarters, planning to catch her there. After waiting impatiently for what seemed like much too long, she caught Jo leaving the building.

  “So Sergeant Moore had started yelling ‘Traitor! She’s advocating treason!’ from the back where she had come in to watch, but none of us could hear it at first for all the applause and talking,” Jo explained as they walked across the base. “Then Issacson was the one who had to pull Helen off when she was punching Moore in the face once Moore came to the front with her bullshit.” Jo grinned. “I didn’t know Helen had it in her, but she was like a little Joe Lewis, and you know none of us were going to get in the way of Sergeant Moore taking a beating. Anyway, then the MPs came and I know Helen’s in the stockade and I think Rains and Moore and Issacson are all in the colonel’s office.”

  Bett followed Jo into the mess hall and got some dinner for Helen. She found Helen none the worse for being held in one of the tiny cells. “How long will you have to be here?” Bett asked, trying not to shudder at the memory of almost being forced into the exact same place when she’d tried to duck out of KP.

  “I think it’s supposed to be a week, but Rains might be able to get me out sooner once they clear this mess up,” Helen said. Then she motioned Bett closer to the bars. Bett leaned in reluctantly. “But I know I got at least two good punches in, and that’s worth two weeks to me.” She grinned. “That redneck bitch has had it coming since our first day, Bett. She was awful to every one of us, remember? If it hadn’t been for Sergeant Rains, I’d have probably spent a lot more time in here…or just got sent home. When Moore started talking that way about her, I—I just couldn’t take it.”

  Bett nodded. “I know Sergeant Rains appreciates your support, Helen, even if she disapproves of your methods.”

  “Yeah, she’ll probably say something just like that,” Helen said, digging in to her meal. “Thanks for this.” She stopped and looked at Bett again. “And thanks for all your help, too. Next to Sergeant Rains, you’re the reason I’ve made it this far. I know Tee would say the same. You’re all right in my book.”

  Bett smiled as she stood, thinking how right Rains was in what she had said about relationships. If someone had told her seven weeks ago that she’d be good friends with the daughter of a coal miner…“You’re all right, too, Helen.” She lowered her voice, looking at the MP on guard duty at the end of the hall. “And don’t tell anyone I said so, but you did exactly what we all wanted to do.” Helen grinned again. “I’ll try to check on you before breakfast tomorrow,” Bett said, turning. “Now I’m going to see if I can find out what’s going on with Sergeant Rains.”

  On her way out, she passed a very worried looking Teresa Owens, heading inside. “She’s fine,” Bett assured her. “But she’ll be glad to see you, I’m sure.”

  By the time Bett got to the administration building where the colonel’s office was located, all the lights were out and everyone seemed to be gone.

  When she finally got back to the table at the mess hall with her own dinner, Rains was nowhere to be seen, but Jo was still there, talking with some of the other girls from the platoon. She had more news. “The colonel doesn’t want to bring charges, but Moore won’t shut up about this treason crap, so Issacson’s gotta call in some brass for a hearing tomorrow. We’re all going to testify for Rains if we can. I think she’s confined to quarters for now.”

  “Put me on the list of people who want to testify, Jo,” Bett said, finishing her meal quickly. “I’ll see you back at the barracks later.”

  She went back to the cafeteria line again and the first server looked at her suspiciously. “Ain’t you been through here already?”

  *

  There was a WAC MP posted outside the officers’ quarters, but Bett smiled at her and the MP nodded, letting Bett pass without comment. Once inside, she looked down the hallway that led past several doors. There was also a stairway toward the back. She didn’t know which room was Rains’s and hoped she wasn’t upstairs. Only one door was open—a bedroom at the very back of the building. Bett walked there quietly and looked in. Rains was sitting on the floor with her eyes closed. Her back was against the wall, and a bundle of herbs with an acrid tang was burning on a ceramic plate in front of her. Bett walked in and set the tray on a small chest of drawers as Rain
s looked over.

  “I am not the least bit surprised to see you here, Private Smythe.”

  Bett smiled. “Am I so predictable?”

  Rains tamped out the burning herb and stood. “No, I would not say that. But maybe I’ve just gotten used to being surprised by you.”

  “Well, that’s no good,” Bett replied, tidying the tray. “If you’re used to it, it can’t be a surprise.”

  Rains nodded. “You have a point there.”

  Bett tried not to be obvious about looking around, but she had already seen that the room was very sparsely furnished. “Don’t you have a chair in here?”

  “No, it’s a bedroom. I only sleep here. If I want to sit, I sit on the floor, as you saw.”

  “But how will you eat?”

  Rains looked at the contents of the tray from behind Bett. “Stop fussing. It won’t be the first time I have eaten standing. Or the last, I expect.” She put her hands on Bett’s shoulders, her low voice softening. “It was good of you to bring this, Private Smythe. And I am glad of your company.” She squeezed gently and let go.

  Rains had never said anything like that to her before, and her words, and the touch, made Bett’s heartbeat race. She cocked her head, trying to act casual. “You must be really desperate to say such a thing.”

  “Actually, there have been very few times when I wasn’t glad of your company. Sometimes I would have liked more notice is all. But for now, I am tired of being in my own mind.”

  Bett turned, speaking somberly. “What’s going to happen to you, Sergeant?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Well, what does Colonel Issacson say?”

  Rains took a bite of a roll. “Would you mind if we talked about something else?”

  Bett knew well that when Rains said this, she meant it. “We could try. What did you have in mind?” Bett couldn’t believe she could say this without a flirting tone, but it seemed to be happening.