Robert Adams - A Man Called Milo Morai

At the raised boxing ring, Lewis held the ropes apart so Milo could step through them. Joining his victim, the gray-haired boxer went to a corner of the ring and waved Milo to the opposite corner. The few other men in the high, vaulted room of the sometime riding hall drifted over to watch, for Sergeant James Lewis was always worth watching.

“Move around on the balls of your feet, son,” the noncom advised Milo. “And keep your knees bent some to help you take the force of a punch, see. I promise, after I’s messed you up some, I’ll stop. You ready?”

Milo sighed. “As ready as I guess I’ll ever be.” And then he advanced to the center of the ring.

Immediately he absorbed the first jarring jab to his face, Milo’s body and limbs rearranged themselves without his conscious volition.

“Oh, ho, Moray,” puffed Lewis. “Done had some time with a old-fashion bare-knuckle fighter, have you? Okay, I can fight that way, too, but I warn you, it’ll prob’ly hurt you more in the end.”

Lewis was good, skilled, experienced and had stayed in practice if not in unremitting training over the years, so he did land a few more blows here and there. But so, too, did Milo, once more letting his instincts guide his body and reflexes. His final blow put Lewis flat on his back on the canvas, and the watchers entered the ring to pound him on the back and heap flattering praise upon him before picking up First Sergeant Lewis and bearing his inert body back to the locker room.

When the noncom came around and pushed away the hand waving the ammonia ampoule under his blood-crusted nostrils, he just drew himself up on his elbows and stared at Milo for long minutes in silence. Then, slowly shaking his head, he swung his legs off the side of the massage table and sat up. He swayed then, and Milo quickly took a step to the older man’s side and gripped a biceps, lest his recent opponent pitch onto the floor.

Lewis said precious little as they dressed and drove back to the company area. When he had parked nose-in and turned off the engine of the reconnaissance car, he said, “Moray, my boy, you punch like the kick of a fuckin’ mule, I swear to God you do! You learn you modern boxin’ and all, you’ll be champeen of whatever division you winds up in, I don’t doubt it one bit. I’m just thankin’ God you had them fuckin’ gloves on—you might of kilt me dead without them.

“When you gits back to your barracks, you tell Sergeant Cassidy I said to round up all the other platoon sergeants and bring them to my office, pronto. What you ain’t to tell him or anybody elst is why I wants to see them.

“I didn ?do hardly any damage can be seen easily on you, see, and I don’t want none them takin’ it inta their heads to try workin’ you over, son, ‘cause you just might kill one or two of them or they might kill you, and I don’t want anyway to have to work out no L.O.D.s determinations on how a bunch of my cadre got themselfs beat half to fuckin’ death; no man what hadn’t fought you would believe it.

“A’right, Moray. You can go now. But you take care of yourself, hear? I’m gonna be keepin’ my eye on you.”

Milo never knew exactly how Lewis had phrased or explained his hands-off-Moray order to his cadremen, but from then on, Cassidy and the other noncoms treated him almost as an equal, and a few days prior to the completion of their basic training cycle, First Sergeant Lewis once more summoned him. This time, however, the senior noncom met him formally, in his office just off the orderly room.

When Milo had completed the required reporting ritual, he was told to close the door and stand at ease. “Moray, after you graduates Tuesday, you ain’t gonna have far to travel. You’re gonna go just down the road a ways to the advanced infantry basic battalion, and you do as good there as you done done here, your next stop is gonna be acrost the post to the NCO Academy. You’re prime, Moray, and I ain’t just flatterin’ you when I says it, neither, and so lotsa the other units is gonna want to grab you up for to fill out their cadres, but you tell any as talks about it or tries it that they’ll do ‘er over the dead body of First Sergeant James Evans Lewis. You hear me, son?”

Lewis smiled the first smile that Milo had ever seen on his lined, scarred face. “I wants you back here, boy, to be one of my platoon sergeants, see. You got you more brains nor the resta the bunch I has now put together, ‘ceptin’ my field first. You play your cards right and you’ll wind up as field first afore too fuckin’ long, under Stiles, as first. See, my thirty’s gonna be up in only ‘bout four years, come the thirteenth day of January, nineteen and forty-three, my hitch is up and I’m long gone. I means to leave thishere trainin’ company in good hands, though, and you and Stiles is the plumb best I seen sincet the last war. It’s damn fuckin’ seldom the Army gets men like you two, see, and I ain’t gonna let a prize like you get out of my hands. I ain’t that big of a fuckin’ fool, nosiree-bob, I ain’t!”

The Sergeant Moray, Milo (n.m.i.), who stood before Lewis’ desk after graduation with honors from both advanced infantry basic and the NCO Academy still could recall no single incident prior to his awakening in a Chicago hospital room, but he knew by then that Dr. Sam Osterreich and old Pat O’Shea had likely been accurate in their suppositions about him. The most of the business of soldiering just came far too easily to him for him not to have been one, somewhere, sometime, in some army, and probably for some little time, too.

Lewis had been obliged several times over to pull strings, call in IOUs for past favors, beg, wheedle, cajole and do everything except physically fight to retain his dibs on Moray. But he had done all of these gladly, partly for the joy of winning, of course, but also because the attempted shanghaiings of his peers reinforced his own statements and views as to the potential and value of the man.

He smiled up at the new-made buck sergeant. “Welcome home, son. Close the door and sit down.” With the door shut, Lewis arose and stepped over to his filing cabinet, opened the bottom drawer and drew from its rearmost recesses two canteen cups and a quart of bourbon, still better than half full.

Immediately after work call the next morning, Lew’s drove Milo down to the motor pool and introduced him to Master Sergeant O’Connor, the NCO-in-charge. “Teach him to drive, Harry. He missed learnin’ how, see, and I can’t spare him long enough to send him off to no fuckin’ school. I’ll be owin’ you one, if you do.”

A week under the motor sergeant’s often impatient tutelage gave Milo the rudiments of properly handling the smaller wheeled transport vehicles. This was followed by a week on the deuce-and-a-half, the general-purpose two-and-a-half-ton truck. Then, of a day toward the end of that second week, O’Connor drove one of the brand-new general-purpose one-quarter-ton vehicles (which very soon were to be nicknamed “jeeps”) up to Lewis’ training company and closeted with the first sergeant in his office.

When they were seated and O’Connor had had a swallow or two of the bourbon, Lewis asked, “You ain’t havin’ no fuckin’ trouble with my boy, Moray, are you, Harry?”

His hands seemingly absently occupied with a cigarette paper and his sack of Bull Durham tobacco, O’Connor replied, “Aw, naw, top, not him. He’s a’ready a right fair driver, for all he’s got him a kinda heavy foot now and then. I done got him famil’arized with alia the smaller stuff, four-wheel and two- and three-wheel, last week. This week I grounded him on the deuce-and-a-half, both the six-wheelers and the ten-wheelers, and he ain’t half bad in them, neither. Man learns quick and remembers good.”