Robert Buettner - Orphanage

“Me, sir?”

“Sir? Commissioned officers are addressed as ‘sir!’” He stepped around in front of me and stared into my eyes, so close that I thought he’d poke my forehead with his brown, Smokey Bear hat brim. He was leather-faced and so old that the hair fuzz above his ears was gray. Like his eyes. They were colder than Indiantown Gap.

“I am Senior Drill Sergeant Ord and am so addressed! Name?” A spit bead arced from his mouth. It froze before it hit my chin and ricocheted away like a foul tip.

“W-Wander, Drill Sergeant!”

“Trainee Wander.” He paused. He was talking loud, so everybody could hear, even over the wind.

I bet he pulled this routine with every incoming group. And some poor dweeb—me—was made an example. Maybe I rolled my eyes at the thought.

“At the position of attention, you may blink, swallow, and breathe! Not joke, roll your eyes, and dance the macarena!”

The what? I shook in the wind like an out-of-tune Pontiac.

He turned away, hands clasped behind his back. “The platoon will move out of this mild breeze and indoors as soon as you assume the position of attention, Wander.”

I could feel the hatred of every frozen-ass person on that asphalt. It was so unfair. I couldn’t stand still. Shivering was an involuntary reflex. I hadn’t done a thing. Well, maybe I shouldn’t have talked.

I was freezing inside my ski fleece. Drill Sergeant Ord wore just an olive drab, starched-cotton uniform shirt and pants Moused over laced boots that shone like glass. And that fool hat. But he strolled back and form like he was poolside.

It was probably three minutes but felt like thirty until my body went numb and motionless.

Ord faced us, hands behind his back, and rocked on his boots. “Very well. When I dismiss this platoon, you will shoulder your gear, face right, and move out smartly to the quartermaster building.” He pointed at a whitewashed shed on the horizon. It was probably four hundred yards away but looked like it was in the next county.

Somebody whimpered.

“There you will receive a hot meal and be issued uniforms, including field jackets with liners. These you will find to be the finest cold-weather protection ever devised.”

Somebody whispered, “Dear God, let’s go!”

Ord seemed not to hear. “They are provided to you at no small expense by this country’s taxpayers, whom you are privileged to defend.”

The wind howled.

Somebody whined through clenched teeth. “My dick’s frozen, or I’d pee my pants.” If he did, we’d all be trying to warm our hands off the steam.

Ord ignored all these other whisperers. I’d bet the taxpayers would be pissed if they knew they were paying Ord to pick on an orphan who got railroaded into the army.

“Dis-missed!”

Evidently, “move out smartly” was army talk for “stampede.” If I’d known what came next, I’d have run the opposite way.

We thundered in from the cold to the quartermaster shed like we were taking Omaha Beach . It was a barn of a room split lengthwise by a waist-high counter. Behind it loitered vacant-eyed men in olive fatigues and behind them shelves sagged beneath clothing and equipment just as drab.

We lined up and one by one got piled chin-high with clothes that smelled like Grandma’s closet.

I said to the gung ho black guy from the airport, “This stuff’s used!”

“Not since the war.”

“Second Afghan?”

“Second World.”

I laughed.

“Seriously.” He plopped his gear on a wooden table and jerked a thumb at rough, whitewashed board walls. “The army’s overcrowded. Last time they opened In-diantown Gap was Vietnam.”

A bored clerk behind the counter tore plastic from another packet of field jackets. Mothballs trickled onto the counter.

I stuck out my hand to the black guy. “Jason Wander.”

“Druwan Parker.” His hand swallowed mine.

“How come you know so much, Parker?”

“I always figured to enlist My uncle’s a general. Adjutant General’s Corps.”

This smart guy picked Infantry! So I had made a good choice.

“He says I gotta do time in hell before he’ll swing me a branch transfer to AG Corps. So I’m starting in Infantry.”

My heart sank, then rose. “Branch transfer?”

He shook his head. “Unless you got connections, it don’t happen in wartime. Most everybody here’s Infantry ‘til they die.”

“Maybe the Space Force is at war. The war’s out by the moon.”

“That’s not the point. The economy’s tanked. Unemployment’s the highest in a century. The army is America’s soup kitchen. They’re demothballing posts like this and dragging out old equipment to train us all.”

“Train us for what?”

He shrugged. “Clean up craters that used to be cities. Evacuate new targets. Shoot rioters when food runs out. Don’t you watch the news?”

Why, when I could get the Cliff Notes version from Parker? He was a nice guy and smart to boot.

A garage-size door at the building’s end rumbled, rolled aside, and let winter in. Snow shot at us, horizontal on the wind. A canvas-topped truck backed up and plugged the opening. Framed in the truck’s cargo bay stood a guy in white fatigues, hands on hips. Fumes belched into the I building. The military was still allowed to use diesels.

I never believed that back before the turn of the century internal-combustion-engine cars rumbled over the roads like stampeding buffalo and turned the air brown. Until now.

I coughed. “That’s bad!”

“No, that’s good!” Parker stood and tugged me toward the track. “That’s the mess truck.”

Parker’s quick action put us fourth of fifty in the chow line. This was a relationship to cultivate.

The white-suited cook tossed us each a cardboard box maybe eight-by-five inches and we walked back to our table.

Parker muttered, “Botulism in a box!”

“Huh?”

He tore open his box and undersized green cans and brown foil packets spilled onto the table. “C-rations. One can’s a main course, then there’s dessert and stuff. These have been in some warehouse since Vietnam! The army never throws nothin‘ away.”

He shrugged and read one of his cans. “Some of the main courses are edible. Like this one. beef with gravy.”

I tilted my box toward me, peeked in, and read a can top, stenciled ham and lima beans.

“But,” he said, “there’s one, ‘ham and lima beans.’ Recycled barf.”

“Trade boxes, Druwan?”

Fifteen minutes later I stood in line burping up lima beans, realizing that Parker was even smarter than I thought, and pushing my civilian bag forward with my foot. At the head of the line Drill Sergeant Ord sat at a table while each of us emptied out all our crap for his inspection.

Ord didn’t look up as I scooped my stuff onto the table.

“Warm now, Wander?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant.”

He tossed my Chipman into a big, green poly envelope labeled with my name. “You’ll get it back after Basic.”

“How’m I supposed to mail people?”

He snapped his head up.

I added, “Drill Sergeant.”

He nodded.

I figured it out. You just had to use their little suck-up words.

“You know the satellites aren’t receiving, trainee. And there are no land repeaters in these hills. Your little personal assistant is good for nothing here but stored porno and hologames. You’ll be too busy for either.”

He reached into a box and pulled out a dull green Chipboard. “This is yours to keep.”

“Some trade! Army-surplus junk that nobody’s mailed with since before the Broncos won the Worldbowl.”

“The army encourages you to write home, trainee.”