Robert Buettner: Orphanage

Finally, I closed my eyes.

“Zero four hundred hours! Fall out, gentlemen!”

It couldn’t be 4:00 a.m. I’d just closed my eyes. Overhead lights seared my eye sockets. Metallic thunder rattled the barracks. Ord stood in the center aisle, stirring a stick around the walls of a galvanized trash can. His uniform was perfect, his face glowing. Feet and bodies thumped floor tile. I sat up.

“Hunnh!” Above me, Parker woke in his new upper bunk. The mattress bulged as he rolled off the bunk edge, didn’t find the floor, and crashed. He screamed and clutched his leg. I looked, then looked away and gagged. Under his long Johns, Druwan’s lower leg bent at the knee where no knee was supposed to be.

Parker was our first training casualty. If he had been our last, human history would have been different.

Ord showed two guys how to lace their arms to make a basket Parker could sit on, an arm around each of their necks. They shuffled him off to the infirmary while his complexion turned from ebony to putty. He clenched his teeth but never said a word while the platoon stood at attention on the company street’s frozen, floodlit dirt. Ord faced us. “Good morning, Third Platoon!”

“Good morning, Drill Sergeant!” Forty-nine voices feigned enthusiasm. “Would you enjoy a tour of the post?” Like a needle in the eye. “Yes, Drill Sergeant!”

“Physical training is normally conducted in sweat suits and running shoes. Those are expected to arrive momentarily.”

No doubt being imported from Russia on the coal boat. “We will therefore conduct PT in fatigue uniform. I am certain you all heeded the advice to soften and break in your combat boots last night.”

Oboy. Ord faced us right, converting our four squads from four rows to four columns, marched us forward, then brought us to a double-time jog. He jogged alongside calling cadence without breathing hard. You’d have thought the bastard would have said something nice about Parker. He would either be offered a discharge or be recycled and start training over again when his leg healed. I had no bunkmate.

After four hundred yards I broke a sweat and friction from the stiff boots warmed my heels. We’d have to stop soon.

By the time we reached the edge of the board-building cluster that was the post, sweat stung my eyes, and I panted. My heels burned. I glanced at Ord. His boots skimmed the ground as he sang cadence. We would be turning back any second.

“Anyone who doesn’t care to extend our tour to the pistol range?”

Maybe they were all out of breath like me. Maybe they were chicken. Nobody spoke.

“ Out-standing ! Marvelous day for a run!”

We labored on.

By the time we turned around at the pistol range, which was somewhere near Los Angeles, I hobbled fifty yards behind the pack. The problem had to be the high-topped boots and the jacket. I was a gazelle during soccer season. Okay, maybe I should have spent some time getting in shape like everybody had warned me.

Deathlike wheezing sounded at my left shoulder. I glanced back. The guy flailed along, head peeking out of his field jacket’s neck like a spectacled turtle’s from its shell. At least I wasn’t last. His glasses bounced on his nose, and he sobbed and stared ahead of us. “Oh dear God.”

I saved my breath. I figured he wept from blisters or exhaustion until I looked where he was looking. Ord drifted back from the pack toward us like a vulture. I almost sobbed myself.

“Difficulty, trainees?”

The Turtle shook his head on a scrawny neck.

Ord smiled. “That’s the spirit, Lorenzen. Trainee Wander is seeking a new bunkmate. I believe you two are a perfect match.”

Ord was saddling me with this geek! I wasn’t some nerd. I was just a tiny bit out of top condition. Not only had I lost Parker, who knew his way around, now I had to babysit this dork instead.

Ord sped up and circled the platoon’s main body like a great white as they tromped along.

The geek panted. “Sounds. Like the sergeant. Wants us to get To know each other. Walter Lorenzen.” He tried to hold out his hand as we stumbled along side by side but it flopped like windblown Kleenex.

“Jason Wander, Walter.” I clenched my teeth as much at the prospective relationship as at my blisters.

When we struggled back to the company street, Ord made us police the barracks to cool down before breakfast. If the blister-footed march to the mess hall cooled us down any more, we’d be ice sculptures. A white plume curled from the stovepipe that poked through the hall’s green-shingled roof. My heart leapt. Where there’s smoke…

Side-by-side horizontal ladders stood basketball-rim tall between us, heat, and food. The first two guys in line peeled off gloves, climbed onto wooden steps at one end, and swung monkey bar-style across the ladders to cheers, then dashed up the mess hall steps to warmth and sustenance. The pair behind them followed.

Lorenzen and I stepped up. Icy steel stung my palms as I rocked across the ladder. I’ve always had good upper-body strength. Halfway across I glanced back. Lorenzen dangled one-handed like an olive drab booger stuck on his ladder’s second rung.

“Pair drop and go back to the end of the line!” We dropped as Ord motioned the pair behind us up onto the steps.

Lorenzen whispered as we hopped up and down at the line’s ass end. “I’m sorry, Jason.”

“No big deal.” I blew into my fists.

At the building’s rear, next to us because of our preferred position at the line’s end, some idiot had planted a six-foot-tall twig of a sapling. A squared-off rock border made it into a scruffy garden centerpiece, awaiting spring.

Someone needed to clue the army that there wouldn’t be spring as long as the sky only rained dust.

After three tries and three drops we were the last pair into the mess hall. Walter had never made it past rung two. He rubbed blistered palms. A few seated guys glanced up and snickered. We two huddled like lepers.

I stared across the tables while circulation revisited my extremities. Steam rose from pancakes, fried eggs, and bacon heaped on compartmented plastic trays. Bacon aroma made my saliva gush.

Lorenzen said, “Good. No SOS.”

“Huh?”

“No shit-on-a-shingle for breakfast. Creamed, chipped beef on toast. It’s supposed to be awful. My grandfather was a soldier, and he always complained about it. He won the Medal of Honor.”

“For eating it?”

Lorenzen grinned. “Good one, Jason.”

Yeah, it was. I smiled back and straightened up.

The next few training days blurred into a muck of cold, sweat, and exhaustion. Instruction consisted of crap like drill and ceremony and how to boil water so you didn’t get sick. The only thing halfway interesting was a demonstration of plastic explosive that scared me nuts. Explosives terrified me since I was ten, when Arnold Rudawitz blew off his fingernail with a Fourth of July cherry bomb. They said we’d have to throw a live grenade before we graduated. I’d have to get sick that day.

Rifles I liked, though. We got M-16s a couple weeks later. Ancient but deadly.

In the classroom building they lay on tables atop cloths stenciled with outlines of their various components. First the army teaches you how to take your weapon apart and put it together and clean it and care for it like it was your puppy. Then they teach you how to kill with it.

We stood at attention, each man behind his chair and his weapon, the whole four-platoon company.

Excitement was palpable. It’s not that males want to kill living things with guns. It’s that hosing down targets with a ‘16 on full auto is the ultimate extension of writing your name in the snow with urine.