David Malouf - The Complete Stories

Dave Kitchener showed no interest in these proceedings. They were Greg's affair. He left him to it. And because the officer no longer made himself responsible, Greg found all this intimate business of getting Cam out of bed and awake and stripped more repugnant than ever. Damn him! he thought — meaning Cam. He had come to see this peculiarity in the other boy, his reluctance to come awake, as a form of stubborn innocence. It set his own easy wakefulness in a shameful light. He resented it, and his resentment carried over into their dealings in the library as well. They began to avoid one another.

Meanwhile the waking and drilling went on. And afterwards, while they stood naked and shivering but at ease, the lectures.

Each morning the squadron was broken up into specialist units, but in the afternoons after mess, they came together for a series of pep talks that were intended to develop a spirit of solidarity in them as well as providing an introduction to the realities of war. Some of these talks were given by men, bluff self-conscious fellows not much older than themselves, who were just back from the fighting in Korea. They made everything, even the rough stuff, sound like Red Rover or some other game, where getting a bloody knee, or your shirt torn, was the risk you took for being in it. One fellow told them that his liaison officers up there had been called Cum Suk and Bum Suk, then went on to describe the effects of something called napalm.

In the break between lectures they stood about smoking, or formed circles and tossed a medicine-ball.

Dave Kitchener's lectures were of a different sort, and they came, after a time, to signify for Greg the real point of these midnight sessions, for which the rest, the dreamlike ritual of ordering and presenting arms, of turning left, right, about face, coming to attention, standing at ease and easy, was a mere preliminary, a means of breaking them down so that they would not resist. They drilled. Then they stood at ease, they stood easy, and Dave Kitchener, walking in slow circles around them, began.

After the formal hectoring of the bullring, the roars of official rage and insult that were a regular thing out there, Dave Kitchener's voice, which seldom rose above a whisper in the room, was unnerving. They felt his breath at moments on the back of their necks. Then, too, there was their nakedness. They were like plucked chooks — that's how Greg felt. Goose-pimpled with cold and half-asleep on their feet, they stood, while the voice wove round and round them.

“What I'm trying to do is wake you up to things. You're so wet behind the ears, both of you, you're pitiful! Have you got any idea how pitiful you look? Because your mothers love you and you've been to nice little private schools, you think you've got it made. That nothing can touch you. That you're covered by the rules. Well, let me tell you, lad, there are no rules. There's a war on out there, you're heading right for it, and there are no rules. Oh, I know that's not what they tell you in those jolly pep talks they give you. What I'm talking about is something different. The real war. The one that's going on all the time. Right here, now, in this room.” He laughed. Greg heard the spittle bubble on his tongue. “The one where they've already got you by the balls.” He stood back, looked them over, turned away in disgust. “You poor little bastards. You don't even know what I'm talking about, do you? You should see yourselves. You're pitiful. You're fucking pitiful. I'm wasting my time on you.”

He would go on like that for the best part of an hour, a mixture of taunts, threats, insults, concern, and blistering anger at the quality in them that most offended him, their nave confidence in things; which he was determined to relieve them of, and which they were unable to give up — it belonged too deeply to the power they felt in themselves, the buoyancy and resistance of youth. Greg discovered after a time how to handle it. You did just what you were ordered to do down to the last detail, with scrupulous precision, as you never did out there on the bullring. Not in mockery of the thing itself — that would have been to enter into collusion with him, for whom this was already a mockery— but to mock his authority with its limits. Your body obeyed to the letter. The rest of you stayed away.

Their last day in camp was a passing-out parade. Several of the older fellows were to get commissions, which would entitle them to wear their caps without the virginal white band. Three of them were getting wings.

The bullring dazzled in the sun; they sweated in their heavy uniforms. A band played. The voices of the drill sergeants leapt out and they responded. “Stand at ease, stand easy.” Dave Kitchener was there, his cap straight, his collar fastened. He saluted when the others did.

Watching from his company in the ranks, Greg was puzzled by a kind of emptiness in himself, a lack of connection with all this. Something in him had moved away, and might have been lounging off there in the shade of one of the huts, with its spine against a wall and the curl of a smile on its lips, bored now with the whole show: these movements that were so fixed and refined that the discipline they embodied seemed like another nature, the swing of their arms that brought the rifles down, the clunking of boots, their bodies aligned and responding as one to snapped commands. His own body was too constant for him not to remember that he had performed these movements smartly elsewhere. He had an impulse to make some deliberate error and break the line. He closed his lids and swallowed. “Eyes right!” The image that fixed itself in his head was of the bullring empty, lit only by the moon, with the bluish shadow of the flag-mast, also empty, falling far across it.

He saw Cam Brierly only once in the following year. They were no longer the youngest, and since that had been the only thing in common between them, they were free to keep apart. They never spoke of Dave Kitchener or made any mention of the night training. In time, those shameful episodes took on a quality of unreality that belonged to the hour, somewhere between one and three in the morning, when they had taken place: the hours of regulated dark when they, like all those others laid out in officers’ huts and barracks, should have been safe under the blankets pursuing innocuous dreams. It was almost, in the end, as if they had been. Greg's anger faded in him. So did the sense of injury he felt. When sometimes, in the following years, he thought of Dave Kitchener he understood, from the midst now of that other war he had spoken of, what it was that had fired and frustrated the man. He felt a kind of pity for him.

It was about this time that he had a dream. He was standing once again beside Cam Brierly's bed, looking down at the sleeping figure from a height, a distance of years, and with a mixture of tenderness and awe that arrested every possibility of movement in him. He could no more have leaned down and broken the other's sleep at that moment than woken himself. Some powerful interdiction was on him. He looked back over his shoulder and said firmly: "No!”

But the one who had been there in his dream was not there to hear it. He found himself staring into darkness, fully awake.

Sally Prentiss was one of those girls who in the last days of the Vietnam War were known “the widows.”

For a week or ten days as required they would set up in a one-bedroom apartment — thoughtfully supplied with candles in a kitchen drawer for intimate evenings and a box of geraniums on the sill — with an American GI or marine (sometimes an officer) who, for months amid the welter and din of war, had been hoarding some other dream than the ones that were generally on offer at the Cross: an illusion of domestic felicity in the form of a soft-mouthed girl and the sort of walk-up city-style living that is represented by an intercom and a prohibition against the playing of loud music after eleven o'clock.