Jane Smiley - Early Warning

Everyone agreed that it was much colder in Wisconsin than in Iowa, and snowier and windier, too, and then the conversation turned to Minneapolis, and Rosanna asked, if you had to live somewhere “up there,” well, which would be the lesser evil, Milwaukee or Minneapolis? And someone knew someone who lived in Fargo — who was that again? Claire and Henry exchanged a smile.

AFTERWARD, when Tim thought back to those weeks before he went into the army, all he remembered was sleeping. He could have also remembered drinking, but it seemed in retrospect as though he were drunk with sleep, not asleep with drink. His roommates studied (he sometimes opened his eyes and saw them huddled over their desks, trapped in a circle of light). They took their exams (he sometimes rolled over as they came back into the room). Brian even made his bed for him and picked stuff up off the floor. But then he had flunked out, and there he was, finally awake, sitting in the living room at home, and his dad was staring at him. His dad was also talking, but he barely heard that. What he really paid attention to was the disbelieving stare. Yes, he had signed up, since he was going to be drafted anyway, and, no, he could not think of a single other way to occupy his time. Boot camp, a training school, deployment — no, he could not imagine Vietnam. He didn’t read the papers, he didn’t know what he was “getting himself into,” but who was his dad to say a word against it? Didn’t he, Arthur Brinks Manning, promote the war all the time? Hadn’t he hit the roof when he found out that Mom went to that big antiwar protest in Washington? Hadn’t his own father been a career military officer?

Then Dad said, “I want some sense of purpose, Tim. Some idea that you know what you are doing instead of just putting one foot in front of the other!”

Tim gave what he considered a perfectly logical reply: “Enlisting rather than waiting to be drafted has a sense of purpose.”

“What do you want to do over there?”

“Don’t they always tell you what to do?”

Dad blew out some air, trying, in his usual way, not to lose his temper completely; Dean walked past out in the hall and shouted, “You’re an idiot!”

“Fuck you!” yelled Tim. Then he jumped up, felt in his pocket for his keys, and headed out the door. After that, the days were a blur of snow and rain, until he got to Fort Bliss, where the weather was hot all day and cold all night and the landscape was as flat as a frying pan except where it was mountainous, dry, and crumbly. No rain. One kid on the bus, from Dallas, said that it only rained in El Paso if the temperature was over a hundred, and Tim couldn’t tell whether he was joking or not.

The screaming began immediately. Uniformed drill sergeants in hats leaned into them, and screamed in their ears to run, run, move it. Tim ran, while trying to carry his duffel bag. He who had never been scared before was, he had to admit, a little scared, especially when the duffel bag fell off his shoulder and hit Sergeant Wheeler, who then chased him nearly across the parking lot, screaming at the top of his lungs.

They were chased into the barracks and told to claim their beds. Tim claimed one of the upper bunks. The kid below him was named Harry Pine, from Waterloo, Iowa. Tim did not mention the farm in Denby. The barracks was shaped like a giant H. A squad of ten or twelve recruits lived in each leg of the H. The latrine and the showers were in the crossbar — no curtains, no walls. The platoon, which was what the four squads were called, had kids of all kinds — black, Mexican, white, even Chinese, one guy named Jim Song.

Tim had his head shaved. He was yelled at by drill sergeants. They ran, they marched, they shot weapons (never guns) at targets, they ran some more, they carried packs, they ate, they yelled (but only “Yes! Sir!” and “ No! Sir! ”). They were yelled at, they spoke when spoken to, and looked where they were told to look. One night, when Tim was sound asleep, he heard just the fragment of a shout, and then found himself pummeled from below and launched out of his bunk by the long legs of Harry Pine, who was having a nightmare. He landed on his ass, and it hurt to run, run, move it the next day, but he ran anyway.

Sergeant Wheeler leaned over the recruits. Every time a recruit opened his mouth or shifted his weight, Sergeant Wheeler asked him who the hell he thought he was, and if he thought he was someone, well, he, Sergeant Wheeler, was there to fucking teach him a lesson. Where was that soldier from? From Texas? Well, all they had here in Texas was steers and queers, and Sergeant Wheeler didn’t see any horns on that soldier! Was he from California? Well, all they had in California was homos and strip shows, and he didn’t see a G-string on that soldier! And then that soldier (sometimes but not often Tim) would be sent to do two or four laps at top speed around the training field, and he had better not pass out. Sergeant George stood in front of a recruit, practically on the guy’s toes, staring into his face, and screaming until it seemed like he was going to knock the kid over, but he never did — they weren’t allowed to actually touch you, Tim realized. Twenty-five push-ups, shouting what kind of pansy are you? the whole time. Sergeant George asked him where the fuck had he learned to make a bed like that, and ripped off the covers and told him to do it over. Sergeant Wheeler told him to present his weapon, and peered down the barrel and asked him who the fuck he thought he was, that he didn’t clean every last trace of powder out of that fucking barrel? Twenty-five push-ups right now!

Soldiers fell down. Soldiers passed out. Soldiers cried. Soldiers got concussions, broke arms and legs and noses. A kid from Omaha broke his jaw. Soldiers disappeared. Tim, who had climbed to the top of the bookcase when he was two years old and then gotten himself down again; who had ridden his bicycle for miles when he was six; Tim, who had thought nothing of running the whole five blocks to second grade as fast as he could go — didn’t mind the regimen. He enjoyed how the other recruits, in spite of wearing the same clothes and having the same haircuts and being told to do the same things over and over again, persisted in remaining intransigently themselves: Harry Pine was slow; no matter how they yelled at him, he could not make his limbs or his reflexes move faster. Eddie Briggs was hotheaded — Sergeant George could make him do fifty push-ups, and he still couldn’t learn not to tell Sergeant George to fuck off. Everything made Jack Saylor, a black guy from Chicago, laugh, even Sergeant George leaping into his face and shouting, “What the fuck you laughing at, soldier?” As for Tim, when he did push-ups or ran around the field, he thought music — Tell him that you’re always gonna love him, / Tell him, tell him, tell him right now.

He took tests. He had to answer problems about if you had four gallons of gas in the tank and the truck got seven miles to the gallon, could you get to Kansas City if it was thirty-five miles away, and if you had seventeen apples and twelve pears, how many men could you feed if half of the men wanted two apples and half wanted a pear and an apple? What he would do if three men in a jeep went over a ten-foot cliff, and what he would do if he saw someone in water of unknown depth screaming for help? He listened to recordings of tapping and thought of the tapping as a kind of rhythm that reminded him of playing in the Colts with Steve and Stanley Sloan. He turned out to have some commo talent, along with three other white guys and six black guys.