Jane Smiley - Early Warning

Sometime in week six — still no rain, but the weather was heating up — Private Wagner from Camden, South Carolina, went around asking everyone for money. Private Wagner was a tall, pasty guy, an inch taller than Tim, who was six two, with round blue eyes, glasses, and a self-confident manner that Tim at first respected — although he never actually said anything to a drill sergeant, he had been known to roll his eyes without being caught. He was going to sneak out, get a ride over to Juárez and pick up some weed. How a kid from South Carolina knew a dealer in Juárez, Tim could not imagine, but Private Wagner intimated that he knew just about everything there was to know. And, sure enough, on the designated night, after lights out, Private Wagner disappeared with fifty bucks. There was some whispering, but then Tim fell asleep. When he woke up at reveille, he glanced down the row of bunks, and there was Private Wagner, sliding out of bed as if he’d been there all night. The buzz went around that he had the stuff, and that night they smoked it. Tim, who had smoked a fair amount of dope with the Sloan boys and with Fiona, didn’t feel a thing, and thought the weed had an odd smell. Sure enough, the whisper went round two days later that the junk was weed — tumbleweed. After that, Private Wagner didn’t act quite as cocky, and Tim saw him for what he was, an eighteen-year-old kid who didn’t know his head from his ass. Tim didn’t mind basic training. The only time he was routed to KP, he didn’t have to peel potatoes — he had to get up early and smooth the frosting on the coffee cakes that had been baked the night before; every cake on the rack was covered with cockroach tracks.

—

THE BUS RIDE, sailing through the hot landscape with the windows open, seemed to Tim to go on for days instead of hours. Most of the soldiers were heading for commo, like Tim, but some (the fat ones) were looking at cooking detail. They were calmer and sat up front. Someone was in charge, and that might have been Tim himself, who had been made platoon leader for an unknown reason that probably had to do with the fact that he was over eighteen, did have some college (apparently, passing English and history was not critical to leadership abilities), and had tolerated the drilling well. They all wore their uniforms, including their helmets. They stopped here and there to drop off a few soldiers. Late in the afternoon, the bus pulled through the gates of Fort Huachuca, a much smaller complex than Fort Bliss, set in a blanker and more barren landscape. It was the beginning of April; there were wildflowers here and there — long branches of orange and red blooms struck his eye, and fields of something simple and also orange. These were, of course, interspersed with cactuses. He had seen Road Runner cartoons, he knew what a cactus was, but no pictures prepared you for what a cactus really looked like. Or Arizona, for that matter.

There was a stiff dry breeze when they got off the bus. It didn’t feel hot — it felt hot shading into cool. It was fragrant. Tim was told to report to an office across the road. He ordered his platoon to wait for him.

Whether he was tired or just disoriented, he couldn’t have said, but when he went into the designated office, he made a mistake — almost his first mistake in the army. He knew perfectly well that you didn’t have to salute indoors, and he was holding his helmet in his right hand, so when the lieutenant saluted him, he saluted him back — but it was his left hand that moved toward his forehead. You would have thought that he had raised a pistol and shot the lieutenant, who lunged across his desk, what is the matter with you, soldier, you been through basic or not? Don’t you know the first thing about the military? Tim stood there, his face straight and his eyes a little hooded, until the lieutenant’s top finished being blown. Then he said, “Private Manning reporting, sir.” He had switched his helmet to his left hand, and now he saluted with his right. Lieutenant Canette saluted him back and sat down again, as if nothing at all had taken place. That was the last time he was yelled at.

The barracks was a long building with the latrine at the end. Tim had a top bunk about a third of the way into his platoon. Below him was Private Rowan. Reveille was at six, which these days was after sunrise. Tim’s first job of the day was to assemble his men after they had been told to drop their cocks and grab their socks by the sergeant, then dressed and made their bunks (though no one came around anymore to throw their bedclothes on the floor and berate them for wrinkles). He marched his formation from the barracks to the mess hall — a quarter-mile, he thought. “Right, left, right, left! Ain’t no use in feelin’ down!” (A chorus of “Ain’t no use in feelin’ down!”) “Jody’s got your girl in town!” (“Jody’s got your girl in town!”) “Ain’t no use in feelin’ blue!” (“Ain’t no use in feelin’ blue!”) “Jody’s got your sister, too!” (“Jody’s got your sister, too!”) Or there might be “Dress it right and cover down!” (“Dress it right and cover down!”) “Thirty inches all around!” (“Thirty inches all around!”) Tim always scowled as he yelled, in order to make his voice even more resonant in the wind. He hadn’t realized, when he was singing with the Sloan boys, how loud his voice was, or how musical.

A few of his soldiers sat at the skinny table, where they had to eat double helpings and clean their plates, no matter whether the eggs were green or not. Two or three sat at the fat table, and Tim, who ate shit on a shingle every single day without once asking himself what was really in it, ate at the regular table. There was plenty of food — none of it good, but Tim ate up. Food was fuel.

After breakfast, he marched a somewhat smaller formation to the commo training building. It was hotter now, but he kept them going, bellowing out, “Left, right, left, right! Jody saw your girl today!” (“Jody saw your girl today!”) “How’s he gonna stay away!” (“How’s he gonna stay away!”) “She turned your picture to the wall!” (“Turned your picture to the wall!”) “Left his boots out in the hall!” (“Left his boots out in the hall!”)

The next four or five hours were spent learning alpha, bravo, charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot. There were several radios, including the prick 10, which was about ten inches by twelve inches, looked like a school notebook, and weighed ten or fifteen pounds. They would be carrying those. The angry 19 was more of a console radio, maybe the size of a suitcase. It must have weighed sixty pounds and had a longer range. It had glowing black dials, and the operator used either a headset or a desk mike. Tim imagined himself yelling into it just before an enemy soldier burst into the room and shot him in the chest.

Thirty recruits sat in the classroom with pencils and pieces of paper. Their instructor, who had been drafted from a minor-league baseball team, lolled at the front desk like a domesticated tiger. It wasn’t only his biceps and triceps and shoulders, which rippled with muscle, or his pecs, which narrowed to a thirty-inch waist; it was his supple grace. He was waiting for one thing — to be put on the Fort Huachuca baseball team. His job was to turn on the tape. The tape ran a series of beeps, and the kids wrote as fast as they could, trying to understand and write down the letters in groups of five. What came out never meant anything, or, rather, each set meant one thing, and one thing only: Dit dit dit — S. Dit dit — O. Dit — E. Dah — T. Dah dit dit dah dah — Tim. They had to write down letters, and do so faster each week. Tim was a little bit faster than the others — it took him about a week to make sense of the letters. Private Rowan never made sense of the letters, so he was sent over to learn to cook. When the tape ran out, the kids shouted at the baseball player, “Hey, Bobby, wake up!” The tiger stretched himself and woke up, reached over, and flipped the switch.