He paused, glared, sweat again pouring down his face, and Jim watched him with a feeling of dull dread and hopelessness. He felt like he was trapped in a small room.
“Any day now some of you may be sent on assignments that involve our using the muscle against misguided bastards who think their personal asses are all that count. I don’t want any shilly-shallying. If you are ordered to shoot someone, you shoot him. There’s no time for you to complain that you haven’t heard the guy speak Russian. Anyone who disobeys an order from a superior officer is a traitor and deserves to be shot. Don’t you forget it…
“All of you men here have just become part of this army. You are idiots, ignoramuses, assholes, zeroes. Don’t pretend you’re anything else. We’ll teach you to be soldiers. You’ll learn. But right from the beginning I want you to know that there’s really only one lesson: obey… And don’t you forget it…”
Later that night, as Jim spread out his sleeping bag next to Tony’s on the floor of a double room in the Moonlighter Motel—their temporary barracks—the other six men in the room, all of whom had been “in” since the second day of the war, were loose and joking. There were three blacks, two of whom were big men and the third a little runt of a man, and three middle-aged whites. They had all been at the theater and heard the major’s talk.
“Sheet, man, we’re the kings,” one of the big black men said as he spread his sleeping bag out on top of a double bed. “Ain’t no way you gonna get me outa this army. In here they look out after your ass. Out there it’s everybody’s ass for hisself. Ain’t no way.”
“I don’t like shootin’ no people,” the little black man said sullenly as he prepared to crawl into his sleeping bag, also on the floor. “You shoot anybody they ask you?”
“Sheet, I shoot my mother, man, if they says to,” the first black man countered. “That’s the way it is, man. This is wah!”
The other three men, the older whites, remained silent, two of them preparing to sleep on the second double bed and the third, a plump, red-faced man, bedding down near Tony and Jim.
“If they ask us to shoot somebody,” Tony announced loudly in the brief silence, “you can be damn sure that guy deserves to be shot.”
Jim, uncomfortable, unconvinced, was quietly unlacing his GI boots.
“Well, at least we won’t starve to death in the Army,” the plump man said with a hesitant smile.
“They feed us, they give us guns, and when a bomb comes, they tell us to duck,” one of the other white men said. “Compared to what I was facing four days ago, this is heaven.”
“You’re damn right,” the man next to him echoed.
Jim placed his boots and his fatigues in a neat pile at the head of his sleeping bag and, in his underwear, crawled into his sleeping bag.
“What this wah is, is a great big mother-fucking urban renewal program,” the big talkative black man said as he undressed. “Now Manhattan and Washington and Boston all get to look like Harlem.” He laughed.
The others were silent. Jim linked his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. He could feel the floor swaying underneath him, its motion the counterpoint to Vagabond’s during the last two days at sea.
He felt isolated, alone. Tony appeared to feel at home in the Army; Jim felt he would be lucky to last a single day. He tried to think about what he could do and where he could go if he escaped, but he was tired, the three blacks were laughing about something, and the two white men in the other double bed were whispering together. He heard Tony getting into the sleeping bag beside him.
“Don’t mind these shits,” Tony whispered to him. “Tomorrow we’ll be assigned to a platoon, and it’ll be a whole new ball game.”
Jim didn’t reply. He didn’t think the league he was stuck in now was going to be getting any better for a long, long time.
For most of his fifty-eight years George Cooper had thought that he would defend his country to the death. He had fought in the Korean War; two of his sons had fought in the war in Vietnam. So it was with some degree of confusion that he found himself standing behind a barricade of farm machinery, oil tanks, and hay with eighteen other farmers and a few of their teenage sons, preparing to fight a company of soldiers from the Army of the United States. Every decision he had made during the week that followed the outbreak of war had seemed logical, but there was nothing logical about what was happening now. His own government seemed about to kill him and his sons and friends because they felt they ought to be able to keep some of their farm animals and produce for their families and friends.
When four days earlier an officer had come and told him the Army needed all his eggs every day and all his spring corn, George had still been too stunned to resist. But when some of his neighbors began to complain that the Army was taking everything, and then yesterday a new officer came to requisition the rest of his spring vegetables and forty chickens, George began to feel that his country had already been invaded; it was just that the uniforms weren’t the color he’d expected them to be.
George understood that food was now gold and that he and his neighbors were millionaires in a poverty-stricken world. He understood that with real money almost meaningless he would have to give away most of his food without compensation so that others wouldn’t starve to death. What he couldn’t understand and couldn’t accept was that he had to give up everything to the government and depend on feeding his own family on what the government planned to give back to him.
Eggs and corn he could spare. But his chickens, or Bart Hasler’s cows, or Fred Lapp’s hogs, these they couldn’t give up without endangering their own families’ survival. Taking their animals away was like tearing down small factories.
The officer had arrived that morning for the chickens, and George had refused to surrender them. The officer had left, announcing he would return with reinforcements. He had. About sixty soldiers with automatic rifles were standing around three troop carriers parked two hundred feet away on the road. The chickens were in the henhouse behind them. About half of Bart’s herd of sixty cows and most of Fred’s hogs were in the big barn to their left. A large store of recently harvested vegetables was in the cellar of the main house. The women and smaller children were staying over at Fred’s farm a mile away. All the young men were in the service someplace, one of them, John Simpson’s son, Cal, standing with an automatic rifle among the sixty soldiers confronting them.
When the officer shouted at them through a bullhorn, the other farmers chose George to go out and speak to him. The soldiers began to fan out around the barns and henhouse, and Bart, who was in charge of tactics, had posted men in various defensive positions around the barn and henhouse to keep the soldiers at a distance. Their orders were that if any soldier got within fifty feet of the barns they were to fire a warning shot at the ground in front of them.
The officer in charge was a Captain Ames, a tall, skinny fellow with a nervous twitch on one side of his face. He didn’t seem too sure of himself. George wasn’t too sure of himself. He’d left his shotgun back with the others and ambled slowly out to talk to Ames.
“We’ve come for your chickens, Mr. Cooper,” Captain Ames said in an unnaturally loud voice. “My orders are to confiscate all edible livestock in this area.”
“All of them?” George asked in surprise. In the morning the order had been for just forty of his chickens.
“All of them.” Captain Ames held out a piece of paper, presumably containing written authorization for the confiscation.