‘You know, Gordon, one day you may have to make a hard decision. If you do, you’d better already know who it is you are and what it is you believe in. Because you wouldn’t have the time to figure those things out in a crisis. You know?’
Gordon opened his mouth to protest. He wasn’t the President. He wasn’t even the nominee for President. He was just the Vice-Presidential nominee on the challenger’s ticket, and they were eleven — or now eight — points down with only five weeks to go.
Although he returned to his paper without answering, Elaine’s question increasingly bothered him. I know what I believe in, Gordon thought as he moved on to the next article. ‘Russian Armed Forces Split,’ the headline read, and underneath it in smaller type was ‘Fighting reported heavy in Western Russia.’ But instead of concentrating on the names, the places, the figures, he held a running dialogue with himself. He believed in a government that was just, and honest, and fair. He believed that people had the right to walk down safe streets. He believed that stopping the spread of anarchy was absolutely essential to both.
Every muscle in Andre Faulk’s body ached, but the white kid next to him looked half dead.
‘Listen up, gentlemen!’ shouted the weapons instructor — a lieutenant wearing thick-rimmed shatterproof black glasses. ‘This is your weapon.’ He raised a black assault rifle in the air, and despite Andre’s general misery a smile broke out on his face. The gun was a motherfucker.
Andre looked over with rising excitement at the sagging white kid. He was all red in the face like he was sick. His eyes were half closed, and his mouth hung open. Andre looked around, but nobody else in their training platoon dared take their eyes off the instructor with DIs roaming the perimeter of the group.
‘This weapon is the most important thing,’ the lieutenant continued, ‘you’ll get to touch in boot camp since we don’t allow masturbation.’ The recruits all laughed nervously. ‘This is also the most dangerous thing we let you near, ’cause this rifle don’t know from Adam. It just kills. Wherever it’s pointed when the sear releases — whoever is standing there at that exact moment — will take a 5.56-mm round going twenty-eight hundred feet per second. This weapon, gentlemen, will go off if you drop it!’
Andre felt the white guy lean against his shoulder. He was sagging against him in a stupor. Andre pushed the guy away, saying, ‘Hey.’
The kid opened his eyes and sat up.
‘You some kinda troublemaker, Faulk?’ a DI shouted, but after a moment the lecture resumed.
Out of the corner of his eye, Andre saw the sick guy slowly weirding out again — swaying this way and that with drooping eyelids. He’s fuckin’ failin’ asleep! Andre realized. That motherfucker is failin’ asleep and they bust my ass! It was practically the only time he’d spoken to another recruit, and it had gotten him in trouble. Andre decided to shut up and keep his head low.
‘How about you, recruit?’ the lieutenant said. He was pointing at the sleeping white guy. Andre smiled.
‘Stempel!’ rang out like a shot, and so did a burst of laughter from the group. The recruit’s eyes were wide open now. ‘You stupid shit!’ the DI shouted. He stepped high over men sitting crosslegged and stood over the poor bastard. ‘Did we not give you enough sleep last night, Stempel? Is that what it is? So you just decided to nap your way through the most important fucking lecture you’ve ever gotten in your short and miserable life?’
Everyone laughed again.
‘What the hell are you laughing about?’ the DI shouted — spinning around and glaring at the forty or so men seated in the semicircle. Coiled and ready, the sergeant menaced the now unsmiling platoon. ‘Don’t you realize you’re a unit, and this poor bastard’s in it? Have you somehow failed to appreciate that those friendly casualties the lieutenant is talking about is you? You see humor in the fact that Stempel here won’t know anything about fundamental safety procedures when dealing with a high-powered military assault rifle?’
Everyone now looked at the scrawny kid.
‘Twenty push-ups!’ the DI boomed. Stempel started to assume the push-up position, but the DI shouted, ‘Not you, Stempel! Everybody else! Gimme twenty! Count ’em!’
‘One!’ Andre yelled amid the other forty-odd voices as he pressed his chest to the dirt.
‘Now, Stempel,’ the DI announced loudly, ‘I want you to laugh!’
‘Two!’
‘Laugh, Goddamnit!’
‘Three!’
Stempel started to laugh insincerely. ‘Heh, heh, heh.’
‘Louder!’
With Stempel laughing, his fellow recruits did twenty push-ups. Many barely completed their last few, and others gathered around them to shout encouragement. The DIs took it all in — obviously approving of the camaraderie of the men. Andre finished and sat quietly — waiting.
When the last were done, Stempel was ordered to stand.
‘Now, recruit,’ the lieutenant asked — sounding satisfied by the punishment although he’d played absolutely no part in it ‘Why don’t you give me the nomenclature of the M-16A1 rifle?’
Although still looking as sickly as ever, if not worse, Stempel belted out the words. ‘Sir, the M-16A1 assault rifle, sir, is… is a 5.56-mm, magazine-fed, shoulder-fired, gas-operated, assault rifle capable of semiautomatic fire or three-round bursts through use of a selector switch… sir!’
‘Very well, then. Sit down and listen up.’ There were glares from the other men when Stempel sat. He looked at Andre with a pathetic expression on his face. Shit, Andre thought. What’s he lookin’ at me for? ‘I’m only gonna do this twice!’ the lieutenant shouted. ‘Once at regular speed, once more slowly.’ He put the rifle onto a metal table. ‘To field strip the M-16 rifle, you remove the magazine.’ The empty black box dropped into the instructor’s hand. ‘Release the charging handle. Pull the charging handle to the rear.’ He slid a black metal piece of the rifle toward the butt. ‘Remove the charging handle by pulling down and to rear.’ It came off in his hand and he laid it down. ‘Push out the retaining pin,’ he held the tiniest of metal pieces, virtually invisible to the recruits, ‘and drop out the firing pin.’ A single dart-shaped object came out of the black weapon. ‘Rotate the bolt to the right until the cam pin is clear of the bolt-carrier key.’
The instructor lost Andre completely. From the looks of some of the other recruits he had lost them too. Still, the lieutenant went on. ‘Rotate the cam pin one quarter-turn and remove. Pull the bolt from the bolt-carrier.’ The pieces of the weapon — some large, others minute — were piling up all over the table. ‘Hold the extractor down to control spring tension. Carefully push out the extractor pin and remove the extractor.’ A long spring — coiled so tightly that the lieutenant handled it with care — slid out with a piece of metal stuck in it. Each part had a name. The lieutenant went on and on.