But if you didn’t have more urgent things to do after supper, you could write a letter, loaf, gossip, discuss the myriad mental and moral shortcomings of sergeants and, dearest of all, talk about the female of the species (we became convinced that there were no such creatures, just mythology created by inflamed imaginations — one boy in our company claimed to have seen a girl, over at regimental headquarters; he was unanimously judged a liar and a braggart). Or you could play cards. I learned, the hard way, not to draw to an inside straight and I’ve never done it since. In fact I haven’t played cards since.
Or, if you actually did have twenty minutes of your very own, you could sleep. This was a choice very highly thought of; we were always several weeks minus on sleep.
I may have given the impression that boot camp was made harder than necessary. This is not correct.
It was made as hard as possible and on purpose.
It was the firm opinion of every recruit that this was sheer meanness, calculated sadism, fiendish delight of witless morons in making other people suffer.
It was not. It was too scheduled, too intellectual, too efficiently and impersonally organized to be cruelty for the sick pleasure of cruelty; it was planned like surgery for purposes as unimpassioned as those of a surgeon. Oh, I admit that some of the instructors may have enjoyed it but I don’t know that they did — and I do know (now) that the psych officers tried to weed out any bullies in selecting instructors. They looked for skilled and dedicated craftsmen to follow the art of making things as tough as possible for a recruit; a bully is too stupid, himself too emotionally involved and too likely to grow tired of his fun and slack off, to be efficient.
Still, there may have been bullies among them. But I’ve heard that some surgeons (and not necessarily bad ones) enjoy the cutting and the blood which accompanies the humane art of surgery.
That’s what it was: surgery. Its immediate purpose was to get rid of, run right out of the outfit, those recruits who were too soft or too babyish ever to make Mobile Infantrymen. It accomplished that, in droves. (They darn near ran me out.) Our company shrank to platoon size in the first six weeks. Some of them were dropped without prejudice and allowed, if they wished, to sweat out their terms in the non-combatant services; others got Bad Conduct Discharges, or Unsatisfactory Performance Discharges, or Medical Discharges.
Usually you didn’t know why a man left unless you saw him leave and he volunteered the information. But some of them got fed up, said so loudly, and resigned, forfeiting forever their chances of franchise. Some, especially the older men, simply couldn’t stand the pace physically no matter how hard they tried. I remember one, a nice old geezer named Carruthers, must have been thirty-five; they carried him away in a stretcher while he was still shouting feebly that it wasn’t fair!—and that he would be back.
It was sort of sad, because we liked Carruthers and he did try — so we looked the other way and figured we would never see him again, that he was a cinch for a medical discharge and civilian clothes. Only I did see him again, long after. He had refused discharge (you don’t have to accept a medical) and wound up as third cook in a troop transport. He remembered me and wanted to talk old times, as proud of being an alumnus of Camp Currie as Father is of his Harvard accent — he felt that he was a little bit better than the ordinary Navy man. Well, maybe he was.
But, much more important than the purpose of carving away the fat quickly and saving the government the training costs of those who would never cut it, was the prime purpose of making as sure as was humanly possible that no cap trooper ever climbed into a capsule for a combat drop unless he was prepared for it — fit, resolute, disciplined and skilled. If he is not, it’s not fair to the Federation, it’s certainly not fair to his teammates, and worst of all it’s not fair to him.
But was boot camp more cruelly hard than was necessary?
All I can say to that is this: The next time I have to make a combat drop, I want the men on my flanks to be graduates of Camp Currie or its Siberian equivalent. Otherwise I’ll refuse to enter the capsule.
But I certainly thought it was a bunch of crumby, vicious nonsense at the time. Little things — When we were there a week, we were issued undress maroons for parade to supplement the fatigues we had been wearing. (Dress and full-dress uniforms came much later.) I took my tunic back to the issue shed and complained to the supply sergeant. Since he was only a supply sergeant and rather fatherly in manner I thought of him as a semi-civilian — I didn’t know how, as of then, to read the ribbons on his chest or I wouldn’t have dared speak to him. “Sergeant, this tunic is too large. My company commander says it fits like a tent.”
He looked at the garment, didn’t touch it. “Really?”
“Yeah. I want one that fits.”
He still didn’t stir. “Let me wise you up, sonny boy. There are just two sizes in this army — too large and too small.”
“But my company commander—”
“No doubt.”
“But what am I going to do?”
“Oh, it’s advice you want! Well, I’ve got that in stock — new issue, just today. Mmm … tell you what I’ll do. Here’s a needle and I’ll even give you a spool of thread. You won’t need a pair of scissors; a razor blade is better. Now you tight ’em plenty across the hips but leave cloth to loose ’em again across the shoulders; you’ll need it later.”
Sergeant Zim’s only comment on my tailoring was: “You can do better than that. Two hours extra duty.”
So I did better than that by next parade.
Those first six weeks were all hardening up and hazing, with lots of parade drill and lots of route march. Eventually, as files dropped out and went home or elsewhere, we reached the point where we could do fifty miles in ten hours on the level — which is good mileage for a good horse in case you’ve never used your legs. We rested, not by stopping, but by changing pace, slow march, quick march, and trot. Sometimes we went out the full distance, bivouacked and ate field rations, slept in sleeping bags and marched back the next day.
One day we started out on an ordinary day’s march, no bed bags on our shoulders, no rations. When we didn’t stop for lunch, I wasn’t surprised, as I had already learned to sneak sugar and hard bread and such out of the mess tent and conceal it about my person, but when we kept on marching away from camp in the afternoon I began to wonder. But I had learned not to ask silly questions.
We halted shortly before dark, three companies, now somewhat abbreviated. We formed a battalion parade and marched through it, without music, guards were mounted, and we were dismissed. I immediately looked up Corporal-Instructor Bronski because he was a little easier to deal with than the others … and because I felt a certain amount of responsibility; I happened to be, at the time, a recruit-corporal myself. These boot chevrons didn’t mean much — mostly the privilege of being chewed out for whatever your squad did as well as for what you did yourself — and they could vanish as quickly as they appeared. Zim had tried out all of the older men as temporary non-coms first and I had inherited a brassard with chevrons on it a couple of days before when our squad leader had folded up and gone to hospital.