"I have a real serious problem, men, because I would like to believe you. I would like to believe you are sorry. I am a believing man. But I have discovered that you are liars. That you give your word and it is meaningless. Is that correct?"
"Yessir," answered the two recruits, at stiff attention, their eyes sneaking glances at the flicking crop, snapping every so often against the hard leather boots.
"Being unable to take your word that you will be sorry, I must make sure."
The crop snapped against a nose. The young
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man covered the bloody streak across his face with his hands. He gasped. His eyes teared.
Little drops of blood came down his nasal passage to the rear of his throat. He tasted it, hot and choking.
"Now I know you're sorry," said Bleech. "I know you are truly and deeply sorry. That's how I have to do things when I can't take a man's word."
And with that, he snapped a knee into the groin of the second recruit and that boy went over in two, his face coming very close to the ground very quickly. He opened his mouth to scream a silent scream. And Bleech stepped on the back of his head, pushing his face into the ground, then ground the polished heel of the polished boot into the boy's jaw, where a sickening crack happened and the boot sank two inches into the face and the jaw was broken.
"That's for talkers, boys. But this is nothing compared to what will happen if you talk outside. There is no greater sin in this man's world than talking outside the unit."
Colonel Bleech stomped a polished foot in the South Carolina dust. It was a hot dry summer in these hills of the training camp, where no paved roads led and the only entrance the recruits knew about was by helicopter.
Lordy, did they know helicopters. They knew loading and unloading the way most people knew how to swallow. They knew how to carry people, both willing and reluctant. They had more techniques for dragging someone by lip or ear or even chain than they could count.
Only one person never questioned an order of
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the peculiarity of the training. And that was the big raw-boned boy from near Pieraffle, South Carolina, twenty-seven miles south of Charleston, the boy who liked Gene Autry movies, chipped beef on toast, who never got tired, and who spoke kindly about Lt. Colonel Wendell Bleech, even behind his back.
So when Walker Teasdale fell into despondency, his chin resting on the barrel of his rifle, his eyes looking into that great nowhere where people see no tomorrow, the other recruits took special notice.
"How do you know you're going to get killed, Walker?" they asked.
"I know. I know how, too," he said. "They're gonna shoot me for disciplinary reasons. I know it. They're gonna take me out to that piney hill and they're gonna make me dig my grave and then they're gonna put a bullet in my head."
"Who's they, Walker?"
"Colonel Bleech and the drill sergeants."
"You ? They think you're perfect."
"They won't tomorrow."
"Nobody knows what's going to happen tomorrow, Walker."
"I do," said Walker, firm in gaze and voice, a steady sureness in his manner, as when he talked about putting bullets into targets.
He asked for a glass of water and young men who ordinarily wouldn't wait on anyone unless ordered by a superior jumped to find a glass. There were no glasses in the barracks, so someone drank the last bit of smuggled moonshine in a mason jar, washed it out with water, and filled it.
Walker put his gun on his rack and, with a slow
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wisdom that had replaced his boyish innocence, looked at the water, then drank it all.
"This is my last sustenance, fellas. Ah've seen the buzzards in my dreams and they called my name. Ah take no more food or drink."
The other recruits thought this was pretty much craziness, since no one had seen a buzzard around these parts since coming to camp more than ten months ago, all of them thinking1 that basic training should have been a two-month affair and finding out, in an address by Colonel Bleech, that two months wasn't enough to teach a man to tie his shoes right, let alone become a soldier, a real soldier.
When Bleeeh said "soldier," his voice lowered, his spine stiffened, and a deep pride came to his entire bearing. His lead-weighted riding crop would always tap at his polished boots on that word.
On the morning that Walker Teasdale said he would die, the recruits were awakened as usual with drill sergeants screaming in their ears, for their usual semiclothed morning run, wearing just boots, shorts, and rifles with full packs of ammunition.
Long ago, they had stopped commenting on how none of them had ever heard of basic training like this, with a five-mile run every morning and at triple time. One of the recruits who had a brother in the Airborne once tried to chant as he ran and had to run punishment miles because this unit never made noise when it ran, when it fought, and when it marched.
"There'll be plenty of noise on the great day," Colonel Bleech had promised, but everyone was
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afraid to ask what that great day was, although they had heard a lieutenant mention it, too, but the lieutenant admitted he didn't know what that great day was. All he knew was that he owned two homes, an Alfa Romeo sports car, and sent his two daughters to private schools-all on a lieutenant's pay.
The pay was good, but tired, frightened young men do not think of money when they want only rest. And they don't think of money when they are thinking only of dying.
Walker Teasdale did his five-mile run with the unit that morning and passed up his favorite chipped beef on toast, even though the other recruits kept passing him heaping portions of it.
They packed for a two-day marching into what was called Watts City, a specially constructed battle site in which the unit maneuvered through alleys and simulated taverns and empty lots. Whoever built Watts City, someone said, must have cheated on the contract because the whole thing looked like a slum.
As they double-timed through piney woods, their bodies now hardened and moving easily without complaint of lung or muscle, dark birds circled and pivoted in the delicate blue sky.
"Buzzards," whispered someone and everyone looked to Walker and then the birds. Only one trooper that day refused to look up. He knew the birds would be there. He had dreamed them. He had seen them in his sleep as he had seen this piney hill. And he knew his time was coming.
They marched as the sun made their uniforms sweat-wet clinging clothes. The pine needles, soft beneath their feet, had at one time made bloody
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blisters, but now these blisters were callouses. The recruits hardly noticed the tax levied on their bodies by the march.
Most thought they were on another mock raid on Watts City, but at the outskirts of the reconstructed slum they turned away and double-timed down into a leafy valley with a small brown mudwater stream, and there Walker Teasdale saw the little hill above him that he had seen in his dream.
And if he had not been staring at that hill, he might not have seen the brown boot stick out from behind a tree. Other recruits rested, but Walker stared at the hill. He knew he would have all the rest he would ever need, soon and forever.
The other recruits took their smoking break by the muddy stream. And then a bugle seemed to come out of the sky and they all looked up but saw nothing. Only Walker saw the slender object in the hand of Colonel Bleech atop the small piney hill.
It sounded like the voice of God coming from all the trees, but Walker knew the small object must be a microphone and the voice was Colonel Bleech's and was coming from hidden speakers in the trees.
"The greatest violation that can ever occur has occurred," came the voice from the hills and sky and even the stream. It was around them and in them.