“Ready?” José, the production foreman growls, his single hand on the light switch. He lost the other in an ice-grinding machine. Without waiting for an answer from the men ranged tensely along the line of glittering hooks, like runners poised for the gun, he jerks down the heavy knife switch. The lights douse, then reignite a deep carmine red.
With a prolonged, grinding rattle, then a clashing metallic clanging, the Line surges into motion.
Hector came back sputtering, choking, cold seawater splashing his face, light dazzling his eyes. He blinked up into the Hat’s flashlight.
“Get the hell up, yoohoo!” the drill instructor screamed into his face. “Now, chickenhead. Get him on his feet. Get that rifle alert to the dirt! You point that thing at me again, I’m gonna personally kick you to Korea!”
They jerked him up on his boots. Sand grated in his MARPATs. For two hours that night they’d carried logs through the surf, trying to build a bridge out to an island. Burdened the entire time with the unendurable weight DI Brady had saddled them with. The DI thought them too weak to be in his Corps. Because they were pansies and good Army material and not trying hard enough, he’d torn up their stress cards and decided that wherever they went, even during the Crucible, the final hours of hell that marked the climax of boot camp, the Booger Squad would carry, in addition to their combat gear, a full fifty-five-gallon drum of water. A clumsy, four-hundred-pound, impossible-to-grip burden that after the first hour they would have traded instantly for a cross and a crown of thorns.
Boot camp in peacetime, the DIs told them, had been twelve weeks. In World War II, Korea I, Vietnam, and now this war, it had been shortened. A special Corps good deal, so they could get to the best part of being a Marine: killing the enemy. The Booger Squad got everyone who bilged from other platoons. The men and women with ankle injuries, or who were too fat, not aggressive enough with the pugil sticks, who couldn’t get over the obstacles. Hector’s problem, aside from slow arithmetic, was that he couldn’t swim. Whenever his head went under, he panicked. He flailed around, choking, and had to be hauled out by the scruff.
Which Bleckford was doing now, hauling him along by the scruff. His fellow recruit had to be far beyond the peacetime body-fat standards, Bleckford was stupid, Bleckford never could come up with the right answer when the Hat started in on him. Yet his yard-wide ass was usually ahead of Hector on the confidence courses, balance beams, log runs. Squirming through muddy ditches with barbed wire hanging slack over them, waiting to snag their rifle barrels, helmets, their uniforms, coated with slick Carolina mud like the chocolate shell on an ice-cream bar.
“Ramos!” The Hat, right next to him, double-timing like he always did while the recruits were dragging one boot after the other. The man was inexhaustible. Relentless. Could see in the dark like a cat. Knew everything. Could curse in Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. Had fought in Iraq, been wounded in Afghanistan. “That rifle points at a forty-five-degree angle to the direction of movement. It does not point at the back of the trooper ahead of you. It does not point at the ground. It does not do any good pointing at the ground, like your dick! Ramos! What are the characteristics of the Chinese standard rifle round?”
Hector stumbled over his boots, searching a fatigue-erased brain. Words reached his tongue by reflex, without any thought process. “Sir! The DB 95 cartridge has a 64-grain bullet with a muzzle velocity of three thousand feet per second. Sir!”
“When fired from what?”
“Sir! When fired from a Type 95 rifle with a rate of 650 rounds per minute in full automatic fire. Sir!”
“Bleckford! What is the cost of the standard Chinese rifle round?”
A hoarse, tired bark. “Sir! Uh… This… recruit… does not know the cost of the Chinese, uh, whatever you said. Sir.”
“You dumbass Detroit bullet stopper… the Chinese rifle round costs a yuan and a half. A yuan is worth ten cents. So that’s fifteen cents. Evans! How much does it cost the Corps to train you?”
“Sir, this recruit—”
“Louder, goddamn it. I can’t hear you!”
“Sir, this recruit does not know—”
“Shut the fuck up! It costs the United States Marine Corps a million dollars to train each of you meatheads. It costs the People’s Liberation Army fifteen cents to kill you. How in the name of Christ are we going to win this fucking war? Ramos, tell me.”
“Sir, this recruit is going to have to kill a shitload of Chinese, sir!”
“At last, he makes sense. Are you a fucking Christian, Ramos?”
“No, sir. I’m a Catholic, sir!”
Brady screamed into his right ear, “What is this ‘I’? There is no fucking ‘I’ in my Marine Corps, chickenhead!”
“Sir, this recruit is a Catholic!” Ramos screamed back, stripping his throat raw. “Sir!”
“Do you love all men, Ramos?”
“Sir, this recruit tries to, sir!”
“Do you love me, Ramos?”
“Sir, this recruit loves the drill instructor as a sinful piece of human shit, sir!”
Brady put his face close in the dark and snarled, “Barely acceptable, Ramos. Just barely. But do you love the Chinese, Recruit? That’s what you sad little motherfuckers are going to have to figure out. Or do you hate them, like, enough to blow their fucking guts all over the dirt and stamp on them?”
“I hate the—”
His helmet rang so hard he reeled in his boots. He bit back a gasp. “Sir, this recruit hates the fucking Chinese, Drill Instructor.”
Brady lifted his arms and howled, “I am here to bring clarity into your benighted universe, fools! To force you to gaze into the abyss of your fucking empty souls!” The howl faded to a mad chuckle, ominous in the dark against the dull thudding of boots, the dull clink of gear, the dull slosh of water in the drum, the dull exhausted gasps of the recruits, the dull crash of waves on sand. “There’ll be no stress cards and no safe words in Korea. Triple the size of the Corps, they said. So we get sandblowers, transdragons, shitforbrains, chickenplucking yardbirds. The bitched-up scrape of every fucked-up abortion. Every waddling, slowpaced, lefthanded, non-English-speaking, obese, wrong-eye-dominant Cat Five… pick up the pace, assholes! Tide’s a-comin’ in, gotta beat it before we drown. Ramos! Bleckford! Breuer! Conlin! Schultz! Evans! Vincent! Let’s hear it back there, ladies! Titcomb! Count, cadence, count!”
A deep Alabama voice foghorned,