Jenkins helped Jones to his feet. “I never said he wouldn’t kick your ass.” Then the sergeant turned to face me. “Feeling lucky, are we?”
“I’m not all that sure, sergeant.” Now it was really too late to back down!
Jenkins motioned Jones out of the ring, and this time he bowed to me, which really made me think I had fucked up. I had nothing else to do but return the bow. This time we circled each other warily, and he didn’t charge in at me. I actually had to fake a backwards motion to get him to commit, and he struck at me with a fist punch, which didn’t leave him off balance. I still managed to twist him around and toss him, but he had barely landed on the sand before he rolled to his feet and came back at me. This time I was off balance and I took two solid blows to my ribs as I fell on my ass. I was up quickly though, rolling out from under his kick, and managed to take a second kick in stride and drop him in the sand a second time. That just got me a smack to the head. I was moving back into position when he stopped the fight.
I was breathing hard, and rubbing my sore ribs, and I was pleased to note that the sergeant was rubbing a hand along his rear. “So, what degree are you, and in what?” he asked.
“First dan, aikido. Uh, that’d be a first degree black belt, sergeant,” I answered.
“I know what it means, soldier,” he answered me, but not angrily. “You’re very good, but your timing is off.”
I nodded. He was right, I wasn’t moving properly. “I know, sergeant. I should have been more fluid, and quicker.”
“It’s the uniform, and the boots. I bet you’ve only practiced in a gi and barefoot, right?”
It was like a light went off in my head! No wonder I was moving like molasses! “That’s it, I think! I’ve never worn boots during practice! Can we do another fall?”
He just snorted a small laugh. “Not now. Just get your ass back in ranks.” Corporal Jones and Sergeant Jenkins supervised the day’s unarmed combat training, and I made sure to do as I was told. At the end of the period, however, I was called over. Both Jones and Jenkins were standing there.
“You could have made him look like a real horse’s ass. Why didn’t you?” asked the sergeant.
“That would have been disrespectful, sergeant.”
Jones spoke up. “You would give a break to an enemy?”
“Are you my enemy or my teacher, corporal?” I asked.
The two noncoms looked at me curiously. I was then sent on my way, although I was also given extra duty. Three nights a week I was to make my way to the training hall, and Sergeant Jenkins would give me an extra special workout along with Corporal Jones. The sergeant was a black belt in karate. When the corporal made a pro forma protest about this, the sergeant replied that he shouldn’t have let me put his dick in the dirt. That got an easy laugh from the corporal. At least I wasn’t in any trouble.
When we started weapons training with the M-16, Sergeant Jenkins asked me if I was as good with rifles as with aikido. “I don’t know, sergeant. I’ve never even held a gun before,” I told him. That got him to laughing, but it earned me five minutes of running around holding my M-16 with one hand and grabbing my crotch with the other, singing, ‘This is my rifle! This is my gun! This is for shooting! This is for fun!’ That kind of sucked.
It turned out that I did well with weapons, probably because I didn’t have any bad habits to unlearn, or at least that’s what the instructors said. The guys who bragged that they were sent out in the morning with a rifle and a single bullet, and weren’t allowed to eat if they didn’t bring back dinner, weren’t all that good with an M-16. I figured they were full of shit, anyhow. My father, growing up on a farm during the Depression, had told us that story too, but with him I believed it. I managed to qualify as Expert in both rifle and pistol. That was with the Colt.45, Model 1911A1. The army wouldn’t change over to the Berretta 9 mm until the mid-Eighties, and I thought before, and think now, that was the stupidest thing they could have possibly done. God knows it’s loud, and if you aren’t prepared it kicks like a mule, but it wasn’t that hard for a guy my size to hold and fire, and the target goes down permanently.
Some of what we did was what I told Marilyn we would do, which was to go hiking and camping in the woods. Well, that’s not precisely what we did. We practiced patrolling and setting up defenses and ambushes and stuff like that. This was just an introduction. The guys who ended up in the infantry would take advanced classes in crawling through the woods. The end results tended to be comical.
At one point, towards the end of training, the battalion was split in two and we had to play a giant war game, with the equivalent of two big companies on each side. We had a headquarters and two opposing lines of defense, and we had to patrol ‘No Man’s Land’ and bring back intelligence. It was sort of like playing Capture the Flag while taking steroids and LSD. That was when the fun started. I was assigned to the Blue Army, along with the guy in the bunk beneath me, Harlan J. Buckminster (this was all done alphabetically), and we were assigned to be part of the patrols probing the Orange Army’s defenses.
So, off we went. We left our simulated headquarters, following behind our simulated sergeant, while our simulated lieutenant showed us our simulated front line. We were to sneak across a very large and very scrubby field and find out what the Orange Army was simulating, and then sneak back and let the simulated good guys know what the simulated bad guys were up to. This was a whole lot more fun when I was 10 and I could sneak home for some non-simulated milk and cookies.
Harlan and I slathered on the grease paint and grabbed our M-16s. We only had blanks, but you don’t fuck around with guns. As our simulated leaders looked on, we slipped down to the edge of the field and dropped to our bellies. It was a nice and sunny day, and even the dirt was relatively dry. It took us over an hour of slow crawling to make our way across the field and around the scrubby brush. Then, maybe twenty meters (yards to normal people, but the Army had gone NATO and we all used metric) away from the edge of the forest somebody other than Harlan and me yelled out, “HALT! WHO GOES THERE?”
Harlan looked at me with wide eyes, which was the only thing you could see of his face, since he was as black as the ace of spades to begin with, and now he was covered with grease paint. I just looked back and shook my head. I didn’t know what to do, either!
Just then the voice yelled out, “JULIUS!”
I looked over at Harlan and shrugged my shoulders. Julius must have been a password, but since we didn’t know the countersign, we were fucked. He shrugged, too.
“JULIUS!” was repeated.
We were so fucked. No way would we get a third chance. We were already dead men. It was so stupid, I just had to take the chance. “CAESAR!” Harlan just looked at me and rolled on his back, and tried to keep from laughing.
Just as suddenly, a helmeted head prairie-dogged up from about fifty feet away. “Hi, guys! What’s up?”
Harlan and I stared at each other. I couldn’t believe that these guys had picked the stupidest set of passwords in the history of warfare. Harlan whispered, “I can’t believe this shit!”
“It’s better to be lucky than smart!” I returned. I rolled to my knees and stuck my head above the scrub and looked around. The Orange Army sentry was standing there, holding his rifle to the side.
“Well, don’t just stand there! Come on in!” he said eagerly. His fellow sentry emerged from behind a stump a few meters away and stood up, too.
Well, we were well and truly fucked now! I could only see two ways out of this. Either we would be recognized as members of the hated Blue Army, and captured, tortured, and gruesomely killed, or we were going to have to return the favor to these guys. I looked over at Harlan and said, “Give me your rifle.” I tore off the blue Velcro patch on my left arm that signified who I was. Harlan had a blue one of his own, and the two sentries wore orange Velcro.