“Huh? Sir?”
“There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men. We’re trying to teach you to be dangerous — to the enemy. Dangerous even without a knife. Deadly as long as you still have one hand or one foot and are still alive. If you don’t know what I mean, go read ‘Horatius at the Bridge’ or ‘The Death of the Bon Homme Richard’; they’re both in the Camp library. But take the case you first mentioned; I’m you and all you have is a knife. That target behind me — the one you’ve been missing, number three — is a sentry, armed with everything but an H-bomb. You’ve got to get him … quietly, at once, and without letting him call for help.” Zim turned slightly—thunk!—a knife he hadn’t even had in his hand was quivering in the center of target number three. “You see? Best to carry two knives — but get him you must, even barehanded.”
“Uh—”
“Something still troubling you? Speak up. That’s what I’m here for, to answer your questions.”
“Uh, yes, sir. You said the sentry didn’t have any H-bomb. But he does have an H-bomb; that’s just the point. Well, at least we have, if we’re the sentry … and any sentry we’re up against is likely to have them, too. I don’t mean the sentry, I mean the side he’s on.”
“I understood you.”
“Well … you see, sir? If we can use an H-bomb — and, as you said, it’s no checker game; it’s real, it’s war and nobody is fooling around — isn’t it sort of ridiculous to go crawling around in the weeds, throwing knives and maybe getting yourself killed … and even losing the war … when you’ve got a real weapon you can use to win? What’s the point in a whole lot of men risking their lives with obsolete weapons when one professor type can do so much more just by pushing a button?”
Zim didn’t answer at once, which wasn’t like him at all. Then he said softly, “Are you happy in the Infantry, Hendrick? You can resign, you know.”
Hendrick muttered something; Zim said, “Speak up!”
“I’m not itching to resign, sir. I’m going to sweat out my term.”
“I see. Well, the question you asked is one that a sergeant isn’t really qualified to answer … and one that you shouldn’t ask me. You’re supposed to know the answer before you join up. Or you should. Did your school have a course in History and Moral Philosophy?”
“What? Sure — yes, sir.”
“Then you’ve heard the answer. But I’ll give you my own — unofficial — views on it. If you wanted to teach a baby a lesson, would you cut its head off?”
“Why … no, sir!”
“Of course not. You’d paddle it. There can be circumstances when it’s just as foolish to hit an enemy city with an H-bomb as it would be to spank a baby with an ax. War is not violence and killing, pure and simple; war is controlled violence, for a purpose. The purpose of war is to support your government’s decisions by force. The purpose is never to kill the enemy just to be killing him … but to make him do what you want him to do. Not killing … but controlled and purposeful violence. But it’s not your business or mine to decide the purpose of the control. It’s never a soldier’s business to decide when or where or how — or why—he fights; that belongs to the statesmen and the generals. The statesmen decide why and how much; the generals take it from there and tell us where and when and how. We supply the violence; other people—‘older and wiser heads,’ as they say — supply the control. Which is as it should be. That’s the best answer I can give you. If it doesn’t satisfy you, I’ll get you a chit to go talk to the regimental commander. If he can’t convince you — then go home and be a civilian! Because in that case you will certainly never make a soldier.”
Zim bounced to his feet. “I think you’ve kept me talking just to goldbrick. Up you come, soldiers! On the bounce! Man stations, on target — Hendrick, you first. This time I want you to throw that knife south of you. South, get it? Not north. The target is due south of you and I want that knife to go in a general southerly direction, at least. I know you won’t hit the target but see if you can’t scare it a little. Don’t slice your ear off, don’t let go of it and cut somebody behind you — just keep what tiny mind you have fixed on the idea of ‘south’! Ready — on target! Let fly!”
Hendrick missed it again.
We trained with sticks and we trained with wire (lots of nasty things you can improvise with a piece of wire) and we learned what can be done with really modern weapons and how to do it and how to service and maintain the equipment — simulated nuclear weapons and infantry rockets and various sorts of gas and poison and incendiary and demolition. As well as other things maybe best not discussed. But we learned a lot of “obsolete” weapons, too. Bayonets on dummy guns for example, and guns that weren’t dummies, too, but were almost identical with the infantry rifle of the XXth century — much like the sporting rifles used in hunting game, except that we fired nothing but solid slugs, alloy-jacketed lead bullets, both at targets on measured ranges and at surprise targets on booby-trapped skirmish runs. This was supposed to prepare us to learn to use any armed weapon and to train us to be on the bounce, alert, ready for anything. Well, I suppose it did. I’m pretty sure it did.
We used these rifles in field exercises to simulate a lot of deadlier and nastier aimed weapons, too. We used a lot of simulation; we had to. An “explosive” bomb or grenade, against matériel or personnel, would explode just enough to put out a lot of black smoke; another sort of gave off a gas that would make you sneeze and weep — that told you that you were dead or paralyzed … and was nasty enough to make you careful about anti-gas precautions, to say nothing of the chewing-out you got if you were caught by it.
We got still less sleep; more than half the exercises were held at night, with snoopers and radar and audio gear and such.
The rifles used to simulate aimed weapons were loaded with blanks except one in five hundred rounds at random, which was a real bullet. Dangerous? Yes and no. It’s dangerous just to be alive … and a nonexplosive bullet probably won’t kill you unless it hits you in the head or the heart and maybe not then. What that one-in-five-hundred “for real” did was to give us a deep interest in taking cover, especially as we knew that some of the rifles were being fired by instructors who were crack shots and actually trying their best to hit you — if the round happened not to be a blank. They assured us that they would not intentionally shoot a man in the head … but accidents do happen.
This friendly assurance wasn’t very reassuring. That 500th bullet turned tedious exercises into large-scale Russian roulette; you stop being bored the very first time you hear a slug go wheet! past your ear before you hear the crack of the rifle.
But we did slack down anyhow and word came down from the top that if we didn’t get on the bounce, the incidence of real ones would be changed to one in a hundred … and if that didn’t work, to one in fifty. I don’t know whether a change was made or not — no way to tell — but I do know we tightened up again, because a boy in the next company got creased across his buttocks with a live one, producing an amazing scar and a lot of half-witty comments and a renewed interest by all hands in taking cover. We laughed at this kid for getting shot where he did … but we all knew it could have been his head — or our own heads.
The instructors who were not firing rifles did not take cover. They put on white shirts and walked around upright with their silly canes, apparently calmly certain that even a recruit would not intentionally shoot an instructor — which may have been overconfidence on the part of some of them. Still, the chances were five hundred to one that even a shot aimed with murderous intent would not be live and the safety factor increased still higher because the recruit probably couldn’t shoot that well anyhow. A rifle is not an easy weapon; it’s got no target-seeking qualities at all — I understand that even back in the days when wars were fought and decided with just such rifles it used to take several thousand fired shots to average killing one man. This seems impossible but the military histories agree that it is true — apparently most shots weren’t really aimed but simply acted to force the enemy to keep his head down and interfere with his shooting.