It’s nice to have the band play; it picks you right up when your tail is dragging the prairie. We hadn’t had anything but canned music at first and that only for parade and calls. But the powers-that-be had found out early who could play and who couldn’t; instruments were provided and a regimental band was organized, all our own — even the director and the drum major were boots.
It didn’t mean they got out of anything. Oh no! It just meant they were allowed and encouraged to do it on their own time, practicing evenings and Sundays and such — and that they got to strut and countermarch and show off at parade instead of being in ranks with their platoons. A lot of things that we did were run that way. Our chaplain, for example, was a boot. He was older than most of us and had been ordained in some obscure little sect I had never heard of. But he put a lot of passion into his preaching whether his theology was orthodox or not (don’t ask me) and he was certainly in a position to understand the problems of a recruit. And the singing was fun. Besides, there was nowhere else to go on Sunday morning between morning police and lunch.
The band suffered a lot of attrition but somehow they always kept it going. The camp owned four sets of pipes and some Scottish uniforms, donated by Lochiel of Cameron whose son had been killed there in training — and one of us boots turned out to be a piper; he had learned it in the Scottish Boy Scouts. Pretty soon we had four pipers, maybe not good but loud. Pipes seem very odd when you first hear them, and a tyro practicing can set your teeth on edge — it sounds and looks as if he had a cat under his arm, its tail in his mouth, and biting it.
But they grow on you. The first time our pipers kicked their heels out in front of the band, skirling away at “Alamein Dead,” my hair stood up so straight it lifted my cap. It gets you — makes tears.
We couldn’t take a parade band out on route march, of course, because no special allowances were made for the band. Tubas and bass drums had to stay behind because a boy in the band had to carry a full kit, same as everybody, and could only manage an instrument small enough to add to his load. But the M.I. has band instruments which I don’t believe anybody else has, such as a little box hardly bigger than a harmonica, an electric gadget which does an amazing job of faking a big horn and is played the same way. Comes band call when you are headed for the horizon, each bandsman sheds his kit without stopping, his squad mates split it up, and he trots to the column position of the color company and starts blasting.
It helps.
The band drifted aft, almost out of earshot, and we stopped singing because your own singing drowns out the beat when it’s too far away.
I suddenly realized I felt good.
I tried to think why I did. Because we would be in after a couple of hours and I could resign?
No. When I had decided to resign, it had indeed given me a measure of peace, quieted down my awful jitters and let me go to sleep. But this was something else — and no reason for it, that I could see.
Then I knew. I had passed my hump!
I was over the “hump” that Colonel Dubois had written about. I actually walked over it and started down, swinging easily. The prairie through there was flat as a griddle-cake, but just the same I had been plodding wearily uphill all the way out and about halfway back. Then, at some point — I think it was while we were singing — I had passed the hump and it was all downhill. My kit felt lighter and I was no longer worried.
When we got in, I didn’t speak to Sergeant Zim; I no longer needed to. Instead he spoke to me, motioned me to him as we fell out.
“Yes, sir?”
“This is a personal question … so don’t answer it unless you feel like it.” He stopped, and I wondered if he suspected that I had overheard his chewing-out, and shivered.
“At mail call today,” he said, “you got a letter. I noticed — purely by accident, none of my business — the name on the return address. It’s a fairly common name, some places, but — this is the personal question you need not answer — by any chance does the person who wrote that letter have his left hand off at the wrist?”
I guess my chin dropped. “How did you know? Sir?”
“I was nearby when it happened. It is Colonel Dubois? Right?”
“Yes, sir.” I added, “He was my high school instructor in History and Moral Philosophy.”
I think that was the only time I ever impressed Sergeant Zim, even faintly. His eyebrows went up an eighth of an inch and his eyes widened slightly. “So? You were extraordinarily fortunate.” He added, “When you answer his letter — if you don’t mind — you might say that Ship’s Sergeant Zim sends his respects.”
“Yes, sir. Oh … I think maybe he sent you a message, sir.”
“What?”
“Uh, I’m not certain.” I took out the letter, read just: “‘—if you should happen to run across any of my former mates, give them my warmest greetings.’ Is that for you, sir?”
Zim pondered it, his eyes looking through me, somewhere else. “Eh? Yes, it is. For me among others. Thanks very much.” Then suddenly it was over and he said briskly, “Nine minutes to parade. And you still have to shower and change. On the bounce, soldier.”
07
The young recruit is silly—’e thinks o’ suicide.
’E’s lost ’is gutter-devil; ’e ’asin’t got’is pride;
But day by day they kicks ’im, which ’elps ’im on a bit,
Till ’e finds ’isself one mornin’ with a full an’ proper kit.
Gettin’ clear o’ dirtiness, gettin’ done with mess,
Gettin’ shut o’ doin’ things rather-more-or-less.
I’m not going to talk much more about my boot training. Mostly it was simply work, but I was squared away — enough said.
But I do want to mention a little about powered suits, partly because I was fascinated by them and also because that was what led me into trouble. No complaints — I rated what I got.
An M.I. lives by his suit the way a K-9 man lives by and with and on his doggie partner. Powered armor is one-half the reason we call ourselves “mobile infantry” instead of just “infantry.” (The other half are the spaceships that drop us and the capsules we drop in.) Our suits give us better eyes, better ears, stronger backs (to carry heavier weapons and more ammo), better legs, more intelligence (“intelligence” in the military meaning; a man in a suit can be just as stupid as anybody else — only he had better not be), more firepower, greater endurance, less vulnerability.
A suit isn’t a space suit — although it can serve as one. It is not primarily armor — although the Knights of the Round Table were not armored as well as we are. It isn’t a tank — but a single M.I. private could take on a squadron of those things and knock them off unassisted if anybody was silly enough to put tanks against M.I. A suit is not a ship but it can fly, a little — on the other hand neither spaceships nor atmosphere craft can fight against a man in a suit except by saturation bombing of the area he is in (like burning down a house to get one flea!). Contrariwise we can do many things that no ship — air, submersible, or space — can do.
There are a dozen different ways of delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale, via ships and missiles of one sort or another, catastrophes so widespread, so unselective, that the war is over because that nation or planet has ceased to exist. What we do is entirely different. We make war as personal as a punch in the nose. We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time — we’ve never been told to go down and kill or capture all left-handed redheads in a particular area, but if they tell us to, we can. We will.