Mr. Dubois then turned to me. “I told you that ‘juvenile delinquent’ is a contradiction in terms. ‘Delinquent’ means ‘failing in duty.’ But duty is an adult virtue — indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be, a ‘juvenile delinquent.’ But for every juvenile criminal there are always one or more adult delinquents — people of mature years who either do not know their duty, or who, knowing it, fail.
“And that was the soft spot which destroyed what was in many ways an admirable culture. The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’ … and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.”
I wondered how Colonel Dubois would have classed Dillinger. Was he a juvenile criminal who merited pity even though you had to get rid of him? Or was he an adult delinquent who deserved nothing but contempt?
I didn’t know, I would never know. The one thing I was sure of was that he would never again kill any little girls.
That suited me. I went to sleep.
09
We’ve got no place in this outfit for good losers. We want tough hombres who will go in there and win!
When we had done all that a mud foot can do in flat country, we moved into some rough mountains to do still rougher things — the Canadian Rockies between Good Hope Mountain and Mount Waddington. Camp Sergeant Spooky Smith was much like Camp Currie (aside from its rugged setting) but it was much smaller. Well, the Third Regiment was much smaller now, too — less than four hundred whereas we had started out with more than two thousand. H Company was now organized as a single platoon and the battalion paraded as if it were a company. But we were still called “H Company” and Zim was “Company Commander,” not platoon leader.
What the sweat-down meant, really, was much more personal instruction; we had more corporal-instructors than we had squads and Sergeant Zim, with only fifty men on his mind instead of the two hundred and sixty he had started with, kept his Argus eyes on each one of us all the time — even when he wasn’t there. At least, if you goofed, it turned out he was standing right behind you.
However, the chewing-out you got had almost a friendly quality, in a horrid sort of way, because we had changed, too, as well as the regiment — the one-in-five who was left was almost a soldier and Zim seemed to be trying to make him into one, instead of running him over the hill.
We saw a lot more of Captain Frankel, too; he now spent most of his time teaching us, instead of behind a desk, and he knew all of us by name and face and seemed to have a card file in his mind of exactly what progress each man had made on every weapon, every piece of equipment — not to mention your extra-duty status, medical record, and whether you had had a letter from home lately.
He wasn’t as severe with us as Zim was; his words were milder and it took a really stupid stunt to take that friendly grin off his face — but don’t let that fool you; there was beryl armor under the grin. I never did figure out which one was the better soldier, Zim or Captain Frankel — I mean, if you took away the insignia and thought of them as privates. Unquestionably they were both better soldiers than any of the other instructors — but which was best? Zim did everything with precision and style, as if he were on parade; Captain Frankel did the same thing with dash and gusto, as if it were a game. The results were about the same — and it never turned out to be as easy as Captain Frankel made it look.
We needed the abundance of instructors. Jumping a suit (as I have said) was easy on flat ground. Well, the suit jumps just as high and just as easily in the mountains — but it makes a lot of difference when you have to jump up a vertical granite wall, between two close-set fir trees, and override your jet control at the last instant. We had three major casualties in suit practice in broken country, two dead and one medical retirement.
But that rock wall is even tougher without a suit, tackled with lines and pitons. I didn’t really see what use alpine drill was to a cap trooper but I had learned to keep my mouth shut and try to learn what they shoved at us. I learned it and it wasn’t too hard. If anybody had told me, a year earlier, that I could go up a solid chunk of rock, as flat and as perpendicular as a blank wall of a building, using only a hammer, some silly little steel pins, and a chunk of clothesline, I would have laughed in his face; I’m a sea-level type. Correction: I was a sea-level type. There had been some changes made.
Just how much I had changed I began to find out. At Camp Sergeant Spooky Smith we had liberty — to go to town, I mean. Oh, we had “liberty” after the first month at Camp Currie, too. This meant that, on a Sunday afternoon, if you weren’t in the duty platoon, you could check out at the orderly tent and walk just as far away from camp as you wished, bearing in mind that you had to be back for evening muster. But there was nothing within walking distance, if you don’t count jack rabbits — no girls, no theaters, no dance halls, et cetera.
Nevertheless, liberty, even at Camp Currie, was no mean privilege; sometimes it can be very important indeed to be able to go so far away that you can’t see a tent, a sergeant, nor even the ugly faces of your best friends among the boots … not have to be on the bounce about anything, have time to take out your soul and look at it. You could lose that privilege in several degrees; you could be restricted to camp … or you could be restricted to your own company street, which meant that you couldn’t go to the library nor to what was misleadingly called the “recreation” tent (mostly some parcheesi sets and similar wild excitements) … or you could be under close restriction, required to stay in your tent when your presence was not required elsewhere.
This last sort didn’t mean much in itself since it was usually added to extra duty so demanding that you didn’t have any time in your tent other than for sleep anyhow; it was a decoration added like a cherry on top of a dish of ice cream to notify you and the world that you had pulled not some everyday goof-off but something unbecoming of a member of the M.I. and were thereby unfit to associate with other troopers until you had washed away the stain.
But at Camp Spooky we could go into town — duty status, conduct status, etc., permitting. Shuttles ran to Vancouver every Sunday morning, right after divine services (which were moved up to thirty minutes after breakfast) and came back again just before supper and again just before taps. The instructors could even spend Saturday night in town, or cop a three-day pass, duty permitting.
I had no more than stepped out of the shuttle, my first pass, than I realized in part that I had changed. Johnnie didn’t fit in any longer. Civilian life, I mean. It all seemed amazingly complex and unbelievably untidy.
I’m not running down Vancouver. It’s a beautiful city in a lovely setting; the people are charming and they are used to having the M.I. in town and they make a trooper welcome. There is a social center for us downtown, where they have dances for us every week and see to it that junior hostesses are on hand to dance with, and senior hostesses to make sure that a shy boy (me, to my amazement — but you try a few months with nothing female around but lady jack rabbits) gets introduced and has a partner’s feet to step on.
But I didn’t go to the social center that first pass. Mostly I stood around and gawked — at beautiful buildings, at display windows filled with all manner of unnecessary things (and not a weapon among them), at all those people running around, or even strolling, doing exactly as they pleased and no two of them dressed alike — and at girls.