Especially at girls. I hadn’t realized just how wonderful they were. Look, I’ve approved of girls from the time I first noticed that the difference was more than just that they dress differently. So far as I remember I never did go through that period boys are supposed to go through when they know that girls are different but dislike them; I’ve always liked girls.
But that day I realized that I had long been taking them for granted.
Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don’t walk. At least not what we do when we talk. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s much more complex and utterly delightful. They don’t move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions … and all of it graceful.
I might have been standing there yet if a policeman hadn’t come by. He sized us up and said, “Howdy, boys. Enjoying yourselves?”
I quickly read the ribbons on his chest and was impressed. “Yes, sir!”
“You don’t have to say ‘sir’ to me. Not much to do here. Why don’t you go to the hospitality center?” He gave us the address, pointed the direction and we started that way — Pat Leivy, “Kitten” Smith, and myself. He called after us, “Have a good time, boys … and stay out of trouble.” Which was exactly what Sergeant Zim had said to us as we climbed into the shuttle.
But we didn’t go there. Pat Leivy had lived in Seattle when he was a small boy and wanted to take a look at his old home town. He had money and offered to pay our shuttle fares if we would go with him. I didn’t mind and it was all right; shuttles ran every twenty minutes and our passes were not restricted to Vancouver. Smith decided to go along, too.
Seattle wasn’t so very different from Vancouver and the girls were just as plentiful; I enjoyed it. But Seattle wasn’t quite as used to having M.I. around in droves and we picked a poor spot to eat dinner, one where we weren’t quite so welcome — a bar-restaurant, down by the docks.
Now, look, we weren’t drinking. Well, Kitten Smith had had one repeat one beer with his dinner but he was never anything but friendly and nice. That is how he got his name; the first time we had hand-to-hand combat drill Corporal Jones had said to him disgustedly: “A kitten would have hit me harder than that!” The nickname stuck.
We were the only uniforms in the place; most of the other customers were merchant marine sailors — Seattle handles an awful lot of surface tonnage. I hadn’t known it at the time but merchant sailors don’t like us. Part of it has to do with the fact that their guilds have tried and tried to get their trade classed as equivalent to Federal Service, without success — but I understand that some of it goes way back in history, centuries.
There were some young fellows there, too, about our age — the right age to serve a term, only they weren’t — long-haired and sloppy and kind of dirty-looking. Well, say about the way I looked, I suppose, before I joined up.
Presently we started noticing that at the table behind us, two of these young twerps and two merchant sailors (to judge by clothes) were passing remarks that were intended for us to overhear. I won’t try to repeat them.
We didn’t say anything. Presently, when the remarks were even more personal and the laughs louder and everybody else in the place was keeping quiet and listening, Kitten whispered to me, “Let’s get out of here.”
I caught Pat Leivy’s eye; he nodded. We had no score to settle; it was one of those pay-as-you-get-it places. We got up and left.
They followed us out.
Pat whispered to me, “Watch it.” We kept on walking, didn’t look back.
They charged us.
I gave my man a side-neck chop as I pivoted and let him fall past me, swung to help my mates. But it was over. Four in, four down. Kitten had handled two of them and Pat had sort of wrapped the other one around a lamppost from throwing him a little too hard.
Somebody, the proprietor I guess, must have called the police as soon as we stood up to leave, since they arrived almost at once while we were still standing around wondering what to do with the meat — two policemen; it was that sort of a neighborhood.
The senior of them wanted us to prefer charges, but none of us was willing — Zim had told us to “stay out of trouble.” Kitten looked blank and about fifteen years old and said, “I guess they stumbled.”
“So I see,” agreed the police officer and toed a knife away from the outflung hand of my man, put it against the curb and broke the blade. “Well, you boys had better run along … farther uptown.”
We left. I was glad that neither Pat nor Kitten wanted to make anything of it. It’s a mighty serious thing, a civilian assaulting a member of the Armed Forces, but what the deuce?—the books balanced. They jumped us, they got their lumps. All even.
But it’s a good thing we never go on pass armed … and have been trained to disable without killing. Because every bit of it happened by reflex. I didn’t believe that they would jump us until they already had, and I didn’t do any thinking at all until it was over.
But that’s how I learned for the first time just how much I had changed.
We walked back to the station and caught a shuttle to Vancouver.
We started practice drops as soon as we moved to Camp Spooky — a platoon at a time, in rotation (a full platoon, that is — a company), would shuttle down to the field north of Walla Walla, go aboard, space, make a drop, go through an exercise, and home on a beacon. A day’s work. With eight companies that gave us not quite a drop each week, and then it gave us a little more than a drop each week as attrition continued, whereupon the drops got tougher — over mountains, into the arctic ice, into the Australian desert, and, before we graduated, onto the face of the Moon, where your capsule is placed only a hundred feet up and explodes as it ejects — and you have to look sharp and land with only your suit (no air, no parachute) and a bad landing can spill your air and kill you.
Some of the attrition was from casualties, deaths or injuries, and some of it was just from refusing to enter the capsule — which some did, and that was that; they weren’t even chewed out; they were just motioned aside and that night they were paid off. Even a man who had made several drops might get the panic and refuse … and the instructors were just gentle with him, treated him the way you do a friend who is ill and won’t get well.
I never quite refused to enter the capsule — but I certainly learned about the shakes. I always got them, I was scared silly every time. I still am.
But you’re not a cap trooper unless you drop.
They tell a story, probably not true, about a cap trooper who was sight-seeing in Paris. He visited Les Invalides, looked down at Napoleon’s coffin and said to a French guard there: “Who’s he?”
The Frenchman was properly scandalized. “Monsieur does not know? This is the tomb of Napoleon! Napoleon Bonaparte — the greatest soldier who ever lived!”
The cap trooper thought about it. Then he asked, “So? Where were his drops?”
It is almost certainly not true, because there is a big sign outside there that tells you exactly who Napoleon was. But that is how cap troopers feel about it.
Eventually we graduated.
I can see that I’ve left out almost everything. Not a word about most of our weapons, nothing about the time we dropped everything and fought a forest fire for three days, no mention of the practice alert that was a real one, only we didn’t know it until it was over, nor about the day the cook tent blew away — in fact not any mention of weather and, believe me, weather is important to a doughboy, rain and mud especially. But though weather is important while it happens it seems to me to be pretty dull to look back on. You can take descriptions of most any sort of weather out of an almanac and stick them in just anywhere; they’ll probably fit.