Authors: Tobias Wolff
Instead of growing weaker through the long days I felt myself taking on strength. Part of this strength came from contempt for weakness. Before now I’d always felt sorry for people who had trouble making the grade. But here a soft heart was an insupportable luxury, and I learned that lesson in smart time.
We had a boy named Sands in our squad, one of several recruits from rural Georgia. He had a keen, determined look about him that he used to good advantage for a couple of weeks, but it wasn’t enough to get him by. He was always lagging behind somewhere.
Last to get up. Last to formation. Last to finish eating. Our drill sergeant was from Brooklyn, and he came down hard on this cracker who didn’t take his army seriously.
Sands seemed not to care. He was genial and sunny even in the face of hostility, which I took to be a sign of grit. I liked him and tried to help. When he fell out on runs I hung back with him a few times to carry his rifle and urge him on. But I began to realize that he wasn’t really trying to keep up. When a man is on his last legs you can hear it in the tearing hoarseness of every breath. It’s there in his rolling eyes, in his spastically jerking hands, in the way he keeps himself going by falling forward and making his feet hurry to stay under him. But Sands grinned at me and wagged his head comically:
Jeez Louise, where’s the fire?
He wasn’t in pain. He was coasting. It came as a surprise to me that Sands would let someone else pull his weight before he was all used up.
There were others like him. I learned to spot them, and to stay clear of them, and finally to mark my progress by their humiliations. It was a satisfaction that took some getting used to, because I was soft and because it contradicted my values, or what I’d thought my values to be. Every man my brother: that was the idea, if you could call it an idea. It was more a kind of attitude that I’d picked up, without struggle or decision, from the movies I saw, the books I read. I’d paid nothing for it and didn’t know what it cost.
It cost too much. If every man was my brother we’d have to hold our lovefest some other time. I let go of that notion, and the harshness that took its place gave me a certain power. I was recognized as having
“command presence”—arrogance, an erect posture, a loud, barky voice. They gave me an armband with sergeant’s stripes and put me in charge of the other recruits in my platoon. It was like being a trusty.
I began to think I could do anything. At the end of boot camp I volunteered for the airborne. They trained me as a radio operator, then sent me on to jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia. When I arrived, my company was marched onto the parade ground in a cold rain and drilled and dropped for push-ups over the course of the evening until we were covered with mud and hardly able to stand, at which time they sent us back inside and ordered us to be ready for inspection in thirty minutes. We thought we were, but they didn’t agree. They dumped our footlockers onto the floor, knocked our wall lockers down, tore up our bunks, and ordered us outside again for another motivational seminar. This went on all night. Toward morning, wet, filthy, weaving on my feet as two drill sergeants took turns yelling in my face, I looked across the platoon bay at the morose rank of men waiting their ration of abuse, and saw in one mud-caked face a sudden lunatic flash of teeth. The guy was
grinning
. At
me
. In complicity, as if he knew me, had always known me, and knew exactly how to throw the switch that turned the most miserable luck, the worst degradations and prospects, into my choicest amusements. Like this endless night, this insane, ghastly scene. Wonderful! A scream! I grinned back at him. We were friends before we ever knew each other’s names.
His name was Hugh Pierce. He was from Philadelphia. It turned out that we’d gone to rival prep schools. To come across anyone from that life here was
Strange enough, but I didn’t give the coincidence much thought. We hardly ever talked about our histories. What had happened to us up to then seemed beside the point. Histories were what we’d joined the army to have.
For three weeks the drill sergeants harried us like wolves, alert to any sign of weakness. Men started dropping out. Hugh loved it. The more fantastic the oppressions, the greater his delight. He couldn’t stop himself from grinning his wiggy grin, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he waited for the next absurdity. Whenever the drill sergeants caught him smiling they swarmed all over him, shouted dire threats directly into his ears, made him do push-ups while they sat on his back. Nothing got to him. His pleasure in the ridiculous amounted almost to a pathology. And they couldn’t wear him down, he was too strong for that—immensely strong, and restless in his strength. Unlike me, Hugh made a habit of helping men who dropped back on our runs, mostly out of generosity, but also because to him exertion was joy. He liked making it harder for himself, pushing the limits however he could. At night, when the last drill instructor had exacted the last push-up and pronounced the last insult, we fell into our bunks and made wisecracks until sleep got us. But for me the joke was wearing a little thin. By now I was mainly trying to keep up.
In the last week we jumped. We jumped every day. For hours each morning we waited on the tarmac, running in place, doing push-ups and equipment checks while the drill sergeants went through all the possibilities of getting lunched. They dwelt in loving detail on the consequence to our tender persons of even the
slightest accident or mistake. Did anyone want to reconsider? Just step to the side. Always, some did. Then we boarded the planes, facing one another across the aisle until the green light came on and the jumpmaster gave the order to stand and hook up our static lines. To psych ourselves for the plunge we sang “My Girl” in falsetto and danced the Stroll, swinging our shoulders and hips, flapping our wrists feyly as we made our way down the cargo bay to the open door of the plane. The planes were C-130 turboprops. The prop blast was tremendous, and you jumped right into it. It caught you and shot you back feetfirst spinning like a bullet. You could see the earth and sky whirling around your boots like painted sections on a top. Then the chute snapped open and stopped you cold, driving your nuts into your belly if you didn’t have the harness set right, snatching you hard even if you did. The pain was welcome, considering the alternative. It was life itself grabbing hold of you. You couldn’t help but laugh—some of us howled. The harness creaked as you swung back and forth under the luminous white dome of the silk. Other chutes bloomed in the distance. The air was full of men, most quiet, some yelling and working their risers to keep from banging into each other. The world was laid out at your feet: checkered fields, shining streams and ponds, cute little houses. For a time you belonged to the air, weightless and free; then the earth took you back. You could feel it happen. One moment you were floating, the next you were falling—not a pleasant change. The ground, abstractly picturesque from on high, got hard-looking and particular. There were trees, boulders, power lines. It seemed personal, even vengeful, the way these things rushed
up at you. If you were lucky you landed in the drop zone and made a good rolling fall, then quick-released your parachute before it could drag you and break your neck. As you gathered in the silk you looked up and watched the next stick of troopers make the leap, and the sight was so mysterious and beautiful it was impossible not to feel love for this life. It seemed, at such a moment, the only possible life, and these men the only possible friends.
In our last week of jump school Hugh and I signed up for the Special Forces and were sent on to Fort Bragg.
The Special Forces came out of the OSS teams of World War II. They’d worked in German-occupied territory, leading partisan brigades, blowing bridges and roads, killing enemy officers. The membership was international. When I came to Fort Bragg some of the old hands were still around: Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Brits, Hungarians. We also had a number of Germans who had signed on after the war, more attached to the uniformed life than to any homeland.
This accented remnant gave a legionary feeling to the unit, but most of the troops were young and American. They were also tough and smart, and savvy in a way that I began to understand I was not. I could keep up with them physically, but I didn’t get the hang of things as easily as they did—as if they’d been born knowing how to lay a mortar, blow a bridge, bushwhack through blind undergrowth without ever losing their sense of where they were. Though I could do a fair impersonation of a man who knew his stuff, the act wouldn’t hold up forever. One problem was that I didn’t quite believe in it myself.
There was no single thing I had trouble with, no skill I couldn’t eventually learn. I simply ceased to inhabit my pose. I was at a distance, watching this outrageous fraud play the invisible bushman, the adept with knives, the black-faced assassin willing at the drop of a hat to squeeze the life out of some total stranger with piano wire. And in that widening distance between the performance and the observation of the performance, there grew, subtly at first, then intrusively, disbelief and corrosive irony. It was a crisis, but I hardly recognized its seriousness until one achingly pure spring day at the sawdust pit where we practiced hand-to-hand combat.
We were on a smoke break. I lay on my back, staring up at the sky. Our two instructors were sitting behind me on the wall of sandbags that surrounded the pit. One of them had just received orders for Vietnam and was saying he wouldn’t go back, not this time. He’d already done two six-month tours, and that, he said, was enough. The other sergeant murmured commiseration and said he could protest the orders but it probably wouldn’t do any good. He didn’t seem at all surprised by this show of reluctance, or even falsely sympathetic. He sounded troubled. I’m not going, the sergeant with the orders kept saying. I’m not going.
Both of them were dull the rest of the session. They just went through the motions.
This set me thinking. Here you had a man who knew all the tricks and knew them well enough to teach them to others. He’d been there twice and been competent enough to get home. Yet he was afraid. He was afraid and didn’t bother to hide it from another man
who’d been there, certain it wouldn’t be held against him. What sort of knowledge did they share, to have reached this understanding?
And if this sergeant, who was the real thing, had reason to be afraid, what about me? What would happen when my accounts came due and I had to be in truth the wily, nerveless killer I pretended to be? It was not my habit to meditate on this question. It came to me unbidden, breaking through the bluff imitation of adequacy I tried so hard to believe in.
I never unloaded my worries on Hugh. I didn’t hide them, but when we were out on a tear they ceased to trouble me. We patrolled Fayetteville on our nights off and spent the weekends cruising farther afield in Hugh’s Pontiac, to Myrtle Beach and Chapel Hill and down to Fort Gordon, Georgia, where his brother was stationed. Yak, yak, yak, all the way. Girls. The peculiarities of our brothers-in-arms. Books—at least I talked about books. And of course the future. We had big plans. After we got out of the army we were going to get all our friends together and throw the party of the century. We were going to buy motorcycles and bazooka through Europe. We were going to
live
. It’s been almost thirty years now and the words are mostly gone, but I remember the ecstatic rush of them, and the laughter. I could make Hugh laugh pretty much at will. It was a sight: crimson circles appeared on his high cheeks, his eyes brightened with tears, he wheezed for breath. He could do the same thing to me. We were agreed that the world was a comical place, and that we’d been put here for the sacred purpose of being entertained by it.
And we sang; how we sang. Hugh had uncanny
rhythm. He could do scat. He could imitate a bass, a muted trumpet. He had a good voice but preferred to sing harmony and backup while I took the lead. We did old Mills Brothers songs, the Ink Spots, Sinatra. A couple of the girls we went out with were always after us for “The Best Is Yet to Come.” That was our big gun. I laid down the melody while Hugh did crazy riffs around it, shoulders jumping, eyes agleam, head weaving like a cobra’s. We might have been pretty good. Then again, maybe we weren’t.
This was 1965. The air force had started bombing North Vietnam in February. The marines were in Danang, and the army had forty-four combat battalions on the way. Plenty of guys we knew were packing up for the trip. Hugh and I were going too, no question about that, but we never talked about the war. I can guess now that the reckless hilarity of our time together owed something to our forebodings, but I didn’t suspect that at the time. Neither of us acknowledged being afraid, not to each other. What good would that do? We had chosen this life. My reasons were personal rather than patriotic, but I had consented to be made use of, and in spite of my fears it never occurred to me, nor I’m sure to Hugh, that we would be used stupidly or carelessly or for unworthy ends. Our trust was simple, immaculate, heartbreaking.
That fall Hugh got sent for medic’s training to Fort Sam Houston in Texas. I was at loose ends and bored. My company commander had been working on me to apply for Officer Candidate School, and I finally agreed. I took some tests and went before a panel of generals and colonels who took note of my command presence
and pronounced me officer material. They told me I’d be on my way in a month or so.
While I was awaiting my orders I got a letter from one of the girls Hugh had gone out with. Her name was Yancy. She said she was pregnant and that Hugh was the father. She knew he’d left Fort Bragg but didn’t know where to find him, and asked me to send her his address and let him know the situation. I got this letter on a Saturday afternoon. The building was empty. I sat on my bunk and tried to think what to do. Yancy was the friend of a girl named Trace I’d gone out with. The two of them roomed together, tending bar and living it up on terms as hedonistic as ours, or so it seemed to me. I hadn’t seen either of them since Hugh left, and I didn’t know what to make of this. Was I honestly supposed to believe that Hugh was the only man Yancy had been close to during the time in question? I supposed it was just possible. But what would Hugh think if I gave her his address, or if I sent him the message she wanted me to send? Would he think I was meddling, taking her side? Judging him? I understood that the strongest friendship can be spoiled by a word, a tone, even an imagined tone.