Flores died on the way up.
CHAPTER 2
It scared me so, I hooked it off,
Nor stopped as I remember,
Nor turned about till I got home,
Locked up in mother’s chamber.
Yankee Doodle, keep it up,
Yankee Doodle dandy,
Mind the music and the step,
And with the girls be handy.
I never really intended to join up.
And certainly not the infantry! Why, I would rather have taken ten lashes in the public square and have my father tell me that I was a disgrace to a proud name.
Oh, I had mentioned to my father, late in my senior year in high school, that I was thinking over the idea of volunteering for Federal Service. I suppose every kid does, when his
eighteenth birthday heaves into sight — and mine was due the week I graduated. Of course most of them just think about it, toy with the idea a little, then go do something else — go to college, or get a job, or something. I suppose it would have been that way with meif my best chum had not, with dead seriousness, planned to join up.
Carl and I had done everything together in high school — eyed the girls together, double-dated together, been on the debate team together, pushed electrons together in his home lab. I wasn’t much on electronic theory myself, but I’m a neat hand with a soldering gun; Carl supplied the skull sweat and I carried out his instructions. It was fun; anything we did together was fun. Carl’s folks didn’t have anything like the money that my father had, but it didn’t matter between us. When my father bought me a Rolls copter for my fourteenth birthday, it was Carl’s as much as it was mine; contrariwise, his basement lab was mine.
So when Carl told me that he was not going straight on with school, but serve a term first, it gave me to pause. He really meant it; he seemed to think that it was natural and right and obvious.
So I told him I was joining up, too.
He gave me an odd look. “Your old man won’t let you.”
“Huh? How can he stop me?” And of course he couldn’t, not legally. It’s the first completely free choice anybody gets (and maybe his last); when a boy, or a girl, reaches his or her eighteenth birthday, he or she can volunteer and nobody else has any say in the matter.
“You’ll find out.” Carl changed the subject.
So I took it up with my father, tentatively, edging into it sideways.
He put down his newspaper and cigar and stared at me. “Son, are you out of your mind?”
I muttered that I didn’t think so.
“Well, it certainly sounds like it.” He sighed. “StillI should have been expecting it; it’s a predictable stage in a boy’s growing up. I remember when you learned to walk and weren’t a baby any longer — frankly you were a little hellion for quite a while. You broke one of your mother’s Ming vases — on purpose, I’m quite surebut you were too young to know that it was valuable, so all you got was having your hand spatted. I recall the day you swiped one of my cigars, and how sick it made you. Your mother and I carefully avoided noticing that you couldn’t eat dinner that night and I’ve never mentioned it to you until now — boys have to try such things and discover for themselves that men’s vices are not for them. We watched when you turned the corner on adolescence and started noticing that girls were different — and wonderful.”
He sighed again. “All normal stages. And the last one, right at the end of adolescence, is when a boy decides to join up and wear a pretty uniform. Or decides that he is in love, love such as no man ever experienced before, and that he just has to get married right away. Or both.” He smiled grimly. “With me it was both. But I got over each of them in time not to make a fool of myself and ruin my life.”
“But, Father, I wouldn’t ruin my life. Just a term of service — not career.”