Or, if you actually did have twenty minutes of your very own, you could sleep. This was a choice very highly thought of; we were always several weeks minus on sleep.
I may have given the impression that boot camp was made harder than necessary. This is not correct.
It was made as hard as possible and on purpose.
It was the firm opinion of every recruit that this was sheer meanness, calculated sadism, fiendish delight of witless morons in making other people suffer.
It was not. It was too scheduled, too intellectual, too efficiently and impersonally organized to be cruelty for the sick pleasure of cruelty; it was planned like surgery for purposes as unimpassioned as those of a surgeon. Oh, I admit that some of the instructors may have enjoyed it but I don’t know that they did — and I do know (now) that the psych officers tried to weed out any bullies in selecting instructors. They looked for skilled and dedicated craftsmen to follow the art of making things as tough as possible for a recruit; a bully is too stupid, himself too emotionally involved, and too likely to grow tired of his fun and slack off, to be efficient.
Still, there may have been bullies among them. But I’ve heard that some surgeons (and not necessarily bad ones) enjoy the cutting and the blood which accompanies the humane art of surgery.
That’s what it was: surgery. Its immediate purpose was to get rid of, run right out of the outfit, those recruits who were too soft or too babyish ever to make Mobile Infantrymen. It accomplished that, in droves. (They darn near ran me out.) Our company shrank to platoon size in the first six weeks. Some of them were dropped without prejudice and allowed, if they wished, to sweat out their terms in the non-combatant services; others got Bad Conduct Discharges, or Unsatisfactory Performance Discharges, or Medical Discharges.
Usually you didn’t know why a man left unless you saw him leave and he volunteered the information. But some of them got fed up, said so loudly, and resigned, forfeiting forever their chances of franchise. Some, especially the older men, simply couldn’t stand the pace physically no matter how hard they tried. I remember one, a nice old geezer named Carruthers, must have been thirty-five; they carried him away in a stretcher while he was still shouting feebly that it wasn’t fair! — and that he would be back.
It was sort of sad, because we liked Carruthers and he did try — so we looked the other way and figured we would never see him again, that he was a cinch for a medical discharge and civilian clothes. Only I did see him again, long after. He had refused discharge (you don’t have to accept a medical) and wound up as third cook in a troop transport. He remembered me and wanted to talk old times, as proud of being an alumnus of Camp Currie as Father is of his Harvard accent — he felt that he was a little bit better than the ordinary Navy man. Well, maybe he was.
But, much more important than the purpose of carving away the fat quickly and saving the government the training costs of those who would never cut it, was the prime purpose of making as sure as was humanly possible that no cap trooper ever climbed into a capsule for a combat drop unless he was prepared for it — fit, resolute, disciplined, and skilled. If he is not, it’s not fair to the Federation, it’s certainly not fair to his teammates, and worst of all it’s not fair to him.
But was boot camp more cruelly hard than was necessary?
All I can say to that is this: The next time I have to make a combat drop, I want the men on my flanks to be graduates of Camp Currie or its Siberian equivalent. Otherwise I’ll refuse to enter the capsule.
But I certainly thought it was a bunch of crumby, vicious nonsense at the time. Little things — When we were there a week, we were issued undress maroons for parade to supplement the fatigues we had been wearing. (Dress and full-dress uniforms came much later.) I took my tunic back to the issue shed and complained to the supply sergeant. Since he was only a supply sergeant and rather fatherly in manner I thought of him as a semi-civilian — I didn’t know how, as of then, to read the ribbons on his chest or I wouldn’t have dared speak to him. “Sergeant, this tunic is too large. My company commander says it fits like a tent.”