The sheep trick works, too; our whole section, three squads, did it together. I don’t recommend it as a way to sleep; you are either in the outer layer, frozen on one side and trying to worm your way inside, or you are inside, fairly warm but with everybody else trying to shove his elbows, feet, and halitosis on you. You migrate from one condition to the other all night long in sort of a Brownian movement, never quite waking up and never really sound asleep. All this makes a night about a hundred years long.
We turned out at dawn to the familiar shout of: “Up you come! On the bounce!” encouraged by instructors’ batons applied smartly on fundaments sticking out of the pilesand then we did setting-up exercises. I felt like a corpse and didn’t see how I could touch my toes. But I did, though it hurt, and twenty minutes later when we hit the trail I merely felt elderly. Sergeant Zim wasn’t even mussed and somehow the scoundrel had managed to shave.
The Sun warmed our backs as we marched and Zim started us singing, oldies at first, like “Le Regiment de Sambre et Meuse” and “Caissons” and “Halls of Montezuma” and then our own “Cap Trooper’s Polka” which moves you into quickstep and pulls you on into a trot. Sergeant Zim couldn’t carry a tune in a sack; all he had was a loud voice. But Breckinridge had a sure, strong lead and could hold the rest of us in the teeth of Zim’s terrible false notes. We all felt cocky and covered with spines.
But we didn’t feel cocky fifty miles later. It had been a long night; it was an endless day — and Zim chewed us out for the way we looked on parade and several boots got gigged for failing to shave in the nine whole minutes between the time we fell out after the march and fell back in again for parade. Several recruits resigned that evening and I thought about it but didn’t because I had those silly boot chevrons and hadn’t been busted yet.
That night there was a two-hour alert.
But eventually I learned to appreciate the homey luxury of two or three dozen warm bodies to snuggle up to, because twelve weeks later they dumped me down raw naked in a primitive area of the Canadian Rockies and I had to make my way forty miles through mountains. I made it — and hated the Army every inch of the way.
I wasn’t in too bad shape when I checked in, though. A couple of rabbits had failed to stay as alert as I was, so I didn’t go entirely hungrynor entirely naked; I had a nice warm thick coat of rabbit fat and dirt on my body and moccasins on my feet — the rabbits having no further use for their skins. It’s amazing what you can do with a flake of rock if you have to — I guess our cave-man ancestors weren’t such dummies as we usually think.
The others made it, too, those who were still around to try and didn’t resign rather than take the test — all except two boys who died trying. Then we all went back into the mountains and spent thirteen days finding them, working with copters overhead to direct us and all the best communication gear to help us and our instructors in powered command suits to supervise and to check rumors — because the Mobile Infantry doesn’t abandon its own while there is any thin shred of hope.
Then we buried them with full honors to the strains of “This Land Is Ours” and with the posthumous rank of PFC, the first of our boot regiment to go that high — because a cap trooper isn’t necessarily expected to stay alive (dying is part of his trade)but they care a lot about how you die. It has to be heads up, on the bounce, and still trying.
Breckinridge was one of them; the other was an Aussie boy I didn’t know. They weren’t the first to die in training; they weren’t the last.
CHAPTER 5
He’s bound to be guilty ‘r he