We got still less sleep; more than half the exercises were held at night, with snoopers and radar and audio gear and such.
The rifles used to simulate aimed weapons were loaded with blanks except one in five hundred rounds at random, which was a real bullet. Dangerous? Yes and no. It’s dangerous just to be aliveand a nonexplosive bullet probably won’t kill you unless it hits you in the head or the heart and maybe not then. What that one-in-five-hundred “for real” did was to give us a deep interest in taking cover, especially as we knew that some of the rifles were being fired by instructors who were crack shots and actually trying their best to hit you — if the round happened not to be a blank. They assured us that they would not intentionally shoot a man in the headbut accidents do happen.
This friendly assurance wasn’t very reassuring. That 500th bullet turned tedious exercises into large-scale Russian roulette; you stop being bored the very first time you hear a slug go wheet! past your ear before you hear the crack of the rifle.
But we did slack down anyhow and word came down from the top that if we didn’t get on the bounce, the incidence of real ones would be changed to one in a hundredand if that didn’t work, to one in fifty. I don’t know whether a change was made or not — no way to tell — but I do know we tightened up again, because a boy in the next company got creased across his buttocks with a live one, producing an amazing scar and a lot of half-witty comments and a renewed interest by all hands in taking cover. We laughed at this kid for getting shot where he didbut we all knew it could have been his head or our own heads.
The instructors who were not firing rifles did not take cover. They put on white shirts and walked around upright with their silly canes, apparently calmly certain that even a recruit would not intentionally shoot an instructor — which may have been overconfidence on the part of some of them. Still, the chances were five hundred to one that even a shot aimed with murderous intent would not be live and the safety factor increased still higher because the recruit probably couldn’t shoot that well anyhow. A rifle is not an easy weapon; it’s got no target-seeking qualities at all — I understand that even back in the days when wars were fought and decided with just such rifles it used to take several thousand fired shots to average killing one man. This seems impossible but the military histories agree that it is true — apparently most shots weren’t really aimed but simply acted to force the enemy to keep his head down and interfere with his shooting.
In any case we had no instructors wounded or killed by rifle fire. No trainees were killed, either, by rifle bullets; the deaths were all from other weapons or things — some of which could turn around and bite you if you didn’t do things by the book. Well, one boy did manage to break his neck taking cover too enthusiastically when they first started shooting at him — but no bullet touched him.
However, by a chain reaction, this matter of rifle bullets and taking cover brought me to my lowest ebb at Camp Currie. In the first place I had been busted out of my boot chevrons, not over what I did but over something one of my squad did when I wasn’t even aroundwhich I pointed out. Bronski told me to button my lip. So I went to see Zim about it. He told me coldly that I was responsible for what my men did, regardlessand tacked on six hours of extra duty besides busting me for having spoken to him about it without Bronski’s permission. Then I got a letter that upset me a lot; my mother finally wrote to me. Then I sprained a shoulder in my first drill with powered armor (they’ve got those practice suits rigged so that the instructor can cause casualties in the suit at will, by radio control; I got dumped and hurt my shoulder) and this put me on light duty with too much time to think at a time when I had many reasons, it seemed to me, to feel sorry for myself.