Before Unk could remember anything, the head pain that had made him get on with the execution hurt him again. The pain did not stop, however, with the warning nip. While Boaz watched expressionlessly, the pain in Unk’s head became a whanging, flashing thing.
Unk stood, dropped his rifle, clawed at his head, reeled, screamed, fainted.
When Unk came to on the barrack floor, his buddy Boaz was daubing Unk’s temples with a cold washrag.
Unk’s squadmates stood in a circle around Unk and Boaz. The faces of the squadmates were unsurprised, unsympathetic. Their attitude was that Unk had done something stupid and unsoldierly, and so deserved what he got.
They looked as though Unk had done something as militarily stupid as silhouetting himself against the sky or cleaning a loaded weapon, as sneezing on patrol or contracting and not reporting a venereal disease, as refusing a direct order or sleeping through reveille, as being drunk on guard or drawing to an inside straight, as keeping a book or a live hand grenade in his footlocker, as asking who had started the Army anyway and why . . .
Boaz was the only one who looked sorry about what had happened to Unk. “It was all my fault, Unk,” he said.
Sergeant Brackman now pushed through the circle, stood over Unk and Boaz. “Wha’d he do, Boaz?” said Brackman.
“I was kidding him, Sergeant,” said Boaz earnestly. “I told him to try an’ remember back as far as he could. I never dreamed he’d go and do it.”
“Oughta have more sense than to kid a man just back from the hospital,” said Brackman gruffly.
“Oh, I know it — I know it,” said Boaz, full of remorse. “My buddy — ” he said. “God damn me!”
“Unk,” said Brackman, “didn’t they tell you about remembering at the hospital?”
Unk shook his head vaguely. “Maybe,” he said. “They told me a lot.”
“That’s the worst thing you can do, Unk — remembering back,” said Brackman. “That’s what they put you in the hospital for in the first place — on account of you remembered too much.” He made cups of his stubby hands, held in them the heart-breaking problem Unk had been. “Holy smokes,” he said, “you were remembering so much, Unk, you weren’t worth a nickel as a soldier.”
Unk sat up, laid his hand on his breast, found that the front of his blouse was wet with tears. He thought of explaining to Brackman that he hadn’t really tried to remember back, that he’d known instinctively that that was a bad thing to do — but that the pain had hit him anyway. He didn’t tell Brackman that for fear that the pain would come again.
Unk groaned and blinked away the last of the tears. He wasn’t going to do anything he wasn’t ordered to do.
“As for you, Boaz — ” said Brackman. “I don’t know but what a week’s latrine duty would maybe teach you something about horseplay with people just out of the hospital.”
Something formless in Unk’s memory told Unk to watch the by-play between Brackman and Boaz closely. It was somehow important.
“A week, Sergeant?” said Boaz.
“Yes, by God — ” said Brackman, and then he shuddered and closed his eyes. Plainly, his antenna had just given him a little stab of pain.
“A whole week, Sarge?” asked Boaz innocently.
“A day,” said Brackman, and it was less a threat than a question. Again Brackman reacted to pain in his head.
“Starting when, Sarge?” asked Boaz.
Brackman fluttered his stubby hands. “Never mind,” he said. He looked rattled, betrayed — haunted. He lowered his head, as though better to fight the pain if it came again. “No more horseplay, damn it,” he said, his voice deep in his throat. And he hurried away, hurried into his room at the end of the barrack, slammed the door.
The company commander, a Captain Arnold Burch, came into the barrack for a surprise inspection.
Boaz was the first to see him. Boaz did what a soldier was supposed to do under such circumstances. Boaz shouted, “A-tennnn-hut!” Boaz did this, though he had no rank at all. It is a freak of military custom that the lowliest private can command his equals and noncommissioned superiors to attention, if he is the first to detect the presence of a commissioned officer in any roofed-over structure not in a combat area.