A STORY

by RICHARD YATES

SERGEANT REECE was a slim, quiet Tennessean who always managed to look neat in fatigues, and he wasn’t exactly what we’d expected an infantry platoon sergeant to be. We learned soon enough that he was typical — almost a prototype— of the men who had drifted into the Regular Army in the thirties and stayed to form the cadres of the great wartime training centers, but at the time he surprised us. We were pretty naïve, and I think we’d all expected more of a Victor McLaglen sort— burly, roaring and tough, but lovable, in the Hollywood tradition. Reece was tough, all right, but he never roared and we didn’t love him.

He alienated us on the first day by butchering our names. We were all from New York, and most of our names did require a little effort, but Reece made a great show of being defeated by them. His thin features puckered over the roster, his little mustache twitching at each unfamiliar syllable. “ Dee — Dee Alice —” he stammered. “ Dee Alice —”

“Here,” D’Allessandro said, and it went like that with almost every name. At one point, after he’d grappled with Schacht, Scoglio, and Sizscovicz, he came to Smith. “Hey, Smith,” he said, looking up with a slow grin. “What the hell yew doin’ heah ‘mong all these gorillas?” Nobody thought it was funny. At last he finished and tucked the clipboard under his arm. “All right,” he told us. “My name’s Sahjint Reece and I’m your platoon sahjint. That means when I say do somethin’, do it.” He gave us a long, appraising glare. “P’toon!” he snapped, making his diaphragm jump. “Tetch — hut!” And his tyranny began. By the end of that day and for many days thereafter we had him firmly fixed in our minds as, to use D’Allessandro’s phrase, a dumb Rebel bastard.

I had better point out here that we were probably not very lovable either. We were all eighteen, a confused, platoon-sized bunch of city kids determined to be unenthusiastie about Basic Training. Apathy in boys of that age may be unusual — it is certainly unattractive — but this was 1944, the war was no longer new, and bitterness was the fashionable attitude. To throw yourself into army life with gusto only meant you were a kid who didn’t know the score, and nobody wanted to be that. Secretly we may have yearned for battle, or at least for ribbons, but on the surface we were shameless little wise guys about everything. ‘Trying to make us soldiers must have been a staggering job, and Reece bore the brunt of it.

But of course that side of the thing didn’t occur to us, at first. All we knew was that he rode us hard and we hated his guts. We saw very little of our lieutenant, a plump collegiate youth who showed up periodically to insist that if we played ball with him, he would play ball with us, and even less of our company commander (I hardly remember what he looked like, except that he wore glasses). But Reece was always there, calm and contemptuous, never speaking except to give orders and never smiling except in cruelty. And we could tell by observing the other platoons that he was exceptionally strict; he had, for instance, his own method of rationing water.

It was summer, and the camp lay flat under the blistering Texas sun. A generous supply of salt tablets was all that kept us conscious until nightfall; our fatigues were always streaked white from the sail of our sweat and we were always thirsty, but the camp’s supply of drinking water had to be transported from a spring many miles away; so there was a standing order to go easy on it. Most noncoms were thirsty enough themselves to construe the regulation loosely, but Reece took it to heart. “If yew men don’t learn nothin’ else about soldierin’,”he would say, “you’re gonna learn water discipline.” The water hung in Lister bags, fat canvas udders placed at intervals along the roads, and although it was warm and acrid with chemicals, the high point of every morning and every afternoon was the moment when we were authorized a break to fill our canteens with it. Most platoons would attack a Lister bag in a jostling, wallowing rush, working its little steel teats until the bag hung limp and wrinkled, and a dark stain of waste lay in the dust beneath it. Not us. Reece felt that half a canteenful at a time was enough for any man, and he would stand by the Lister bag in grim supervision, letting us at it in an orderly column of twos. When a man held his canteen too long under the bag, Reece would stop everything, pull the man out of line, and say, “Pour that out. All of it.”

“I’ll be God damned if I will!” D’Allessandro shot back at him one day, and we all stood fascinated, watching them glare at each other in the dazzling heat. D’Allessandro was a husky boy with fierce black eyes who had in a few weeks become our spokesman; I guess he was the only one brave enough to stage a scene like this. “ Whaddya think I am,” he shouted, “a goddam camel, like you?” We giggled.

Reece demanded silence from the rest of us, got it, and turned back to D’Allessandro, squinting and licking his dry lips. “All right,” he said quietly, “drink it. All of it. The resta yew men keep away from that bag, keep your hands off your canteens. I want y’all to watch this, Go on, drink it.”

D’Allessandro gave us a grin of nervous triumph and began to drink ravenously, pausing only to catch his breath with the water dribbling on his chest. “Drink it,” Reece would snap each time he stopped. It made us desperately thirsty to watch him, but we were beginning to get the idea. When the canteen was empty Reece told him to fill it up again. He did, still smiling but looking a little worried. “Now drink that,” Reece said. “Fast. Faster.” And when he was finished, gasping, with the empty canteen in his hand, Reece said, “Now get your helmet and rifle. See that barracks over there?” A white building shimmered in the distance, a couple of hundred yards away. “You’re gonna proceed on the double to that barracks, go around it and come back on the double. Meantime your buddies’re gonna be waitin’ here, ain’t none of ‘em gonna get nothin’ to drink till yew get back. All right, now, move. Move. On t he double.”

In loyalty to D’Allessandro none of us laughed, but he did look absurd trotting heavily out across the drill field, his helmet wobbling. Before he reached the barracks we saw him stop, crouch, and vomit up the water. Then he staggered on, a tiny figure in the faraway dust, disappeared around the building, and finally emerged at the other side to begin the long trip back. At last he arrived and fell exhausted on the ground. “Now,” Reece said softly. “Had enough to drink?” Only then were the rest of us allowed to use the Lister bag, two at a time. When we were all through, Reece squatted nimbly and drew half a canteenful for himself without spilling a drop.

That was the kind of thing he did, every day, and if anyone had suggested he was only doing his job our response would have been a long and unanimous Bronx cheer.

2

I THINK our first brief easing of hostility toward him occurred quite early in the training cycle, one morning when one of the instructors, a strapping first lieutenant, was trying to teach us the bayonet. We felt pretty sure that in the big, modern kind of war for which we were bound we probably would not be called on to fight, with bayonets (and that if we ever were it wouldn’t make a hell of a lot of difference whether we’d mastered the finer points of parry and thrust), and so our lassitude that morning was even purer than usual. We let the instructor talk to us, then got up and fumbled through the various positions he had outlined.

The other platoons looked as bad as we did, and faced with such dreary incompetence on a company scale the instructor rubbed his mouth. “No,” he said. “No, no, you men haven’t got the idea at all. Fall back to your places and sit down. Sergeant Reece front and center, please.”

Reece had been sitting with the other platoon sergeants in their customary bored little circle, aloof from the lecture, but he rose promptly and came forward.

“Sergeant, I’d like you to show these people what a bayonet is all about,”the instructor said. And from the moment Reece hefted a bayoneted rifle in his hands we knew, grudgingly or not, that we were going to see something. It was the feeling you get at a ball game when a heavy hitter selects a bat. At the instructor’s commands he snapped into all the positions with quick precision, freezing into a slim statue while the officer crouched and weaved around him, talking, pointing out the distribution of his weight and the angles of his limbs, explaining that this was how it should be done. Then, to climax the performance, the instructor soul Reece alone through the bayonet course. He went through it fast, never off balance and never wasting a motion, smashing blocks of wood off their wooden shoulders with his rifle butt, driving his blade deep into a shuddering torso of bundled sticks and ripping it out to bear down on the next one. He looked good. It would be too much to say that he kindled our admiration, but there is an automatic pleasure in watching a thing done well. The other platoons were clearly impressed, and although nobody in our platoon said anything, I think we were a little proud of him.

But the next period that day was close-order drill, at which the platoon sergeants had full command, and within half an hour Reece had nagged us into open resentment again. “What the hell’s he think,” Schacht muttered in the ranks, “he’s some kind of a big deal now, just because he’s a hot shot with that stupid bayonet?” And the rest of us felt a vague shame that we had so nearly been taken in.

When we eventually did change our minds about him it did not seem due, specifically, to any act of his, but to an experience that changed our minds about the army in general, and about ourselves. This was the rifle range, the only part of our training we thoroughly enjoyed. After so many hours of drill and calisthenics, of droning lectures in the sun and training films run off in sweltering clapboard buildings, the prospect of actually going out and shooting held considerable promise, and when the time came it proved to be fun. There was a keen pleasure in sprawling prone on the embankment of the firing line with a rifle stock nestled at your cheek and the oily, gleaming clips of ammunition close at hand; in squinting out across a great expanse of earth at your target and waiting for the signal from a measured voice on the loud-speaker. “Ready on the right. Ready on the left. Ready on the firing line. . . . The flag is up. The flag is waving. The flag is down. Com-mence—fire” There would be a blast of many rifles in your ears, a breathless moment as you squeezed the trigger and a sharp jolt, as you fired. Then you’d relax and watch the target slide down in the distance, controlled by unseen hands in the pit beneath it. When it reappeared a moment later a colored disc would be thrust up with it, waved and withdrawn, signaling your score. The man kneeling behind you with the score card would mutter “Nice going” or “Tough,” and you’d squirm in the sand and lake aim again. Like nothing else we had encountered in the army, this was something to rouse a competitive instinct, and when it took the form of wanting our platoon to make a better showing than the others, it brought us as close to genuine esprit de corps as anything could.

We spent a week or so on the range, leaving early every morning and staying all day, taking our noon meal from a field kitchen that was in itself a refreshing change from the mess hall. Another good feature—at first it seemed the best of all — was that the range gave us a respite from Sergeant Reece. He marched us out there and back, and he supervised the cleaning of our rifles in the barracks, but for the bulk of the day he turned us over to the range staff, an impersonal, kindly crowd, much less concerned with petty discipline than with good shooting.

Still, Reece had ample opportunity to bully us in the hours when he was in charge, but after a few days on the range we found he was easing up. When we counted cadence on the road now, for instance, he no longer made us do it over and over, louder each time, until our dry throats burned from yelling “HUT, WHO, REEP, HOE!” He would quit after one or two counts like the other platoon sergeants, and at first we didn’t know what to make of it. “What’s the deal?” we asked each other, baffled, and I guess the deal was simply that we’d begun to do it right the first time, loud enough and in perfect unison. We were marching well, and this was Reece’s way of letting us know it.

3

THE trip to the range was several miles, and a good share of it was through the part of camp where marching at attention was required — we were never given route-step until after we’d cleared the last of the company streets and buildings. But with our new efficiency at marching we got so that we almost enjoyed it, and even responded with enthusiasm to Reece’s marching chant. It had always been his habit, after making us count cadence, to go through one of those traditional singsong chants calling for traditional shouts of reply, and we’d always resented it before. But now the chant seemed uniquely stirring, an authentic piece of folklore from older armies and older wars, with roots deep in the life we were just beginning to understand. He would begin by expanding his ordinary nasal “Left . . . left . . . left” into a mournful little tune: “Oh yew had a good home and yew left —” to which we would answer “RIGHT!” as our right feet fell. We would go through several variations on this theme: —

“Oh yew had a good job and yew left —” “RIGHT!”

“Oh yew had a good gal and yew left —” “RIGHT!”

And then he’d vary the tune a little: “Oh Jody rolled the hones when yew left —”

“RIGHT!” we’d yell in soldierly accord. Jody was your faithless friend, the soft civilian to whom the dice throw of chance had given everything you held dear; and the next verses, a series of taunting couplets, made it clear that he would always have the last laugh. You might march and shoot and learn to perfection your creed of disciplined force, but Jody was a force beyond control, and the fact had been faced by generations of proud, lonely men like this one, this splendid soldier who swung along beside our ranks in the sun and bawled the words from a twisted mouth: “Ain’t no use in goin’ home — Jody’s got your gal and gone. Sound off—”

“HUT, WHO!”

“Sound off—”

“REEP, HOE!”

“Ever’ time yew stand Retreat, Jody gets a piece of meat. Sound off —”

“HUT, WHO!”

“Sound off —”

“REEP, HOE!” It was almost a disappointment when he gave us route-step on the outskirts of camp and we became individuals again, cocking back our helmets and slouching along out of step, with the fine unanimity of the chant left behind. When we returned from the range dusty and tired, our ears numb from the noise of fire, it was somehow bracing to swing into formal cadence again for the last leg of the journey, heads up, backs straight, and split the cooling air with our roars of response.

A good part of our evenings, after chow, would be spent cleaning our rifles with the painstaking care that Reece demanded. The barracks would fill with the sharp, good smells of bore cleaner and oil as we worked, and when the job had been done to Reece’s satisfaction we would usually drift out to the front steps for a smoke while we waited our turns at the showers. One night a group of us lingered there more quietly than usual, finding, I think, that the customary small talk of injustice and complaint was inadequate, unsuited to the strange well-being we had all begun to feel these last few days. Finally Fogarty put the mood into words. He was a small, serious boy, the runt of the platoon and something of a butt of jokes, and I guess he had nothing much to lose by letting his guard down. “Ah, I dunno,” he said, leaning back against the doorjamb with a sigh, “I dunno about you guys, but I like this — going out to the range, marching and all. Makes you feel like you’re really soldiering, you know what I meant?”

It was a dangerously naïve thing to say— “soldiering” was Reece’s favorite word — and we looked at him uncertainly for a second. But then D’Allessandro glanced dead-pan around the group, defying anyone to laugh, and we relaxed. The idea of soldiering had become respectable, and because the idea as well as the word was inseparable in our minds from Sergeant Reece, he became respectable too.

4

SOON the change had come over the whole platoon. We were working with Reece now, instead of against him, trying instead of pretending to try. We wanted to be soldiers. The intensity of our effort must sometimes have been ludicrous, and might have caused a lesser man to suspect we were kidding — I remember earnest little choruses of “Okay, Sergeant” whenever he dispatched an order — but Reece took it all straight-faced, with that air of unlimited self-assurance that is the first requisite of good leadership. And he was as fair as he was strict, which must surely be the second requisite. In appointing provisional squad leaders, for example, he coolly passed over several men who had all but licked his shoes for recognition, and picked those he knew could hold our respect — D’Allessandro was one, and the others were equally well chosen. The rest of his formula was classically simple: he led by being excellent, at everything from cleaning a rifle to rolling a pair of socks, and we followed by trying to emulate him.

But if excellence is easy to admire it is hard to like, and Reece refused to make himself likable. It was his only failing, but it was a big one, for respect without affection can’t last long — not, at least, where the sentimentality of adolescent minds is involved. Reece rationed kindness the way he rationed water: we might cherish each drop out of all proportion to its worth, but we never got enough or anything like enough to slake our thirst. We were delighted when he suddenly began to get our names right at roll call, and when we noticed that he was taking the edge of insult off most of his reprimands, for we knew these signs to be acknowledgments of our growth as soldiers, but somehow we felt a right to expect more.

We were delighted too at the discovery that our plump lieutenant was afraid of him; we could barely hide our pleasure at the condescending look that came over Reece’s face whenever the lieutenant appeared, or at the tone of the young officer’s voice — uneasy, almost apologetic — when he said, “All right, Sergeant.” It made us feel close to Reece in a proud soldierly alliance, and once or twice he granted us the keen compliment of a wink behind the lieutenant’s back, but only once or twice. We might imitate his walk and his squinting stare, get the shirts of our suntans tailored skintight like his and even adopt some of his habits of speech, Southern accent and all, but we could never quite consider him a Good Joe. He just wasn’t the type. Formal obedience, in working hours, was all he wanted, and we hardly knew him at all.

On the rare evenings when he stayed on the post he would sit either alone or in the unapproachable company of one or two other cadre men as taciturn as himself, drinking beer in the PX. Most nights and all weekends he disappeared into town. I’m sure none of us expected him to spend his free time with us — the thought would never have occurred to us, in fact—but the smallest glimpse into his personal life would have helped. If he had ever reminisced with us about his home, for instance, or related the conversations of his PX friends, or told us of a bar he liked in town, I think we would all have been touchingly grateful, but he never did. And what made it worse was that, unlike him, we had no real life outside the day’s routine. The town was a small, dusty maze of clapboard and neon, crawling with soldiers, and to most of us it yielded only loneliness, however we may have swaggered down its avenues. There wasn’t enough town to go around; whatever delights it held remained the secrets of those who had found them first, and if you were young, shy, and not precisely sure what you were looking for anyway, it was a dreary place. You could hang around the U.S.O. and perhaps get to dance with a girl long hardened against a callow advance; you could settle for the insipid pleasures of watermelon stands and penny arcades, or you could prowl aimlessly in groups through the dark back streets, where all you met as a rule was other groups of soldiers on the aimless prowl. “So whaddya wanna do?” we would ask each other impatiently, and the only answer was, “Ah, I dunno. Cruise around awhile, I guess. Usually we’d drink enough beer to be drunk, or sick, on the bus back to camp, grateful for the promise of an orderly new day.

It was probably not surprising, then, that our emotional life became ingrown. Like frustrated suburban wives we fed on each other’s discontent; we became divided into mean little cliques and subdivided into jealously shifting pairs of buddies, and we pieced out our idleness with gossip. Most of the gossip was self-contained; for news from the extraplatoon world we relied largely on the company clerk, a friendly, sedentary man who liked to dispense rumors over a carefully balanced cup of coffee as he strolled from table to table in the mess hall. “I got this from Personnel,”he would say in preface to some improbable hearsay about the distant brass (the colonel had syphilis; the stockade commander had weaseled out of a combat assignment; the training program had been cut short and we’d all be overseas in a month). But one Saturday noon he had something less remote; he had gotten it from his own company orderly room, and it sounded plausible. For weeks, he told us, the plump lieutenant had been trying to get Reece transferred; now it appeared to be in the works, and next week might well be Reece’s last as a platoon sergeant. “His days are numbered,”the clerk said darkly.

“Whaddya mean, transferred?” D’Allessandro asked. “Transferred where?”

“Keep your voice down, willya?" the clerk said, with an uneasy glance toward the noncoms table, where Reece bent stolidly over his food. “I dunno. That part I dunno. Anyway, it’s a lousy tuck. You kids got the best damn platoon sergeant on the post, if you wanna know something, He’s too damn good, in fact; that’s his trouble, Too good for a half-assed second lieutenant to handle. In the army it never pays to be that good.”

“You’re right,” D’Allessandro said solemnly. “It never pays.”

“Yeah?” Schacht inquired, grinning. “Is that right, Squad Leader? Tell us about it, Squad Leader.” And the talk at our table degenerated into wisecracks. The clerk drifted away. 5

REECE must have heard the story about the same time wo did; at any rate that weekend marked a sudden change in his behavior. He left for town with the tense look of a man methodically planning to raise hell, and on Monday morning he almost missed Reveille. He nearly always had a hangover on Monday mornings, but it had never before interfered with his day’s work; he had always been there to get us up and out with his angry tongue. This time, though, there was an odd silence in the barracks as we dressed, “Hey, he isn’t here,” somebody called from the door of Reece’s room near the stairs. “Reece isn’t here.” The squad leaders were admirably quick to take the initiative. They coaxed and prodded until we had all tumbled outside and into formation in the dark, very nearly as fast as we’d have done it under Reece’s supervision. But the night’s C.Q., in making his rounds, had already discovered Reece’s absence and run off to rouse the lieutenant.

The company officers rarely stood Reveille, particularly on Mondays, but now as we stood leaderless in the company street our lieutenant came jogging around the side of the barracks. By the lights of the building we could see that his shirt was half buttoned and his hair wild; he looked puffy with sleep and badly confused. Still running, he called, “All right, you men, uh—”

All the squad leaders drew their breath to call us to attention, but they got no further than a ragged “Teteh —” when Reece emerged out of the gloaming, stepped up in front of the lieutenant, and said, “P’toon! Teteh — hut!” There he was, a little winded from running, still wearing the wrinkled suntans of the night before, but plainly in charge. He called the roll by squads; then he kicked out one stiff leg in the ornate, Regular Army way of doing an about-face, neatly executed the turn, and ended up facing the lieutenant with a perfect salute. “All presen’accounted for, sir,” he said.

The lieutenant was too startled to do anything but salute back, sloppily, and mumble “All right, Sergeant.” I guess he felt he couldn’t even say “See that this doesn’t happen again,” since, after all, nothing very much had happened, except that he’d been gotten out of bed for Reveille. And I guess he spent the rest of the day wondering whether he should have reprimanded Reece for being out of uniform; he looked as if the question were already bothering him as he turned to go back to his quarters. Dismissed, our formation broke up in a thunderclap of laughter that he pretended not to hear.

But Sergeant Reece soon spoiled the joke. He didn’t even thank the squad leaders for helping him out of a tight spot, and for the rest of the day he treated us to the kind of petty nagging we thought we had outgrown. On the drill field he braced little Fogarty and said, “When’d yew shave last?”

Like many of our faces, Fogarty’s bore only a pale fuzz that hardly needed shaving at all. “About a week ago,”he said.

‘’Bout a week ago, Sahjint,” Reece corrected. “About a week ago, Sergeant,” Fogarty said. Reece curled back his thin lips. “Yew look lak a mangey ole mungrel bitch,” he said. “Doan yew know you’re s’posed to shave ever’ day?”

“I wouldn t have nothing to shave every day.” “Wouldn’t have nothin’ to shave, Sahjint.” Fogarty swallowed, blinking. “Nothing to shave, Sergeant,” he said.

We all felt badly let down. “What the hell’s he think we are,” Schacht demanded that noon, “a bunch of rookies?” And D’Allessandro grumbled in mutinous agreement.

A bad hangover might have excused Reece that day, but it could hardly have accounted for the next day and the day after that. He was bullying us without reason and without relief, and he was destroying everything he had built up so carefully in the many weeks before; the whole delicate structure of our respect for him crumbled and fell.

“It’s final,” the company clerk said grimly at supper Wednesday night. “The orders are cut. Tomorrow’s his last day.”

“So?” Schacht inquired. “Where’s he going?”

“Keep your voice down,” the clerk said. “Gonna work with the instructors. Spend part of his time out on the bivouac area and part on the bayonet course.”

Schacht laughed, nudging D’Allessandro. “Hod damn,” he said, “he’ll eat that up, won’t he? Specially the bayonet part. Bastard’ll get to show off every day. He’ll like that.”

“Whaddya, kidding?” the clerk asked, offended. “Like it my ass. That guy loved his job. You think I’m kidding? He loved his job, and it’s a lousy break. Aon kids don’t know when you’re well off.”

D’Allessandro took up the argument, narrowing his eyes. “Yeah?” he said. “You think so? You oughta seen him out there every day this week. Every day.”

The clerk leaned forward so earnestly that some of his coffee spilled. “Listen,” he said. “He’s known about this all week—how the hellya want him to act ? How the hell would you act if you knew somebody was screwing you out of the thing you liked best? Can’teha see he’s under a strain?”

But that, we all told him with our surly stares, was no excuse for being a dumb Rebel bastard.

“Some of you kids act too big for your pants,” the clerk said, and went away in a sulk.

“Ah, don’t believe everything you hear,” Schacht said. “I’ll believe he’s transferred when I see it.”

But it was true. That night Reece sat up late in his room, getting morosely drunk with one of his cronies. We could hear their low, blurred voices in the darkness, and the occasional clink of their whiskey bottle. The following day he was neither easy nor hard on us in the field, but brooding and aloof as if he didn’t care any more. And when he marched us back that evening he kept us standing in formation before the barracks for a few moments, at ease, before dismissing us. His restless glance seemed to survey all our faces in turn. Then he began to speak in a voice more gentle than any we had ever heard him use. “I won’t be seein’ yew men any more after today,” he said. “I’m bein’ transferred. One thing yew can always count on in th’ army, and that is, if yew find somethin’ good, some job yew like, they always transfer your ass somewheres else.”

I think we were all touched — I know I was; it was the closest he had ever come to saying he liked us. But it was too late. Anything he said or did now would have been too late, and our predominant feeling was relief. Reece seemed to sense this, and seemed to cut short the things he had planned to say.

“I know there ain’t no call for me to make a speech,” he said, “and I ain’t gonna make one. Onliest thing I want to say is—” He lowered his eyes and stared at his dusty service shoes. “I want to wish all yew men a lot of luck. Y’all keep your nose clean, hear? And stay outa trouble?” The next words could scarcely he heard. “And doan let nobody push y’around.”

A short, painful silence followed, as painful as the parting of disenchanted lovers. Then he drew himself straight. “P’toon! Tetch — hut!” He looked us over once more with hard and glittering eyes. “ Dis-missed.”

And when we came back from chow that night we found he had already packed his barracks bags and cleared out. We didn’t even get to shake his hand.

6

OUR new platoon sergeant was there in the morning, a squat, jolly cab driver from Queens who insisted that we call him only by his first name, which was Ruby. He was every inch a Good Joe. He turned us loose at the Lister bags every chance he got, and confided with a giggle that, through a buddy of his in the PX, he often got his own canteen filled with Coca-Cola and crushed ice. He was a slack drill master, and on the road he never made us count cadence except when we passed an officer; never made us chant or sing anything except a ragged version of “Give My Regards to Broadway,” which he led with fervor although he didn’t know all the words. _ _ _

It took us a little while to adjust to him, after Reece. Once when the lieutenant came to the barracks to give one of his little talks about playing ball, ending up with his usual" All right, Sergeant,” Ruby hooked his thumbs in his cartridge belt, slouched comfortably, and said, “Fellas, I hope yez all listened and gave ya attention to what the lieutenant said. I think I can speak fa yez all as well as myself when I say, Lieutenant, we’re gonna play ball wit’ you, like you said, because this here is one platoon that knows a Good Joe when we see one.”

As flustered by this as he had ever been by Reece’s silent scorn, the lieutenant could only blush and stammer, “Well, uh —thank you, Sergeant. Uh —I guess that’s all, then. Carry on.”And as soon as the lieutenant was out of sight we all began to make loud retching noises, to hold our noses or go through the motions of shoveling, as if we stood knee-deep in manure. “Christ, Ruby, Schacht cried, “what the hella you buckin for?”

Ruby hunched his shoulders and spread his hands, bubbling with good-natured laughter. “To stay alive,” he said. “To stay alive, whaddva think?” And he defended the point vigorously over the mounting din of our ridicule. “Whatsa matta?” he demanded. “Whatsa matta? Don’tcha think he does it to the captain? Don’tcha think the captain does it up at Battalion? Listen, wise up, will yez? Evvybody does it! Evvybody does it! What the hellya think makes the army go?” Finally he dismissed the whole subject with cabdriverly nonchalance. “Arright, arright, just stick around. Yull find out. Wait’ll you kids got my time in the army, then yez can talk.” But by that time we were all laughing with him; he had won our hearts.

In the evenings, at the PX, we would cluster around him while he sat behind a battery of beer bottles, waving his expressive hands and talking the kind of relaxed, civilian language we could all understand. “Ah, I got this brother-in-law, a real smott bastid. Know how he got outa the army? Know how he got out?” There would follow an involved, unlikely tale of treachery to which the only expected response was a laugh. “Sure!” Ruby would insist, laughing. “Don’tcha believe me? Don’tcha believe me? And this other guy I know, boy, talk about bein’ smott — I’m tellin ya, this bastid’s really smott. Know how he got out?”

Sometimes our allegiance wavered, but not for long. One evening a group of us sat around the front steps, dawdling over cigarettes before we pushed off to the PX, and discussing at length — as if to convince ourselves — the many things that made fife with Ruby so enjoyable. “Well yeah,” little Fogarty said, “but I dunno. With Ruby it don’t seem much like soldiering any more.”

This was the second time Fogarty had thrown us into a momentary confusion, and for the second time D’Allessandro cleared the air. “So?” he said with a shrug. “Who the hell wants to soldier?”

That said it perfectly. We could spit in the dust and amble off toward the PX now, round-shouldered, relieved, confident that Sergeant Reece would not haunt us again. Who the hell wanted to soldier? “Not me,” we could all say in our hearts, “not this chicken,” and our very defiance would dignify the attitude. An attitude was all we needed anyway, all we had ever needed, and this one would always sit more comfortably than Reece’s stern, demanding creed. It meant, I guess, that at the end of our training cycle the camp delivered up a bunch of shameless little wise guys to be scattered and absorbed into the vast disorder of the army, but at least Reece never saw it happen, and he was the only one who might have cared.