The Army                                    by Michael Jackman                                               (Excerpt from the novel.) We jumped onto the ground and hugged it hard. Rather we cupped the soil around our heads and shoved our faces into the ground, imitating some prone ostrich. Somehow, I remained unconvinced that this was the way to survive a nuclear explosion. Evidently, this performance was enough to satisfy our Drill Sergeants, for they barked out the "All clear!" and we stood up, unfazed by the nonexistent blast. We assembled again, this time to enter the chamber. The Drill Sergeants ordered us to the ready and I sucked in some of the fresh air. As if they were wise to this they stalled for a bit before marching us in. We walked in with a group of about ten Privates. There was not a smell so much as an immediate sense of pain. As soon as I entered I felt my eyes starting to water painfully. In a few moments, hot tears of pain were streaming down my face. We walked around and around. In the center of the room, a canister of CS gas sent up its deadly vapors. My eyes simmered with gas, like I had wiped my eyes with pepper juice. My cheeks puffed with my breath. I had to exhale. I continued marching around the room in some kind of cake walk, waiting for the music to stop. What was this room, anyway? It looked like a Swiss sauna. Finally, running out of breath, I took in a little whiff of the deadly fumes. It was astonishing. I felt like I had breathed in a cup of Japanese mustard. I choked on the stuff. I felt a terrible pain in my nose reaching around to the base of my skull. My nasal passages burned with a red hot pain, and my throat registered deadly alarm. I choked on it. Walking around the room, I observed my fellows in the same kind of distress, their eyes screwed up in disgust, gagging on the bad air. Then I noticed that my nose was dripping. Dripping? That's putting it mildly! My nose was pouring green soggy stuff. I opened my mouth in agony and a strange bile poured out that I had no idea existed. Christ! What was inside me? My face became a stream of oozing garbage. Mercifully, the Sergeants ordered us out, and I nearly toppled a Drill Sergeant on the way out. Outside, we stood in a circle, exuding slime from our percolating faces. In no time my entire uniform was coated with snot, vomit, saliva, phlegm, and other stuff that I don't know what to call. We stood there huffing the fresh air, stupefied. * * * * * * * * The bus was twenty or thirty years old. I guessed that from the pale blue siding and the coarse blue upholstery of the stiff seats. We rode the bus rarely, so I figured we must have been riding beyond convenient marching distance. The dark woods offered little suggestion of our location. The bus shifted into low gear as the sylvan canopy opened onto a small but deep valley. The other buses came into view, and I saw most of our company had already arrived in the twilight. We came to a stop and got off the bus. The darkness brought a chill with it, and I was pleased to find a big rusty drum stoked with crackling firewood behind the machine gun towers. Private Yake was already there, warming his palms over the fire, which cast disturbing shadows on his face. "Hey, dude. You ready to duck machine gun fire?" asked Yake. "Is that what we're doing? Are there going to be explosions?" "Yeah, they've got some TNT pits they're gonna set off. Cady here already went through." "It's fucking loud, man," Cady grumbled, "Wear your ear plugs. They told me not to put 'em in and now my head's ringing like a telephone." "No way man, I wanna hear the bullets whizzing by," Yake chuckled. Our conversation was cut short as we were called into formation. We quickly got into line and held our right arms out to set us at proper distance, skipping to the right, nimbly forming the proper geometric shape that would appease our superiors. Drill Sergeant Juarez paced back and forth as we waited for our commands. It was a relief to be in the charge of Juarez. He was only cruel on the rare occasion when he had to prove his superiority, and for the most part was congenial and easy to please. "All right, Privates," Drill Sergeant Juarez began, "at ease. Take it easy for now. Tonight, you Privates are going to crawl under some machine gun fire, and make your way to the towers, where you will make a charge with your bayonets fixed. If you stand up you'll be shot to pieces. There are also some TNT pits out there, and you'll get blasted as you crawl in the prone position. Remember from your previous training, hold the rifle out in front of you and keep your legs spread open. Keep your head sideways and crawl on your belly. Use your elbows and knees to advance in the prone position. It's going to be loud, but you knuckleheads keep your earplugs out! How can you expect to be ready for the shock -" Drill Sergeant Juarez was interrupted by the blasting of the machine guns. The next cycle through the range had begun. During his thoughtful pause we heard the first of the pits ignite in a deep explosion. He walked closer to us to be better heard. "Okay, Privates," roared Juarez, "I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you that you are all equally worthless as far as the U.S. Army is concerned! A Private's worth to the U.S. Army is almost zero! Perhaps you poor Privates are bored with crawling around like cockroaches. In that case, you are free to stand up and take a breath of fresh air! Remember, Privates, your worth to us is only the money it takes to feed, clothe, and train you! If you want to die now instead of -" Juarez's shouting was drowned out as a quartet of dynamite pits exploded in some chaotic chord. From behind me in the darkness, a high voice piped up. "Drill Sergeant, Private Sendo requests permission to speak!" "Speak, Private!" "Drill Sergeant, if Privates are so useless and worthless, why are there so many of us." Juarez's face seemed unusually indulgent. I wondered if this question had ever been asked before. "Well, Private, that's a fine question! The fact is, that you are all expendable. . .well, I don't want to sound rude, but it's the God's-honest truth! You are expendable!" The earsplitting thunder of the range died down and Drill Sergeant Juarez marched us down the side of the firing range. I stole a few peeks at the range and saw Specialists raking it over a bit and places fresh charges in deep nests of barbed wire lit by stark floodlights. At the end of the range we filed into a trench. We formed a line the width of the range, three Privates deep, standing before a wall of railroad ties. "Fix bayonets!" declared Juarez. The floodlights went out. Moments later a stream of glowing tracers barreled over our heads, and the air was alive with deafening gunfire. Placing my rifle atop the wall I pulled myself up. I slid one leg then the other over the ties and began to crawl along the sand. I stopped and opened my palm to get the earplugs. I pushed them into my ringing ears thinking, "Fuck that Yake, let him go deaf!" As I advanced with my face to one side, it grew impossible to see my surroundings. How far above were the bullets? I felt far to chicken to even turn my face or look about. Suddenly, the sand tripped up nearby and my organs were revolted by the sickening thud. I lay there a moment. Somebody started punching my boot. The second wave? I pressed on. I fell into the trench at the end of the course. "KILL! KILL! KILL!" we all shouted as we attacked the straw men. A limp bit of straw fell out of the dummy indolently, unimpressed by my war cry. Drill Sergeant Juarez ordered us to assemble, and picked a handful of us at random. We fell out and Juarez marched us over to a team of Specialists standing around a truck. One by one, we were handed rakes, hoes, and shovels, and told to jump up into the bed of a camouflage pickup truck. Covered with gritty sand and face paint, propping up hand tools between our knees, we looked like hobo sharecroppers out to work the land. The squad leader entered the cab without a word, revved the engine, and launched us over some very rough territory. We lurched across the hills around the valley dangerously. The truck would jerk up some rocky slope, then tip down abruptly. I held onto the cab with white knuckles while it bucked like a rodeo horse. Then the vehicle slowed down only to lean perilously to one side with open earth yawning wide a few inches from the tires. I waited for the thing to topple over and crush us, impaling us on the farm implements. Whenever possible we would huddle around the fire cans during these cold days on the range. The smell of smoke would soak through our clothes, our hair, it would cling to the skin after a vigorous shower; we never seemed completely rid of it. It would waft through the air like a barbaric perfume wherever we went. This time, however, it was different. Now we saw a grey gauze of smoke in the moonlight, growing darker as we progressed. Soon we coughed in the blackened air, and I looked ahead to see tongues of flame licking the shot-to-hell trees. The vehicle came to a stop and the squad man got out. "All right, listen up! You Privates put this fire out!" he hollered in a raspy voice, as though for the hundredth time. "Put out every spark!" He walked away into a cloud of smoke lighting a cigarette, as though he had given his final order for the evening. We attacked the burning trees with our hoes, scraping off the scorched bark and chopping off smoldering branches. We shoveled the soil onto inflamed stumps, knocking at the flames. The churning smoke blackened my nose and mouth, choking my lungs. I beat against the fire with my shovel, dancing on the flaming ground, kicking dust at the fire. In the midnight smog I couldn't see any of the other Privates, but I could hear them at work, battling the conflagration. Slowly, the infernal fumes subsided and our view began to clear. Now the fire would lay in wait in a tarnished spark then spring to life when you thought you had it beat. The fire proved a wily and tenacious foe. Again and again, we beat the fire back into a corner only to find it had crept behind us somehow to attack from the rear. Just as we would stamp out the glowing coals in one place, walls of flame would materialize in a remote corner of the forest. At last we could find no living fire, and we set about interring what embers remained. * * * * * * * * You can forget all that nonsense you see in Hollywood movies. The army isn't full of patriots. At least I didn't see too many. I mostly saw guys who obeyed their commanders for food, shelter, and paychecks, and out of fear, too. So drop that vision right now of the valiant warrior storming through a hail of gunfire so that sacred national banner doesn't touch the earth. These are the inventions of a bored screenwriter, of a dime store novelist who has run out of solid ideas. Most every Private I encountered could barely name more than a handful of states, a couple of the founding fathers, or a few lines of the constitution. They were more interested in chasing skirts, knocking back some strong booze, or rocking out to loud music. Also, you can bury that exciting notion about soldiers out in the field riding tanks and humvees all day, firing the big guns, whooping it up with battle cries all the time, cruising around in helicopters, or playing virtual reality computer games. That's bunk. That's what some recruiter tells you when he barges in on your high school civics class. That's the bamboozling you get from the TV ads. The plain truth, brothers and sisters, is that the lion's share of military life is spent cleaning rifles, washing dishes, carting garbage, brushing teeth, ironing clothes, and filling out mountains of paperwork so high as to impress those dedicated bureaucrats out of a job in Moscow. Why, the big joke in M.P. training was that M.P. stood for multi-purpose. I can't list all the fun and stimulating duties of a soldier from memory. The excitement of it all must have made me dizzy. I can't fully express how much joy I got from washing piles of dishes for the big dinner when the officers got together, it's such a pleasure to thrust my hands into scalding scum. How can I describe the delight to be found in cleaning up vomit left by Sergeants after an exuberant drinking spree, or taking pile after pile of stinking trash out to the dumpster. It makes my head spin with sheer giddiness to recall all those wild thrills. That's right, you can just imagine the tough soldiers slipping dopey white socks over their combat boots when they enter the bay (to keep the floor wax in fine shape), or spending hours hunting the elusive and dangerous dust bunny, doing battle with dingy brass, fighting for the perfect shine. Why do soldiers carry weapons at all? They may as well carry sponges and cans of scouring powder. Join the army to prepare yourself for a career: as a janitor!