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 tobe 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 cadremen 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 heldremained 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 USO 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 were 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
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 cadremen 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 heldremained 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 USO 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 were 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
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