Читать книгу Shrapnel - William Wharton, Уильям Уортон - Страница 11

Before we’re shipped overseas, I’ve been reassigned to Regimental Intelligence and Reconnaissance, called I&R. Somebody scanned my records and found my AGCT score. I move from K Company to Regimental Headquarters company.

It’s even better than being a KP pusher. We’re given special training in patrolling, using high tech (for the army that is) phones and radios, we get to drive jeeps, trucks and weasels. Weasels are a kind of personnel carrier that has tracks and can go through water. We’re even sent back to Benning for parachute jump training. In two weeks we make five jumps. They won’t let us make the sixth because then we’d be eligible for paratrooper jumping wings, which would have given us fifteen dollars extra a month.

The Master Sergeant of Regimental Headquarters is a special kind of person. He could well be one of the meanest people I will ever know, but he is always smiling and laughing. He has small eyes and a big stomach. He’s ‘regular army’ and a southerner. I don’t know how smart he actually is, but when it comes to running an infantry company he’s a genius. He runs a company as if it’s his own private army, set up for his personal profit. We privates, and everyone else, are his serfs.

The Company Commander and other officers love him because they don’t have to do anything. The Company Commander is just decoration in this company. Twice Sergeant Hunt is offered a commission and refuses. He lives better, eats better, and makes more money with all his schemes, than the Regimental Commander.

But he makes one mistake. He gets too greedy; and somebody, somewhere along the line, discovers that Hunt’s been having marital allotment cheques sent to three different women in three different states. He’s a trigamist. He could get away with this because he signs the allotments himself. He has one wife in Alabama, one in South Carolina and another in Mississippi. There’s a court martial and he’s broken all the way down to Private. He has to make up for the fraudulent allotments and he does. I think he’s a rich man by that time, anyway.

Anyone else would have wound up in Leavenworth, but he can call in some of his chits, and officers like him. He’s moved into the regular barracks like the rest of us, and we have a new Master Sergeant shipped in.

Now everyone who’d ever been given a hard time by him jumps on Private Hunt. His life isn’t worth living. Shaving cream is squeezed into his toothpaste tube, he’s short-sheeted every night and has to remake his bed before he climbs into it. There can be anything, spiders, scorpions, snakes, condoms full of water, anything, under those blankets. But he never says anything, he just smiles, crinkling his eyes; throws these things on the floor, and puts everything back together.

He has all the shit details; latrine duty, KP, and pulls hard guard. Even lousy PFCs try to make his life miserable. He only smiles his fat smile with flesh bunched up around those small eyes. To me he looks more dangerous this way, his shirt sleeves showing where his old master stripes had been when he was top kick. I make a point of staying away from him.

He’s older than any of the company officers, including the new CO, by far. Probably in his late thirties, he seems like an old man to us. He just keeps his mouth shut, does whatever he’s told, no matter what, even things he doesn’t have to do, like mop the barracks floor every morning before reveille. And nobody knows arm regulations, word and verse, as Hunt does. I’m convinced something bad is coming.

It doesn’t take long. He somehow manages to be transferred to ‘C’ Company. Then, nobody ever went up through the ranks the way Hunt does. He stitches each new rank on with big loose stitches until he’s finally back to three up, three down, with the diamond of a Master Sergeant. These he stitches on tightly.

Starting right then, he begins arranging transfers from Headquarters to C Company of about twenty non-coms and PFCs. These twenty are those who had given him the worst time. We all go down to look at the bulletin board every morning with dread. We never hear from any of those soldiers again except to see their names on the demotions list, if they had any rank. He wears them down, one at a time. Since then, I’ve harboured a fear of big, smiling, fat, southerners. It’s a form of personal bigotry.