VII. Free Walk
Fort Benning, Georgia.
February 12, 1984.
"Get over it, get through it, or let it destroy you."
His words rang through the frigid morning air like a bell, high and clear, and in voice gruff from just waking up, we repeated them back to him. It was dark out, cold as sin, and the wind bit right through my crisp army uniform, making the tough fiber feel more like a wet napkin.
We fell into formation, an army of shadows marching across the base, racing the dawn, trembling, hardly making a sound ourselves to preserve the warmth in our bodies.
"Get over it, get through it, or WHAT-?"
Our voices formed a chorus, "Let it destroy you."
Snow drifted down, never seeming to touch the ground, but piling on my shoulders. I kept my face forward, squinting against the harsh floodlights that lit the field before us.
Precious seconds passed and I started to get used to the cold. One shuffling step at a time, I widened my strides, relaxing the taut muscles in my calves, letting my arms swing more freely instead of hugging them to my sides. I chanced a breath through my mouth, and walked through the stream it produced, wincing at the ache the cold put into my teeth.
McKinney shouted again, "Get over it, get through it, or WHAT-?"
"Let it destroy you!"
Morning was the best time to gets things done. Guardsman were at the end of their watch, dew covered everything and made surfaces slick, it was bitterly cold, dark, and silent, and every man, woman, and child needed to sleep. McKinney beat that into us as he stood in the barracks with his megaphone, stirring us all from sleep an hour early. He took no questions that morning, only ordered us outside and had us start up a frigid jog.
We stayed out for two hours, until the sky began to lighten and my lips and nose felt like they might shrivel and fall off. We ran half the time, and walked the other half, though the running was much more pleasant in the cold. The recruits who chose to breathe through their mouths were rewarded with a dry, hacking cough as the air took its toll on their throats. I puffed through my nose, and by the time we stopped it was raw and tender inside.
I ran beside Ford, who I learned a lot about in that hellish two hours. He was sort of simple, an obligatory high school graduate who came from a flyover state and talked with a light southern accent. He spoke little, but he followed commands well, and since we had taken a short bus ride together before arriving, he had taken to finding me, wherever I was, and putting himself beside me. In that way he was a little like a dog. He was ugly, too, and not the simple kind of ugly. His face was covered in scars from a long history of acne, he was missing the top of his ear – according to Ford a horse had bit it off – and his head was shaped like a rectangle. He might have been an easy target for jabs, but Ford was as strong as an ox, with big round muscles on his arms and a thick barrel chest. He could scale that cement wall on the leader-reaction course with no help.
His presence kept the other recruits at a distance, because silence was dangerous, but Ford was big and ugly and gentle. Even in the blistering cold he found the time to look over at me and grin.
When the run from hell ended, McKinney brought us to an office building on the edge of the field we had been running around on all morning, keeping us marching in place as he walked up and down the lines to have a look at us. It was the first scrutiny he had paid us all morning.
He pointed out flaws in uniforms, occasionally putting his hand on someone's back to indicate they should stop slouching. By the time he got to me I had tucked in the remains of my shirt, rebuttoned my jacket, and stiffened my back. He passed right by me and struck his boot out, tapping Ford on the heel. He was moving his feet too quickly.
We were divided between two classrooms inside, and Ford sunk into the chair beside me, picking at the front of it nervously. He had barely slept the night before, buried in that book of his, and it showed in the deep circles under his eyes.
Before he left, McKinney came to each classroom and said his mantra again,
"Get over it, get through it, or WHAT-?"
In the small, warm classroom, our words seemed so much louder, "Let it destroy you!"
Our soft skills instructor was a tall, rigid man named Allister. He had no cards, no notes, no textbook, but the moment he arrived he started in on the history of warfare in the United States. He spoke quickly, sharply, his lessons more like a story he had witnessed in his own lifetime than a history that went back centuries. It was such a blunt change from our two-hour run that I had a hard time staying awake – the adrenaline was leaving me, dancing away like the snow.
Hours passed as Allister rambled on through the wars that had plagued the country, detailing battles and strategies. He put a particular focus on weaponry, how it was advanced and used, and the many forms of communication the army had utilized over the years.
He let us out once at noon to use the facilities and eat a hasty lunch, and then had us back for tests and quizzes, to place us on a scale, he said, so the army knew what to do with us.
It was a necessary evil, because it was Sunday, and the last half of Sunday was free walk.
I heard about it in processing, from some other recruit, who heard it from an officer somewhere down the line. Free walk was the best part of basic training. Recruits got the afternoon off to make the phone calls they had earned, go to religious services, or use the exercise facilities on base. When that foghorn sounded a basketball game stirred on the courts and I went to watch.
I sat alone on the bleachers, clutching my arms around my chest to keep myself warm, and turning my head against the wind. If I closed my eyes I could almost pretend I was back home, sitting beside the courts near the house and listening to another pick-up game come to an end, waiting my turn to jump in. It was always summer then, and the thought of it sent a wave of warmth through my core. For a split second it was like Andre was sitting beside me.
Someone tapped on the bleachers, and I had to open my eyes and let Miami slip away. With it went the warmth, the comfort, and I found myself in the cold shadow of my drill sergeant.
He looked staunch and groomed, as always, and faced the icy wind without flinching. He was still wearing his uniform, perfectly arranged to make his shoulders look wider, his chest flatter, and his head less square. McKinney looked to me the perfect soldier, but it was not his uniform that I respected him for. He said what he meant, spoke concisely, and never once seemed threatening, like the other drill sergeants who roamed the base with their platoons. Even if he was just parroting rules and regulations, living by a code, following his routine, it was admirable.
I had only known the man for two days and had never spoken to him alone, without my company around me, so I felt vulnerable out there on the bleachers.
He cleared his throat, and said, "Westen. You earned phone time yesterday."
During the leader-reaction courses my group had won enough to claim the extra phone time, and I had seen them use it one at a time, holding onto that payphone like it was something more than plastic and metal to them. Family and friends. Ford told me he was calling his girlfriend, to make sure she was still waiting for him back home. Hart had called his mother. When he walked back toward the church he was wiping his eyes.
I watched them from my perch on the bleachers, wondering about the lives they had come from. Would they understand why I stayed away from that phone?
"No one to call, drill sergeant," I said to McKinney, trying to be respectful, and wondering if I should have jumped up and saluted him when he got here. It was too late now.
He surveyed me with cold, dead eyes, and nodded. "You best find something else to do, then, instead of sulking on these bleachers. You might have come here alone, but you got a hundred brothers now. Make some friends. I've never had a suicide on my watch."
I snorted, and the drill sergeant raised an eyebrow at me. With only a look, he made me flush and scrambled for words, "Um, sorry, sir, I just… I wasn't sulking. I was just watching."
"Watching? Watching who? Watching them?" He motioned at the game going on behind him, without actually looking that way. "Would be a lot warmer if you joined in."
"I can see better from here."
"True, but just seeing isn't enough." McKinney motioned me off the bleachers, and when I was standing, he inspected my uniform again. "Not a stitch out of place."
"No, sir."
"No, drill sergeant," he corrected mechanically. "You get to know people a lot better when you get close to them." Having him so close was eerie, because his perfect, soldierly face was also devoid of most emotion, hard or soft, and it had its share of notches where skin had been lost and regrown. Up this close I could see wrinkles I had missed before, and a thin line trailing all the way from his forehead to his chin, where someone must have cut him.
I wanted to step away, to get out of the scrutiny of those black eyes, but his words and his tone made me curious. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, people are complicated. What they do and what they mean to do are different. I saw you watching them in processing, and watching them yesterday on the courses, and watching them today while you were running – too much watching. These boys aren't your enemies, Westen, they aren't out to get you. Whatever you came from, whatever made you so scared, you're not there anymore. So go join in."
His words hit me like a shovel to the face. His beady black eyes were looking right through me. Part of me was angry – I wasn't scared – and part of me felt far more vulnerable than before. Naked in the cold. Was I really that easy to read? Did I look like some scared lonely kid sitting all by himself on the bleachers?
I stammered, "But the teams-"
"Referee, for all I care. But get your ass off the sidelines. You're a smart kid, I can see that. Maybe a little quiet. But the best rangers I ever knew were quiet, too."
"Rangers?"
"Rangers lead the way," he said, almost to himself, in a voice that betrayed an uncharacteristic sadness. He grabbed my shoulder then, giving me a rough shove toward the court. "Get out there and learn something. I see you sulking again, you'll get a lot more than a talk."
There was no arguing with the man, even though the teams were full and even. McKinney had talked about rangers – army rangers, the best of the best – and the thought of going down that path sent a shiver through me. Was that what he saw in me? No. He had only known me two days. He was just trying to keep me from being the first suicide on his watch. He thought I was sulking, so he threw me a bone.
Still, the idea dug into me, a planted seed, and sprouted, blossoming over the rest of the afternoon. I took some career pamphlets back to my bunk that night and looked through them. I had never thought about what I would actually do in the army, only that I wanted to get away from home, and the army was the best option.
Engineering, electronics, navigation, bomb diffusion – and of course the rangers. When I had gone through processing, my personal score had given me a lot of options. Soon the paper tests we had taken that day would come back and make the future clearer.
Ford sat on the end of my bunk, munching on an apple he had pilfered from the mess hall, and looked through each pamphlet as I finished them.
He read slowly, meticulously, but persisted through every word. He took the ranger pamphlet and shook his head at it, "I heard they beat you in ranger school, and break your thumbs."
McKinney came in before I could ask why they would break your thumbs. He called for lights out and then shouted his mantra again, one last time for the night,
"Get over it, get through it, or WHAT-?"
In the barracks, a hundred sleepy voices responded in unison, "Let it destroy you."
He shut the lights off and the barracks went black. Ford had hidden his apple when he came in, but now he retrieved it and the sound of him biting into it made me cringe.
"Long day ahead tomorrow, I heard," Ford said, a talking shadow. He switched over to his bunk, laid out, and kept munching on his apple. "Something about gas."
"I hope they don't break our thumbs," I responded, turning away from him.
I pulled the wool blanket up to my nose and thought about home again.