Interlude

1

KP

KP, or call it Kitchen Police, Kitchen Service, or whatever, but back in my day, some soldier did it. I was woken up one morning in my seventh week of training, it was Sunday and someone wanted to go to church, so guess who they picked for the kitchen job, me? She wasn’t supposed to have it, she’d had it three times before, and she was supposed to be done with it. But the army never works that way, they just keep putting straws on the camel until it falls off, or says something to stop it, and I wasn’t everyone’s favorite soldier, so I just accepted it, I was close to moving on to the next stage, advanced training in Alabama, so I figured another day at KP wouldn’t hurt. However, at that time I did not know where my next destination would be. I didn’t even know if they were going to move me, I mean, they could have arranged for me to stay a while if they hated me so much, you know, tormented me with another eight weeks of this boy scout training. as I had felt it to be. They had, I heard, but they wouldn’t do it to me. Although I’m getting ahead of myself, it’s of no consequence to the story here and beyond.

“Soldier, get up, you have KP!” said the young sergeant, my drill sergeant, at 4:00 AM, with a smile on his face. He was a vulture, “I’ve had it three times before!” Said.

“You have ten minutes… no more!” she added her to the ugly face of hers. The Sergeant Major stood outside, waited to see if I was coming, and I was, ran back and forth…and was on his way in ten minutes flat.

It was as if, by staying in the platoon, I had shot a high explosive inside the sergeant’s head, I think he would have liked me to have gone AWOL, gone to Canada to have fun. As I walked outside, towards the dirt road in front of the barracks, and then down the dirt road, and crossed the black asphalt road, which went in the opposite direction, towards the Dining Hall, he looked a little sad, I was turning out to be a soldier indeed, and he wasn’t sure if he liked that.

It was a long day, or it would be. First it was the plates, then the pots and pans, and then the potatoes, yeah, I hated making the potatoes, not because it was hard, nothing in the military is that hard, it was boring, and they had an automatic potato peeler, right? behind me, looking at my butt, as I sat on the back steps of the dining room, peeling potatoes the old-fashioned way, with a knife, slowly, and a large pot for the potato skins and another for the potatoes. . I think it was based on not wanting us to have anything to do, rather than nothing to do and the automatic peeler would just get the job done faster and free up time. Oh well, it was all part of the show, I told myself. And it gave me time to think about many things.

(I thought of Maria Garcia, a young woman I was dating who I had met over Christmas vacation, back in St. Paul (last December). She had a son, we drank a lot together, and she always seemed to be inviting family, friends, people in general to their house, Mexican thing I think, or Spanish thing, the more company the better, as far as me being the gringo, I was not used to this, and I suppose that if less than a family life in the sense that had so many people around, more of a loner. But it was nice to meet everyone. lover. And I never told her I was in the army, and on my last day off, I just left, that was it, I woke up one morning, I had my orders to leave, and I left, I didn’t even make a phone call., if I had, I wouldn’t have known what to say anyway. I’d see her about two years later, I’d find myself in St. Paul, at a grocery store , and I would ask myself: “What happened to you? even crazy, just worried I replied, “I’m really sorry, I was on my way to Vietnam, to war, and I thought, if I told you, it would just get in the way.” Well, there was some truth to that, I had gone from Fort Bragg, to advanced training in Alabama, and to West Germany, before I went to Vietnam, I took all of that out of the picture, erased it, you could say, and just added Vietnam and the war.

“Oh my God,” she said, with a serious look.

“How are you now?” I asked. And she assured me that she was fine. Obviously, living with someone, and so, we parted good friends.

In my three hundred and forty-fourth potato, I got to thinking about Sergeant Wolf, a black sergeant, drill sergeant. How he smoked, he solemnly smoked those cigarettes, to the end. He was there among the other Drill Sergeants often, talking, he was from ‘C’ platoon, I think he liked me, because he made him look good and our Sergeants bad; they always had bets, betting on this and that: saying that there platoon was better, and I think my drill sergeants lost a lot of bets. He had a skinny neck, almost nothing, and a head of absurd size; a body hunched over like a monkey, and hands that almost touched the ground when he walked. He was an instructor of Judo and Karate; He could have taught the men better, but for the time we had, he was good enough. I think sometimes his prerogative was to show me better, but whatever he showed, or demonstrated, I could do better, he had horrible agility, small dull eyes, clean shaven. He seemed like he darted here and there, like a spider, stupidly, I often found myself looking at him. I wouldn’t miss it, I told myself.

Yes, in fact, many thoughts went through my mind this day, this twelve hour day: I remembered the three generals, the second or third day I had been in training camp, Smiley, Bruce and I were sitting in the area clothing supply waiting to measure us up for our green uniforms, and here come three generals, I really didn’t know a general from a captain, but one had three stars on his shoulders. “How do they treat you soldier?” he asked me, I didn’t get up and just said, “Okay, okay, I guess”, he smiled and said something else, and I never said hello or even snapped to attention, that was an upset to my young man. drill sergeant, but he got over it, after warning me, if it happened again, he would be severely reprimanded; the general saw that the sergeant was upset, and told him in so many ways: give him a break.

The other thing that came to mind in my reverie was the appearance of the old sergeant, my drill sergeant, when I say old, I don’t really mean old, old, but for a drill sergeant, old: he had a square jaw, like me, but he was a few inches taller, not much, a rough-looking face, like he’d been around for a while, small eyes, half-closed all the time, or apparently. Sometimes he was vigorous and sometimes a cold and pathetic look gravitated from his face to his forehead. He was what many called a red neck, maybe thirty-seven, but he was a vulture nonetheless.)

two

army life

At times I felt like I was the secondary focus of the group of drill sergeants, one of the soldiers had been beaten up for not adjusting and being smart with them, which I never really did, I mean I never verbally disrespected them. He just wasn’t afraid of them, and they knew it. Besides, I guess I was under surveillance, waiting for them to do it to me or try to. And they knew I was waiting, and I think my eyes warned them, be careful, you’re treading on uncharted ground, and someone besides me will also get hurt. The ones I took to be men of honour, among our leaders, disappointed me a little, most were fine, but some were not. They had a job to do, I know, and that’s how I felt at the time: all haggard and hard-eyed, with grim jobs, and often drunk before the lights went out for us. The drill sergeant major, my drill sergeant couldn’t speak for two weeks, laryngitis (inflammation of the larynx). I’m not sure why I thought this was funny, but he couldn’t scream like he would have liked.

By the end of the day, I had some aches and pains and some numbness, my muscles were dancing and my nerves were twitching. Smiley passed by once and said, “See you at the brewery tonight…!” And Bruce and Allen would be with him. The two good southern boys, as they called themselves. Allen was a large figure of a man, bespectacled and intelligent. I nodded ‘yes’ and kept peeling those potatoes and cutting them.