Authors: Bruce Bethke
of calisthenics. You didn’t want to be the last one done with laps, ‘cause
that meant two extra. You didn’t want to look lazy during calisthenics,
‘cause that meant ten minutes extra. And you didn’t want to do the ten
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minutes, because by the time you got done the mess hall’d be down to
oatmeal and stewed prunes. That was one lesson I learned
real
fast.
After a breakfast two notches below the Buddy’s All-Nite Burgers
$1.99 Special (now I know why they call it a
mess
hall), we’d trot back
outside for an hour or so of close-order drill, followed by a run through
the obstacle course. Drill was the only time we mixed with the other
serials: There were three groups that’d started in the weeks before us and
one that started the week after us, but we never saw them much ‘cept for
the hour each morning we spent marching around the quad and yelling at
each other. Deathless stuff, like, “Lift your heads and hold them high!
Two-Oh-Three is passing by!” Some of the jarheads got real into it,
anyway.
Then we’d hit the obstacle course, and if everybody in the unit
finished up quick enough we’d get a special treat: Free time on the firing
range.
It took me three days to decide that I hated the firing range. For
starters, the guns all were these stubby little single shot bolt-action
Stevens .22s about accurate enough to hit the long side of a bus—if the
bus wasn’t moving, and if you were
real
close. There were only ten
guns, meaning it was always a race to see who got to them first, and they
kept the guns locked up in this muzzle-ring-and-chain harness thing. So
you couldn’t help but point them downrange, but this also meant you
had to lie on your belly in the dirt to use them.
Then, to make things more nuisant, they gave you just ten rounds at
a time, and you had to give up your gun, get back in line, and return your
fired brass before you could get any more. Scott came up with the idea
that they were being awful penny-ante about recycling, until the day our
unit finished practice and came up two rounds short.
Damn, you’d have thought somebody’d copped the Queen Nancy
jewels! Suddenly the place was swarming with Grade Fours and we had
to form up and snap to for instant inspection. The detex crew came in
and started working us over one by one, until Lawrence Borec stepped
forward, did the admit, and handed over the two rounds. That’s when I
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realized, sudden, that all the hassle was ‘cause they were
afraid
we’d
smuggle live ammunition off the range.
Borec was lucky. Since he’d confessed, voluntary, he only had to
dig a new latrine.
Anyway, the true/true reason I got to hate the firing range was that
that was where I got my first solid confirm on how the cliques were
forming up. One of the junior jarheads got hung up on the obstacle
course climbing wall one day, and two others helped him over, and
that’s how we found out that Payne didn’t mind if we helped each other
through the course. After that, the jarheads started helping everybody,
because of course the faster we got through the obstacle course, the more
time they got to spend on the firing range fondling guns.
But once we got to the firing range, they were all ice and brick walls
again. A couple times in the ammo line I wound up next to Deke Luger,
and I’d smile, nod, give him a little half-wave, anything to try and get an
acknowledge out of him. No matter what I did, though, he’d just act like
I was invisible. So one morning I pushed myself right in his face and
demanded to know the secret handshake.
All he said was, “There’s this thing called status, y’know?
You
are
an Involuntary.”
Fine. I never did get step one of my escape plan figured out, but I
did grow my own clique: Scott the McPunk, Piggy Jankowicz, and
Lindsey Alistair Schmidt-Boulé, who preferred to be called Mister Style
(understandable, I think). Granted, Scott was no Rayno, and Jankowicz
and Mr. Style weren’t exactly cyberpunk material. And taken together
we weren’t so proud as the Jarheads, tough as the Slammers, or devious
as the Little Hitlers.
But between the four of us we had more
brains
than the whole rest
of the camp put together, and if his highness Mister Douglas Kemuel
Luger wanted to be stone cold, he could go putz himself. Far as I was
concerned, they could
all
get together in a big circle and putz each other,
sequential.
In ten weeks, four days, and seven hours I was gonna be out of there.
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#
After lunch we’d spend a few hours pretending The Academy was a
school—but a school for Class D morons. No DynaBooks, no reports, no
quizzes: They’d just herd us into a big room and let some Instructor
drone at us for two hours. (Yeah, Instructor with a capital I. They didn’t
have names, just initials. The SI, the DI, the EIEIO ... Got so that if they
introduced somebody new and his title ended in I, we instant hated him.)
Eventually the
n
I would bore himself to sleep and the Grade Fours’d
splinter us into small groups to spend another hour or two talking about
it, whatever
it
was. Hard to talk intelligent when you don’t have a
chance to prep for the subject. One day we might be talking about
agriculture, the next day it might be economics, the day after we might
hit on some kind of -ology. But way too much of the time it was moldy
old history, and we burned an awful lot of hours talking about Greeks,
Persians, Hittites, Hoplites, Sodomites, Bakelites, Lavalites, Budlites—
And basically, about a lot of naked guys who ran around with bronze
swords trying to give each other vasectomies to the max. One day I got
into a truly stupid argument with Lawrence Borec ‘cause he thought it
was real cool the way the Spartans fought to the last man at
Thermopylae, and I thought it just proved that they were too stupid to
notice that the Athenians had bugged out and left them holding the bag.
Just when it looked like Borec was going to punch my lights out (typical
Class D Moron response to taking the dumb side in an argument), the
proctors interrupted and sent me off to a different group, where I stood
around for a few minutes waiting for someone to notice me and update
me on the discussing.
Nobody did. That’s when the neat idea popped off the stack. I took a
few more days to test it, discreet, and then took it to heart as a basic
given of this weird pseudoschool:
They didn’t keep records
.
They didn’t call roll, not that there was anyplace else to be. They
didn’t track which discussion group you went with, or what you said.
They didn’t notice if you never said anything at all!
Even when I had
Roid Rogers for proctor, all my tensing up was wasted ‘cause he acted
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like I was near invisible. One bald 13-year-old looks the same as the
next, I guess, and in the Von Schlager scheme of things short-timers
were hardly worth the work of harassing.
Once I flagged this, I settled in for a nice, comfty coast. When I
could, I did group with Scott, Piggy, and Mr. Style, and we cranked out
some
great
discussion. Sometimes it even had something to do with the
lecture.
When I couldn’t link with my clique, I just kept my mouth shut,
nodded and smiled a lot, and chanted my mantra:
Nine more weeks to
go. Only nine more weeks.
Nine weeks, and counting.
#
We started the war games the last week in June. One hot Monday
Payne came marching into discussion, announced that the games had
started, and read off the names of six generals: Four jarheads (one being
Deke Luger), Lawrence Borec, and my man Scott. By peculiar
coincidence, these were the same six guys who did most of the talking in
discussion. Sudden, I got this terrible nasty feeling that maybe the
proctors
did
notice who said what. Maybe they noticed
everything
.
I cut off that line of think. They’d passed out little blue rule books to
everybody, and on his way out the door Payne had casual mentioned that
we had two days to memorize the rule book and prep for the first battle.
That meant I’d better read the rule book thorough.
Scott was definitely no Rayno. If my clique was stuck with him for a
general, we were already neck deep in the latrine.
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Chapter 0/D
Cornwallis, Rommel, Yamashita: All your really great military
leaders knew how to lose with dignity. Scott Nordstrom, on the other
hand, screamed out “Shit!”, pounded half the little lead soldiers of the
Spartan army down deep into the sand, and went stomping away from
the game table cussing a blue streak.
“Piss!” He kicked the creaky wood door open, flooding the shack
with bright Friday afternoon sunlight, then stormed outside and kicked
something that sounded like a garbage can. “Ow! Bunch of
dweebs!
”
Piggy was in vegetable mode again, staring at the rafters, and Stig,
the Butthole Skinhead that Payne assigned to our army (yeah, each army
got either a Little Hitler, a Slammer, or a Butthole Skinhead; the
generals were just
thrilled
about that, let me tell you)—Stig was
nowhere to be found, so I caught Mr. Style’s attention and pointed to the
game table. “You wanna cover the post mortem for me? I’m gonna look
after Fearless Leader.” Mr. Style gave me a nod and started moving
towards the proctors. I jumped down from the bleachers and followed
Scott out the door.
It wasn’t hard to figure out. Even Lawrence Borec—excuse me,
General Larius, of the Macedonian Mercenaries—could have flagged the
reason why Scott was acting like a three-year-old. In the first battle, on
Wednesday, the ace jarhead who generaled the Spartans had spent most
of his time marching his soldiers around the 8- by 8-foot sand table,
trying to corner Deke Luger’s Athenians. It took him about an hour to
force the battle; it probably wouldn’t have taken him so long but Scott
let our Theban army get in the way and the Spartans had to waste almost
ten minutes exterminating us.
Scott took the loss pretty bad, ‘specially since the proctors spent the
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rest of Wednesday afternoon pointing out everything he’d done wrong
and the Spartans were such an insufferable bunch of smug bastards in
the bunkhouse all Wednesday night. One of the surviving vidiots made
the mistake of trying to go Tommy on them; a guy wearing vidshades
and earcorks is
incredibly
vulnerable, ‘specially to a bunch of Spartans
who are really getting into the role play. Poor guy wound up dancing