Last Man Out Read Free Page B

braced to attention. The drill sergeant’s footfalls were loud as he walked toward the Professor’s bunk. McGee scowled at him a moment, then went down the line to Tate’s bunk. He told the man who slept on the bunk over Tate to trade places with the Professor.
    Van Pelt was standing across from me. He pursed his lips and squinted his eyes, as if in pain, when he realized what McGee was doing. Tate was possibly the most ill-tempered individual in the world. Not only did people leave the shower room when he entered, they were reluctant to stand behind him in the chow line for fear they might accidentally bump into him and set him off. He was an animal. No one even tried to get along with him.
    After McGee left, Tate grabbed the Professor’s T-shirt and told him in words that were hard to understand but whose tone was expressively clear what would happen to him if he peed in the top bunk. One of the black men suggested that Tate kill the honky “right now” rather than later, because he was sure to piss in his sleep again.
    The last thing we heard that night after lights out was Tate’s muttered warning, “Okay, mudder fucker, wet da bed and I’ll knock ya fucking head off, ya hear?”
    The next morning the Professor was up and dressed before anyone else. He looked tired. Van Pelt guessed he had not slept at all that night. And he did not sleep the next night. The Professor went on sick call the following morning after breakfast. When we returned from training before lunch, his equipment was gone. We never saw him again.
    A couple days later we drew our rifles, the venerable M-14s. As we gathered outside the armory, I inspected my issue and tested its balance. It was an older rifle that had probably been handled by young recruits for years. Its stock had been restained and revarnished many times; the butt plate was scratched from hard landings in the manual of arms. The trigger mechanism was worn from a thousand training disassemblies and assemblies. The weapon looked like a tired old piece of rental equipment with no character, and I remembered the love affair I had with the Springfield at Oak Ridge Military Institute. The shoulder strap was old, tattered webbing, and I tightened it as much as I could so the strap would slap smartly against the stock when I handled it.
    McGee called us into ranks and talked about the value of the rifle, the main tool of our trade. He said that before we learned to shoot it, we had to learn to respect it and handle it correctly. Our training for the next couple of days would be in the manual of arms—moving the weapon from the ground at our side, as we stood at attention, to “port arms” and then to “right shoulder arms” and “left shoulder arms” and finally back to the ground, “order arms.” I stood in the middle of the platoon and thought about going through the manual of arms a hundred thousand times at Oak Ridge. McGee’s description was like explaining the fundamentals of walking to an experienced hiker.
    Taking a rifle from a man in the first squad, McGee demonstrated the movements. He gave himself the commands and brought the weapon up and then back to the ground again, with a bit too much waggle in his movement, I thought; he would have been reprimanded at Oak Ridge. Then he talked us through them slowly—count one, port arms; count two, right shoulder arms; count three, back to port arms; count four, left shoulder arms; count five, order arms—before giving the commands at regular speed.
    The rifle movement felt familiar, and I slapped the rifle strapas I brought it up and down. I also snapped the butt plate with my thumb as I went to right shoulder arms so that it twisted quickly into the crevice of my shoulder. I was careful to move only my arms and to keep the rest of my body absolutely still, as we had been taught on the drill team. With some pleasure, I noticed that the men in front of me were awkwardly moving their shoulders and heads as they lumbered