Whistle Read Free Page A

do anything they wanted for the rest of the day. Winch watched them, and did not move. He arbitrarily had decided he was not going to take part. Nor talk about it.
    “Aint you coming, Winch?” one of them asked.
    “No.”
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake, come on,” one growled. “It’s home.”
    “No!”
    Winch swiveled his head toward them. He did not really know which one had spoken. They were all strangers anyhow. He flashed a freakish kind of cannibal’s flesh-hungry grin at them. “I’ve seen it.”
    “Not like this time,” one said, and gestured at his other arm encased in plaster, “not like this time.” The plaster went up to and around the shoulder and held the arm out at right angles above an aluminum frame. The uncovered hand looked purple.
    “Oh, leave him be,” one said. “You know how he is. You know what he’s like. He’s a goofy.”
    They traipsed out, dragging themselves, two of them leg-wounded and hobbling, all four of them moving slowly with the caution of damaged men. A goofy. It was the kind of reputation he had tried to establish with them. It was the kind of reputation he had tried for years to establish everywhere.
    Them gone, he stretched out in his berth and, alone, stared up at the smooth underside of the berth above. He had no desire to go on deck and look at the American coastline.
    Home. Home, they’d said. It did not mean anything to him. Could it really mean something to them?
    We all of us feel the same way at some point, he told himself. All of us who knew anything. Home could get to be very unreal. Besides, it didn’t seem fair, to us. All of us being so lucky. Getting to lose a leg or an arm or an eye and come back home out of the fire to all the bars and pussy. While the others, the healthy ones, had to stay out there and try to live and breathe in the smoke.
    Winch felt for his worn musette bag and unfastened the catches and pulled out a bottle of Scotch and brought it up to him. He told himself not to drink from it. He told himself he was not allowed. Then he uncapped it, and took a long, hot double swallow.
    Well, so long out there, you! Toast, you fuckers!
    He dipped the neck of the bottle in salute of his toast. If booze was a poison, a particular poison for him now, it was sure one hell of a marvelous poison.
    This thing of reputations. It was peculiar. People were always talking about command presence. They said, either someone had command presence, or he did not have it. They said, if you did not have command presence, you could not learn it. A lot of bullshit.
    A new word for it, which was really a very old word for it, was beginning to be popular again after five hundred years. An old Church word out of the Middle Ages, charisma. You either had charisma or you didn’t, and if you had it you could do anything you wanted, demand anything, and people would follow you and obey you.
    What people did not understand about command presence was that it did not come from the inside but was imposed upon some object person, from the outside, by the followers themselves. They wanted something to look up to. They wanted someone to tell them what to do. Command presence was created by the eyes of the commanded. A land of massive human conspiracy. Maybe it also existed in the eyes of foolish commanders. But no smart commander believed it. He merely utilized it. Hadn’t he been doing it himself for years?
    Winch sighed and put one hand behind his head. Winch had been one of the charisma people, one of the “stars” of his Division for years. So much so that he was known in other Divisions, across the Army. What he had learned from it was that all celebrities were alike. They were a secret club of thieves. They recognized each other on sight, and they never attacked each other in any depth. The club’s secret password was a look of shrewdness in the eyes with you, a look of complicity. They never talked about charisma. What Winch had learned from charisma people, from being