In Pharaoh's Army by Tobias Wolff Read Free Book Online Page A

bulked up for bumping and bashing, swayed like carcasses under their white-knuckled hands. Their necks turned red, their arms quivered, they grunted piteously as they tried to raise their chins to the bar. They managed to pull themselves up once or twice and then just hung there, sweating and swearing. Now and then they kicked feebly. Their pants slipped down, exposing pimply white butts. Those of us who’d already done our pull-ups gathered around to watch them, under the pretense of boosting their morale (“Come on, Moose! You can do it! One more, Moose! One more for the platoon!”) but really to enjoy their misery, and perhaps to reflect, as I did, on the sometimes perfect justice turned out by fortune’s wheel.
    Instead of growing weaker through the long days I felt myself taking on strength. Part of this strength came from contempt for weakness. Before now I’d always felt sorry for people who had trouble making the grade. But here a soft heart was an insupportable luxury, and I learned that lesson in smart time.
    We had a boy named Sands in our squad, one of several recruits from rural Georgia. He had a keen, determined look about him that he used to good advantage for a couple of weeks, but it wasn’t enough to get him by. He was always lagging behind somewhere.Last to get up. Last to formation. Last to finish eating. Our drill sergeant was from Brooklyn, and he came down hard on this cracker who didn’t take his army seriously.
    Sands seemed not to care. He was genial and sunny even in the face of hostility, which I took to be a sign of grit. I liked him and tried to help. When he fell out on runs I hung back with him a few times to carry his rifle and urge him on. But I began to realize that he wasn’t really trying to keep up. When a man is on his last legs you can hear it in the tearing hoarseness of every breath. It’s there in his rolling eyes, in his spastically jerking hands, in the way he keeps himself going by falling forward and making his feet hurry to stay under him. But Sands grinned at me and wagged his head comically:
Jeez Louise, where’s the fire?
He wasn’t in pain. He was coasting. It came as a surprise to me that Sands would let someone else pull his weight before he was all used up.
    There were others like him. I learned to spot them, and to stay clear of them, and finally to mark my progress by their humiliations. It was a satisfaction that took some getting used to, because I was soft and because it contradicted my values, or what I’d thought my values to be. Every man my brother: that was the idea, if you could call it an idea. It was more a kind of attitude that I’d picked up, without struggle or decision, from the movies I saw, the books I read. I’d paid nothing for it and didn’t know what it cost.
    It cost too much. If every man was my brother we’d have to hold our lovefest some other time. I let go of that notion, and the harshness that took its place gave me a certain power. I was recognized as having“command presence”—arrogance, an erect posture, a loud, barky voice. They gave me an armband with sergeant’s stripes and put me in charge of the other recruits in my platoon. It was like being a trusty.
    I began to think I could do anything. At the end of boot camp I volunteered for the airborne. They trained me as a radio operator, then sent me on to jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia. When I arrived, my company was marched onto the parade ground in a cold rain and drilled and dropped for push-ups over the course of the evening until we were covered with mud and hardly able to stand, at which time they sent us back inside and ordered us to be ready for inspection in thirty minutes. We thought we were, but they didn’t agree. They dumped our footlockers onto the floor, knocked our wall lockers down, tore up our bunks, and ordered us outside again for another motivational seminar. This went on all night. Toward morning, wet, filthy, weaving on my feet as two drill