I don’t remember if I ever told you about my time in boot with this guy named Regis. Big mean tatted-up black guy who claimed he’d spent two years in prison for beating his brother to a pulp over a slice of pie or some such thing. Everybody in the barracks was scared to death of him. During the day he was all “Yes, Drill Sergeant! No, Drill Sergeant!” Always crushing every exercise and physical test, even marksmanship. So he was the platoon’s golden boy, you know? From Day One the DIs were all but drooling over him. So of course they made him Squad Leader.
But he was different in the barracks at night. With no NCOs watching us every second, he was like some kind of marauding beast. I saw him put guys in a headlock until their eyes rolled up in their heads. The man was a terror, just like every clichéd character in every boot camp movie ever made. I guess his kind became a cliché because it’s the truth. There’s always one of them when you throw a bunch of guys together. I mean I’ve seen it before, though never to the extent of Regis. It was like living with a psycho in our midst. You never knew what he was going to do or who he’d do it to. You only prayed it wouldn’t be you. That first week he probably knocked every one of us on our asses at least once, and always for something trivial, just because he felt like it.
The worst of it was what he did to a guy named Stewart. And Stewart wasn’t a little guy either. He was a solid six feet tall, but kind of an egghead, I guess, sort of awkward and stiff, with a confused look in his eyes behind those ugly birth-control glasses the Army gives out. He was always talking about Harry Potter and stuff like that, things like alchemy and the philosopher’s stone and subjects most of us didn’t understand and didn’t care to. Personally I never minded listening to him, because I was always ready to learn things I didn’t know anything about, but sometimes even I had to call information overload and put him on hold awhile.
What Stewart was doing in the Army, I have no idea. All we could figure is he was such a social misfit that his old man must have sent him away to get toughened up. Thing is, I doubt his old man ever envisioned somebody like Regis as a bunkmate.
The abuse started maybe the third, fourth night of Red Phase. Not all of us heard it happening, but enough that that next day a bunch of us were comparing notes first chance we got. Not long after lights out Regis climbed into Stewart’s bunk with him. What woke me was the crack of a slap. Stewart’s bunk was only two away from mine, so that slap yanked me out of a deep sleep and had me sitting up and listening, trying to figure out what was going on. There was a lot of whispering and whimpering then, Regis’ deep voice and Stewart’s higher, terrified one.
What happened after that was pretty clear, what with Stewart gagging and whimpering and Regis’ muttered threats.
The rest of us kept telling each other we needed to do something about it. I mean there were eighteen of us and only one Regis. But all we did was talk and whisper like a bunch of schoolgirls. Nobody wanted Regis turning on him instead.
This went on two or three nights a week. Regis must have memorized the Fire Guards’ routine, because he was fast and slick and was always back in his own bunk when necessary. We all started avoiding both of them as much as possible, Stewart as well as Regis. That’s something I could never figure out. It was almost like we blamed Stewart too, or were terrified of catching his bad luck. Or maybe we were just too afraid to be kind to him. I think about it now and I just want to throw up, that’s how disgusted with myself I still am.
The only thing the rest of us did was agree to give Regis the lowest rating on evals. And we put the reason for the rating in the comment section. I don’t know exactly how many of us actually did it, but enough that the DI and platoon sergeant interviewed both Regis and Stewart the next day. Neither of them even came back to clean out their lockers, not until the rest of us were out on the firing range.
After that the DI was tougher than ever on us. Like we were responsible for it happening in the first place, which I guess maybe we were. By graduation the rumor was going around that Regis had been transferred to another platoon, but Stewart got sent home on a medical discharge, though we all knew that was BS. I guess the Army wasn’t willing to get rid of a killing machine with as much potential as Regis. Figured they’d just redirect his energies to more effective mayhem. The guy’s probably an LT by now.
For some reason I feel like I needed you to know about this. Don’t ask me why. You always seemed to like me for some reason, which I could never understand, a bright guy like you. Anyway, now you know. I never deserved a minute of your friendship.
I wonder what ever happened to Stewart. I could probably find out, but I’m sort of afraid to go looking. Once a coward, always a coward.
You always told us every time something bad happened, whether to us or by us, you always told us to not think about it. Try not to think about it, you said. But you thought about it, Spence. I know you did. The way I’d catch you looking at us sometimes, that sadness in your eyes like you knew something we didn’t. Thing is, we knew it too. Shame. Grief. Fear. Disgust. There wasn’t one of us over there who didn’t know it and feel it every single day.
Thing is, they shave our heads and dress us in the same clothes and try to make us all look alike—hood rats and farm boys and poor white trash and everything else we were before they threw us all together. Then they drill us and teach us to shoot and fight and they do their damnedest to make us despise the enemy. They program us like machines so we’ll use our weapons like the voice for our fear and anger and hatred, the only voice they let us have. The only one that will get us a word or two of congratulations from the company commander.
But deep down we’re all still men. Boys, really. Deep down we all miss our homes and families and just want to get back to them in one piece. We all just want to feel loved and safe again, want to sit at the table with people glad to be with us, people who don’t hate us because of the uniforms we wear, people who don’t want to kill us.
And when some of us do come back in one piece, and we take off the uniforms and let our hair grow out, and we try to look like we were never in those places and never did what we know we did, deep down there’s a poison in our blood that will never go away. More than ever now we just want to be loved and safe but there’s always a dirtiness inside us. It won’t wash out and the more we try to not think about it, we only think about it more.
That’s what they really did to us, Spence. Every single one of us. Every war they’ve ever made us fight. They start by shaving our heads, but it’s our souls they destroy.