From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [257]
He managed to get away in the confusion of the packing and slip over to Choy’s to the pay phone and call her reversing the charges. Alma was not there, but Georgette took the call and said she would give her the message and wished him luck in the field. He told her two weeks was not so long. He did not know then of course that it would be longer than two weeks, much longer than two weeks, three months in the Stockade longer than two weeks. If he had he would probably have sent Alma a different message, but he thought he had all that taken care of. He thought he could get along with The Treatment almost indefinitely, now that he had this sanctuary down town. And he could have. As it happened, The Treatment had nothing at all to do with it. As The Warden would have said, it was just about his speed, what happened. Irony pursued him, or he pursued it.
The long string of big two and a half ton trucks from the motor pool pulled lumberingly rumblingly into the quad and parked in front of the 2nd Battalion, and there was a final great bustle of crablike confusion on the floor as everybody unmade full field packs to stick in a Handy oiler or a bore brush they had forgotten and then rolled full field packs again. Wall lockers banged tinnily as they got into the field uniform of OD wool shirt open at the neck and CKC slacks stuffed into leggins, and the little go-to-hell caps with the robin’s-egg-blue piping of the Infantry that you could stuff in your pocket when you had to wear the soup plate helmet. They swarmed downstairs and fell in and were counted off and assigned to trucks and then clambered up onto the tailgates and the tailgates were shut and latched behind them and the big trucks moved out belching exhaustively. That was the kind of soldiering Prewitt liked.
Chapter 30
IT WAS WHILE THEY were at Hickam Field on this problem that they wrote the Re-enlistment Blues.
It was to be the original, the real, the one and only, Army blues; when they got it written. They had talked about it a long time. They had never done it. Probably they never would have. But with Bloom gone to NCO School and Maggio in the Stockade and no chance for Prew to go to Maunalani Heights, he and Anderson and Friday Clark suddenly found themselves thrown back together for a little while with nothing else to do. The Re-enlistment Blues came out of that.
They had moved in and made their bivouac at the foot of an old abandoned railroad embankment that jutted up nudely out of the scrubby liana and keawe jungle a couple of hundred yards inside the fence. It was on the Field side, hidden from the Pearl Harbor-Hickam Highway, in a low grove in the tangle where the ground was open and thick-dusty smooth as if once occupied by feeding cattle, under the gnarled close-fitting branches that had kept the undergrowth from growing back and provided cover. Then they had strung three hundred yards of double apron wire and laid out a chain of staggered interlocking posts founded on the Hickam Main Gate to the north, and they were home. It was a fine place except for the mosquitoes. They settled into the regulated ebb and flow of two hours on and four hours off around the clock.
Only two-thirds of the Company was here. The other third was over on Kamehameha Highway five miles east, guarding an electric substation from sabotage as the two-thirds here were guarding planes from sabotage. It was strictly a sabotage problem. Over there they were even using ready-rolled accordion wire instead of double apron. The boxing squad had stayed in Schofield, to train for Company Smokers.
Capt Holmes had set up his CP over there, where the mosquitoes were not so bad. Stark set up his kitchen here, where the most men were. Stark had been willing to let Capt Holmes have two cooks and one of his field stoves, if he would furnish his own KPs, but that had been as far as Stark would budge. It worked out fine, for the men on post at Hickam. They did not mind having the mosquitoes. Stark always had one cook or KP up all night with hot coffee and