From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [259]
“Lets hurry it up now. Them men on post is waitin to come in. Two hours from now you guys be waitin to come in, and bitchin like hell if you relief’s a minute late, so get a move on now and lets get it over with.”
And then filling the cup one more time to carry with him and an extra sandwich, wrapping it in the waxed paper Stark insisted the cooks leave out for them (which normal mess sergeants also never furnished), buttoning it down in the pocket of the OD shirt warm against the chest, to leave the disgusted sleepy cook who believed fervently that they were being coddled, The Chief staying sensibly in the kitchen with the coffee, to climb the steep path behind the cook tent to the top of the embankment.
Maybe a little of the Re-enlistment Blues also came out of that.
And he would stand, after the relief was made, and from the suspended animation that is guard duty in the field at night he would watch the headlights passing on the highway beyond the fence to turn in at the brightly lighted Main Gate to the north, slow for the Air Corps’ guards inspection, and then move off toward the concentration of cloud-reflected light that was Hickam Field, a mile to the west inside. And he would watch them then, feeling the sleepiness run down out of him like water, with the rapt absorption of a cougar or a deer or bear standing on a mountainside at night studying with wonder the brilliant moving trains that brought the hunters for the opening of the season without realizing their significance, him watching, not as a man, but as an unseparated part of nature and the intuitive night itself, as if two hours alone in the silence of it had finally driven him, forced him, back, out of himself and into the great awareness he had convinced himself he did not believe in any more.
And he could see then, at those times momentarily, how the deer and other game might also love the hunters who would kill them, just as he could see then that the hunters loved the game they tried so hard to kill, far more than any SPCA humane society would ever love it. And he would not, if he could, have had it any other way. Because he was a soldier, and because he could see it all then, in the easily shattered crystal clarity of the thin glass goblet of the silence that is guard duty in the field at night the last half hour before you are relieved.
Maybe the Re-enlistment Blues also came out of that.
He heard his relief, before he saw him, coming down the top of the embankment. Then Readall Treadwell hove into view, following his own footfalls into life, looking like a walking Woolworth’s under full equipment and slapping at mosquitoes. “Friday said to tell you he be down along the bob wire to the south,” Readall Treadwell said.
“What the hells he doin way down there?”
“How the hell should I know? I’m just tellin you what he tole me.”
“Okay,” he grinned. He cleared his throat. He always cleared his throat. After two hours on post he always felt his vocal cords might not work. “I must of woke him up when I came on,” he said.
“Yeah? Too goddam bad. Has the goddam lieutenant been around yet?”
“Nope, not yet.” He would get Friday and they would get the guitar and come up and wait for Andy.
“Then I’ll catch him sure,” Readall Treadwell said bitterly. “That son of a bitch never comes around after eleven. No sleep again tonight.”
“Yeah? Too goddam bad,” Prew grinned. “You can always go down and talk to one of the other posts and sneak a cigaret.”
“Piss on that noise,” Readall Treadwell said. “Sleep is what I need. And sleep is what I never get. You tell Big Chief to send a man around when he sees the truck,” Reedy called after him, “if he wants this post to be awake.