From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [260]
Chief Choate was lying placidly on his back in his puptent among the messy blankets, his bulk seeming to bulge the sides, reading a comic book inside his mosquito bar by the light of a candle stuck to his helmet. The Chief bunked by himself, there was hardly room for Choate, let alone a partner, in a regulation shelter tent; and when he went in the field, which was seldom, he packed two shelterhalves instead of one, ever since the time when Leva the supply clerk had had to bunk with him once.
“Reedy said to tell you to send a man around if the lootenant comes.”
“This aint my relief,” the Chief protested. “I aint on duty.”
“I’m only tellin you what I was told to tell you.”
“That lazy son of a bitch,” the Chief said mildly, letting the book fall open like a postage stamp upon his chest. He stretched. “Build a fahr under him and he would holler for somebody to come put it out. Okay,” he said, “I’ll fix it,” and went back absorbedly into the adventures of Dick Tracy.
Friday was a full hundred and fifty yards down along the big loose curve of the double apron, through the stumbling root-tripping darkness. He was talking across the wire to the Air Corps night sentry from the Field junk yard across the road. Down here, where the wire cut back sharply from the gravel road to the flank that rested on one of the brackish ponds that became the swamp below where the mosquitoes bred, they were worse than fierce. They were fierce back at the bivouac.
“What the hell are you doing way off down here?” Prew said as he came up, slapping at the whirling spinning cutting knives that hovered thirstily around his ears.
“Me and this guy arguing the Army,” Friday grinned.
“Well you dont have to stand in this goddamned swamp to do it, do you? God damn these mosquitoes!” They hung in kaleidoscope-shifting phantom clouds, frenzied buzzsaws never quite in his ears, wheeling and darting and as untouchable as fighting Indians on horseback.
“He got to stay close. His post is right over there,” Friday nodded at the road. He grinned. “He says the Air Corps is the worst and I claim the Infantry’s the worst. What do you think?”
“They none of them worth a damn,” Prew said, slapping at mosquitoes. “You ask me.”
“You dont mean that!” the Air Corps man said in a shocked, startled voice.
“I don’t?” Prew said, startled himself. “Why dont I?”
“I was only kidding,” Friday explained.
“Because—” the Air Corps man began.
“This is my buddy Prewitt,” Friday grinned at him, “that I was telling you about.”
“Oh,” the Air Corps man said. “Thats different. I didn’t know.”
“You dont want to pay any attention to what he says,” Friday grinned. “He’s a thirdy year man in the Infantry. He loves it. He can tell you all you want to know about it.”
“Swell,” the Air Corps man said eagerly; he stepped up and put his hand formally across the fence. “Sure glad to know you, Prewitt. My name is Slade.”
“All he wants to know about what?” Prew said, taking the hand.
“He wants to transfer to the Infantry,” Friday said.
“To the Infantry!”
“Yeah. To the Compny. Our Compny.”
“Not our Compny! What the hell for?”
“What for!” the Air Corps man Slade said excitedly. “Because I joined the Army to be a soldier, not a goddam gardener, thats why.”
Prew looked at him closer. “Most the guys I know are trying to get into the Air Corps.”
“Well, if they do they’ll sure regret it,” Slade said, waving indifferently at the swooping hordes around his head. “Unless they like being gardeners, that is.”
“Gardeners?” Prew said. “I thought everybody in the Air Corps went to a School.”
“Ha,” Slade said. “Sure. Join the Air Corps and learn a trade. Thats what my dad thought.”
“Your dad,” Prew said.
“Yes, when he got me to enlist in the Air Corps.”
“Oh,” Prew said.
“If I’d had any sense I’d have enlisted in the Infantry right then, like I wanted to do in the first place.”
“I told him you’d know how,” Friday said.
“How what?”
“How to go about transferring to the Compny.”
“Oh,” Prew said. “Sure. All you have to do is go up to Schofield and see the Compny Commander after we get back