From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [352]
But if these things were threats, so had Prewitt’s trial been a threat, and he had handled that. Without missing one single afternoon.
If the Government was getting ready for a war in July of 1941, that was not the same as being in one. That it was bound to come eventually did not mean it would be here tomorrow. It would take something pretty big, before the country would be willing to get in; and all the rifles in the world did not make a war-Army until you had talked the people into shooting them.
And that part, Milt Warden figured carefully, would come slow. And therefore the other changes, geared to that main wheel, would also be slow. The actual work required in the orderly room of G Company—th Infantry would not be so much. He could handle that part easy. If there was going to be any trouble at all, the heart of it would be O’Hayer and the supplyroom.
Well, Leva would just have to handle the supplyroom. Leva had handled it before, in as bad or worse than this, and while it might be years off yet it did something to a man to see the future run up to, and stop at, the blank wall of a war. It made him aware that he had better get all he was going to get out of his life now, and it made him want his afternoons.
Figuring it all like that, carefully foreseeing and apportioning everything, even the war whose inevitability he had already accepted three years ago, Milt Warden was not going to be caught off balance. He could still go on juggling his two lives, even if now he did have to do it on a tightrope. If Milt Warden had his back to the wall, at least Milt Warden knew it. And if there was one thing in the world that had never let Milt Warden down, it was Milt Warden.
What he could not foresee, of course, was that some stupid ass in his outfit would kill himself. And even if he could have foreseen it, it would not have helped. Court-martials he could handle, from memory blindfolded, court-martials he had done by the bushel. But a suicide was something else again, he had never had a suicide before, and the Army disliked suicides, especially now, at this time. It disliked them even worse than murders, and it required that an almost infinite number of reports be made out to prove the fault was not the Army’s.
In addition, there was all the usual death work: the personal effects that would have to be sorted and according to policy carefully screened for all pornography before they could be packaged up for shipment home, the letters to the parents he would have to write for Holmes, the equipment of the Deceased to be turned in and itemized so the shortages could be checked and subtracted from the Final Payroll that would be paid to the parents of the Deceased, the closing out of personnel files and the Service Record, the arranging of the details of the military funeral.
The very least the son of a bitch might have done, Milt Warden felt, was make it look like an accident by jumping off the Pali. At least then he would have been remembered with affection.
That afternoon, after the OD had been called in to make the corpse official, he managed to get away long enough to call her. He caught a Post cab over to the Kemoo Liquor Store that perched like a mushroom on the edge of the Wahiawa Reservoir across the highway from the gate, and, knowing its Chinese proprietor from his bachelor days, used his private phone in the back. He got her just as she was leaving for town to meet him.
Her first reaction was one of anger. Male operators were no less prone to gossip than the female ones, especially if they were EM and the subject was an Officer. The Signal Corps operators on the Post knew every number in the Officers’ Quarters by heart. They had always avoided using the phone as much as possible, and when they did they resorted to a sort of secret language in which