From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [424]
A Barco drill has no trigger like an air hammer and it is twice as heavy because its one-cylinder gasoline engine is built right onto the barrel. When they picked it up to move it to a new spot, they had to pick up the whole vibrating bucking mass, bracing it against a thigh to even hold it, because if you turn it off it takes five minutes to start it again with the spring plunger and you have to move it every minute or so. And the only place on a Barco that you can touch without getting burned, except for the grips, is the gas tank under the handles, and after half an hour of bracing the gas tank against your thigh your fatigue pants leg is scorched rusty brown and all the hair is worn off and burned off your leg. Compared to an air hammer a Barco is an antiquated monstrosity, and if you had asked any of the men who complained because they didn’t have air hammers (and all of them did) to trade the Barcos in for them, they would have snorted and said they didnt need air hammers like the goddam Engineers. It was as if they liked burning the hair off their legs, and shaking their back teeth loose when they moved them, and wearing the skin on their hands down to raw meat. It was as if they used them and hated them and loved them and would not have had anything else. It was as if they had never had so much fun in their lives.
And across the road the Engineers with their pneumatic drills digging the demolition listened to them sing and watched them enviously, and they knew the Engineers watched them and laughed and sang even more loudly. Until finally even some of the Engineers, after they got off their own shifts, came over to help.
And in a month it was done, and they laid the brace-steel and poured the concrete themselves for the roofs, and went back to Schofield and garrison soldiering, some of them with a new disease that made it feel like the veins in the shoulders and elbows and wrists were swollen and aching while their fingers and hands and finally their whole arms got tingly numb, a disease that every time they did any work with their hands they would wake up with in the middle of the night and get up and shake their arms back awake while the veins in their joints kept aching a long time afterwards so that they had to go out to the latrine for a Piss Call and smoke a cigaret while they let the aching subside so they could go back to bed, but a disease that they never went on sick call with because they had never even heard of it and did not know it was a disease.
The date was November 28th, 1941.
Chapter 48
IT WAS DURING that same six weeks of grace, from the 16th of October to the 28th of November, while the Company was out in the field sweating their butts off and would have sacrificed a left arm to trade places with him, that Robert E Lee Prewitt began to realize just how necessary being a thirty-year-man was. If you wanted to enjoy being on pass.
It kept coming into Prewitt’s mind more and more frequently how he was not a thirty-year-man any more.
He was still pretty sick when the maneuvers started. At least, his side was still sore enough for him to get up in the middle of the night and sit and smoke in the wooden-armed occasional chair by the bed, when the irritated tossing for sleep in the bed got too frustrating. He had learned that trick at Myer the first time his nose had been broken; the sitting up and not trying to sleep always relaxed you enough so you could doze in the chair.
But by the time the red forces had made their landing, he was much better. Enough better to discover that the secret of at least 50% of the enjoyment of a pass seemed to be the disagreeable knowledge that soon it would end and you would have to go back.
He knew about the maneuvers, all right. Both girls brought the news home with them from work two full days before the maneuvers even got started. Then there were the newspaper articles that mentioned them and used them, just like last year and every year since the European war