One Second After [93]
"Yeah, but Dan, this is a college. A small Christian college up in the mountains of North Carolina. Somehow it just doesn't feel right to me."
"Where else in this entire valley are there four hundred young men and women, in fairly good shape to start with, intelligence pretty darn good, already imbued with a sense of identity for the school and those who lead it, like you, me, Washington?"
"I don't know," John sighed, watching as the column went to right flank march and two girls screwed up, Washington in their faces and reaming them out so that one was crying as she tried to march.
"We had six hundred kids here, on the day before things went down," Dan said, now at John's side and watching the kids drill.
"About a hundred and fifty have left, trying to strike out for home. That was hard; you were not here for that meeting in the chapel. A lot of praying, soul-searching. I advised them to stay. Told them that if anything, their parents would want them to stay here until this crisis was over, knowing that they would be safe. Most who left are local, a day's walk away, but a couple of them are from Florida, said they felt they should try and get home."
John shook his head. The ones trying to get to Florida were most likely now facing hundreds of thousands heading the other way.
"The rest agreed to stay. Remember how several years back we had all those discussions in faculty meetings about orienting the college more to service? A couple of other colleges in the area, our rivals, were touting that all the time, so we put into the curriculum community service. That's what we're doing now."
"Dan, there's a helluva difference between kids working at a homeless shelter or community day-care center and drilling like an army."
"I don't think so, John. The times, as the old song went, are a-changin'."
The column of students turned and marched back across the green, weapons at the shoulder, and the sight of it sent a chill down his spine. He looked back at Pyle's painting and then back to them.
My God, no difference, John realized. The tradition of close-order drill was a primal memory left over from the days when armies really did go into battle that way, shoulder to shoulder. Today it was supposedly about discipline and spirit and the fact that soldiers were at least expected to march. But no different, no different from what he used to talk about with such enthusiasm at the Civil War Roundtable and see at reenactments.
The difference was, though, this was for real. From close-order drill Washington would take them to elementary tactics: fire and movement, holding a fixed position, laying down fields of fire, assault of a fixed position, marksmanship, leadership in combat, emergency first aid, infiltration tactics, hand-to-hand combat, how to kill with a knife, how to kill with your bare hands.
The sight of them drilling such struck home, as forcefully as what John had been forced to do in the park.
"Washington thinks the world of you," Dan said. "By the way, he told me what happened in the park. Said you handled yourself well."
"Handled myself well? I puked my guts out."
"No, not that. First time you shoot someone, if you got any heart in you, any touch of the divine spark, you should be horrified." He looked off.
"I lost my leg during Tet. The day before that, though, I was on point, turned the corner of a trail, and there he was...." He sighed, shaking his head. "The Thomas Hardy poem, remember it?"
John nodded. " 'I shot at him and he at me, And killed him in his place.
"Well, I got him first; he was walking point for his unit and we just ran into each other. Before I even quite realized it I emptied my Ml6 into him. Hell of a firefight exploded, and I was on the ground, lying by his side, and I could hear him gasping for air. Do you know what he said?"
John was silent, half-suspecting.
"He was crying for his mother. I understood enough of the language to know that...."
His voice trailed off and John could see tears in Dan's eyes.
"The kid I shot," John said, "certainly wasn't calling for his