Before Their Time: A Memoir Read Online Free

think, was happening to Kelleher and Keaton. There stood skinny Paul Willis in the middle of the barracks floor, dressed only in Bern Keaton’s olive drab shorts, which just happened to be his size. They even had Bern’s laundry mark on them. And still smiling, still theatrically mute, as pale, willowy, and dim as Hamlet’s Ophelia, Willis continued to deny that they were Bern’s.
    This offended us. We became morally indignant. And smug. (Didn’t Willis’s “crime” prove our superiority to the old-timers in the YD?) We began to avoid him, as though he carried something contagious on his person. Rocky Hubbell, to whom we finally complained as our squad leader, advised us to look the other way. It was only underwear, he said blandly. In time, I came to understand that this was excellent counsel, although I disdained it at first. Willis, I began to reason to myself, was one of our scouts. At some moment in a dubious future, some critical moment, we might all have to depend on his judgment and his good will, perhaps for our very lives. That idea made me rethink everything. I decided that I would allow Paul Willis to be a thief. I would have to.
    Besides, Rocky Hubbell did not like confrontations. Not in his squad. Given an option, he always avoided a verbal shoot-out. Steadiness was what Rocky admired. Rocky, who was a tall, bony Texan, the first I had ever known, still had something of the romantic look of the old west about him, something dusty and a little raw. He barely moved his lips when he spoke, so you had to listenhard to hear what he was saying; this, of course, kept everybody at full attention. One of his pleasures was to write sentimental love letters to his girlfriend in Amarillo. Sprawled on his barracks cot in the evening for hours at a time, he composed these notes with meticulous care, chewing on his pencil and staring into space, perhaps looking for the muse. Sometimes he tested a phrase on us, asking for approval from Bern Keaton or me, whom he considered the squad’s arbiters of culture, thereby confirming our own opinions of ourselves. “The beautitudes [
sic
] of God’s blessings” is one I recall, with gratitude. This unexpected poetic thrust in Rocky made us feel close to him; any sign of softness in our NCOs or officers had the same effect.
    Inevitably, I guess, there had to be an opposing force at work in Rocky, if only for symmetry’s sake. With Rocky it took the form of a chaotic impulse hidden just below the surface. We all felt its power at one time or another, and it could be scary. Rocky’s explosions, when they erupted, generated such heat and electricity that he would later have to pretend that he couldn’t remember what had happened; they were too much to acknowledge for a man who contrived to live in such an aura of sanity most of the time. A report of a crazed gunfight in a Columbia, South Carolina, alley once: nobody hurt. An extended joyride in a stolen car outside the same city just before we went overseas: no charges pressed. And others, later on. They were all forgiven, it seems, in light of Rocky’s military record, which was without flaw. Lieutenant Gallagher intended to keep it that way; squad leaders as competent as Rocky Hubbell were rare. Nevertheless, once we had developed reservations about his behavior, we learned to keep an eyeon him. We needed him, as we needed Paul Willis, at his sanest and most effective, when he was feeling fully responsible for us and himself, when there were no distractions.
    Another interesting thing about Rocky: he didn’t like to show himself naked in front of the squad. This forced him into a whole set of embarrassed contortions whenever he dressed or undressed in the barracks with us, something that was comical at times in his efforts to keep from being seen, as though he were a virginal maiden like Susanna, nervous at being spied on by the elders. (We may not have been elders, but we were certainly voyeurs.) It also meant that he was