Before Their Time: A Memoir Read Online Free Page A

usually the last man in the showers, joining us only when we were almost done, standing with his back to the rest of us, soaping himself slowly, as he pretended to be lost in thought. That too made him unexpectedly vulnerable.
    “Small penis,” Doug Kelleher decided.
    “No penis,” Bern Keaton said.
    And we all laughed, perhaps too loudly, in the traditional way of slaves who think they’re smarter than their master.
    As for Barney Barnato, he never did make it back to the division in time for Tennessee maneuvers. He was still on emergency leave in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where his mother had been dying for three weeks. That was the story at the time. Poor Barney Barnato, we thought, remembering our own mothers; it was sad. That left just six of us in the first squad for maneuvers, something more than half strength, if my count is right and if I can forget Ira Fedderman and the others who only joined us after maneuvers were over.

TWO
Crossing the Cumberland
    WE WERE encamped east of Nashville. Once we had been swallowed up by the first squad and handed the hated BAR, three days of a steady, chilled rain made life even more miserable for us and kept the Yankee Division from moving out into the sodden Tennessee hills that surrounded the camp. In those hills, we were to search out and destroy an unknown “enemy” division that had already arrived on the scene somewhere and was waiting for us in hiding. That at least was the rumor that spread through C Company. The scenario, which made room for a certain amount of improvisation, was simple enough. The encounter between us, the fake battle that had been planned for so long between the two divisions, was to be to the finish, theirs or ours. It was serious business, in Army terms, and one of the final steps in our training before heading overseas.
    The decision was made at Division Headquarters to bivouac where we were until the rains lifted. Meanwhilewe soaked in our wet uniforms, the coarse wool of socks and sweaters sticking to our skins and stinking. It was late April in Tennessee and felt like mid-winter, and the fact that it was already spring by the calendar turned our mood even more sour. We hung around the cooking fires making grim jokes, sipping coffee so hot that we could hardly hold the scalding canteens in our bare hands, watching our clothes steam in the heat of the flames. Shivering like animals, we felt sorry for ourselves and swore at the world for being imperfect, forgetting why we were in Tennessee in the first place; ideology was suddenly no match for bodily comforts.
    During that time, Bern Keaton and I shared a pup tent, a logical pairing on the surface, you would think, ordered by Rocky in good faith, but it turned out to be a match made in hell. The problem was that I was not entirely competent at meeting certain basic military demands, a curse that followed me everywhere I served in the Army. For example, I never learned how to dig an efficient drainage ditch around our tent—an ordinary job for almost anyone else—so that rainwater, instead of innocently running off from our quarters as it should have, poured through the tent itself, soaking blankets, clothes, rifles, ammo, and us. When this happened, Bern and I stared at the fierce little streams that swept through our shelter, then turned to each other, stricken. Was he blaming me? Should he blame me? Could I defend myself? These terrible questions hovered silently in the air while guilt riddled my eyes and Bern looked away in disgust.
    By the second night, the tent itself was leaking through its overhead seams (not my fault, not anybody’s), and soon,as the dismal wet hours slowly passed, Bern Keaton and I awoke to the discovery that we could not bear the other’s presence. By mid-morning we had begun to hate each other. It was the kind of smoldering loathing that flares up when misery is not only shared but created by two people bound to each other by necessity (the sad story of many