"Destroyer 034 - Chained Reaction.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

"Yessir," said the other recruit.
"Gollee," Walker Teasdale had said. "Ah thought it was against the law not to like nigras."
"Ah hate 'em," said the other recruit.
"Seems a waste of time to hate anybody," said Walker.
"Not niggers. Any time you spend hating them is time well spent."
"Well, ah don't hate nobody," said Walker. "There's good and bad in all kinds."
"Ceppin' niggers is mostly bad," laughed the other recruit, and training became so hard, with the constant repetition of tiring drills, that the strangeness of the unit became less a topic of discussion than survival in the following few days.
There were drills like silence. Five men would be told a secret by the commanding officer and then sent out into the field. This secret would not be mentioned again until two weeks later when the five were brought before the commanding officer, Lt. Colonel Wendell Bleech, a rotund, pink-faced ball of a man with a harsh crew cut and extra large epaulettes on his shoulders, which let the cloth of his military blouse hang fuller over his suet-bloated body.
Colonel Bleech liked to talk about mean and lean. Colonel Bleech liked toasted English muffins with peach jam and sweet butter.
4
Colonel Bleech also liked to punish in front of the assembled unit. He went beyond enlightened rehabilitation. He broke noses and arms and legs and threatened each time, "the next time I get rough."
Colonel Bleech had a riding crop with lead balls laced into the flattened pommel. Colonel Bleech pointed to two of the recruits.
"The secrets I told you are no longer secrets. They have come back to me. I swore you to secrecy. Do you know the most important thing in a man's makeup and character is his word? You have violated your word. You have raped your word. You have desecrated your word. Now what do you two have to say for it?"
They said they were sorry.
"Now, see, men, I have a problem," said Bleech. He liked high riding boots and balloon riding pants. He looked like a tan pumpkin. Anyone who hadn't seen him kick prostrate recruits in the groin would think he was downright cherubic. He slapped his crop against his shiny riding boots.
"I have a real serious problem, men, because I would like to believe you. I would like to believe you are sorry. I am a believing man. But I have discovered that you are liars. That you give your word and it is meaningless. Is that correct?"
"Yessir," answered the two recruits, at stiff attention, their eyes sneaking glances at the flicking crop, snapping every so often against the hard leather boots.
"Being unable to take your word that you will be sorry, I must make sure."
The crop snapped against a nose. The young
5
man covered the bloody streak across his face with his hands. He gasped. His eyes teared.
Little drops of blood came down his nasal passage to the rear of his throat. He tasted it, hot and choking.
"Now I know you're sorry," said Bleech. "I know you are truly and deeply sorry. That's how I have to do things when I can't take a man's word."
And with that, he snapped a knee into the groin of the second recruit and that boy went over in two, his face coming very close to the ground very quickly. He opened his mouth to scream a silent scream. And Bleech stepped on the back of his head, pushing his face into the ground, then ground the polished heel of the polished boot into the boy's jaw, where a sickening crack happened and the boot sank two inches into the face and the jaw was broken.
"That's for talkers, boys. But this is nothing compared to what will happen if you talk outside. There is no greater sin in this man's world than talking outside the unit."
Colonel Bleech stomped a polished foot in the South Carolina dust. It was a hot dry summer in these hills of the training camp, where no paved roads led and the only entrance the recruits knew about was by helicopter.
Lordy, did they know helicopters. They knew loading and unloading the way most people knew how to swallow. They knew how to carry people, both willing and reluctant. They had more techniques for dragging someone by lip or ear or even chain than they could count.
Only one person never questioned an order of
6
the peculiarity of the training. And that was the big raw-boned boy from near Pieraffle, South Carolina, twenty-seven miles south of Charleston, the boy who liked Gene Autry movies, chipped beef on toast, who never got tired, and who spoke kindly about Lt. Colonel Wendell Bleech, even behind his back.
So when Walker Teasdale fell into despondency, his chin resting on the barrel of his rifle, his eyes looking into that great nowhere where people see no tomorrow, the other recruits took special notice.
"How do you know you're going to get killed, Walker?" they asked.
"I know. I know how, too," he said. "They're gonna shoot me for disciplinary reasons. I know it. They're gonna take me out to that piney hill and they're gonna make me dig my grave and then they're gonna put a bullet in my head."
"Who's they, Walker?"
"Colonel Bleech and the drill sergeants."
"You ? They think you're perfect."
"They won't tomorrow."
"Nobody knows what's going to happen tomorrow, Walker."
"I do," said Walker, firm in gaze and voice, a steady sureness in his manner, as when he talked about putting bullets into targets.
He asked for a glass of water and young men who ordinarily wouldn't wait on anyone unless ordered by a superior jumped to find a glass. There were no glasses in the barracks, so someone drank the last bit of smuggled moonshine in a mason jar, washed it out with water, and filled it.
Walker put his gun on his rack and, with a slow
7
wisdom that had replaced his boyish innocence, looked at the water, then drank it all.
"This is my last sustenance, fellas. Ah've seen the buzzards in my dreams and they called my name. Ah take no more food or drink."
The other recruits thought this was pretty much craziness, since no one had seen a buzzard around these parts since coming to camp more than ten months ago, all of them thinking1 that basic training should have been a two-month affair and finding out, in an address by Colonel Bleech, that two months wasn't enough to teach a man to tie his shoes right, let alone become a soldier, a real soldier.
When Bleeeh said "soldier," his voice lowered, his spine stiffened, and a deep pride came to his entire bearing. His lead-weighted riding crop would always tap at his polished boots on that word.
On the morning that Walker Teasdale said he would die, the recruits were awakened as usual with drill sergeants screaming in their ears, for their usual semiclothed morning run, wearing just boots, shorts, and rifles with full packs of ammunition.
Long ago, they had stopped commenting on how none of them had ever heard of basic training like this, with a five-mile run every morning and at triple time. One of the recruits who had a brother in the Airborne once tried to chant as he ran and had to run punishment miles because this unit never made noise when it ran, when it fought, and when it marched.
"There'll be plenty of noise on the great day," Colonel Bleech had promised, but everyone was
8