From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [153]
Chapter 19
NO OFFICERS APPEARED at drill all morning, even for the usual look-see. It developed into a sort of general Tell-Off-Prewitt field day with first one noncom then another carrying the ball. They gave him a good going over. He had not up to then believed that anything could hurt a man so much, without actually resorting to physical pain. He was, he realized, learning a considerable bit about pain lately.
In the first period Dhom, the calisthenics master (by virtue of being trainer to the boxing squad), read him off over a silent 36-count side straddle hop exercise and had him to do it again alone (as was customary with the awkward squad) while the Company rested. Prew, who had not miscounted a side straddle hop since getting out of recruit drill, did it, perfectly, and was asked to do it once again and this time try to get it right and then warned (as was customary with the awkward squad) to look alive or find himself on extra duty.
Prew knew Dhom, and had never much cared for him. It was Dhom who had once, during a Retreat formation, bulled his way into ranks like a bowling ball making a strike and punched a young recruit in the jaw for talking; he came near getting busted over that one, though never, of course, near enough to worry over. But on the other hand, it was also Dhom who last fall during the annual 30-mile hike had carried four extra rifles and a BAR the last 10 miles to bring G Company in one hundred percent present, the only company in the Regiment to make it. And also, it was Dhom whose perpetual henpecking by his greasy Filipino wife had become a company institution.
Back at the barracks, talking to The Chief, Prew had dismissed being hurt. Being hurt had not entered into it then. Harlan County boys are born with a facility for standing physical pain, if they live at all, and he was proud of his tested capacity, confident in the belief that they could doubletime him forever and work him till he dropped but they could never break that endurance that was the only thing his father had bequeathed him. He saw it as a simple battle of wills on a physical plane—which in a way it was. But it was also more than that, and this he had not seen. He had not seen that these men meant anything to him. Long ago, at Myer, when he first quit fighting to get in the Bugle Corps and saw how they all construed this to be lack of guts, he had had to reluctantly put aside his hope of ever being understood. This caused a certain loneliness but he accepted that because, he told himself, it was probably that in the first place that made him want to bugle. Then later, when they dropped him from the Bugle Corps because he got the clap and nobody of his many friends stepped forward to go to bat for him and try to get him reinstated, he had tossed the empty bottle labeled Comradeship aside also, realizing that it was now time for the hangover. This had increased his loneliness, but it also hardened his invulnerability.
And now, being invulnerable since there was nothing left for them to hurt, he had been quite sure that these men meant nothing to him. What he had forgotten, of course, was that these men were men and, being men, could not help but mean something to him, who was also a man. What he had forgotten momentarily was that he was a man, and that these men were, in effect, the same men who had come silently out on the porches last night (only last night, it was) to listen to his Taps. These men were, in effect, the disembodied voice that had come across the quad from Choy’s, the abstract spokesman for them all, saying proudly, “I told you it was Prewitt.” How this could be, he did not know. He could see this was going to be a hard thing to understand. What he had forgotten entirely was that though he had matched them for his faith in comradeship and understanding and had lost, he still had his faith in men kicking around somewhere, and that this was where they could still reach him. It did not take the hurt long in getting started.
During