From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [338]
At eight the lights were turned off. Each man crawled in his bunk until the flashlight bedcheck had been made. Then they got back up and sat down on the floor again and went on smoking Duke’s Mixture with deep drags that lit up faces redly, and still they went on talking. Smoking Duke’s Mixture was no hardship to them who had grown up on rolled cigarets, and they had no trouble passing the time talking because they did not talk to pass the time but because they just loved to talk. Each man always had more stories with himself as hero than he could tell, and if he told the same story with himself as hero again a week later it was still almost new again by then, and anyway he had always developed it and elaborated it in the same way a writer rewrites a story with himself as hero, so that usually it was not even recognizable. Talking had always been their chief recreation, who could only afford the more expensive amusements like women and whiskey once a month on Payday, and they were experts in their field. When they could have slept, always the best method of time passing as any man who has spent time in the Black Hole knows, they still preferred to sit up and talk and tell stories with themself as hero.
It was almost like the days back on the bum, Prew thought sleepily. No women, no whiskey, no tailormades, no money. If you shut your eyes, you could believe you were back in a jungle on the outskirts of some little jerkwater town, smooth dusty under the trees on the leeward side of a grade that passed the watertank and cut off the wind, sitting around the small fire with a belly full of a good mulligan that you had been assigned the bumming of the carrots for, or maybe the onions, or the spuds. The faces were the same faces, and the voices were the same voices, and the flavor of the talk was the same American flavor.
American faces, he thought sleepily happily with that ecstasy of the martyr that had always been his goal and his destiny, American faces and American voices, weak with all the lustful-hungry greedy-lying American weaknesses, but strong now with the strength bred of necessity which is the only real strength ever, leathery lean hardbitten faces and voices in the old American tradition of the woodsmen and the ground-clearing farmers who also fought bitterly to stay alive. Here is your Army, America, he sleepily wanted to tell Them, here is your strength, that You have made strong by trying to break, and that You will have to depend on in the times that are coming, whether You like it or not, or want to or not, and no matter how much it may hurt Your pride. And here in Number Two was its cream, sifted and resifted and then sifted again, until all the dry rot had been winnowed out, all the soft spots squeezed out, all the rotting gangrene that all the social columnists were so afraid of excised out, so that only the firm hardy remainder of the most absolute of toughness, that would not only hold its own but would triumph, in a whole world of toughness, was all that was left now.
Thank your various Gods for your prisons, You America. Pray to Them hard, to not teach you how to get along without them,—until They have first taught you how to get along without your wars.
And he, Robert E Lee Prewitt, Harlan Kentucky, was one of them, one of these here, in the old hungry tradition, here where there was not one single fat-layered insurance salesman’s face in the new American tradition to be found.
You could not be one of them unless you shared it all with them, and for the first time in a long time he felt sleepily he was back with his own kind again, that he did not have to explain to, because each one of them had the same hard unbroachable sense of ridiculous personal honor that he had never been able to free himself from either.
And it had all been more than worth it, from the moment he had sat down at the mess table and taken that first single bite he had been too scared to taste, and he would start gladly right in on a second round again right now, if it was required to clinch it.
Poor B