HOW LIKE A GOD
69
we made arrangements with the various Company Commanders to
excuse any of their cadre who attended the classes from night duty
in
the field or in the company areas. Cooperation throughout the
regiment was excellent, the Army, like the nation, honoring the exer–
tions of scholarship, even such a scholarship as this.
One evening in June, everything was ready. After supper, I
went to my barracks, washed, and changed into civilian clothes–
slacks, a light shirt, and an old green corduroy jacket that I had
worn through years of graduate school. I walked slowly across to
our building, ruminating pleasantly about teaching once more, and
entertaining with some equally pleasant idleness a familiar academic
illusion: perhaps
this
kind of teaching would be more satisfying,
would have more material results, than the kind I was accustomed
to. I became innervated by the coolness of the evening air. The dust
stirred up by the drilling troops had settled back into the light dew,
and a barely perceptible odor of new-cut grass mingled with the
habitual, suffusive redolence of grease-traps and garbage cans. In
its own way, and for only a few hours, the Army was going to be
a campus.
Having unlocked the door and surveyed our sparkling-shabby
classroom, its glimmering floor and freshly spattered walls, its rows
of battered chairs aligned with military rectitude, I sat down to
wait. Within half an hour eight men arrived. These eight were all
that ever came, and they all stayed to the end of the course. I ini–
tiated them with a brief introduction to the aims of the class, had
them write a one-page essay about nothing, gave them an assignment
from the text for the next week, and dismissed them.
I had thought to dissipate the military atmosphere by coming
in
civilian dress. I had considered that a certain informality would
be beneficial, and had hoped to put these expectably shy sergeants
at their ease in a classroom. I felt that in uniform my Pfc stripes
might too pointedly recall them to the ignominy of their illiterate–
ness. It was but a few months since they had been running me
ragged day and night, trying, in eight brief weeks, and by the most
violent methods allowed them, to initiate me into their military
"arts" and habits. Yet all the resentment and contempt that still
rankled
in
my soul for the veteran soldiers who had trained me
were modulated when I saw their representatives that first evening.
