70
PARTISAN REVIEW
They were as children come to the Thanksgiving or Christmas party
at school: they had dressed for the occasion.
It
was to all appearances a momentous one. Some of them had
put on clean fatigues, heavily starched and pressed, and a couple
of them had the trouser creases sewn in. They were tailored, as
usual, and fit with that peculiar rounding tightness that in the Army
is held to be the type of soldierly style. Their red helmet liners
gleamed, and when they laid them on the arms of the student chairs
they made the sharp, hollow scraping that became for me a kind of
analogue to the murmur of conversation that preceded lectures at
a university. The others had worn fresh khakis, starched into pore–
less armor, and their breasts were dotted with the ribbons they had
earned by time-serving or valor. The combat boots of all of them
had been polished assiduously and were worn with bloused trousers;
they seemed tacitly to agree that since this class, though it assembled
during off-duty hours, was a kind of quasi-military function, the
shibboleth of the field, the combat boot, should unite them and
bear them up. During the next eight weeks they persisted in this
supererogatory costume, finding, I believe, that their soldierly address
helped as-mage the embarrassment of their ignorance. The starch
held them together when they fumbled for nouns and adjectives. The
helmet liners retained their plastic firmness while the meaning of
words vanished as in water. The ribbons pressed their fealty and
courage and endurance to their breasts even as they faltered over
passages of the most elementary English. Sitting before me like small
boys they could not afford a moment's lapse in their existence as
men at arms. Grossly, yet without preconception, and while involved
in the most unsoldierly practices, they insisted upon their official
identity.
My eight students made a striking crew. Two of them were
Negroes from the South. Three were "imports": one a Puerto Rican,
another a Hawaiian, the other a Chilean. One came from the back–
hills of Pennsylvania and another from the back-hills of California.
The eighth man claimed to have been raised in Tampa, Florida.
Yet they were, with the exception of this last man, a remarkably
homogeneous group, united by something more than their profession.
One of the first things I experienced was a genuine difficulty in
understanding what they said. They spoke with the most remarkable
