January Dawn (3 page)

He looked at my hand, then at my face, then said, “Save it. I don’t want to know your name. You’ll wash out before the end of the week,” and walked off.

Well, so much for that. Maybe I should keep my mouth shut after all.

I climbed up in my bunk burning red with embarrassment.

“Hey man, forget that prick.” The voice came from the bunk next to me. He stood up and offered his hand. “How’re you doing? The name is Hayes.” Hayes was a dark skinned kid, with a slender face, a square chin and bull nose.

“Tennpenny.”

“Who was that guy?” Hayes’ bunkmate asked.

“That’s Alex Redman,” Hayes said.

“Redman? Isn’t that family basically royalty?”

Royalty?

“Yeah, and you see where that’s gotten him. He’s a spoiled rotten daddy’s boy with an attitude.”

A young recruit in the bunk on the other side of me chimed in. “I heard his dad’s got him on the fast track to become on officer.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Hayes said, peering under my bunk at the young man. “What’s your name?”

“Shannon.”

“How old are you anyway? You like you aint even out of Pre-School yet.”

Shannon did look young. He had a small frame, a childlike face with black hair and a small upturned nose surrounded by freckles.

“Leave the poor kid alone,” Shannon’s bunkmate said, climbing down from her bunk and grabbing a towel from her locker. She was very pretty, with a well-defined face, high cheek bones, a soft pointed chin and brown hair that she bunched up in a ponytail. Her slender frame was covered with a pair of camouflage pants and a gray tank top. “Or I’ll put all of you in time out.” She rubbed Shannon’s head as she strutted away to the showers. We all watched her go.

“Hey girl, what’s your name?” Hayes called out.

“Leah Carrigan.”

Hayes turned to plead with Shannon. “Hey kid, what do I have to do to get you to switch bunks with me, huh? I’ll do anything to be able to stare up at that ass all night long.”

“Sorry,” Shannon said, stretching out on his bed with his hands beneath his head. “Pre-School doesn’t share his toys.”

“That’s cold brother.”

I sat there in silence listening to all this and I couldn’t help but think that everything would turn out okay. These guys didn’t seem so bad. Everyone except this Redman kid.

“Alright, First Platoon, listen up,” said one of the other recruits down the hall.

I’d seen him before. He was a very brawny, intimidating character. Judging from afar, I could tell he was taller than me by at least a couple of inches. This guy was always charging out first ahead of everyone when the drill instructors instructed us to do something. He would get real loud and yell at all of us to hustle up. I think maybe he thought he was another drill sergeant.

“I’m Esra Teague and I’ll be taking over this platoon as platoon leader.”

It wasn’t his stark abrasiveness that drew my attention, but his tattoo. I had never seen one before. On his shoulder was a snake, its tail wrapped around his arm and its head rising sharply on his chest, baring large fangs. An identical snake on the other shoulder stared daringly into the menacing eyes of the other.

He continued, “As platoon leader I’ll make sure this platoon is the best in the business. We’ll train harder and work harder than any other. They will remember First Platoon of Class 209 for years to come.”

“Easy killer. You can’t go around proclaiming yourself as platoon leader yet. You have to win the Leadership Aptitude Examination before you can say that.”

“Who said that?”

My bunkmate stepped forward.

“Alex Redman. I should have known.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Oh, but I do. Everyone here knows the Redman name thanks to your father.” Teague held his arms out wide, making a spectacle of this chest-puffing competition. “Tell me, is treason hereditary?”

Alex’s face burned a shade of pink as he bit his tongue and held back his anger.

“If you have a problem with me we can settle it right here,” he said.

“I don’t have a problem with you. I have a problem with your whole family of seditious turncoats. Your father walked out on this country. We were at war and your father, the great People’s General, fled like a coward when we needed him most. The President is a great man, but he should have wiped your family off the face of this planet.”

“My father is not a traitor and you know nothing about me or my family.” Alex walked right up on Teague, but Teague stood his ground, looking down on him.

“What are you going to do about it, playboy?” Teague asked. The barracks was still and silent. We all expected a fist fight to erupt at any second.

“I’m going to be the bigger man and walk away. The LAE starts tomorrow. If you by some miracle grow a pair of balls by then, we can settle this soon enough. We’ll let the numbers do the talking,” he said, poking Teague in the chest with his index finger.

The two juggernauts parted ways, leaving a cloud of palpable tension in their wake.

“What did he mean by calling General Redman a traitor? I thought he resigned,” Shannon said.

“No, the President relieved him of duty. Except for the President wasn’t the president back then, he was the Chief of Staff or something. It was right after the war in Bolivia. I heard General Redman outright refused to fight anymore. He turned his back on his own country.” Hayes sounded confident in his beliefs.

“That doesn’t make him a traitor,” Shannon said.

“No, but there are reports that say he sold state secrets to several European governments after he was dishonorably discharged. What did you hear Beau?” Hayes asked his bunkmate, a guy by the name of Beauregard.

“I heard that he went crazy and murdered a bunch of POWs after the war. Gunned them down himself. Hundreds of them.”

Treason? State secrets? Murder? I didn’t know what they were talking about, but it sounded too complicated for me to comprehend. Whatever it was, it sure pissed off this Alex Redman.

“That’s bullshit. He would never do that. That man is one of the greatest military minds of the twenty-first century,” Shannon said.

“I agree with you. I’m just telling you what I heard. We could really use him right now. This war would be going a lot differently. I mean we have General Gammon, but the President pulled him out of the Virginian Front last December and replaced him with some nobody, a General Sullivan, or Silverman, or something,” Beauregard said.

“If Silas Redman is the greatest general the Confederacy has had in the past century, then General Gammon is the second greatest. Heck, I consider myself lucky for being drafted when I did. I got the once in a lifetime opportunity to serve under General Gammon. How many soldiers get to say that?” Hayes said.

I laid in my bed and listened to their conversation go back and forth. I had no clue at all about what they were talking about, so I tried to stay invisible.

That night was tough for me. The lights went out at ten, which I learned was 2200 hours in military time. With the lights went all the chatter.

I tossed and turned in bed for a while before giving up. I laid there staring up at the ceiling lost in wondrous anxiety.

It’s amazing how lonely and quiet it can get in an army barracks. You could only hear the faint echoing footsteps of the two soldiers on firewatch duty and the creaking and cracking of bed frames as the recruits slept.

It was strange being in a new place with new people, new sights, new smells, new everything. To make matters worse, I felt like I stuck out. I was so ignorant of the world.
Maybe nobody else has noticed.

I don’t remember what time it was when I finally fell asleep, but I remember thinking that if there was one thing that I had learned on my first day, it’s that army life is tough.

February 8

A week of training had passed and I was still struggling to understand the intricacies of military life. Our lives worked like intricate clockwork and always at the very center were the drill instructors, screaming, yelling and bossing us around.

Every morning, the drill sergeants would wake everyone up at 0430. We’d get sixty seconds to dress and we had to be outside in formation and ready for physical training. If that sixty seconds was up and you weren’t dressed completely, one of the drill sergeants would yell at you for being too slow and then force you to do PT in whatever you were wearing. I’d seen some guys do morning PT in their underwear before. Early mornings in February are not the warmest.

After morning PT, we were given thirty minutes to tidy up, shower and shave. In the military they like everything neat and orderly, especially your bed. Because I had never had to make my bed before, I struggled pitiably, especially with the corners.

My bunkmate Alex angered easily. He could make his bed perfectly with no creases and expert edges, but after watching me fumble with my bed he’d grunt some profanities, push me aside and make my bed for me. The drill instructors would punish both of us if either of our beds were not up to par. The whole “one for all, all for one” mantra and all. After about the third day though, I got the hang of it and made a nice, crisp bed.

Every soldier had to shave every morning, whether they had the ability to grow facial hair or not. I was one of those who could not. Like so many other simple aspects of life I was never fortunate enough to learn how to shave. So, while standing in front of the mirror I would watch the recruit next to me shave and would copy what he did. Needless to say my face was pockmarked with bloody nicks the first week.

Following this brief respite, we had thirty minutes for morning chow. The cafeteria had two service lines. As you walked down the line with your tray the cooks would stack mounds of wholesome food on your plate.

Drill Sergeant Elroy would march in at the end of the meal, never even a second late, and take First Platoon to morning instruction.

Morning instruction usually took place inside a classroom. The drill sergeants would take turns teaching lessons from a dry erase board or slideshow presentations. Lessons ranged from compass orienteering, wilderness survival, leadership techniques, radio communications, first aid, proper personal hygiene, squad-based infantry tactics and map reading, to name a few.

Since I couldn’t read all that well, I had quite a bit of trouble learning in a few of the classes.

Mr. Jeffries had taught me my letters when I was ten. He would scratch them in the dirt with a stick and I’d have to copy him. I started to learn how to spell a few three letter words that way also, before Mr. Stephens caught us. When he found us, he went a rage. He didn’t hurt me, but he made me watch as he beat Mr. Jeffries bloody. It was all I needed to make me not want to learn anymore.

But Mr. Stephens was no longer in charge of my life, so I made an effort to learn everything the drill instructors taught me.

After those few hours of sleep inducing classroom instructions, they fed us afternoon chow and then marched us directly to our next cycle of training.

The afternoon instruction was my favorite, because we were outside where I felt the most comfortable. Here we would practice any lessons we learned that morning in the classroom and then do more physical training and cadence drills. We would practice rain or shine, until we were perfect. However, we eventually realized that the drill instructor’s definition of perfect was a level that could never be reached.

Evenings were a little more laidback. We’d be fed once again at evening chow, and after we would have an hour of national enrichment. All four platoons would muster on the parade ground for the Nationalism Hour. That was the proper name for it, but in the barracks the boys christened it Gammon’s Evening Thought.

General Gammon, the Ft. Benning Base Commander and renowned battlefield General, would walk through the rank and file of the platoons evoking some patriotic theme or question. Most of his talks lasted a half hour or so, but once worked up, his fiery emotions could take up an entire hour or more.

Whenever I would hold my little Confederate flag I would feel something surge through my body. What that something was I could never put into words, but General Gammon could. How he could say exactly what I was feeling I didn’t know. His words were enlightening, to say the least. It was times like those when I would forget all of my misgivings about being in the army training for war. I could feel it in my bones that I was in the right place.

After standing stiff legged at attention for an hour, we would march back to the barracks to clean. We’d sweep, mop and scrub all the floors, including the bathroom and shower stalls. Everything had to shine. Once we got the drill instructor’s approval, we had free time until lights out at 2200. By that time, we were begging for bed.

If there was one thing I liked most about Basic it was chow time. They fed us three square meals a day and the food that they doled out was better than anything I had ever eaten.

I set my tray down on the table and licked my lips.
This looks delicious
.

“Dagnabbit,” Shannon said, flopping his tray down on the table. “Can you believe they feed us this garbage every day?”

I could only grin as I ate my food ravenously.
If I was given the choice, I could eat this food all day, nonstop.

“You want my toast?” he asked, stabbing the piece of bread with his fork and offering it up to me. I reached for it, but I was too slow, someone behind me had snatched it right off the fork. It was Hayes and Beauregard. They both took a seat at the table.

“Are you complaining about the food again, Pre-School?” Hayes asked.

Anthony Hayes was from North Carolina, I learned. He belonged to a respected black family and grew up in an all-white neighborhood outside of Raleigh. His mom and dad owned a car dealership and sent him to a prominent private school. The Army came to his school to conscript a hundred boys that had turned eighteen that year. He was one of the lucky few. They shipped him off to Basic a few weeks later.

“Yes, I am. All I want is something…real. Is that too much to ask for?”

“Shannon. It’s eggs, bacon and toast,” Beauregard said.

Walter Beauregard was from neighboring South Carolina and claimed to be a descendant of the great General P.G.T. Beauregard of the War of Southern Independence back in the early 1860s. Beauregard had an oblong face, a pug nose and a wide mouth. A pair of wide brimmed, thick lensed glasses made his eyes look bigger than they actually were.

“Yeah, I know. Powdered eggs, burnt toast, and nasty, overly-processed sliced pig,” Shannon said in his slow Texan drawl.

I didn’t know what “powdered eggs” or “overly-processed pig” meant. All I knew was that the food was good. And no matter what anybody else said I would still eat it.

“How’s it going, boys?” Carrigan asked, joining us at the table.

“Pre-School is pitching another conniption fit over the food,” Beauregard said.

“Count yourself lucky, Shannon,” Carrigan said. “I haven’t tasted bacon in over a year. You couldn’t find it anywhere back home in Virginia. It was all reserved for military consumption.”

“Was that how the recruiter hooked you in, Carrigan? He promised you all the bacon you could eat?” Hayes asked.

Everyone had a good laugh at that one, except me, I just sat there smiling.

“You know, Tennpenny, it is okay to be human every once in a while and let out a laugh or two,” Hayes said.

I tried to keep to myself whenever I could, but for some reason these same people kept flocking to me and hanging around me. I liked the company, but I didn’t see how I was much of a draw. They found out quickly enough that getting me to talk was going to be a tougher task than surviving Basic.

“Hey, I got a letter from my Ma yesterday. She says my uncle sent her a letter from the front saying that we have the Yankees on the run in Richmond.”

“Bullshit, Hayes!” Carrigan called out.

“Aint no joke. My uncle wouldn’t lie,” Hayes said defensively.

“Hayes, we’ve been fighting over Richmond for nearly two years. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I grew up there. My family was forced to move out when the city was put under siege. It has passed from our hands to their hands countless times. If we did take it, I’ll wager that the Yankees will take it back by the end of the month.”

“Yeah, well, as soon as they put me up on the line it won’t matter, I’ll end this war before Christmas. I’ll push those Yankee bastards back, march right down Pennsylvania Avenue and plant the Southern Cross on the North Lawn myself.” Hayes said.

Beauregard nearly choked. “Your stupid ass couldn’t even find the United States on a map.”

“Damn Beauregard, why do you have to be so negative all the time?”

“Someone has to drag your inflated imagination back to reality. It might as well be me.”

I opened the lid on my yogurt and listened to the back and forth bantering between the comedic duo, but my eyes wandered the room watching all the activity in the mess hall. I had not had much contact with the rest of First Platoon, besides the four at my table.

In fact, I made a concentrated effort to keep my head down and avoid talking to anyone, but being perpetually coupled with an entire platoon made that especially difficult. I liked to stay small as best I could to avoid any unnecessary attention.

Even though I hovered around the shadows, I constantly maintained an attentive attitude, listening and watching everyone, absorbing information about anything and everything. During classes, I listened intently to all the drill instructors. They were all combat veterans and what they were sharing was invaluable.

Even when I was lounging in my bunk in the barracks, I’d eavesdrop on conversations around the room. That’s how I learned names.

It was my intention to satiate my thirst for knowledge. All information was useful information. I was in a whole new world and I needed to get acquainted real fast.

Eighteen years of my life were stolen. Damn if I’m going to let anything or anybody stand in my way of catching up on that lost time
.

I finished off the last of my eggs, piled the crumbs and other leftovers into a neat little pile and scooped them onto my fork and into my mouth. Hayes and the others were still going on about the war. My mind drifted off again as my eyes wandered the fluorescent lit room.

Alex Redman was sitting two tables down. He was sitting alone, drinking milk from a plastic cup. His presence had caused quite a stir within First Platoon. Everywhere you went, his name was spoken in half-hushed voices, as if speaking it out loud was taboo. It was always about his father, this People’s General.

The others made him out to be larger than life, a noble hero, an icon. They said that once upon a time, this virtuous crusader could have ran for the presidency. He represented the core values of the nation. Independence. Justice. Social Equality. He advocated for the people always. He fought for government transparency, and a stable, small-scale standing army instead of having the world’s second largest standing army. For his actions, he received the trust of millions of loyal citizens. But this trust was betrayed. How he did that depended on who you asked. Whatever he did and however he did it, it sure pissed off a lot of people.

Alex was living in the massive shadow of his father, taking the full brunt of the lingering hatred leftover from his father’s sins. The platoon despised him. Not for anything he did, but only because he bore the Redman name. The malicious indifference he was treated with was unduly warranted…to an extent.

Alex was an asshole, yes, but he was a good soldier. I could see that in him, at least. He was smart, he was devoted, he was meticulous, and he was everything a good soldier needed to be. But none of that mattered to the other recruits. He was still General Silas Redman’s son.

“Colton…?”

Looking at him now as he ate his breakfast he looked almost sad. He was trying his hardest. You couldn’t say anything less. But for all his hard work he got nothing in return.

“Colton…?”

It was Carrigan.

“Yes?”

“You’re doing that thing again.”

“What thing?” I asked, knowing full well what she meant.

“You zone out. One moment you’re here and the next you’re not. Your mind wanders.”

“I’m sorry. I just…think a lot.”

Hayes couldn’t help but to chime in. “Yeah Colton, you got to watch that shit, man. Sometimes I’ll be talking to you and five minutes go by before I realize you aint even listening to me.”

“It may not look it, but I do listen to you, Hayes,” I said in all honesty.

“But seriously, Tennpenny, we’ve known you for a week now and we still don’t know anything about you. Who are you?”

Who am I?
I’m Colton Tennpenny…Tennpenny? Where does my name even come from? I have no history to my name, just that I was born with it.

I didn’t know how to answer that question. My eyes darted to Beauregard when he said that, then to Hayes, then Carrigan and then Shannon. They were all watching me. My hands lay in my lap, my right thumb nervously rubbing the palm of my left hand. I desperately searched my mind to come up with an answer, not just for them, but for myself.
Who am I?