Free The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer Page A

pyramidal tent flaps. At the moment there was no one else in the orderly room. "Listen," Mantelli went on, "I know it's a damn shame your platoon's short, but what can I do?"
                "You can give me that fifth man. He's assigned to the platoon, and I'm the platoon sergeant. I want him."
                Mantelli scraped his feet on the dirt floor of the tent. "What do you think happens over at Operations? Colonel Newton walks in, and by God there's a piece of work ain't done, and he sorta sighs, and says, 'Things are going too slow here,' and damn if I don't hear about it. Croft, wake up, you ain't important, the only thing that counts is to have enough clerks to keep a headquarters going." He rolled his cigar tentatively in his mouth. "Now that we got the General and all his staff right in our bivouac, so you can't spit without hitting a court-martial, they need even more men out of your platoon. If you don't shut up I'll put you to cleaning typewriter ribbons."
                "Cap'n, I don't care. I'm gettin' that other man if I gotta go see Major Pfeiffer, Colonel Newton, General Cummings, I don't give a damn. The platoon ain't gonna be hanging around the beach forever, and I want all the men I can get."
                Mantelli groaned. "Croft, if you had your way, you'd be picking through the replacements as if you were buying horses."
                "You're damn right I would, Cap'n."
                "Oh, Jesus, you guys never give me a minute's rest." Mantelli leaned back and kicked the desk once or twice with his foot. Out through the tent flaps he could see the beach framed through a clump of coconut trees. Far in the distance an artillery piece fired once.
                "You gonna give me that extra man?"
                "Yeah. . . yeah. . . yeah." Mantelli squinted. On the sand, not a hundred yards away, the replacements were erecting their pup tents. Far off in the harbor a few Liberty ships at anchor were disappearing in the evening haze. "Yeah, I'll give him to you, the poor sonofabitch." Mantelli flipped through a few sheets of paper, ran his finger down a column of names, and underlined one of them with his nail. "His name's Roth, and his MOS is clerk. You'll probably make a hell of a rifleman out of him."
     
                The replacements remained on the beach for another day or two. The evening after Croft had talked to Captain Mantelli, Roth walked forlornly through the replacement bivouac. The man with whom he was bunking, a big good-natured farm boy, was still over at another tent with his friends, and Roth didn't want to join them. He had gone along the previous night and, as it usually happened, he had felt left out of things. His bunkmate and his bunkmate's friends were all young, probably just out of high school, and they laughed a lot at stupid jokes and wrestled with each other and swore. He never knew what to say to them. Roth felt a familiar wistful urge for somebody he could talk to seriously. He realized again there wasn't anyone he knew well among the replacements -- all the men with whom he had come overseas had been separated from him at the last replacement depot. Even then, it wasn't as if they had anything special about them. They were all stupid, Roth thought. All they could think about was getting women.
                He stared gloomily at the pup tents scattered over the sand. In a day or two he would be sent up to his new platoon, and the thought gave him no joy. A rifleman now! It was such a dirty trick. At least, if they hadn't told him he was going to be a clerk. Roth shrugged. All the Army wanted you for was cannon fodder. They even made riflemen out of men like himself, fathers, with poor health. He was qualified for other things, a college graduate, familiar with office work. But try and explain it to the Army.
                He passed a tent where a soldier was pounding some