Free 365 Days by Ronald J. Glasser Page B

the most myopic general, obviously a costly one. In the two months that it had taken to stop the VC, 20,000 Americans had been killed or wounded. Whole units had become inoperational. Others were running at one-half to three-fourths strength. There weren’t enough first and second lieutenants to go around; sergeants were running companies, and corporals platoons.
    Three days didn’t even give him time to relax. Later, all he could remember about his trip home was that everything seemed so easy there, so fat, and so very dull.
    “Tomorrow morning, gentlemen, we will be up at zero three-thirty. We will begin the day by running one full mile.” What’s all the fuss, Macabe thought; they’d run six miles at a time at Airborne school.
    They woke up at 3:30 in fatigues and jump boots. With 40-pound field packs on their backs, they lined up near the half-mile track of Fort Benning’s Jump School.
    “Gentlemen,” the instructor said, “we shall now run one mile—in twelve minutes.” It took a moment for Macabe to realize what he was hearing. The six miles at Bragg had been a rather leisurely affair. A twelve-minute mile in full gear would almost have to be a sprint. “Tomorrow, we shall run a mile and a quarter; the day after that, a mile and a half, until you are running four miles in twenty-four minutes. Fall out!”
    Everything from then on was timed—the low crawl, the parallel ladders, the run, the dodge and jump—everything. Macabe had come to Benning confident that he was in shape, but they were pushing him right from the beginning. “What’s wrong, soldier, don’t you want to be a Ranger?” He pushed, and still it was, “Come on, sonny, do it again.” There was almost one instructor per man, and he was always there over you, pushing, shouting, yelling. Already lean, Macabe could feel himself getting leaner.
    “You look a little tired, mister, want to rest?”
    “Dragging there, huh? You don’t want to be a Ranger, do you? Not if you move like that.” Through mud and water, through the woods, carrying forty-pound ammunition cans—and each other.
    “Now get your ass moving, or back to mother.”
    “Go back and do that again—right!”
    During those first weeks at Benning, exercise became more than just PT. It took on the aspects of combat, of survival. Exhausted, they were pushed through miles of mud and water under full gear, always under full gear. They jumped blindfolded off three-meter boards, crawled for hundreds of yards, got up and did it again, and all the time they were getting less and less sleep and meeting grueling inspections. And all the time there were forced marches under full gear.
    “The first few hours of sleep are the only ones you need. They’re the deepest ones. The rest are just for dreaming. Now fall out!” They went to bed at one and two and got up at three and four. There was no heat in the barracks, and after a while it didn’t matter. Everything was always done flat out, rapelling down freezing cliffs, log ladders, dragging forty-pound ammunition cans through the mud, going up rocky, forty-degree slopes. An incredible numbness began to take hold of them all; Macabe drank his morning coffee while he was still in line so that he could warm his hands. Then it would begin again.
    He finished drills without even remembering what he had done, pulled himself through another mile without thinking of the mile ahead. In a world removed from anything he could remember, he began losing track of days, then hours. A strange, sullen kind of rebellion began to develop. Exhausted, his humor gone, he began glaring back at the screaming instructors. Others quit; they gave up or just said “Fuck it” and went away. Rebellion would have broken out, not only with him, but with the other survivors as well; a little more pushing, another unnecessary march, just one more abuse would have done it. But just when rebellion was taking over, the instructors, as if on cue, suddenly backed off, and