Lucifer’s Privates

It was a mournfully cold morning in January at Fort Ben Harrison, Indiana. Rain had fallen and frozen until an inch-thick sheet of ice lay on every unheated or unsalted surface. Every leaf on every shrugging tree had become encased in a crystal cocoon and a grass field was now a million chubby ice fingers pointed in accusatory unison at a guilty gray sky.

A shorn-headed young Private First Class was especially miserable, being the softer sort of soldier from California, but the stalwart example set by Teodoro, his tent-mate from the even warmer Philippine climate kept the PFC from complaining too loudly. Without speaking, the two broke the heavy sheet of ice from their puptent and fumbled around numbly with unresponsive feet and hands. It was two o’clock in the morning and they’d been told that a simulated battery of cannons had crept within range of their campsite while they simulated sleep that night.

Sergeant Gadsden was pleased to see his men responding so quickly to his threats of simulated shrapnel which would surely start falling as soon as the simulated cannon crew chipped the ice from their ice-locked simulated gun. Despite the violent diphthong in the word shrapnel, it is simply named after the rotten British general who invented it.

The heavy cracking of the thick ice was the sole sound in the dark and otherwise hibernating forest. The group, anxious to start the march that would bring some warmth to their hands and feet, moved quickly and was soon retreating to a position safe from the shrapnel, if not frostbite. It was during the setup at the new campsite that the fire broke out.

Sergeant Gadsden was a proud, young leader of men, but was just as cold as his privates that morning. He was having difficulty lighting a lantern with shaking, numb hands. He moved into the hastily-erected tent and began sloshing kerosene on the newly exposed leaves on the tent’s floor, while cursing each match that refused to light the unwilling lantern.

There was nothing simulated about the tent burning down with rifles, machine guns, field computers and blank bullets inside. However, the privates simulated dejection when they were sent from the icy forest to garrison to sort through the charred lump of equipment.

Teodoro and the PFC were tasked with pushing a large cart bearing the bulk of the molten clump to the supply sergeant who was busy at work in his shimmering arms room. The exhausted pair in their dirty fatigues felt especially unclean and unmilitary in this room in which hundreds of lovingly cleaned and oiled rifles rested securely in gleaming metal racks. The supply sergeant was clearly angry that a half dozen of his children had been brought back charred, warped and filthy; he shouted at the two sooty faced soldiers to extricate the rifles from the clump and vanish from his sight.

When Teodoro sluggishly tugged on the protruding barrel of one rifle, the charred mass shifted and immediately came to life, filling the gleaming arms room with a deafening whoosh, then a thick cloud of pallid yellow powder. A filthy, but unused fire extinguisher began ejaculated chemical powder over the pristine rifles in the armory, racks and even the supply-sergeant’s spit-shined jump boots. With a fine film of yellow powder on his starched uniform and even his closely-trimmed mustache, the supply sergeant began bellowing at the hapless pair to get the cart out of there. Failing to hear his bellowing above the extinguisher’s roar, the two began tearing the charred items from the cart and throwing them about the arms room floor.

The supply sergeant finally ceased bellowing and prodded the two into the captain’s office and told the tragic tale, recommending stern punitive action for both. After the supply sergeant conducted a smart about-face and marched out, the commander smiled wryly at the sooty-faced young men with charred helmets and said, “You two must be the privates from hell.”