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our platoon. Lieutenant Ivy-League, our platoon leader, would join us a few days later. But, for the present, Thinface was in charge. He could not have been much older than I—perhaps a few months—but he had been in the Marines for three years. That made him ages my senior.
    “All right, here it is,” he told us. He brushed back his lank blond hair quickly. His thin boy’s face was screwed up earnestly, as it always was when he was giving the troops the straight. “Here it is. We’re moving out to the boondocks. Enlisted men”—how N.C.O.’s love that phrase—“enlisted men will fall out tomorrow morning in full marching gear. Sea bags will be locked and left in the huts. Check your mess gear. Be sure your shelter half is okay. You better have the right amount of tent pegs or it’ll be your ass.
    “All liberty is canceled.”
    We grumbled and returned to our huts. We fell to assembling our packs. And then, for the first time, the officers began to amuse themselves at playing-with-soldiers. Every hour, it seemed, Sergeant Thinface burst in on us with a new order, now confirming, now contradicting his earlier marching instructions.
    “C.O. says no tent pegs.”
    “Battalion says to take your sea bags.”
    “Belay that—get those tent pegs in your shelter halves.”
    Only the Hoosier, who had the born private’s calm contempt for officers, refused to join the general confusion. Each time the harried Thinface came panting in with a fresh order, Hoosier arose from his cot and listened to him with grave concern. But when Thinface disappeared, he shrugged and returned to his cot to sit there, smoking, surveying us with a superior look.
    “Hoosier,” I said. “Aren’t you going to pack?”
    “I got my stuff out,” he said, pointing to an array of socks, shorts, shaving cream and other impedimenta. “Aren’t you going to pack it?”
    “Hell, no, Lucky! I’ll pack it in the morning—soon’s they make their silly minds up.”
    Chuckler’s husky voice cut it, that quality of mirth softening the rebuke.
    “You’d better. They’ll have an inspection and it’ll be your ass. They’ll throw you so far back in the brig, they’ll have to feed you with a slingshot.”
    Hoosier snorted derisively, lapsing into a wide-mouthed grin. All afternoon he watched us, smoking, pulling away at two cans of warm beer he had secreted the night before, certain all the while he would be proven right.
    He was. We put and took incessantly, veering like weather vanes in the shifting wind of orders blowing down from officer’s country. But Hoosier was right. In the morning the final order came from the battalion commander. He had abstained from playing soldier. But when his order came through it was like none of the others, because it was official.
    We tore our packs down, reassembled them, and then swung the whole bulky business onto our backs.
    I do not recall how much the marching order weighed. Maybe twenty pounds. Even in this, men are so different. I carried the barest minimum, exactly what the colonel prescribed. But a man concerned for cleanliness might slip in a few extra bars of soap or carry a bottle of hair oil; another might cache two cans of beans in the bottom of his pack; a third could not bear to come away without a bundle of letters from home.
    A soldier’s pack is like a woman’s purse: it is filled with his personality. I have saddened to see the mementos in the packs of dead Japanese. They had strong family ties, these smooth-faced men, and their packs were full of their families.
    We fell in in front of the huts. The packs had a warm comfortable heavy feeling.
    “Forrr-ward—harch! Route step—harch!” Off we went to the boondocks.
    Perhaps we walked ten miles; not much by the standards of veterans, but it was a great distance then. The route was through the pine woods, over a dirt road barely wide enough to admit a jeep. A whole battalion was on the march, and my poor squad was tucked away