The Naked And The Well Read

When the order came to take Hill 19 the Sergeant ground his cigar stub into the fine white sand of Tojaida Island and bared his corn-yellow teeth. “Not that it’s ours to take,” he said, rubbing his thick, calloused hand over the stubble of his square jaw. “You mugs understand we have no property right in the hill, or any moral claim to the area it encompasses.” He shifted his packed, hard body and spat into an overturn C-ration can.

“But is it correct, from an ethical standpoint, to allow physical force to be the deciding factor in disagreements between nations? What would Thoreau say?” It was Dough-Boy, the freckle-faced infantryman with the crooked, midwestern smile and innocent grey eyes that blinked whenever you poured pencil-shavings in them.

“Difficult to say,” the Sergeant replied, pulling a cigar stub from its wrapper. “Kant would subscribe to the deontological theory of moral imperatives.”

“Check!” interrupted Grease-Monkey, the cherub-faced mechanic and former professor of Linguistics at Cornell. “He’d want us to examine our motives in a neutral environment, not the biased circumstances of war.”

Bull, resting his muscle-bloated body on a rusted oil drum, had been shoved to the breaking point. His broad, featureless face exploded in fury as he jumped to his feet. “Talk, talk, talk … all we do is talk. Me want to clobber the enemy, not talk!” As he worked his massive mandibles the others rolled their eyes.

“Reminds me a little of Benjy, the simple-minded Christ figure in Faulkner’s The Sound and Fury,” muttered Stir-Fry, the platoon chef.

“Philistine,” said Germ-Jockey, the seasoned medic.

“Leave ‘im alone,” ordered the Sergeant. There was a long, embarrassed silence as the rage melted from Bull’s boulder-like head. “Hey, like … like me sorry me got mad,” he grumbled, like a friendly grizzly bear endowed with the miracle of human speech. “It’s just dat I didn’t do the readin’ this week.”

The platoon burst into gentle laughter as the Sergeant gave Bull a manly but affectionate kick in the head. “Hell, that all? Jesus, Bull, you can catch up. It’s only eighty pages of Flaubert and we’ll help you with the French.” The Sergeant’s words stretched a broad, moronic smile across Bull’s acre-wide face and helped the platoon temporarily forget the horrors of jungle war.

“Alright … alright,” shouted the Sergeant, shouldering his book bag, “load up and remember … no shooting. We have a moral obligation to preserve all life, regardless of the demands placed on us by an arbitrary government.”

“Even if they shoot at us first, Sarge?” asked Slim-Jim, the munitions expert and beef jerky magnate, as he unloaded his rifle. “I mean, some interpret Ghandi’s later writings as …” The Sergeant interrupted his discourse with a powerful right to the solar plexus. “I’m not takin’ any revisionist up the hill with me,” he added, turning his back on Slim-Jim’s wheezing form, “so you can sit here and stew while we’re gone.”

At the call to “fall out,” the small platoon lined up and began its rigorous but sensitive trek through the dense jungle.

byline: Conan O'Brien '85