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"Sir yes sir!" Valentine shouted. A few voices behind joined in.
Patel put his hands on his hips and faced them. "Rest of you haven't finished evolving?
Communication occurs when the transmitter broadcasts and the transmittee acknowledges.
Try again!"
"Sir yes sir!" they shouted.
"I don't want to hear harmony-you're not a fuckin' chorus. All at once, and louder."
"Sir yes sir!" they shouted loud enough to be heard in Jonesboro. Georgia, not Arkansas.
"After morning exercise, we're going to build you all shelters. Ladies get theirs first, because we're in Southern Command. We're blessed with natural gallantry."
Morning exercises lasted until lunch. Patel took them through his "twelve labors." Again and again, he managed to find fault with the rhythm of their jumping jacks or the height of someone's buttocks during a push-up. He sent Valentine and four exhausted "slackers" off to get the meal while he finished with the rest.
There wasn't a chuck wagon available so they piled bread and beans and trays into a wheelbarrow and ate with spoons. Dessert was flaky pastry smeared with "Grog guck."
Valentine got tap detail. He turned on the spigot and filled cups and a couple of beat-up old canteens and bladders from the flow of water so the recruits had something to drink with their food.
With everyone sprawled on the cold, damp ground eating and drinking, Valentine finally got his pan full of beans. The beans tasted as though they'd once shared a tin with some ham but divorced some time back, though the molasses in the sauce was sweet and welcome.
Patel gave them thirty minutes and then roused them to get to work on the frames for the tents. Valentine was the only one to notice that Patel's breath smelled like aspirin as he bellowed. But they did manage to finish the women's tent and get a start on the showers.
That night they slept around fifty-five-gallon drum stoves burning scrap from the lumber they'd measured and cut.
The first day was nothing to the second. Everyone ached and groaned as they did the twelve labors. Some fool asked when they were going to get their uniforms and Patel showed them why they weren't yet fit to wear Southern Command issue by running across, covering in, and crawling through the noisome field where the camp's sanitary waters drained off.
"Too slow," Patel said each and every time they fell into the mud. Or crawled. Or got up.
Or crossed the field. Or turned around to cross the field again.
They slept in a formidable stench that second night, thanks to the field and two (or more-the men had had a long trip on buses) days' worth of hard-sweat body odor. The next day, eating a breakfast of biscuits and greasy gravy out of wheelbarrows again, they learned all about democracy as they voted to finish the showers before the men's shelter.
Valentine liked the decision that they'd rather sleep rough and cold than dirty. Men who wanted to get clean had pride in themselves. He also liked being under Patel's orders. It got him out of Camp Highbeam meetings and working dinners that were more social than productive.
They had the floorboards laid, the sinks running, and the shower headings up when Patel stopped them and had them line up on the camp's main road to welcome three new companies of the Guards into camp.
They must have made a strange impression, hair spiky with mud, the odd multicolor dungarees of Camp Liberty filthy with a mixture of muck and sawdust.
"Better get back to wrangling them pigs, boys," one called.
"Whew! Someone's been on shit detail," another Guard soldier called as they walked in.
Catcalls and jibes were part of the Command's proud tradition. The men stared off blankly into space or looked down. They didn't have the spirit to answer back.
Yet.
That was his job. And Patel's. And the rest of his NCOs, if he ever got any. To make up for the jokes, after dinner that night he told them a little more about what they would be doing in the Kurian Zone- scouting and trading for food, scrounging up replacement gear, and interacting with the local resistance.
Unfortunately for his company, he learned the next day that the second name stuck. Maybe it was their odd bubo placement in the camp's layout, but Valentine's company became known as the "shit detail" in everything but formal correspondence.
He discussed the problem the next morning with Patel in the little command shack as the men slept-clean now, thanks to the functioning showers but still in tiny field tents or bags in the cold clew-as they planned the day's training.
"What do you think of promoting from within?" Patel asked. "There are several ex-sergeants. You've even got a busted-down captain in your ranks."
"I'd like to see talent rewarded," Valentine said. "It's more of a mind-set than technical and leadership skills that I'm worried about. In the Kurian Zone, it's enough to just issue an order.
