We were back in the Pecan Grove again. Today’s lecture was on handling high explosives... dynamite, nitro-starch, prima cord, stuff like that. We sat as usual nodding in the bleachers while some young shavetail out front droned on and on about setting and crimping fuses, (a crimping tool was to be used at all times without exception), how to place charges, booby-traps, and how to find (poke with your bayonet!) land mines, and antitank mines and disarm them. And how anti-personnel mines were apt to be in all the obvious and overlooked places – especially any such that “invited” one to “straighten up” or correct something. (Thus warned, we all avoided the later picture of Emperor Hirohito which hung askew on a house wall at Tokyamachee – and was “armed” with a firecracker!)

But today it was too much: the heat was stupefying, and only the steady rap! rap! rap! of Depp’s “pointer stick” on selected helmets kept their wearers from sliding into complete oblivion.

The lieutenant came to a break in his lecture.

“Now,” he said, “I would like one of you men to come down here and demonstrate for me, please, the use of the M-2 (if memory serves) fuse crimper as you understand it, and from what I have been saying here the past hour."

This was actually nothing so much as a glorified pair of pliers...

“Volunteers?," the lieutenant intoned.

(But we were draftees, and “selection” was our middle name. We waited (obediently for all that) and not really “hound dog style” ...but close to it maybe to be always “selected” – exactly as our Draft Boards back home had done... to us! Grin! “Volunteering” was only a source-of-last-resort ... particularly when there were noncoms and officers about to do all the complicated drill of the “selecting....”)

The lieutenant knew all this of course, so he hardly paused after his rhetorical request for ‘volunteers’, and immediately pointed to one husky young guy in the first row.

“You, Soldier,” he said. “Front and Center, please”

The trainee rose and stepped out in front of the lieutenant.. On a table beside him were a length of fuse, some “dummy” caps, and an M-2.

“Please show your fellow trainees here how you are supposed to crimp a cap to a fuse,” he said.

The trainee, newly roused from his heat-induced stupor, just stared at the Lieutenant a moment or so as though he had not heard him at all. “Come, Come!,” said the lieutenant rather irritatedly, “Soldier! Crimp that fuse!”

Reacting rather like a grouse that springs instantly to life beneath your feet from a total inert state on a tramp through the woods, the trainee seemed to sort of collect himself all at once as it were, and with one swoop he reached over and grabbed the fuse, pinched the cap onto the end with his thumb and forefinger, and in a practicised sweep brought it right up to his mouth and crimped the cap on with his teeth!”

Then he returned the crimped fuse to the table.

The lieutenant stared bug-eyed. Depp was making noises in his throat way in back of us.

“Soldier!”.... Soldier!”, said the lieutenant. “Soldier... what in the living HELL you doing here?” (He had been at some pains during his lecture to say that whatever else we any of us ever did, we were NEVER to crimp caps with our teeth! Since caps, per se, were news to most of us anyhow, this triggered no opposing behavior patterns...).

His further admonishments had noted we must leave all that to John Wayne and his fellow machos in the movies, as that was never to be done in this man’s army, no siree!, etc. etc,. and if anyone did this, they would most likely blow off part of their lower jaw in the process (should they bite too close and detonate the cap...).

So the demonstrate-ee’s demo amounted to nothing much less than subordination – or so it seemed.

“What have you to say for yourself?” the lieutenant continued. He was some miffed for sure.

“Well, Sir,” the soldier began quite respectfully, “I heard your talk, Sir, and sure nothin’ wrong with it far as I can see. But I don’t know what came over me, Sir. But it bein’ so hot and we-uns here bein’ so sleepy and all, I guess when you sort of snapped at me, I sort of “come to” jest all at oncet, and then – I dunno – I jest did it like I always done it!

I guess...”

“You ‘guess’ what?, said the Looie. “What are you talking about, Soldier? Like you always did what?”

“Like I always crimped caps...Sir.”

“Always? Always..Soldier? How or when have you ‘always’ been crimping blasting caps?”

“In my daddy’s seam, Sir. Since’t I was about seven, maybe eight years old.”

“Your what? Your daddy’s seam? What the hell is a seam?”

“A’hind our place in West Virginia,” the soldier said. “My daddy worked the coal hisself when there weren’t no work at the mines.”

It began to dawn on the lieutenant: his trainee here was a “cracker” – a “coal cracker” (they never called themselves miners). Been working in the mines all his life. His face, (all their faces, when you got to know them – and up close), had little tiny specks like a million blackheads all pushed into the flesh from coal dust and coal bits blown into their hides from a thousand forgotten premature “fire-in-the-holes” which they just took in stride.

There was a short silence there in the hot sun. The lieutenant, doubtless the product of “privilege,” at least compared to his would-be pupil from the poverty-ridden hollows of Appalachia, just looked at him in disbelief, then said, “Your ‘daddy’ taught you to bite caps on?,” he asked.

“Yessir! Yessir! He truly did. He did!” He drew himself up a bit. “We all’s did, Lieutenant, Sir!”

The officer knew when he had been bested – or was close to being so.

“Soldier!,” he said once again, “What you have done here is close to disobeying an officer’s order! Do you understand?”

The ‘cracker’ nodded and said, “Well, Yessir – I am sorry! I really am...”

It was the lieutenant’s opening: “Do you think, Soldier, that if I asked you one more time to crimp a cap to that fuse using the (model) that you could do it?”

Only a slight hesitation ...then “Yessir! I think so...”

“Do it, then!"

The cracker picked up the crimper and a new length of fuse and placing the cap upon it, and inserting the end in the crimper upper jaw (always!), he turned his face to the side, and set the cap, then laid it back on the table with his other work.

“Fine!,” said the Lieutenant. “Now you go back to the ranks and sit down, Soldier”. Then he paused several seconds while the man squirmed back into his seat in the low bleachers.

Then, looking straight at the seated platoon in front of him, and with only the tiniest hint of a smile breaking over his hot and sweaty face, he said out loud to no one in particular, “And if you are ever setting fuses in my vicinity again... well, I promise I just will... look the other way...!” An even shorter pause, and then he said, “But the rest of you - dishwashers, mechanics, students and clerks – whatever you were in civilian life – if you haven’t worked in the mines and try any of this shit, you maybe gonna wish you hadn’t!”

Raising his eyes to Depp, standing in back, he said, “Sergeant! Form your platoon! And take them back to their Quad!”

“It's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew
Where the dangers are double and the pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It's dark as a dungeon way down in the mines...”

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