Yet he fully believed it. His head buzzed. He was beer-warmed. Somehow too he felt warmed by being in the infantry. Here, in the 7th Battalion, 402d Infantry, he would learn war in a way he would never learn war in a signal battalion repairing wires or setting up telephone systems. A wireman or an infantryman. There was no comparison. One was the real thing, one was make-believe soldiering.
Soon, he thought, I will know war. I will learn from these crazy men. Death is not a sin and neither is killing. Crazy. How can anyone say that? How can one of them say that and nobody even flinch?
When Chelini re-entered the Phoc Roc TOC he tried to see them from a different perspective, as if he were one of them. They’re really tight, he thought standing inside the door watching the center table thr
