365 Days by Ronald J. Glasser

it was over. The troops were called out and told to get their gear together and to get into the two-and-a-half-ton trucks.
    For a month they moved out, living in the cold wet foothills of Georgia. There were snug, warm Quonset huts for the instructors, but for Macabe and the others there were only poncho liners and tarpaulins. The rain, cutting through the bushes, froze on them. They woke up in the morning shivering, as cold as they’d been when they’d managed to fall asleep. Moving along vague, slippery paths, they went out on patrols. Upper respiratory infections became pneumonias, pneumonias became pleurisies. The sick and the weak passed out. The rest, gulping penicillin pills, went on—pushing through the bush.
    They stayed out patrolling four or five days at a time. The instructors, closed-mouth and seemingly indifferent, went along, but offered no help. The Georgia hills were at best difficult. In places, though, they were plainly uninhabitable, with tangles of second growth as thick as any forest anywhere. Macabe had never seen anything like it. There were times when he stood there, freezing, the rain blurring his vision, his fatigues soaked, looking into a wall of bushes and veins, with no place even to begin. They pushed through for days. Two weeks out, the patrol got lost and stayed in the field with no food for an extra thirty-one hours. When they got back, their instructor, who had been with them the entire time, failed the patrol leader and sent them out again that same afternoon.
    For weeks they walked through those hills—blank-faced—with their weapons, carrying only what they needed, learning, despite the discomfort or because of it, where to put their feet, how to conserve their strength, what path to pick, how to follow a map. They got used to going for days with only ten-minute naps. There were no concessions for the weather, the land, or the men, but on night maneuvers those troopers classified as weak swimmers were allowed to put two pieces of luminescent tape on the back of their caps instead of one.
    All the time the class grew smaller. You could quit any time. Just walk away. Once on patrol, though, all the options were gone. In a world that had once been full of possibilities there was only one left—finishing. For those who stayed, a certain pride and comradeship grew. Not the group kind at jump school, but an individual respect and reliance. There weren’t enough troops there to hold any one man up, and only one trooper could bring the whole thing down on everyone else’s head. So they moved carefully through the Georgia hills, five-, six-man patrols, watching each other and learning each other’s weaknesses and strengths, supporting where they could, helping if they had to.
    They finished their patrolling techniques with a four-day sweep that ended up taking them into a windswept canyon where, frozen and wet, they edged themselves across slippery planks hanging sixty feet above rock-filled river beds. Two left after that, but even they had to cross the canyon to get out. Macabe felt like some kind of survivor. The future—any future—no longer seemed so worrisome.
    After that last patrol the class was taken back to Benning. Macabe sat, hunched over in the back of the truck, grimly watching the hills recede. Climbing down at Benning, they were given six hours to clean up, get a steak, and get back to go to the mountains. Most went to town, but Macabe stayed by himself. He took a long, hot shower and went off to eat alone.
    In the mountains, they camped high up where it was still winter, despite the fact that it was already almost April in the valleys. There were large patches of snow on the ground, and all the night temperatures were below freezing. The emphasis was not so much on working, as it was on learning the mountains. After Benning and the hills, it was almost leisurely. It was a sort of graduate school. There were field seminars on techniques, situations, execution, on