The Hunting Trip by III William E. Butterworth

not help but overhear Colonel O’Reilly refer to you as a teenaged Protestant sexual deviate. His detractors don’t call him ‘Bad Bill O’Reilly’ without cause. Enough said?”
    â€œYes, First Sergeant. Thank you.”
    â€œCome with me, Williams. I’ll show you to your room, and then we’ll get you started on your ROTPIP.”
    [ TWO ]
    O ver the next two weeks, both through the ROTPIP program and simply by living in what the Army called his barracks, Phil learned a great deal about Berlin generally, and the XXXIIIrd CIC Detachment specifically.
    For one thing, the barracks was like no other Phil had lived in elsewhere in the Army.
    At Fort Dix, he lived in a two-story wooden barracks that had been constructed in 1940 with an expected life of three years. There, each “squad bay”—one on each floor—had accommodated thirty double-decker bunks. At one end of the barracks was the room with toilets and showers, which the Army called the “latrine.”
    Phil, having studied Latin for three years at six different schools, knew the term “latrine” was derived from the Latin word
latrina
, a contraction of
lavatrina
, from
lavare
, which meant to wash. But no one else in his basic training company had ever heard the word before donning a uniform.
    Although the Fort Dix latrine had indeed offered facilities to wash—eight shower heads mounted eighteen inches apart on one wall and eight sinks on the other, it also had offered facilities for the 120 men it served as a disposal point for the fluids and solids for which the soldier’s bodies had no further use. This was accomplished through eight water closets placed so close together that defecators had no trouble sharing a copy of a magazine during the 180 seconds allotted to them twice a day to do their business.
    The barracks and latrines at Fort Holabird had similarly been constructed to last only three years—and this was long before any of the current inhabitants had been born. The differences then were that the bunks on each floor were single bunks, which meant that only sixtymen were competing for occupancy of the water closets, rather than 120, which further meant that the occupancy time allotted could be, and had been, upped to 240 seconds, or four minutes, twice daily.
    The floors of the Holabird barracks and latrine were not nearly as sparkling as those at Dix. Not that they were dirty, but nothing can make a floor sparkle more than 120 men attacking it with toothbrushes and lye soap on a twice daily basis, as was the practice at Fort Dix.
    The room to which he had been assigned on his first day in Berlin was larger than his room in his mother’s house, larger than any room to which he ever had been assigned in any boarding school, and about twice the size of the closet his father insisted on calling “Phil’s Room” in the Williams apartment at 590 Park Avenue.
    It had a bath with a tub, a stall shower, a double-sink, an enclosed water closet, and next to the water closet another porcelain device through which water flowed in all directions, including straight up into the air, the purpose of which Phil could not imagine.
    Inasmuch as he was a junior administrator—in point of fact,
the
junior administrator—he was no doubt going to be forced to share the bath with another junior administrator. Only the more senior administrators (and of course CIC special agents) were given private accommodations.
    He met the other junior administrator that same day. He came into Phil’s room from their shared bathroom.
    He was a slight young man—even smaller than Colonel O’Reilly—whose skin was reddish brown in color. He was wearing horn-rimmed glasses and tennis whites.
    â€œGott im Himmel!”
the young man proclaimed. “ EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Holden EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Caulfield in the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! flesh!”
    â€œExcuse