An extended account of a dispatch first published on Glenn Loury’s page follows. The dispatch in question sought to convey to the homedweller of laundry machines and televisions, throw pillows and ottomans, the routine of life in a bunker, dreary, sometimes comic, sometimes thrilling, often tedious.
Scenes from a bunker
Ungodliness
Much free time of army life is spent trying to stay clean—or rather, because you are never really clean, trying to stay hygienic. Alcohol wipes, shampoo, and foot powder are among the militiaman's bag of toiletries. The surfaces of his world are muddy, dusty, or stained, and when he has the opportunity and will, he is ever trying to keep himself dry and clean and fresh.
Sometimes the means of getting clean would leave one dirtier for it. I recall not a few grimy days thinking whether it was worthwhile to take a shower. It felt such a process. To trudge upstairs, get outside, cross over the muddied duckboards, get wet and clean, and then, as much you can, get dry, before returning through the trench path back to one’s dusty bed. The mud would cake onto the wet birkenstocks, becoming ever larger and weightier blots, the slop below you holding to the sole more recalcitrantly with each step, the sole slowly coming to release itself from the suction with a plosive plop. To reuse the much-used towel was also an economical calculation, and logistical (when would we be doing laundry next?)
It is curious that once you have no other choice than to be dirty and squalid and less hygienic than you would ever conceive of being under regular circumstances, once you accept the fact of squalidness, you feel somehow less repulsed by it.
The food I ate with unwashed hands (unwashed of what exactly I desist from describing), the stained mattress I slept in (stained by what I desist from thinking on), the begrimed and foul-odored clothes I wore, and the sweat which was itself like wearing a layer of material: I accepted with a tacit, well, it's all part and natural to the circumstance. Fuck the discomfort. I'm paid in experience."
Staining the frock at a palatial dinner party feels dirtier than being unspeakably sullied and befouled in the barracks. In the latter engagement I was very much dressed for the occasion.
The same curious principle applies to hunger. Knowing that food, or “chow”, is given at the morning , noon, and evening , the relative hours of 8.30, 13.00, and 18.30, the body puts out of mind, or the mind puts out of body, the thought of eating. That you get hungry is certain. But you will not really know how ravenous an appetite you accumulated until sitting down to satisfy it, and between you will not be in the service of pleasing your own imperious pangs. This paradox can be summed up this way: When there is nothing for it, when there is no other choice, you are more likely to go about the one you have with acceptance and resolution.
There is also a deferred benefit, in furnishing one a new point of reference. The bitter herbs enhance the sweet nectar. One doesn't simply return to normal circumstances; what was the previous standard is now elevated, lifted by having another level added underneath.
The difficult experience is worth more for the formation of a human individual than the smooth, unremarkable ones.
Between Terror and Boredom
The life of the combat soldier is a cycle of enduring periods of inertness between bouts of strained activity.
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