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Hands
by Nicholas Finch Webster came back from boot camp with blistered calluses all over his palms. We asked him about basic training and he told us a story about a kid who tried to commit suicide during the first week. This kid stole an AR-15 from the armory and stowed away with it into the shower room. The kid put the rifle’s barrel into his own mouth and pulled the trigger a few times, right in front of the company commander and a few staff sergeants who were trying to stop him. Poor son of a bitch had never fired a rifle before, and hadn’t yet learned to load a gun properly or even check to see if a gun was loaded in the first place; so of course nothing happened. All the battalions new what’d went down but they didn’t kick the kid out of boot camp. Two days later he rejoined Webster’s battalion. No one said anything to the kid about it, in fact, no one talked about it period. They left it alone, they left him alone. That moment, that part of the kid’s life was a completely isolated incident. Even for the kid it must’ve been like it had never happened. But halfway through basic the kid was gone. His bunk was empty. His stuff was gone too. It was as though the linen that his sheets were made of had crushed him and everything he owned into nothing. Private Smith disappeared, or maybe it was Private Shaw, Webster doesn’t quite remember. All he remembers is how bad the kid’s hands would shake during the parade rest position. I asked Webster how his palms got cut up so badly. We do PT in the mornings, he said, when it’s the coldest out. The winters are brutal, so when you’re doing pushups outside the skin hardens and breaks. Hell, he said, every morning I left bloodied hand prints in the snow. |
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