Read I Pledge Allegiance for Free Online

that.”
    “But I’m not here to kill anybody. That’s for the Marines. We’re just here to pound the daylights out of ’em, nice and simple.”
    “Simple. And nice.”
    “Exactly.”
    “If you say so, Huff.”
    “I say so.”
    And that is that, for now. Eventually, Huff and I and loads and loads of other guys here in the city of
Boston,
not to be confused with the city of Boston, have to hit the rack. We are supposed to sleep when we can, to be ready for the times when we can’t.
    Except that, during lots of the time when I’m supposed to sleep, I can’t.
    I hear Huff snoring in the rack across from me, and Rivera talking quietly in the rack below me. That’s how you know when Rivera is sleeping, because he’s talking. Awake, he’s about the shut-uppest guy I have ever met, so I suppose that’s why it all has to come out when he’s asleep. I have a thought that maybe he stopped talking when he got on this ship and found himself stuck with the nickname Vera. But I wouldn’t know for sure, because he won’t say. Maybe he’ll tell me in his sleep one night.
    Which I would probably miss anyway, because I don’t like to stay in my rack for very long. For starters, the nightmares are back. They’re basically the nightmares I had before, where Rudi, Beck, Ivan, and I are all slaughtered in Vietnam. Only now they’re higher-quality nightmares, after basic training and the war stories you get from every single person you meet in the military whether you want to hear them or not. My nightmares are now more graphic and better informed.
    And it seems I have discovered a kind of claustrophobia I never knew I had. It’s a strange relationship you have out here on a naval vessel in the middle of the ocean. It becomes an odd and unexpected outside/in thing. The topside of the ship is truly as outside as you could ever be in this world. The constant fierce windand the spray, the insane distance of nothingness on the horizon and the sky being bigger than any universe I ever thought existed. That is the Navy I thought about, when I thought about the Navy.
    But then you go inside. Belowdecks, downstairs, whatever you want to call it, and it all closes in on you. It’s too hot. The air sits still and always carries a whiff of the one guy out of twelve hundred who needs a shower. The racks are close. The iron walls are close. It is a gigantic mother of a ship carrying a whole lot of little smallnesses within. It gets to me. It gets to me, and I get to
out.
    It’s why I don’t normally spend more than two consecutive hours sleeping before I go wandering. I don’t know, honestly, if the new vastness of the ocean outside has made me more critical and uneasy, or if it is just the configuration of the ship, or the Navy itself that’s done it. But I’m uneasy.
    And then, of course, there’s this: I can hardly keep a decent watch over my boys from inside, can I? What good am I asleep, or canned like Spam in the depths of the ship?
    What if it happened, to any one of them, while I was sleeping?
    So I walk around and around, sucking in the night air, watching for whatever’s out there in the sweet blackair. It takes an eternity for our ship to get over to the other side of the world in order to blow parts of that world to pieces. Weeks of quiet routine before we get to the real thing, which we know will be anything but quiet. Or routine.
    I wish this part would last a little bit longer. But it can’t. We’ve got a mission. I’ve got a mission.
    And before long, after a lap and another lap of the ship, I wind up where I always wind up, staring up, aft of the ship. I am staring straight up, like a little boy, at the awesomeness of our two Terrier guided missiles sitting ready in their launchers.
    And I know just exactly what Huff is talking about. He likes the big guns in their tanklike turrets, and I like our guided missiles, pointed and ready to do the business. Like nobody’s business.
    I feel the rush every time I see