There was no sound but the surf and a pelting rain, that fell on bare gravelly ground seared everywhere with tire tracks. Bareness was something the Army brought to all its posts, so that a bunch of grass was considered unnecessary, or tended for dear life. The Army city, once a humming, purposeful anonymity, was now completely silent and alone, but for me it still kept some of the power of its restrictions, arousing old apprehensions--that tightening of the stomach at facing some new unknown. The bare white barracks were still intact, and the power lines. There were signs indicating underground cables, or latrines. There were off-limits signs on empty streets. I stood in the rain and remembered that essential order, with its own enormous kind of waste and consumption, and the feelings of frustration and boredom it produced in me. I remembered the routine, the rote-mindedness which often passed for efficiency, the utter helplessness that many soldiers felt during wartime, and were obliged to accept, about being part of something huge, anonymous, even reckless and uncalculated, an ignorance of which they themselves were ignorant and to which they had not been invited. I also remembered the unassuming friendships you could make in the Army, the directness with which men accepted each other. A sparrow hawk flew over. I noticed deer tracks on the ground. They were interruptions of a nature that did not concern me very much as a draftee in an Army camp, although--more than most--we were exposed to the wide nights and their stars, the wonderful freshness of dawn, and the extremes of heat and cold. There is a naked timelessness to Army life that allies it to a sea. A soldier’s life was restricted and oversimplified--he was not his own agent--and at the same time he acted for the world, cast out on an open plain. A great waste took him, equal in its surface or its depths, in being out of his hands. When he protested, he was protesting against the passage of all the nights on all the waters. I can remember a fellow barracksmate one evening after dark saying he had something of great importance he had to speak to me about. We went out and talked in the company street, standing on the sandy grounds between the buildings, conscious of a towering night with flashing stars. He talked desperately, on and on, about the life he had been planning before the Army took him away; he complained that he and the girl he was to marry had been put off; he talked bitterly about the job which had now been denied him, the business he was going to establish, and: “Why? Why? Why?” What business was it of the President of the United States to start a war and send him into it?