Chapter 19: The Broken Book

Thirty-one men get off the bus and Hollis has one afternoon to make them a company. He hands them Korea, he hands them the pot, he hands them the chili mac — and the one thing I keep coming back to is the nineteen-year-old who wants to know whether the beans go in first. Hollis doesn't answer him with a speech. He sends him for the pork chops and shouts after him: get the big ones, mine especially. That's how he tells a new man he's in. I wonder if the private ever figured out what he'd been handed.
If you'd like to read ahead, the chapters after this one are already up on my p*****n: https:///zuochuang