In Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr.’s seminal stop motion animated masterpiece Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, walking was used to describe a characters transformation for evil into good; as well as describing a person taking their first steps, and as a new form of travel, to a character that had been evil and was looking to change. In the Army, however, the concept by merely placing one foot in front of the other was magnified 10 fold. It also wasn’t just used to teach us how to walk; it was our primary mode of transportation, a form of punishment, and a formidable form of exercise, in these three states it excelled for most of us, for others not so much. From the very beginning we were told that we would be walking almost everywhere that we needed to go, but these were no leisurely strolls around the block complete with iced tea or lemonade at the end, these were treacherous and almost never ending marches that sometimes lasted hours before we had our first break.
Walking had not been a problem for me, as I said before I enjoyed walking, in fact I had even walked a great deal before, in certain and various charity organizations, but this sort of marching was starting to get to me. It was relentless and it began to feel like we weren’t moving or doing anything productive unless we were walking. Somehow the Army tried to limit the use of the word walk and therefore alluded to all walking as marching, this was a petty attempt at semantics, almost like the tomato argument.
We weren’t simply putting one foot in front of the other, we weren’t using it for anything more than moving from point A to point B. Sometimes point B was about a mile and a half away, and other times I was a few miles away. It didn’t matter, we practically walked everywhere we needed to; constantly putting one foot in front of the other, or so to say.
This repetitive act was one of the only things that I didn’t questions, maybe it was because I enjoyed it so much. Walking, I was in my own world, almost oblivious to the world around me. This however was not a good thing, especially during basic training, when you’re supposed to follow a group and establish a group think. The problem with marching, as with most other group-think activities, is that not there is always that one person who is never in tune with everyone else. We had a few of those detractors but one will ultimately stick out always because we happened to share the same bunk and same name.
I had never been so infuriated with a person before in my life, he was laziness personified. Whereas I was always questioning the implications of the things set out in front of me, he simply say no point and therefor did not act. The difference in what I did was that I acted, however hesitantly, he had simply seen an obstacle and he was defeated. The sheer audacity of someone like that to even enlist in the Army was something that I didn’t understand. How can I, lacking the ability to blindly follow the group sign, judge someone else who was possibly going through his own period of dis/enlightenment? What I felt for this particular person was not disgust but it was in fact pity. I pitied him, because of his carefree attitude and his willingness to be lazy and not care what anyone thought of him. He knew no such thing as humility and it was pitiful.
The Long Road 