Chapter 2

The strangeness of my clothing was quickly solved when we arrived at the dirty stone buildings of an almost deserted old Fort at the base of Manhattan. Nobody cared what the name was and I remembered it was still standing in my old time period of 2015. Now it was populated by a gaggle of unhappy and confused young males that were all asking when the next meal would be served.

It seemed like wherever we went it was invariably into some sort of a line for something that we were all uncertain was necessary. Apparently, this was a supply warehouse that was filled with sloppily stacked heaps of uniforms and other apparel including boots and hats and belts and everything needed to make us all like soldiers and not civilians. It seemed like the status of civilian was something everyone around me considered lower than a stray dog wandering and looking for scraps to fill his empty stomach.

As if from on high, I heard my name from a distance,

"Kruger, Private Jack Kruger, is there a Jack Kruger here?"

I saw a rotund Sergeant waving sheets of paper at the disorganized chaos in front of the piles of clothing. I raised my hand reluctantly despite my sense of wanting to remain unobserved in the middle of the pack. My unsettled mind was considering that they knew I was an interloper who had sold his body just to get fifty pieces of silver and was not where he should be in the cosmic timeline.

"Here, Sergeant, my name is Jack Kruger."

The heavy-set soldier shook the papers at me and shouted,

"You didn't initial the declaration that you do not now or have ever owned slaves."

I did my best not to laugh or even smile because I saw the fellow was as serious as an undertaker.

This was a lot different than the Marine recruiting station that I had walked into way out in San Francisco that showered me with perks of eligibility until I signed on the dotted line for a long dangerous tour of duty on the front lines in Iraq. Of course, as soon as they had me signed up, I was hustled onto a bus for the journey to the training base in San Diego. I wondered at that time why they didn't just put us all on a plane to save time but I found out that they were using the bus route to get us in a proper attitude for our unexpected welcome at the reception center. Yellow footprints were etched in my mind for all eternity and I could see them even now cast back into the past in the midst of a different kind of war. It was a war between two sides of an internal conflict. It was brother against brother like the Solomon solution to dividing up the baby. Only in this case, the baby was real and the demarcation line was the Mason-Dixon Line between two separate worlds of the same formerly united nation.

I quickly initialed the place indicated by the Sergeant's big ugly thumb and got back into the ranks hoping to stay unnoticed for the time being. It was strange for me to be in such a place and watching history unfolding from the inside instead of viewing it from the distance of a century or two. In a way it was not all that unfamiliar because there were similarities to the way I had been processed for participation in the Iraqi operations and the way these raw recruits were being readied for the bloody battlefields of the American Civil War.

We were being left to stand at ease whilst they sorted out the process and I had time to survey the others around me. My strange clothing must have seemed odd to most of them but they had problems of their own. I noticed an entire contingent of men that had been literally scooped off the down-plank of a ship just arrived from Ireland and they all seemed jovial at finding employment without delay. I guess the prospect of bed and board and a bit of cash was a lot better than starving in a shape up line to work a manual labor job if you were lucky enough to be selected. Another odd group was a circle of dark-skinned fellows that must have just made it up to Union Territory on the Underground Railroad that transported escaped slaves from the southern states up to the north where they would find sponsors to hire them and give them shelter. This group looked particularly fit and aggressive and I sensed they were eager to get into the fray that would free their fellow slaves from captivity in the south.

Some of new recruits looked a bit on the dodgy side with shifty eyes and the sort of mentality that preferred to run with the pack than to take individual action like most normal folks.

Lastly, there were the unlucky conscripted ones that had not found a suitable replacement to take their place on the firing line. They were mostly the uneducated ones with little money to pay their way out of the Union Army. There was a certain lost look in their eyes that made me want to shout out,

"Go home, the war is over. No need to get your head blown off just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Of course, I didn't utter a single word and when they told all the recruits whose last name started between the letters of "A" to "K", I hitched up my pants and huddled in the "K" sector until we were led single file past the heaps of clothing to get fitted out for war.

Our civilian duds went into a huge heap in the corner and I wondered who would benefit from the rags. Not that there were many nice outfits in the jumble. It was more throwaways if the truth be told. My shoes were fairly expensive but they were not up the rough demands of marching for miles and running across open fields being fired at from several different angles hopefully not from behind by mistake in the smoke-filled fields of fire. I knew from my studies of military history that the Civil War battlefields were seldom free from the dense smoke thrown off by the "black powder" projected rounds from their often outdated weaponry. It seemed a far cry from the motto of my unit which was "One shot, one kill!" to a battlefield that only expected one casualty from each two or three hundred shots fired by the Infantry skirmish lines.