"Herd mentality," I explain scornfully.
The ones at the end of the queue cast angry glances in our direc-tion, which we ignore. We walk round the kitchen tent and enter the holy of holies, take cutlery which is reserved for officers, and pass through the second entrance into the serving room where those at the front of the line are collecting their food.
"Aha! The nobility has appeared!" shouts someone from the end of the line. Jamus glances coolly at him, but doesn’t deign to answer.
"Would you mind leaving this place and joining the end of the line?" asks the one on duty.
"Shhh! That’s not the way to talk to future brigade commanders," fat Joshua lectures him. "Would your honors perhaps have the grace to join the simple folk in practicing standing in line?"
This ceremony is repeated three times a day. Everyone knows that we will not stand in line, and everyone has long since got used to it. If we did suddenly join the line, they would feel betrayed. As if they had to watch one of the instructional movies about house-to-house fighting without it being followed by the usual cartoon.
Actually we have nothing against standing in line. But we feel that we would somehow be betraying our jeep company which we are, officially as it were, representing. Noblesse oblige! None of us in the company stands in line. The one with the sharpest elbows gets served first. Only occasionally, when one of the officers pushes in front of the ordinary soldiers, will we remind him of the holiness of the line.
We get a reasonable helping of meat, noodles, soup, and desert on our plates. Jamus wrinkles his nose. "This shit again?" he complains, and puts another big lump of meat on his plate.
"What are you complaining about?" asks the cook angrily from the doorway to the kitchen.
"I knowyou lot," Jamus replies, "you eat the good meat yourselves and give us the leftovers."
"How dare you ..." roars the cook angrily. He wears a kepi on his head, which trembles when he gets excited.
"He is quite right!" bellow supporting voices from the line.
Since we were left hungry on Yom Kippur,3 the cooks have not been very popular. The soldiers don’t like them, apart from the cook of their own forward base. The orthodox cooks, who refuse to prepare food on the Sabbath, are doubly disliked.