It was easy to spot the poorest fellows: They carried paper sacks instead of suitcases. A guy who was wearing argyle socks and balancing a tennis racket drew second looks. I saw one guitar and any number of jackets as threadbare as my own. Everyone looked neat, though, with hair combed and faces clean.

And they looked like I felt: a little scared, now that the CCC was actually upon me.

Riding in a covered truck where you could only see out the back was like watching a movie being rewound: You left things behind instead of approaching them, and saw where you’d been, instead of where you were going.

I watched the train station and then Missoula’s downtown disappear, and then neighborhoods of houses, and, across a river, a sawmill where a plume of smoke rose above a tall, cone-shaped furnace. “A tepee burner,” somebody said. “For burning waste.”

We were bouncing down a tree-lined road at Fort Missoula before I glimpsed the sentry we’d passed on duty at the post’s entrance. By then, everyone on the truck was craning around, trying to see the big white billets, weedy fields, equipment yards, and long, low, wood buildings we were passing.

When the truck stopped, a soldier ordered, “Climb down! Make a line!”

He kept giving orders as we scrambled to obey. “I’m Sergeant Mackey. Make it a straight line, belongings at your feet. You call me Sarge. We have a lot to do between now and chow, so listen up. Leave your things here while you get your physicals . . .”

What was left of the afternoon passed in a confusing blur. Waiting my turn in a line that stretched out from the infirmary’s door, I again was reminded of watching a movie. Only this lime, instead of unreeling backward, it seemed to be looping over and over, frames showing one guy going inside and another coming out. It was funny enough—I was imagining what Laurel and Hardy could do with it, when my turn came.

First I was directed to a room where a bunch of us were told to strip down to our underwear before going out to a hall to wait some more. Dignity came off with clothes, and it was worst for the fellows whose skivvies had more holes than cloth.

And then waiting, clutching the medical record I’d been told to hang on to, I sat next to a guy who was red faced from strangling back a cough. Nodding toward a room where guys were being called one at a time, he asked me, “What do you think they do in there?”

“I’m guessing some doctor checks us over,” I answered.

“You seen a doctor before?”

“Once or twice.”

“I never have.”