"I won't surrender," Hank said as he checked his rifle. "I know that. There wouldn't be anything to gain."
"You couldn't surrender if you wanted to."
"Huh?"
"The Army doesn't allow it. You see, the Army tells you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and where to do it. There's regulations in the manuals to cover everything. If there aren't regulations about something, that's because the Army doesn't allow it. There are no regulations about how to surrender. That means you can't surrender."
"Suppose you haven't got anything to fight with?"
"No dice. If you've only got one bullet, you fire that bullet. Then you use your bayonet. If your bayonet breaks, then you pick up rocks and throw them, and if there aren't any rocks around, then you attack with your bare hands. In other words, you keep fighting until you kill them or they kill you. If you surrender, you're a traitor."
Hank was silent for a while. "If that's so," he said, "why do they have regulations about what to do after you're captured? You know, that 'Give only your name, rank, and serial number' stuff."
"That," explained Murphy with mock impatience, "is for those cases when a guy might be captured while unconscious. The Army's sensible. It knows you can't fight if you've been knocked unconscious by something."
"Did you hear the rumor," Hank went on, "that every guy going into combat has something done to him so he'll kill himself if he's captured? Hypnotism or something?"
"Uh-huh." Murphy wished Hank hadn't mentioned that. He remembered, there at Fort Hendricks, something strange had happened. Take a battalion of men, line them up outside a hospital. One by one, as the men enter a room, give them an injection that knocks them cold. Keep them unconscious for days while you feed them through the veins, and then revive them, put them in a formation and march them back to their barracks without an explanation. Do something like that and you'll cause all sorts of rumors. Those men will wonder what happened to them while they were unconscious. The more they wonder, the more fantastic the rumors will get....