The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps Read online

  “Look, McFee,” he said at length, “I don’t know what kind of language you’ve been getting away with over at the colonel’s quarters, but over here when you’re asked your name you give your full name and you give your serial number and you say sir. Do you understand that? Now let’s have it.”

  “McFee, Lawrence M., 180611.” There was a pause, one which though somehow avoiding disrespect still flirted perilously with the notion of contempt, and the “sir” came only a cagey half second before the crucial, unbearable instant. It was odd, bold, and Blankenship felt a surge of anger, not so much at this behavior as at the fact that he himself suddenly felt, here among two thousand spineless and craven snobs, a sneaking admiration for such talented arrogance. He continued to gaze at McFee. It was a young face—twenty-five or twenty-six, he judged—with features usually described as “clean-cut,” and unshrinking blue eyes. Without his miserable denims he might have been taken for a college football star, for he was big and broad-shouldered, and even standing now at attention he had all the relaxed, supercilious grace of a campus athlete.

  “What’s the matter with you, McFee? The duty sergeant told me you’ve been giving him a hard time.”

  “He tried to strong-arm me.”

  “Mulcahy told me you were beating your gums about the accommodations we’ve got over here.”

  “I was,” he said calmly. “They stink. I said so and your fucking gorilla clobbered me.”

  This outspoken audacity so took him aback that Blankenship rose from where he was sitting, strolled to a spot within a foot of McFee, and propped himself on the edge of the desk. “They do, do they? They stink, huh?” As he spoke, confused and casting about for words, he was aware that he was managing to control his voice—a remarkable fact considering the fury he felt rising at this man’s insolence, and which was not so much directed at the insolence itself but at the cool, even fearless self-possession with which he assumed it. Now he was so close to McFee that he could feel the warm steady breathing that crossed the short space of air between them and was aware, for the first time, of the round welt on McFee’s forehead where, indeed, Mulcahy must have swatted him. The welt was an inconsequential blob of swollen pinkish flesh, but it was nonetheless a visible and now accusatory brand, a tiny ensign of oppression and illegal abuse. For the moment it gave McFee a slight but telling advantage, and it aggravated Blankenship’s silent fury.

  He had never had a prisoner face up to him before. Because it baffled him he stalled briefly for time, and altered his tack. “What did you want to get caught fighting for, McFee? You had a nice soft job in the colonel’s house. Now you’ll just be another one of the bums. You must have had a pretty good confinement record to have gotten such a nice job. What are you, a swabjockey?”

  “I wish the fuck I was.”

  “You a hooligan?”

  “I’m a marine,” he said, with a trace of bitterness, and also of disdain. He stood there steadfast and massive, with his irritating animal grace and with his breath coming warmly and steadily from the set contemptuous smile on his lips. Along with his anger, Blankenship felt a chilly shiver of excitement, as if he had received a personal and even physical challenge from this defiance. And although both his conscience and regulations forbade him to, he felt now, too, an irresistible desire to bait and goad—something he’d never lower himself to do with an ordinary prisoner.

  “You’re not a marine, McFee,” he said quietly, “not anymore. You’re a yardbird. A bum. Didn’t you know that?” He paused, while for a second, in an attempt to stare each other down, their eyes met hot and unwavering. “You’re swill. Slop. You’re not any more of a marine than Shirley Temple. You’re lower than whale shit on the bottom of the sea. You know the saying, don’t you, McFee?” Yet while he spoke he felt a mild mean twinge, as if he were degrading not McFee but himself by using all the stale worn-out obscenities employed numbingly and twenty-four hours a day by every beef-witted sergeant on the island. And staring at McFee while he said them, seeing the look of contempt widen, enlarge, lines of amusement springing into his eyes, Blankenship halted, then said, “What did you do, McFee? Desert? Like all the rest of these patriotic citizens?”

  “If you look in my record book, Gunner, that’s the word they use. I call it something else.”

  “What do you call it?”

  “I call it liberate.”

  “Liberate from what?”

  “How about letting me stand at ease?” McFee said. Instead of a request it sounded like a suggestion, and one so astonishingly bold and crusty that Blankenship heard himself say “At ease” before he had even thought about it. Relaxed, McFee absently fingered the bruise on his forehead and said, in a level cold voice: “If you believe in something you desert from it. When you don’t believe in something anymore you can’t desert from it. You liberate yourself. That’s what I did.”

  His voice had an austere quality, frigid with conviction. It was a voice free of sloppy accents—not cultivated, not even educated perhaps, simply reasonable even when obscene. Without explanation, the sense of authority in the voice stirred in Blankenship a strange and fugitive sort of respect but—possibly because of this respect—sent renewed outrage pulsing through his muscles and bones. He could feel the tension in his rump and in his arms as he sat there and heard the words, saw McFee’s great graceful body go loose, slumped in an attitude of slovenly, insouciant power.

  “You can’t rebel against the Marine Corps, McFee,” he said.

  “Who says you can’t? So they handed me six years for it. But I goddam well rebelled.”

  “Your soul might still belong to God, McFee, but your ass belongs to me. And the penal code of the United States Navy.”

  “So what?” he sneered.

  “So it means you’re double-screwed. Haven’t you got a conscience, McFee? Even a bum has a conscience. It means you didn’t escape anything at all. What makes you think you were liberated when they sent you up for six years? You not only got six years to do but you got the knowledge every minute that some other poor bastard is out there doing the fighting and the dying that you chickened out on. Doesn’t that keep you awake at night?”

  For a second McFee swayed on his heels, lounging carelessly, saying nothing. But the smirk was still there; the irises of his eyes were like thin blue flakes of splintered glass, twinkly with scorn. Then he said, “Semper Fidelis. You people make me laugh. In peacetime you regulars couldn’t get a job swabbing up piss in a poolroom.”

  Blankenship could not remember when he struck. It was certainly not at this moment, for later that evening as he sat in the deserted wardroom he recalled that some other words had passed between them. Of that much he was at least sure, even as he listened vacantly to dance music from the radio and raised his eyes from time to time to watch snowfall sifting a hushed blizzard across the darkened Sound, his mind bewitched by all the whiskey he had drunk—a pint—and fumbling hopefully still for some excuse to mitigate his crushing sense of guilt. There had been the escape itself, it was true, which had made him testy, unhinged him—but Christ, he’d been unhinged before in battles; was this enough to justify such a flagrant sin against the law—the first one he could remember having committed in ten years’ service? As for McFee—well, what about McFee? The knowledge which Blankenship had now (the record book on the radio console before him and the court-martial transcript with its ninety pages of closely typed flimsy) could not nullify the insult and arrogance which had pushed him into the act, nor could he have been expected to know these things then. Yet the facts were unavoidably there (a letter of commendation for “meritorious conduct” on New Georgia, two Purple Hearts) and the circumstances of the court-martial (six years for desertion, but a brutally long six years not because his admirable record had been ignored, which it hadn’t, but because according to the testimony of the M.P.s who had finally tracked him down from San Diego all the way to Tampa, Florida, he had resisted arrest so passionately and with such homicidal fury—backed
up in a restaurant where from behind the counter he had fired six shots from a Smith & Wesson .22 revolver at the arresting officers, nicking the ear of the F.B.I. man who had tagged along for the show, and resorting finally to cups, ketchup bottles, and, in a final spasm, even his own wristwatch as “missiles”)—the facts were there, and as Blankenship sat cracking his knuckles in the chilly wardroom, they added to his guilt a vague sense of shame. It was not that, even now, he felt any sympathy for McFee: he had sinned and was being justly punished. He only felt that, having broken regulations by an act so violent that it put himself, at any rate theoretically, in position for a court-martial, it should have been a lesser, meaner man than McFee who had impelled him to do it. And the least he himself could have done was use his fists.

  Then he remembered when he struck. It was no more than a minute later when, with the blood pulsing like hot broth through his temples, he heard McFee say finally, “Gunner, why don’t you people wise up? The whole Marine Corps is one big jail. You’re the yardbird, Gunner,” repeating through the thin infuriating smirk, “You’re the yardbird, Gunner,” that his hand went tight and moist with sweat around Mulcahy’s club on the desk behind him, and he felt the muscles of his shoulders clumping up in a knot of pain as, almost unthinking, he brought the stick down in one heavy crunching blow against McFee’s cheek; even as it struck he saw McFee’s mountainous frame swing back in punch-drunk and deadened collision with the wall, eyes marveling at his own impact but abulge and white with a sort of absolute certitude and defiance, still mouthing as he sagged downward: “You’re the yardbird, you son of a bitch.”

  MARRIOTT,

  THE MARINE

  I

  In the spring of 1951, when I was called back as a marine reserve to serve in the Korean War, I was in my mellow mid-twenties though I felt like a beaten man. A number of years ago I wrote a fictional narrative based loosely on this period in my life, and it is possible that those who may have read that work will, in the account that follows, discern a few familiar echoes, since I am certain to trespass here and there upon that earlier, restless mood. Basically, I am an unaggressive, even pacific type, civilian to the marrow, and the very idea of military life sets up a doleful music in my brain—no fifes, no pipes, no gallant trumpet calls, only a slow gray dirge of muffled drums. In my reveries of the Marine Corps it is for some reason almost always raining. Engulfed in a sweltering poncho, I am standing in a downpour; with absolute clarity I can recall how, once waiting in a chow line during an Hawaiian cloudburst, I watched transfixed as my mess kit slowly filled to the brim with greasy water. Or my thoughts wander and I ponder the old monotony, the waiting—the truly vicious, intolerable waiting—then the indecent hustle, the offensive food, the sweat and the flies, the lousy pay, the anxiety and fear, the fruitless jabber, the racket of rifle fire, the degrading celibacy, the trivial, evanescent friendships, the whole humiliating baggage of a caste system calculated to bring out in men their basest vanities. I am capable of brooding on such matters with self-punishing persistence, with mixed anguish and pleasure, as one relives so often some ugly ordeal successfully endured.

  No, the Marine Corps is no place for a man of my sluggish, contemplative stripe. Yet any such prolonged experience is likely to generate its own unique nostalgia, if that’s the proper word (many ex-convicts, I’ve learned, confess to dreaming ambivalent dreams about their past incarceration), and besides, the Marine Corps is not the army or the navy but something intransigently itself. Maybe I should own up to an awful, private truth and this is that, despite the foregoing strictures, the Marine Corps has left me with a residual respect—certainly fascination—which, demeaning as it may be, I find it impossible to uproot after all these years. The result is that compulsively, like a voyeur who fights his urge yet is from time to time drawn to public bathhouses, I am led back to those lucidly recollected scenes, forced despite myself to try to make that fearsome institution give up one or two of its innermost secrets.

  Anyway, the second call to duty nearly wiped me out. I had served three years in the marines during the Second World War. I had been a fire-eater then, a real trooper, and possessed the loutish devotion to duty that belonged to the extremely young of my generation. A volunteer, I had worked my way up from buck private to second lieutenant, spending most of my time at camps in the United States but receiving enough of a dose of misery in the Pacific near the war’s end to discourage me from pursuing the military service as a livelihood. I was discharged and set free to finish my college education and subsequently to make my earnest, fledgling way in the world of letters. A year or so later, through a subterfuge which played upon both my inertia and my ego, and which I was dumb enough to fall for, the Marine Corps enticed me back into its purview. Offered a promotion in rank, to first lieutenant, and a reserve status which required no duty or drill, no responsibility, no commitment other than that I be available in the event of a future emergency (and how remote such a danger seemed back there within the minatory shadow of the atomic bomb), I took the bait with what must be regarded as amazing innocence, truly a victim of the age of the soft sell. When orders (in quintuplicate) came, less than four years later, to report for duty to the Second Marine Division in North Carolina, my woe and shock became almost insupportable—partly due to the knowledge of my own complicity in the matter. But bloody wars and the might of nations, as Bismarck observed, are built upon such witless acquiescence.

  Since this account is not about myself, really, but about Paul Marriott—who at the time I am describing was a lieutenant colonel in the regular marines—I do not want to use more space than is necessary in dwelling upon the circumstances that led up to our relationship. But in all honesty I cannot skimp the whole frenzied atmosphere, the mood of despondency—“despair” would not be too strong a word—which surrounded me and my friends as we enacted our solemn rehearsal for another war. For if I had not felt so traumatized, so out of place, so forsaken in this new yet achingly familiar environment, had I not been half-consciously searching for someone with whom I might come to a reasonably civilized understanding, Paul Marriott might have passed unnoticed and we would not have sought each other out, and I might have failed to discover this exceptional man whom the Marine Corps had nurtured and honored. So if only for my own satisfaction I must try to describe my frame of mind at the time, and recount some of the details of the predicament so many of us found ourselves trapped in that spring and the following months.

  It may be easily guessed that at this point I had undergone a fairly thorough transformation. Vanished were the ideals of duty and sacrifice. I had been to college and had cultivated the humane studies and had come to develop a strong aversion to warfare, along with many of my contemporaries; after the thrill of an illusory and romantic “victory” in World War II had palled, we began to be chilled by a premonition that the terminal act of that drama—the defeat and surrender of Japan—was not an ending but a prelude to a succession of wars as senseless and as bestial as any ever seen. Moreover, I had a particularly selfish reason to want to remain a civilian: to be recalled to duty at this moment in my life seemed an especially outrageous swindle. It was not only that I had fallen comfortably into a bohemian way of life, living in Greenwich Village, where I let my hair grow long and accustomed myself to rising as late as two in the afternoon. I had also written a novel, which was about to be published and which showed the unusual signs of becoming—for a first novel—brilliantly successful. I had suffered long and hard on this work, pouring into it all the passion and vitality that the gods squander on youth, and while I was satisfied (as much as one ever can be) with my achievement in terms of its art, I was deep down no tiresome eccentric and hankered also after the side benefits that accrue to single young men whose first novels are brilliantly successful: toast of the world, flattered, fussed over, with a thick wallet and suavely tailored flannels, dining at the Colony and Chambord and plowing my way through galaxies of movie starlets and seraglios of wenchy Park Avenue ma
trons perishing with need of my favors. Almost completely an illusion, to be sure, but one which I burningly entertained; the contrast between this vision and the imminent reality—freezing on some bleak Korean tundra with the stench of cordite in my nostrils, and a heart congealed with terror—seemed to comprise an irony beyond all fathoming. But there was nothing to be done. Like a sleepwalker, I prepared to return to war. I got my hair cut and retrieved from storage my green winter uniform, which (though the jacket fit a bit tight around the middle) was intact, except for the cap, half-devoured by moths, and the cordovan shoes that were mildewed past repair.

  Even the day of my departure for service had a special quality of inauspiciousness which I have never forgotten. A week or so before, President Truman had prudently removed General Douglas MacArthur from his post as commander of United Nations and American forces in the Far East—an action which, it may be remembered, drove tens of millions of Americans into a spasm of bellicose rage. By chance, the afternoon I was to leave by train for the South was the same afternoon that MacArthur had chosen to make his trium phal parade through New York City. I was in my uniform again for the first time. For some reason I recall that day with abnormal clarity: the beatific light of April, pigeons wheeling against a sky incomparably blue, trees in full bud along the Upper East Side streets, vast crowds massing along Fifth Avenue, and in wordless singsong over all—with rhythmic rise and fall like the distant swarming of millions of small insects—the avid buzz of patriotic hysteria. I had never heard that sinister, many-throated voice quite so loud nor so unmistakably before; it seemed an offense to the lovely day, and at least in part to escape it I ducked into the dark bar of the Sherry-Netherland, where with the girl who was seeing me off I got systematically, preposterously drunk. Even so, a weird lucidity possesses my memory of that afternoon: my girl Laurel, small, blond, elegantly shaped, respectably married (to a doctor), with whom I had worked out a warm alliance not lacking in tenderness but for the most part studiously carnal, sat snuggled next to me in the cool dark, biting her lips as she wondered about leaves, furloughs, weekends. The bar was milling with people, most of them talking too loud, and nearby I heard one man say to another: “The market’s going to be in bad trouble if they deescalate this war.” I had not until that moment heard the verb “escalate,” much less “de-escalate”—post-Hiroshima neologisms—and the word itself struck me as being somehow even more sordid than the sentiment which had just impelled its use.