The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps Page 5

  I recall having felt sleepy and in need of a nap before dinner, and I’d arisen to go to my room upstairs when Lacy put a hand on my arm and said: “There are many fives and sixes and sevens on the misery scale—chaps with lots of kids, and those who’ve had to lose their jobs, and combinations of these. They have misery aplenty. But there are only a few authentic nines and tens. Look over there if you want to see Mr. Misery himself.”

  Morose and balding, a mesomorph of thirty with well-developed biceps, thick wrists, and wire-rimmed spectacles that made him look disarmingly professorial, Mr. Misery sat with a single companion at a nearby table, sunk in obvious despair. He had a large, dark drink before him and it was clear that he had worked his way through many others.

  “The guy’s name is Phil Santana, whom you might have heard of if you read the sports pages. He was a big amateur golfer a few years ago, won several famous championships, and then became a pro. He caught a lot of shit on Iwo, last war. A captain. Wife and three kids, was a pro at some fancy club near Cleveland and owned a very successful golf shop. A chap like that, his livelihood depends almost entirely on his direct, personal contact with people. He can’t leave it to someone else to run. It took him three or four rather strenuous years to build up the kind of business he had, and once he leaves it the whole thing dissolves—a bubble, finished. But he had to sell out, poor joker. I truly pity him.”

  “What’s he going to do?” I asked.

  “There’s only one thing he can do now,” Lacy said. “And that’s to ship over into the regular marines—for life. And that’s what he told me that he’s sure he’s going to have to do.”

  I was silent for a long moment, brooding on this Procrustean fable. Then I said: “That’s terrible. That’s just terrible.” I meant it.

  “Fortunes of war,” said Lacy.

  I excused myself and rose to go, just as the jukebox exploded again into life, a garish, winking rainbow, and “My Truly, Truly Fair” filled the bar with its synthetic rapture. I had a last glimpse of the ex–golf pro, whose face—bereft and etched with panic—seemed for an instant to make incarnate the mood of each man in the forlorn, oppressive, temporary room.

  II

  One afternoon about three weeks later I had my first encounter with Paul Marriott. The occasion was a uniformed cocktail party—a “wetting down”—at the main officers’ club given by Lacy’s battalion executive officer, a regular who had just been promoted from captain to major. I didn’t know the new major; in fact, I had gotten to know few regular officers, sidestepping them as everyone else did during after-duty hours. There was, I suppose, little of what might be termed hostility existing between us reserves and the professional officers—the demands of order and discipline precluded that—but we did regard each other with mild constraint and as if by unspoken agreement tended to observe a good-natured social apartheid, as white folks and Negroes do in certain genteel towns of the South.

  In addition to a philosophical opposition—anti-war in nature—that already existed among us, our civilian days had prevented most of us from having anything in common with the regulars. They were all wrapped up in their training manuals and tables of organization and their dreams of advancement. As for ourselves, it would have required an almost total absence of perception on the part of the career officers not to be aware of our half-buried rage and bitterness. So after five in the afternoon we drifted apart—they to their wives and their lawn sprinklers and their custom kitchens in the spruce bungalows off base, we to the seething barrios of our B.O.Q.s, where we could scheme and bitch to our hearts’ content.

  For some reason—perhaps because of his longer, tougher experience in the Pacific, which gave him a little more sense of solidarity with the professionals—Lacy was one of the few reserves who seemed to be able to move at ease in either camp. Since I’d first met him, he had talked to me at length about the officer class newly emergent after World War II, which he saw as a sinister development in the national life. He confided to me that he was both fascinated and amused by these men—by their style and by their strangely oblique, arcane vocabulary, above all by their hectic ambition (though he was not so amused at this)—and he felt himself a spy among them, gathering notes on the genesis of some as yet dimly conceived apocalypse. At any rate, when he asked me to go along with him to the party for the newborn major I readily agreed, infected by his own spirit of research.

  “The book reads wonderfully well so far,” Lacy said to me as we drove out to the officers’ club in his car, a low black Citroën he had brought back from France. It was that famous standard model from back in the 1930s, now defunct, with the long, arrogant hood and flaring fenders—the first one that I or, for that matter, practically anyone else in postwar America had ever seen—and its slinky Gallic panache here on the base among so many Fords and Oldsmobiles had caused more than one glance of suspicion. “I’m really impressed by the book, you know,” he went on. “When do I get to look at another installment?”

  I had been receiving, piecemeal, galley proofs of my novel, which Lacy had asked to read. Save for Laurel, one or two friends in New York, and a few people at the publishing house, Lacy was the first to set eyes on my inaugural work. I had sensed in him by now an exceptional delicacy and discrimination in literary matters—also a winning honesty. I was eager for his praise, and when it came it warmed and touched me. I mumbled my appreciation.

  “Say, incidentally, there’s someone else who wants to see the galleys, if you can manage it. Can I show them to him?” he said.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “My battalion commander, the new one I told you about. The one who replaced Boondock Ben Hudson. He just took over, though I’ve seen a lot of him before.”

  “You must be kidding,” I said, looking at him. “A battalion commander? Reading my southern gothic romance? You’ve gone completely out of your mind.”

  “No sir,” he replied with a smile. “It’s true, I mean it.” He paused, then added: “Well, you’ll see.”

  Although we were late, the cocktail party was still in progress when we arrived at the officers’ club. With its sparkling swimming pool and canopied entrance, its restaurant, its elephantine bar, and its overall feeling of catered leisure, the club was a place I had come to rather intensely dislike. I preferred by far the sensible, lumpen utility of the B.O.Q. bar (at least you could curse the Marine Corps there) to this vulgar hybrid—part country club, part luxury hotel—which seemed so cheap a simulacrum of a true elegance to be found in the outside world, and where one dared not utter a word against military life. Pompous murals were everywhere, as intimidating as those in a Moscow subway station, proclaiming Marine Corps victories of yesteryear—Tripoli, Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima—and so in this pleasure dome made for relaxation I could not relax but was forever squirming with premonitions of a garish future mural, titled Korea, with myself among the fallen martyrs. The entire club had about it an aroma of gin, brass polish, Arpège, and grilled sirloin; it left me troubled by its atmosphere—both muscular and oddly feminine—of vapid affluence.

  “Check that,” Lacy murmured as we mounted the front steps.

  At the side of a major directly in front of us, a long-legged blond girl with one of the finest, firmest bottoms I ever beheld slithered with a delicious little giggle through the open door, hair suddenly atumble and golden on an air-conditioned breeze. Her angular, scowling escort, plainly a regular, wore campaign ribbons up to his clavicle, and looked like a creep. They both vanished.

  “Jesus,” said Lacy. My heart was instantly roiling with hatred, envy, and lust.

  “I’d like to—” I began, wildly distracted, twenty-six years old, an about-to-be-successful writer in the full bloom of his youthful virility and allure—doomed to this continence, this stupid banishment.

  “Now, now,” Lacy put in, “it is strictly forbidden to handle the merchandise.”

  I knew how right he was. Because of the housing shortage, nearly all of the marrie
d reserves had been forced to leave their wives at home, while bachelors like myself were set adrift to lick their chops over the handful of lady marines on the base or to make abortive forays among the navy nurses, most of whom were either bony or fat. It was the regulars who had the women. Though I’m sure it was an illusion, each of them seemed to be southern—glossy little china figurines with roseate cheeks and vacant eyes, created from the same mold. Southern-born myself, I had learned to mistrust them. Thirtyish, sexy in a dimly flirtatious, untouchable Dixieland way, they were filled with dumb talk about leaves and transfers and promotions, or about the music of Lawrence Welk or the comparative merits of the PX at Quantico and Camp Pendleton and “Pearl.” Most of them dawdled through the late-spring days beside the club swimming pool, where they nibbled on ice-cream bars and read Leatherneck and Reader’s Digest and played canasta. One such regular officer’s wife—odorous of gardenia and with splendid breasts swelling beneath a low-cut blouse—spoke to me as we stood, drinks in hand, next to a gory frieze of cockaded marines storming the Mexican redoubt at Chapultepec. She asked me if my novel—which Lacy had told her about—was fiction or nonfiction.

  “That’s a crazy question, honey,” said her husband, a chunky captain from Georgia, rather snappishly. “A novel has to be fiction. That’s the definition of a novel.”

  The girl blushed deeply, then said, “Oh, I know that. What I guess I really mean is, what’s the story about?”

  “So you’re a scrivener?” the captain persisted. “Imagine having a real live scrivener down here in the boondocks. Well, we get all kinds these days. Over in the Eighth Marines the other day they got a hairdresser, I mean a guy who actually does women’s hair.” My heart shriveled. His voice was amiable enough, its tone told me that he meant no sarcasm, and I’m certain that he was as ignorant as I was then of the definition of the word scrivener (“an author who is either minor or unknown,” true enough in my case). But there was a planetary distance between our two worlds and I wished he would get off the subject of my novel, about which he now inquired: “Is it psychological or historical?”

  “It’s about group sex,” Lacy volunteered. And that was a fairly daring thing to say in 1951, among strangers and in mixed company at that. The captain flinched, his wife flushed pink again, and for an instant the spirit of Southern Baptist rectitude seemed to attend us like a tormented presence. But then the silence was broken by a voice at Lacy’s side, addressing him in melodious, unaccented French: “Bonsoir, bonsoir, mon vieux. Comment ça va? Oú étiez-vous? Je vous ai cherché partout. Êtes-vous là depuis longtemps?”

  “Bonsoir, mon colonel,” Lacy replied. “ça va bien, et vous? Non, nous venons juste d’arriver. Colonel, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine.” Then he turned and I was introduced to Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Marriott, United States Marine Corps.

  “So you’re the writer Lacy’s been telling me about?” he said pleasantly. The way he pronounced “about”—making it rhyme with “boot”—told me he was a Virginian. “Well, it’s refreshing to have a literary man around. It adds a needed dash of variety, and I hope we can have a talk or two. … I’d like you gentlemen to meet my son Mike.”

  It generally strikes me as an affectation when people speak in French if there is no particular reason to do so, but both Lacy and the colonel were very fluent—the colonel, to my ear, practically flawless—and this, together with a slight tone of self-mockery, made it attractively droll. As for the colonel himself, I could not help being almost overwhelmed by his ribbons and decorations: if important enough, and if present in sufficient numbers, their luster does tend at immediate sight to dominate the image, and to outshine the face of their owner. Yet it was not just the magnitude of the decorations themselves that was so impressive (the Navy Cross and the Silver Star—each indicating an exploit of what must have been hair-raising valor—in addition to a Legion of Merit and a Purple Heart with stars denoting several wounds), but the dazzling collage of campaign and expeditionary ribbons and marksmanship awards which went along with them, and which could only be worn by a man whose life had been bound up with the marines since early youth. I was in the presence, I reflected, of an absolute professional. Even so, Colonel Marriott looked and (as I later learned) was barely past forty: it sharpened the contradiction between this spangled testimony to a career busily devoted to the arts of war and his worldly, cultivated manner. How, I wondered, had such a relatively young man lived a life so rich in military fulfillment yet found the time to become expert in another language and, presumably, to develop a taste for the Finer Things?

  I shook hands with the colonel’s son—a boy of about eighteen who greatly resembled his father. Except for the obvious difference in their ages, and the fact that he was a shade taller, he could almost have passed for his father’s twin—which is to say that like his parent he was of medium height and athletically built (without, however, appearing aggressively muscled) and like him, too, had cropped sandy hair and intelligent eyes set deeply in a cleanly sculpted face. Despite this likeness, however, the lad had no intention of following his father’s career: that I learned soon after being introduced when, as Lacy and the colonel chatted, I asked him whether he was going to be a professional marine. I don’t know why I posed the question; perhaps the extraordinary resemblance made it seem inevitable.

  “Lord no,” he replied in a soft voice. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.” The response caused my scalp to prickle, largely because of its level frankness, devoid of any sardonic edge. He looked vaguely unhappy, a bit restless. Shifting my tack, I learned that he was a sophomore at Chapel Hill and that he hoped one day to be an architect. Suddenly his face crinkled up in a smile. “I think I’d rather sell hot dogs than be in the marines. If I ever get drafted I’ll do my bit in the air force.”

  I had no more time to pursue the reasons for this mysterious stance, for just at that moment the colonel suggested that we join him at a nearby table. A buffet supper was to be served later, and as we seated ourselves the sound of dance music erupted in a distant room, washing over us with the muffled din of trombones and clarinets; softly overtaking me, a liquor-warm mood of felicity closed round my senses like the inside of some large, benign fist, lulling me into a deceptive feeling of peace. It grew dark outside; the swimming pool and the escarpment of pine trees behind it were drowned in shadows. The war seemed far away, and for the first time since my arrival in camp I felt positively buoyed by alcohol, rather than having it feed and aggravate my discontent. Beyond any doubt it was Colonel Marriott who was responsible for this gentle euphoria: that the Marine Corps contained one regular officer capable of such enlightened, original conversation was enough to make me want to revise entirely my jaundiced estimate of military life. And although I recollect our talk as being “literary” (at twenty-six I doted on such earnest discourse), I found the colonel unpretentiously knowledgeable—astonishing me all the more since pretentiousness in matters they know little about is a common trait among career officers, especially those above the rank of captain. But even before this I was taken with him; he displayed a sympathy for my predicament that was quite out of the ordinary.

  “It must have been one hell of a wrench for you,” he said, “enough to put one into a state of shock. Especially when you have this book coming out. But I suspect you’ve fallen into the routine by now. Are things very much different from ’45?”

  “Well, very much the same,” I replied, “some things a little better—the chow, for example.” And this was, I had to confess to myself, substantially true. Although hardly a culinary miracle, the food was infinitely more palatable than the revolting swill we had been fed much of the time in the previous war. “I mean, over at the B.O.Q. the other evening I had some roast beef that was really first-rate.”

  The colonel smiled. The easy informality he encouraged had caused me already to drop the “sir,” which ordinarily I might have continued to use until we were much better acquainted. Also, I took the cue from Lacy, who
m I had heard once call him “Paul.”

  “Yes,” he said, “the Old Corps is shaping up in many remarkable ways. Food for years and years was one area in which the Corps was glaringly behind the navy. I’ve contended all along that with excellent raw material available there was no reason in the world why the food for both officers and men couldn’t be considerably more than just edible, and that our mess halls could turn out some really civilized meals. Well, somehow, someone got the message a year or so ago, and the cooking’s not half bad now. Say, tell me,” he interrupted himself, obviously wanting to change the subject, “what about this book of yours? Lacy’s very excited about what he’s read. He says it’s bound to cause a big stir when it comes out.”

  He asked me the publication date, and this led to a chatty discussion of books in general. The subject of literary influences came up and when I admitted, a bit awkwardly, that I feared that my work still betrayed rhythms and echoes of my predecessors—mainly Faulkner and Fitzgerald—he looked amused and said: “Oh hell, I wouldn’t worry about that. It’s impossible to be one hundred percent original. A writer has to be influenced by someone. Where would Faulkner be without Joyce, after all? Or take From Here to Eternity, have you read it?” Of course I had, everyone had; at that moment it was still a rampaging best seller. “It’s one hell of a book, really. He’s a mean bastard when he deals with the officers, but it’s true enough. The influences are everywhere—Hemingway, Dreiser, Wolfe, the lot—but somehow it just doesn’t matter. The book has a power that absorbs and transcends the influences.”

  At some point one of us spoke of Flaubert, and when I expressed my great admiration for his work the colonel said: “Well, if he’s your man you really must read Steegmuller’s book, if you haven’t already.”

  “No, I’m afraid I haven’t,” I replied.