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

  “Well, I really recommend Flaubert and Madame Bovary, a truly fascinating work. I’ll lend you my copy if you can’t get hold of one. By the way, do you read French?”

  “Fairly well,” I said, “for newspapers and magazines and such. But not well enough for a book like Bovary.”

  “That’s unfortunate, because of course it’s written in the most, well—crystalline style imaginable. I imagine you’ve read the Aveling translation.”

  “Yes, that’s the one.”

  “She’s not at all bad, actually—certainly it’ll do well enough until a better one comes along. A remarkable woman, you know. Did you know that she was the daughter of Karl Marx?”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said with honest amazement. “That’s fascinating. I just hadn’t made the connection.”

  “Yes, and another strange thing about her—she was rather badly unbalanced mentally and finally became totally obsessed by the life of Bovary, by the career of this woman she’d rendered into English. Finally she killed herself and in the identical manner of Emma Bovary—by taking poison. It’s one of the most curious tales in the history of literature.”

  I was at that time, indeed, especially devoted to Flaubert, and had been through Bovary so often that there were many passages which I had all but committed to memory. I had also read as much about the man’s life as I could lay hands on (my failure to know about Steegmuller’s book is an unexplainable mystery): Flaubert’s enormous craft, his monkish dedication, his irony, his painstaking regard for the nuances of language—all of these commanded my passionate admiration. Few others shared room with Flaubert in my private pantheon of writers. I remember being seized by a vivid excitement as Paul (it was not “Paul” yet, but it later became so, and I’ll refer to him this way hereafter) spoke of the master, alluding not only to his work, about which he seemed to know a great deal, but to his life—here he was equally well-informed. Although he was clearly a Flaubert votary like me, he had a wide-ranging knowledge of French literature in general, and the references he made to Maupassant, Zola, Turgenev, Daudet, and other of Flaubert’s friends and contemporaries were pertinent, illuminating, and thoroughly grounded in broad reading. We had particular fun exchanging views on Louise Colet, Flaubert’s mistress, speculating on her jealousy and her tantrums, and when I suggested that it was Flaubert’s mother who was at the root of his neurosis and his flight from women, Paul paid tribute to my insight—which may not have been original—by saying: “Oh there’s no doubt that you’re absolutely right. It’s straight out of the Freudian textbook. But at the same time Louise must have been an awful ball-breaker.”

  A pretty girl of seventeen or eighteen with red hair approached the table and Paul’s son rose to greet her. Then the rest of us got up and, after introductions and a few murmured amenities, the boy and the girl bade us good night and left gaily, arm in arm. The interruption made me suddenly aware of how quickly the time had passed—outside it was dark and frogs madly piped in the swamp, numberless and shrill above the sound close by of a bleating saxophone. But this interlude had also brought me quickly back to earth; something had caused my wonderful mood to snap in two, and as I took my seat again I saw that Paul Marriott, like the prince transformed into baser stuff at one stroke of the wand, was once again a mere lieutenant-colonel, and the full panoply of stars and ribbons—miraculously lost to sight during the course of our dialogue—was now intimidatingly luminous across the robust chest. Lacy bent forward across the table to ask Paul about some coming field problem. As he did so, I was belatedly overcome by a kind of tickled, boozy wonderment over the fact that for more than an hour I had been engaged in a delicately articulated, absorbing, even scholarly conversation not with a literary critic, not with some rarefied denizen of an academic tower nor even the kind of bright dilettante one is likely to meet on a long ocean voyage but somebody else: a man of formidable experience who had managed to find in the muted and lilac-scented province of nineteenth-century France harmonies that were compatible with a career in the deafening, bloody universe of modern warfare. It was quite difficult to believe, but then again, I thought, maybe I was always too quick to sell the Marine Corps short.

  The heat was fierce that summer; actually, it was sometimes beyond belief, surpassed reason. Situated as we were on the periphery of a vast swamp, the marines at the camp suffered as much from the humidity as from the sun, so that on certain awful days the effect was that of an inhuman steam bath which one could not turn off or escape from. One simply gasped, and groaned, and felt one’s khakis or dungarees become limply awash, like wet flour sacks, the instant one put them on. It was bad enough out in the field; there we hiked and hustled under the baking sun, maneuvered in the woods, set up mortar positions in stifling gullies, and more than one of my boys had to be carried off to the infirmary, alarmingly dehydrated and in the near coma of heatstroke. But out of doors there was often some relief: the shade of the trees offered protection now and then, a sudden breeze might surprise us with its fresh and cooling breath, and everywhere there were tidal streams to swim in. It was back at the main base, in the unventilated confines of the squat brick building which served as battalion headquarters, that the heat became insufferable, past description, so that I could compare it to nothing in my experience and was reminded only of legends I had once read concerning the boiling and benighted city of Villahermosa, in the tropical Mexican state of Tabasco, where even priests went mad with the heat and died railing at a deity heartless enough to create this inferno on earth. There at the office I was forced periodically to spend a morning or an afternoon hunched over a desk, where I would whimperingly go through the motions of some necessary paperwork and swill numberless Coca-Colas, and sweatily absorb for the fourth or fifth time my most recent letter from Laurel, all horny and asprawl upon Fire Island’s halcyon strand.

  It was after one such session, on a day in late June, that I made my troubled way back to the B.O.Q. Having risen at dawn, I thought I would take a nap before lunch and then go out to join my company in its training area. While I was climbing the stairs to my floor, I heard the sound of hillbilly music coming from a radio or phonograph, a raucous female plaint overlaid with a lot of corny fiddles and electronic vibrato, the entire racket far too loud and certainly an affront to the decorum of an officers’ quarters, even though at the moment the place was virtually deserted.

  Now, quite seriously I pride myself even today on having been an early devotee of country music, which has only recently come into its own and earned some respectful attention from musical annotators. Perhaps one has to be southern-born to truly appreciate this homely, untamed genre, but from the time I was a boy I found in the music, at its best, a woebegone loveliness and simplicity of utterance, a balladry—sometimes wrenchingly haunting and sad—that was an authentic echo of the poor soil from which it had sprung, and I cannot even now hear the voices of Ernest Tubb or Roy Acuff or the Carter Family or Kitty Wells without being torn headlong from my surroundings and into a brief bittersweet vision of the pine forests and red earth, the backwoods stores and sluggish tidewater rivers, the whole tormented landscape of that strange world below the Potomac and north of the Rio Grande. But all art forms, of course, generate subforms that are debased and bastardized versions of the original—for every Beethoven ten Karl Gold-marks, for each Messiah, two dozen Dreams of Gerontius—and country music is no exception. At its worst—usually found in its scherzo mood—it is an abomination of synthetic rhythms and bumpkin lyrics, all of it glutinously orchestrated with cellos, vibraphones, electric organs, and God knows what other instruments formerly undreamed of in the Great Smokies or on the banks of the Apalachicola. It was this kind of music I heard as I gained the landing on my floor, realizing, half-deafened and astonished, that it was emanating from my own room.

  Ding-dong Daddy, whatcha doin’ to me—

  I had become spoiled. Having lived for weeks as the sole occupant of a room designed for two, I had all but forgotten the possibility o
f a roommate—who plainly had just moved in. As a matter of fact, his efficiency was such that he had already been inspired to add his name to the card on the frame of the door, and below my name had neatly printed his identification:

  SECOND LT. DARLING P. JEETER, JR., USMC

  Bemused, I gazed at the card for some time, struck by the cadence of the name itself, which I tested several times on palate and tongue, but also by the absence, at the end of “USMC,” of an “R,” designating a reserve. And my spirits sank as I realized that come what may I had drawn a regular. I opened the door, the music boomed forth:

  Ding-dong Daddy, whatcha doin’ to me—

  Had me jumpin’ an’ a-humpin’ till half past three—

  And I beheld, seated at the desk naked but for his green skivvy drawers, stamping out time to the cretinous song with bare feet, a stocky, muscular young man of twenty-one or twenty-two with acne scars on his cheeks and shoulders, wire-rimmed spectacles, straw-colored hair clipped to a half-inch skinhead cut, and—largely due to a wet, protuberant lower lip and an exceptionally meager forehead—an expression of radiant vacuity. If this description seems more than reasonably unfavorable, it is because I mean it to be, since nothing my roommate did or said during the course of our acquaintanceship diminished that first impression of almost unprecedented loutishness.

  “Howdy,” he said, rising and turning down his phonograph, coming forward to shake my hand. I noticed that he had pushed the proofs of my novel somewhat aside on the desk, also my dictionary and several other of the few books I had brought with me—Oscar Williams’s modern American verse anthology and the Viking Portable Dante were two I remember—and these now shared space with a mountainous pile of phonograph records, presumably of the order of “Ding-dong Daddy,” three long, unsheathed, murderous-looking blue-steel knives, a stack of “men’s” magazines (True, Argosy, and the like), a box of Baby Ruth candy bars, and a random assortment of toilet articles including, I could not help but notice, a large cellophane-wrapped pack of fancy condoms known as “wet skins.”

  He gave me a firm grip. “Name’s Darling Jeeter,” he declared in a hearty voice, clearly that of an Ole Country Boy. “Muh friends all call me Dee.”

  I was relieved that he so quickly took care of the name business (he must have had the problem before) since had he not offered me the way out I was prepared to say politely and immediately: “I’m very sorry but I cannot possibly call you Darling.” For although the patronymic is certainly venerable enough (was it mere whimsy that led Barrie to give that honored name to the family in Peter Pan?), and although to christen one’s offspring with a family name is a common enough practice throughout the South (my roommate, as it turned out, hailed from down in Florence, South Carolina), I considered myself already too sensitive to this new and, on my part, desperately unwanted intimacy to compound my discomfort by having to say things like “Darling, would you mind handing me the soap?” or, God forbid … well, the possibilities were too numerous to contemplate.

  Anyway, I introduced myself to Dee, and while I was groggy with the need for a short nap, I felt it only proper that the two of us—officers, gentlemen, southerners at that—sit down and at least go through the motions of getting acquainted, especially when it looked as if we were destined to be cheek by jowl for some time that summer in a climate not really suited for harmonious relations at close quarters. Dee, as it turned out, was a hand-to-hand-combat expert, his specialty knife fighting “close in”; the reason I had enjoyed several weeks of grace without his company was because this period he had spent in California, at the marine base at Camp Pendleton, where he had learned all the tricks of his trade. He had been sent back to Lejeune as an instructor, and was looking forward enormously to his vocation, brief as he hoped it would be.

  “I’ll go anywhere the Corps sends me, that’s muh duty you see, but if you want to know the God-durn real truth what I really want to do is get over to Korea and stick about six inches of cold steel in as many of those God-durned gooks I can get holt of.”

  “How long have you been in the Corps?” I asked.

  “Nine months and eight days,” he replied. “I was in ROTC”—he pronounced it “Rotacy”—“at Clemson and then I took a commission and they done sent me to Quantico. Couldn’t fire a rifle worth a shit on account of muh eyes”—he gestured toward his spectacles, and peered out at me from behind them with an expression that seemed peculiarly faraway and dim, like a rodent’s, not aglint with the fervor of a knife fighter but somehow mossed over with the glaze of arrested development, or perhaps only fifteen years or so of slow fruition in the schools of South Carolina—“but I got me a waiver on the eyes, and I volunteered for knife fightin’, which is the thing I truly come to love. Sometimes I think that a knife is the God-durned prettiest thing in the world. Stick that ole thing in, twist an’ shove, twist an’ shove—shee-it, man! Care for some pogey bait?”

  Not since my early days in the Corps in World War II had I heard the words “pogey bait”—old-time marine and navy slang for candy—and as he reached for the box of Baby Ruths I declined, saying that the weather was too hot and that, besides, my stomach felt rather poorly. Most of the reserves had made a point, generally, of not using the accepted seagoing vocabulary; I soon learned that Dee employed a salty locution whenever possible—“deck” for “floor,” “bulkhead” for “wall”—which did little to further weld our relationship.

  “Ordinarily,” he went on, “I relish an Almond Joy or two along about this time of the morning, but the PX run out of Joys. Had to settle for the Ruths.”

  “Tell me,” I said, honestly curious, “have you ever killed anybody with one of those knives?”

  He took the question with equanimity. “Naw,” he replied, “at Pendleton we practiced on dummies—and on each other, but with rubber blades. Naw, I ain’t killed anybody yet—I’ll have to confess.”

  I could not help but pursue the tack I had embarked upon and I said: “Dee, listen, don’t you think killing people with a knife might just sicken you? I mean, just to watch some guy’s guts fall out, and the blood and everything—well, I know knife fighting is sometimes necessary and damned useful when the chips are down, but Jesus, how can you actually think you’re going to like it?” He had gnawed off the end of a Baby Ruth and was masticating it thoughtfully; the candy was sweetly odorous on the close hot air, and for an instant, vaguely nauseated, I was borne away in a queasy trance of chocolate, peanuts, vanillin, lecithin, hydrogenated vegetable oil, emulsifiers. A runnel of sweat made its way down his hairless belly which, like the rest of him, seemed as tight as rawhide despite his confectionery yen. I lusted for sleep, felt my eyelids slide closed, and listened to a cicada’s shrill crickety screech, electric against the eardrum, as it scraped somewhere outside in the lowering heat.

  “Well you see, ordinarily I might get sick like you say,” he replied. “I don’t truly like the sight of blood any more than the next man. But this here is a different matter now. We face the greatest peril this country has ever known. Did you see that movie they shown us at Pendleton? Red Evil on the Earth it was called, somethin’ like that, about how those Communist bastards are takin’ over everywhere. Sons of bitches. Guy with the bushy beard—what’s his name?—Marx, and that other Russian son of a bitch, I forget his name, the bald one with that itty-bitty goatee on him like a streak of dog doo, God durn, boy, let me get a knife into both of them Communist sons of bitches, twist an’ shove, twist an’ shove, that’s all, and you’ll figure out pretty quick how a man can love cold steel.”

  “They’re both already dead,” I said.

  “They’re both dead, all righty-dighty,” he said evenly. “Then I’ll kill some other good Communist son of a bitch, preferably the color of yellow. You know what the only good kind of Communist there is, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said, “a dead one. Look, Dee, I was up at four this morning and I’m terribly tired. I wonder if you’d mind shutting off the music for a while and
let me take a little nap.”

  “Shore,” he replied, “you go right ahead. I’ll just be real quiet and put muh gear away. You go on and have you some good sack duty while ole Dee gets things squared away.”

  As I was drifting off I heard him say: “How do you figure the situation shapes up for a little nooky around here?”

  “A few navy nurses, Dee,” I murmured, “that’s all. O.K. if you like them real big. Or short and scrawny.”

  “Shee-it, man,” I heard him say, far off through the misty onset of slumber, “I love nooky any which way. I’m just like muh ole daddy. If I could find me a pussy big enough I’d set up camp inside—mess tents, flagpole, parade ground and all.”

  Dee’s connection with his daddy was, as it turned out, neither casual nor merely reminiscent. When I returned to the B.O.Q. the next morning after spending a night in the field, Dee and his father were sitting at the desk munching on Almond Joys. The elder Jeeter was a man in what I took to be his late fifties or early sixties, haggard-looking with a pale, sad, gentle face deeply furrowed and lined; even at my first glance I saw that he was desperately sick. He wore an imitation pongee sport shirt through which a few old chalky-white hairs poked limply, and sacklike trousers, rather wrinkled and dirty, of a defeated greenish hue. He smelled mysteriously of something bitter and metallic, and was seized now and then by a horrible racking cough; I could recall no one for whose health on so short an acquaintance I felt such immediate alarm. He called Dee “Juney.” A onetime Gunner—the marine term for warrant officer—he had served in the Corps for thirty-five years and had just come up from Florence to visit his newly commissioned son. He was a widower.

  “What do you do on the outside, son?” the retired Gunner inquired of me in a kindly voice. Like Jeeter junior he spoke in a rich, loamy, Low Country drawl, with overtones of that arcane South Carolina dialect called Geechee. He sucked tirelessly at cigarettes.