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

  “I suppose I should have gotten him out of there the first night,” I said, “pulled rank on his son or something and made sure that he got some proper treatment. But the doctor at the hospital told me that he was already done for.”

  “No,” said Paul, “you really had no responsibility in the thing. What was the old fellow’s name anyway?”

  “Jeeter,” I said, “regular warrant officer, retired.”

  Paul’s jaw dropped and over his face came a look of sudden dismay. “No,” he said, in a slow wondering voice. “No, it’s hard to believe—Gunner Jeeter, Stud Jeeter he was called—dead! I can hardly believe it! Fellow with a sort of sad hound dog’s face, melancholy eyes?”

  “The same,” I replied. “Yes.”

  He shook his head gently and reflectively. “So the Gunner’s gone to his reward,” he said, and his lips were touched with a wry, mischievous smile. “I only hope there are a lot of hot broads in heaven. The Gunner was one of the greatest swordsmen ever to hit the Corps.”

  “I’ve heard of the Gunner, haven’t I, Paul?” said one of the other officers. “Wasn’t he a Medal of Honor winner in the First World War?”

  “No,” Paul said. “That decoration he got in Nicaragua during the 1920s, fighting the Communist rebels. Although you are right, he had been with the Fifth Marines at Château-Thierry. Stud Jeeter dead and gone, why it’s like the passing of an era!” He sighed and ran his hand through his sandy, close-cropped hair. And an odd expression—remote, searching, reminiscent—came to his eyes, a look that I found unsettlingly brimful of emotion; it was not quite, but manifestly close to, real sorrow, and I discerned a mistiness that for an instant seemed to presage tears. But then he laughed hesitantly and said, “God, he was one of the most colorful characters the Corps has ever seen. Boozer, brawler, whoremonger—and brave as Achilles. Had downed his share of piss and punk, too, but one of the best men with a heavy-machine-gun unit the Corps ever produced. God, I didn’t know he had died!” Again the tone was of real chagrin. “I wish I’d known! I’ll have to go to the funeral.”

  “I believe the funeral was yesterday,” I put in, “down in South Carolina.”

  “Did you know the Gunner, Paul?” one of the officers inquired. The captain and the major, though older than myself by a few years, were considerably younger than Paul, and when they asked these questions about the Gunner, all eager and attentive, I was reminded of something almost tribal—of junior Apache or Sioux braves in the presence of a wiser, more seasoned chieftain, seeking a word of a fabled place and time, of heroes who fought before the reservations existed, when the buffalo thronged the plains and drums beat along the warpath. The Old Corps.

  “He was truly one of the Old Breed,” Paul mused. “They don’t make them like that anymore. Hell, yes, I knew him, I knew the Gunner well. My first year of sea duty as a lieutenant, on the Maryland, he was a sergeant in the marine detachment. That was in ’32 or ’33, and he taught me everything about sea duty I ever knew. Then later on, when I was in Shanghai before the war, the Gunner was there—a warrant officer by then—and again he taught me as much about infantry tactics as I ever learned at Quantico. He was too old to get in the fighting in the last war, and not in very good health, either. The liquor eventually got at him. I think he finally developed a diabetes that put him out of commission. He never would see a doctor, even in Shanghai when he was having terrible trouble with his liver. So I don’t wonder that just now he wouldn’t go to the hospital, even when he was coughing his guts up. Son of a bitch! What a sorry, pathetic way for the old fellow to go out! I’m sad that I didn’t know he was up here, that I somehow couldn’t have paid a last goodbye.”

  Appropriately, as Paul spoke (indeed, with an appropriateness that could only be called banal), the sound of a bugle fell on the late-afternoon air and I glanced outside the club where a flag was being lowered while the bugler blew “Retreat,” and a scattering of marines had paused at momentary attention, their figures casting lean, gangly shadows in the slant of sunset. And for a long instant I was seized—as I always have been when I hear those piercing trumpet notes—with a sense of loss and sadness, a vision of tropic seas and strange coasts, storm-swept distances accompanied always and always in my mind’s innermost recess with the muffled tramp of booted footfalls, as of legions of men being hurried to unknown destinies. Then the sound of the bugle died away and I heard Paul’s voice again through the growing clatter of the bar, where the officers’ wives’ unbridled laughter and “My Truly, Truly Fair,” booming from the Muzak, battled each other over the incessant churning of the cocktail shakers.

  “And so his boy became a marine, did he?” he said to me. “He was so proud of that kid. The last time I saw the Gunner—it must have been ten years ago, in San Diego, just after Pearl Harbor—he said he only wished his boy had been born early enough to fight in the war. But he also said no matter, his kid would be a marine someday. And so he is. How he adored that boy! He’ll get his chance in Korea. Nice fellow?”

  “Charming,” I said, misty-eyed.

  “That Gunner!” Paul exclaimed. “Christ, you know he wouldn’t salute any officer less than flag grade, and there were even some colonels he wouldn’t give the time of day to. Wore his dungarees everywhere, even at parade. What a character!” He went on with a smile, shaking his head, deeply moved, reminiscent: “You know, in 1942 they had surveyed him out for medical reasons at Pendleton—he must have been over fifty then—yet they couldn’t make him quit. Here he was, technically separated from the service, and he had the gumption, the grit—the brass to hitch a ride, I mean literally stow away on a transport going to Pearl Harbor, where he stormed into the commanding general’s office—in his dungarees, mind you—and demanded that he be assigned to duty somewhere in the First Division. He meant Guadalcanal, too, and no rotten office job. Of course, he couldn’t make it, but what grit, what splendid brass! No sir, they don’t make marines like the Gunner anymore. Did you ever hear how he won that Medal of Honor—”

  The Old Corps. Suddenly I understood that despite Paul’s vivid anecdotal style I really didn’t give a damn how the old fart had gotten his Medal of Honor—and this was truly still a measure of my disaffection with the Corps and all it stood for. Paul, however, had warmed to his subject with all the vivacity and zeal of one of those pukka sahib types, usually played by David Niven, memorializing vanished exploits on the Afghan border; and just as my disappointment in Paul became sharpest and most vexing I realized how foolish it was for me to feel that way: he was a marine above all, first and foremost, always a marine, and for me it had been the dreamiest wishful thinking, goofy as a schoolgirl’s, to see him as truly “literary” or “artistic” when these were merely components of an enlightened and superior dilettantism. It was extraordinary enough that those delicate aspects of his personality had not been obliterated by the all-demanding, all-molding pressures of the military system, had not been trampled by the ruthless boot of an organization insisting of its members that their sensibilities remain male and muscular, their culture sterile, ingrown, and philistine if not mindless. He had read Camus. This alone, it seemed to me, was almost a miracle.

  The bugle call still lingered in my mind, suffusing me with a mood both restless and somber, and as I sat there in the twilight listening to Paul’s stories about the Gunner, listening to his warm and feeling panegyric to this old departed mercenary warrior, to these tales of the Old Corps with their memories and echoes of sea duty and shore leave, of jungle bivouacs, of Haitian outposts, Nicaraguan patrols, Chinese skirmishes, and other relics of America’s magisterial thrusts and forays throughout the hemisphere and the world, I realized that Paul was certainly at least as comfortable, if not more so, when talking of these matters as about French cuisine or the gentle art of fiction. He was a professional, and the ties to the small elite fellowship to which he belonged—ties of nostalgia as well as loyalty and faith—were as strong (and no more to be wondered at) in the end as those ties which
bind other men to a vocation in science or the arts or a political belief or—to be more nearly precise—a church.

  THE SUICIDE RUN

  I MUST MAKE A SMALL CONFESSION. Despite my aversion to military things, there are aspects of the life that I have found tolerable—fascinating even, though inferior to chess or Scarlatti. Take mortars, for example. Although I was born with, I’m sure, less than average manual dexterity, the use of mortars in the field—and my ability to supervise the men who handled them—never failed to please me in its neat meshing of teamwork, speed, subtlety of reflex, and mechanical skill. Rather like an athletic ballet with men in almost synchronous motion, the whole process of setting up the long tubes on their bipods and baseplates, locating the aiming stakes, precisely leveling and balancing the weapons with their various little cranks and wheels—all of these comprised a nimble, exciting prelude to the penultimate racket as the rounds popped forth on their lethal journey through the empyrean and to the final, gratifying, earth-jolting crump-crump when—a mile away—the shells blew some poor nigger shack to sawdust. To be sure, it was never so neat and pretty in combat. Nevertheless, I think it all satisfied a thwarted boyish longing in me, a desire for the loudest and fattest firecracker in the world, though in addition there was something unnervingly priapean about those stiff up-tilted tubes poking the air, and my pleasure may have been rooted in a darker source; whatever, the sense of rhythm, precision, and completion I achieved from working with mortars helps provide another reason why military service and infantry combat in particular is such a magic lure for certain men.

  Of course it was not unheard of, during training, for a mortar to burst apart with dreadful effect, killing or maiming everyone nearby, and once that summer—in another regiment—several faulty rounds fell disastrously short of the target and blotted out the lives of eight young recruits; such eventualities occasionally caused me to sweat and made my mouth grow dry with fear. But in general I managed to avoid thoughts like these and took pleasure in the work. In fact, rather paradoxically, it was the severely military aspects of my recall to service which I liked the most, or minded the least. My flesh had fallen into soft disrepair in the stews of Greenwich Village; the new routine was strenuous, with many days and nights on training problems, amphibious landings, and sadistic hikes, and after the first shock wore off it was an actual delight to develop a trooper’s appetite and to feel the muscle tone return to my flabby, once-sodden limbs.

  I acquired a glorious suntan: a couple of snapshots taken of me at the time record the very figure of a strapping, bronzed, miserable young marine. But I had forgotten how appealing, how spirit-enhancing sheer physical exertion could be, and as I galloped through the swamps and woods with my merry crew of mortarmen I was curiously relieved of my bitter discontent—as if in a perverse way the closer my proximity was to the grime and sweat of the battle, and the more intent became my preoccupation with the niceties of infantry tactics, the less I was harried by that pitiless anxiety. No, what brought me closest to true despair was not the war games or even the frequent lectures on subjects like field sanitation, cargo loading, and the Communist menace (I could usually sleep through these), but the periods of leisure—in the evenings or on weekends—when the free time I had allowed me to reflect on the awfulness of my future. To gripe bitterly in the company of my fellow sufferers provided some solace, but its cathartic effect was ultimately limited. Therefore, during my off-duty hours at the base I retreated more and more into a private world, seeing my friend Lacy now and then or, locked in my sweltering room, poring over the galley proofs of my first novel with all the finicky vigilance of a medieval scholastic and, finally, indulging myself in epic sessions of both fancy and plain onanism. I am sure that it was during this summer at Lejeune that I shed once and for all whatever guilt I had ever possessed about the unnameable sin, Christendom’s vilest. Having deprived me of an outlet for my needs, the Marine Corps could at least not outwit me when it came to my innermost dreams, and I embarked on a one-man orgy that in slyness and ingenuity would have outstripped the fancy of Alexander Portnoy Certainly enforced sexual famine is one of the most important keys to an understanding of the genius of the military mystique: cause a soldier to ache with such longing for the odor of a woman’s flesh that it becomes an insupportable rage, and you have often created a man who will grab a bayonet and coolly eviscerate Aggressor Enemy.

  To put it simply, I thought the chances were extremely good that I would die without ever getting laid again, and much of my extra-military energy was spent trying to prevent this from happening—even though it occurs to me now that my frantic pursuit of the goal brought me once very close to sudden death. And so a word about this—

  I was by then receiving letters almost daily from my “mistress,” I suppose you could call her, Laurel—feverish, highly spiced messages in a blatantly legible hand acquired at Miss Hewitt’s. I understand that it is rare for a lady to develop a full-blown pornographic style, but my darling’s imagination was stunningly lewd; the raunchy letters, often written on her husband’s stationery—“F. Edward Lieberman, M.D. Practice Limited to Ear, Nose and Throat”—though they made me only to a small degree sorry for old Ed, had an effect on my glands which ever afterward rendered insipid the word “aphrodisiac.” Our present era of air travel had only commenced then, and New York was still more than five hundred miles away by unimproved highway and train; through superhuman exertion, however, it was barely possible (on those infrequent weekends when circumstances caused us to be at liberty as early as the middle of Saturday afternoon) to drive at suicidal speeds the three hundred miles to Washington, where one could board a train that arrived in Manhattan just before the bars closed at three on Sunday morning. It was a ridiculously abbreviated visit—one had to leave New York no later than nine the next evening in order to be back at the base by reveille on Monday morning—and the lack of sleep it entailed still awes me. But such was our desperation to escape the nightmare in which we found ourselves—and so tormenting was my crucifixion of lust—that Lacy and I made the insane journey every time the chance presented itself.

  And so, already exhausted from days and nights in the swamps, we would barrel out of camp in Lacy’s Citroën, heading north at terrible speed. Even so, the French had not built that model to go as fast as we might have wished. In compensation, Lacy was a sharp-witted, aggressive driver with reflexes that seemed almost computerized, so swiftly and correctly did they discriminate between the long chance and indubitably fatal error; my heart capered wildly when on one of those two-lane Carolina roads at seventy miles an hour—against opposing traffic—he overtook some huge lumber truck, throwing the car into its next-to-last gear just in time to edge in ahead and with so little margin to spare that I felt more than once the oncoming truck or car trade with us a great soughing whoosh, as the Citroën quivered with the strain. Yet each time I realized how exquisitely Lacy had maneuvered—the entire job far more a display of coolness and timing than of any machismo. Sometimes I took turns driving with Lacy. I was not anywhere near as skillful as he was, and far less nervy, but even so I performed stunts that can make me feel queasy when I think of them to this day: a race to an unbarricaded grade crossing with an Atlantic Coast Line passenger train, for instance, when I gunned past the blinking red warning lights at such speed that the car, mounting the crowned hump of the tracks, literally sailed through the air like some resurrected image from the Keystone Kops and regained the asphalt on the other side only seconds before the engine pounded past us, trumpeting in a frenzy. For a long time afterward, I recall, Lacy and I sat in feeble silence while the dusty emerald tobacco fields swept by, and the forlorn stretches of marshland and pine slumbered in the heat, until at last Lacy, shaken but in grasp of the lovely aplomb I had grown accustomed to in him, said in a distant voice: “Twenty-four kilometers to Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Do you like moules marinières?”

  But the time I truly saw the face of death was not then—it was worse even than this w
renching scare—and it is important to me not alone for the aspect it presented, memorable yet somehow ultimately banal, but for the strange vision the same encounter evoked in Lacy, a vision which he told me about and which I’ve never forgotten.

  We had arrived at Penn Station at some hour in the dark of Sunday morning—encrusted with the dust of twenty North Carolina and Virginia counties and the grime of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s most senile and airless parlor car—and had debarked into the arms of our eager girls. Their very presence was like a renewal of life: Lacy’s wife, Annie, very French-looking, not really beautiful but possessing oval provocative eyes and a luminous smile, and, beside her, Laurel, not really beautiful either but with tousled blond hair and adorable lips parted in moist, concupiscent welcome. They bore no gifts but themselves, which was more than enough.

  There followed then the usual scenario (this being not an exact rendition of that particular visit but—alas, for my poor memory—a synthesis of those several times): after a quick good-bye to Lacy and Annie I hurry with Laurel to the taxi ramp, where she has foresightedly kept a cab waiting. We have spoken to each other a few words—cheerful, obligatory, with a slight tremolo betraying our madness: “Hello, honey. Gee, you look good. How was the trip?” She crawls into the cab with the modesty of a stripper, exposing the inner slope of a thigh tanned at Fire Island and—through the interstices of black peekaboo panties—rosy hints of her marvelously supple, inverted-heart-shaped ass. Suddenly I realize that I am running a fever—no mere hectic lovesick flush, either, but the high fever of terminal illness, pneumonia, anthrax, plague. I sink next to her, surround her with my arms, and hear myself utter a demented gargling sound as the cab heads south toward the Village. Along Ninth Avenue oblongs of neon, green and red, flash through my clenched eyelids, and the wet interplay of our tongues astounds me. Slick tongues, darkly wrestling, underwater shapes, they dominate all my sensations—save for the feel of her industrious fingers at work on my fly, with its critical tumescence, and with its stuck zipper. And that is just as well, I am able to reflect even then; satisfied that no precipitate “petting to climax”—in the sexologist’s odious phrase—might vitiate any of the mortal lovemaking left to me.