He had heard the explosion himself. They had been eating at their own
chow-line in a command post set up in a grove of trees, when the noise
came from off to the right, distant enough but still too close: a twin
quick earth-shaking sound--_crump crump_. Then seconds later in the
still of noon when even the birds had become quiet and only a few
murmured voices disturbed the concentration of eating, a shudder had
passed through the surrounding underbrush, like a faint hot wind. It was
premonitory, perhaps, but still no one knew. The leaves rustled, ceased,
and Culver had looked up from where he squatted against a tree to see
fifty scattered faces peering toward the noise, their knives and forks
suspended. Then from the galley among the trees a clatter broke the
silence, a falling pan or kettle, and someone laughed, and the Colonel,
sitting nearby, had said to the Major--what had he said? Culver couldn’t
remember, yet there had been something uneasy in his tone, even then,
before anyone had known, and at least ten minutes before the radio
corporal, a tobacco-chewing clown from Oklahoma named Hobbs, came
trotting up brushing crumbs from his mouth, a message book clutched in
one fat paw. He was popular in battalion headquarters, one of those
favored men who, through some simplicity or artlessness of nature, can
manage a profane familiarity which in another would be insubordinate;
the look of concern on his clown’s face, usually so whimsical,
communicated an added dread.
“I gotta flash red from Plumbob, Colonel, and it ain’t no problem
emergency. All hell’s broke loose over in Third Battalion. They dropped
in some short rounds on a chow-line and they want corpsmen and a doctor
and the chaplain. Jesus, you should hear ’em down there.”
The Colonel had said nothing at first. The brief flicker of uneasiness
in his eyes had fled, and when he put down his messkit and looked up at
Hobbs it was only to wipe his hands on his handkerchief and squint
casually into the sun, as if he were receiving the most routine of
messages. It was absolutely typical of the man, Culver reflected. Too
habitual to be an act yet still somehow too faintly self-conscious to be
entirely natural, how many years and what strange interior struggle had
gone into the perfection of such a gesture? It was good, Grade-A
Templeton, perhaps not a distinctly top-notch performance but certainly,
from where the critic Culver sat, deserving of applause: the frail,
little-boned, almost pretty face peering upward with a look of
attitudinized contemplation; the pensive bulge of tongue sliding inside
the rim of one tanned cheek to gouge out some particle of food; small
hands working calmly in the folds of the handkerchief--surely all this
was more final, more commanding than the arrogant loud mastery of a
Booth, more like the skill of Bernhardt, who could cow men by the
mystery of her smallest twitch. Perhaps fifteen seconds passed before he
spoke. Culver became irritated--at his own suspense, throbbing inside
him like a heartbeat, and at the awesome silence which, as if upon
order, had fallen over the group of five, detached from the bustle of
the rest of the command post: the Colonel; Hobbs; Major Lawrence, the
executive officer, now gazing at the Colonel with moist underlip and
deferential anxiety; Captain Mannix; himself. Back off in the bushes a
mockingbird commenced a shrill rippling chant and far away, amidst the
depth of the silence, there seemed to be a single faint and terrible
scream. Hobbs spat an auburn gob of tobacco-juice into the sand, and the
Colonel spoke: “Let me have that radio, Hobbs, and get me Plumbob One,”
he said evenly, and then with no change of tone to the Major: “Billy,
send a runner over for Doc Patterson and you two get down there with the
chaplain. Take my jeep. Tell the Doc to detach all his corpsmen. And
you’d better chop-chop.”
The Major scrambled to his feet. He was youthful and handsome, a fine
marine in his polished boots, his immaculate dungarees--donned freshly
clean, Culver had observed, that morning. He was of the handsomeness
preferred by other military men--regular features, clean-cut, rather
athletic--but there was a trace of peacetime fleshiness in his cheeks
which often lent to the corners of his mouth a sort of petulance, so
that every now and again, his young uncomplicated face in deep
concentration over some operations map or training schedule or order, he
looked like a spoiled and arrogant baby of five. “Aye-aye, sir,” he said
and bent over the Colonel, bestowing upon him that third-person flattery
which to Culver seemed perilously close to bootlicking and was thought
to be considerably out of date, especially among the reserves. “Does the
Colonel want us to run our own problem as ordered, sir?” He was a
regular.
Templeton took the headset from Hobbs, who lowered the radio down beside
him in the sand. “Yeah, Billy,” he said, without looking up, “yeah,
that’ll be all right. We’ll run her on time. Tell O’Leary to tell all
companies to push off at thirteen-hundred.”
“Aye-aye, sir.” And the Major, boots sparkling, was off in a puff of
pine needles and dust.
“Jesus,” Mannix said. He put down his messkit and nudged Culver in the
ribs. Captain Mannix, the commanding officer of headquarters company,
was Culver’s friend and, for five months, his closest one. He was a
dark heavy-set Jew from Brooklyn, Culver’s age and a reserve, too, who
had had to sell his radio store and leave his wife and two children at
home. He had a disgruntled sense of humor which often seemed to bring a
spark of relief not just to his own, but to Culver’s, feeling of
futility and isolation. Mannix was a bitter man and, in his bitterness,
sometimes recklessly vocal. He had long ago given up genteel accents,
and spoke like a marine. It was easier, he maintained. “Je-_sus_,” he
whispered again, too loud, “what’ll Congress do about this? Look at
Billy chop-chop.”
Culver said nothing. His tension eased off a bit, and he looked around
him. The news had not seemed yet to have spread around the command post;
the men began to get up and walk to the chow-line to clean their
mess-gear, strolled back beneath the trees and flopped down, heads
against their packs, for a moment’s nap. The Colonel spoke in an easy,
confidential voice with the other battalion commander: the casualties
were confined, Culver gathered, to that outfit. It was a battalion made
up mostly of young reserves and it was one in which, he suddenly
thanked God, he knew no one. Then he heard the Colonel go on calmly--to
promise more aid, to promise to come down himself, shortly. “Does it
look rough, Luke?” Culver heard him say, “Hold on tight, Luke boy”--all
in the cool and leisurely, almost bored, tones of a man to whom the
greatest embarrassment would be a show of emotion, and to whom, because
of this quality, had been given, in the midst of some strained and
violent combat situation long ago, the name “Old Rocky.” He was not yet
forty-five, yet the adjective “old” applied, for there was a gray sheen
in his hair and a bemused, unshakable look in his tranquil eyes that
made him seem, like certain young ecclesiastics, prematurely aged and
perhaps even wise. Culver saw him put the headset down and get up,
walking off toward the operations tent with a springy, slim-hipped,
boyish stride, calling out over his shoulder as he went: “Mannix.”
Simply that: Mannix. A voice neither harsh nor peremptory nor, on the
other hand, particularly gentle. It was merely a voice which expected to
be obeyed, and Culver felt Mannix’s big weight against him as the
Captain put a hand on his shoulder and pried himself up from the
ground, muttering, “Jesus, lemme digest a bit, Jack.”
Mannix despised the Colonel. Yet, Culver thought, as the Captain hulked
stiff-kneed behind the Colonel and disappeared after him into the
operations tent, Mannix despised everything about the Marine Corps. In
this attitude he was like nearly all the reserves, it was true, but
Mannix was more noisily frank in regard to his position. He detested
Templeton not because of any slight or injustice, but because Templeton
was a lieutenant colonel, because he was a regular, and because he
possessed over Mannix--after six years of freedom--an absolute and
unquestioned authority. Mannix would have hated any battalion commander,
had he the benignity of Santa Claus, and Culver, listening to Mannix’s
frequently comical but often too audible complaints, as just now, was
kept in a constant state of mild suspense--half amusement, half horror.
Culver settled himself against the tree. Apparently there was nothing,
for the moment at least, that he could do. Above him an airplane droned
through the stillness. A truck grumbled across the clearing, carrying a
group of languid hospital corpsmen, was gone; around him the men lay
against their packs in crumpled attitudes of sleep. A heavy drowsiness
came over him, and he let his eyes slide closed. Suddenly he yearned,
with all of the hunger of a schoolboy in a classroom on a May afternoon,
to be able to collapse into slumber. For the three days they had been on
the problem he had averaged only four hours of sleep a night--almost
none last night--and gratefully he knew he’d be able to sleep this
evening. He began to doze, dreaming fitfully of home, of white cottages,
of a summer by the sea. _Long walk tonight._ And his eyes snapped open
then--on what seemed to be the repeated echo, from afar, of that faint
anguished shriek he had heard before--in the horrid remembrance that
there would be no sleep tonight. For anyone at all. Only a few seconds
had passed.
“Long walk tonight,” the voice repeated. Culver stared upward through a
dazzling patchwork of leaves and light to see the broad pink face of
Sergeant O’Leary, smiling down.
“Christ, O’Leary,” he said, “don’t remind me.”
The Sergeant, still grinning, gestured with his shoulder in the
direction of the operations tent. “The Colonel’s really got a wild hair,
ain’t he?” He chuckled and reached down and clutched one of his feet,
with an elaborate groan.
Culver abruptly felt cloaked in a gloom that was almost tangible, and he
was in no mood to laugh. “You’ll be really holding that foot tomorrow
morning,” he said, “and that’s no joke.”
The grin persisted. “Ah, Mister Culver,” O’Leary said, “don’t take it so
hard. It’s just a little walk through the night. It’ll be over before
you know it.” He paused, prodding with his toe at the pine needles.
“Say,” he went on, “what’s this I heard about some short rounds down in
Third Batt?”
“I don’t know from nothing, O’Leary. I just read the papers.” Another
truck came by, loaded with corpsmen, followed by a jeep in which sat
the helmeted Major Lawrence, a look of sulky arrogance on his face, his
arms folded at his chest like a legionnaire riding through a conquered
city. “But from what I understand,” Culver went on, turning back, “quite
a few guys got hurt.”
“That’s tough,” O’Leary said. “I’ll bet you they were using that old
stuff they’ve had stored on Guam ever since ’45. Jesus, you’d think
they’d have better sense. Why, I seen those shells stacked up high as a
man out there just last year, getting rained on every day and getting
the jungle rot and Jesus, they put tarps over ’em but five years is one
hell of a long time to let 81-shells lay around. I remember once....”
Culver let him talk, without hearing the words, and drowsed. O’Leary was
an old-timer (though only a few years older than Culver), a regular who
had just signed over for four more years, and it was impossible to
dislike him. On Guadalcanal he had been only a youngster, but in the
intervening years the Marine Corps had molded him--perhaps by his own
unconscious choice--in its image, and he had become as inextricably
grafted to the system as any piece of flesh surgically laid on to arm
or thigh. There was great heartiness and warmth in him but at the same
time he performed all infantry jobs with a devoted, methodical
competence. He could say sarcastically, “The Colonel’s really got a wild
hair, ain’t he?” but shrug his shoulders and grin, and by that
ambivalent gesture sum up an attitude which only a professional soldier
could logically retain: I doubt the Colonel’s judgment a little, but I
will willingly do what he says. He also shared with Hobbs, the radioman,
some sort of immunity. And thus it had been last night, Culver recalled,
that upon the Colonel’s announcement about this evening’s forced
march--which was to take thirteen hours and extend the nearly thirty-six
miles back to the main base--O’Leary had been able to give a long,
audible, incredulous whistle, right in the Colonel’s face, and elicit
from the Colonel an indulgent smile; whereas in the same blackout tent
and at virtually the same instant Mannix had murmured, “Thirty-six
miles, Jesus Christ,” in a tone, however, laden with no more disbelief
or no more pain than O’Leary’s whistle, and Culver had seen the
Colonel’s smile vanish, replaced on the fragile little face by a subtle,
delicate shadow of irritation.
“You think that’s too long?” the Colonel had said to Mannix then,
turning slightly. There had been no hostility in his voice, or even
reproof; it had, in fact, seemed merely a question candidly
stated--although this might have been because two enlisted men had been
in the tent, O’Leary, and some wizened, anonymous little private
shivering over the radio. It was midsummer, but nights out in the swamps
were fiercely, illogically cold, and from where they had set up the
operations tent that evening--on a tiny patch of squashy marshland--the
dampness seemed to ooze up and around them, clutching their bones in a
chill which extra sweaters and field jackets and sweatshirts could not
dislodge. A single kerosene pressure-lamp dangled from overhead--roaring
like a pint-sized, encapsuled hurricane; it furnished the only light in
the tent, and the negligible solace of a candlelike heat. It had the
stark, desperate, manufactured quality of the light one imagines in an
execution chamber; under it the Colonel’s face, in absolute repose as
he stared down for a brief, silent instant and awaited Mannix’s reply,
looked like that of a mannequin, chalky, exquisite, solitary beneath a
store-window glare.
“No, sir,” Mannix said. He had recovered quickly. He peered up at the
Colonel from his camp stool, expressionless. “No, sir,” he repeated, “I
don’t think it’s too long, but it’s certainly going to be some hike.”
The Colonel did something with his lips. It seemed to be a smile. He
said nothing--bemused and mystifying--wearing the enigma of the moment
like a cape. In the silence the tempestuous little lamp boiled and
raged; far off in the swamp somewhere a mortar flare flew up with a
short, sharp crack. O’Leary broke the quietness in the tent with a loud
sneeze, followed, almost like a prolongation of the sneeze, by a
chuckle, and said: “Oh boy, Colonel, there’re gonna be some sore feet
Saturday morning.”
The Colonel didn’t answer. He hooked his thumbs in his belt. He turned
to the Major, who was brooding upward from the field desk, cheeks
propped against his hands. “I was sitting in my tent a while ago,
Billy,” the Colonel said, “and I got to thinking. I got to thinking
about a lot of things. I got to thinking about the Battalion. I said to
myself, ‘How’s the Battalion doing?’ I mean, ‘What kind of an outfit do
I have here? Is it in good combat shape? If we were to meet an Aggressor
enemy tomorrow would we come out all right?’ Those were the queries I
posed to myself. Then I tried to formulate an answer.” He paused, his
eyes luminous and his lips twisted in a wry, contemplative smile as if
he were indeed, again, struggling with the weight of the questions to
which he had addressed himself. The Major was absorbed; he looked up at
Templeton with an intent baby-blue gaze and parted mouth, upon which,
against a pink cleft of the lower lip, there glittered a bead of saliva.
“Reluctantly,” the Colonel went on slowly, “reluctantly, I came to this
conclusion: the Battalion’s been doping off.” He paused again. “Doping
off. Especially,” he said, turning briefly toward Mannix with a thin
smile, “a certain component unit known as Headquarters and Service
Company.” He leaned back on the camp stool and slowly caressed the
pewter-colored surface of his hair. “I decided a little walk might be in
order for tomorrow night, after we secure the problem. Instead of going
back to the base on the trucks. What do you think, Billy?”
“I think that’s an excellent idea, sir. An excellent idea. In fact I’ve
been meaning to suggest something like that to the Colonel for quite
some time. As a means of inculcating a sort of group _esprit_.”
“It’s what they need, Billy.”
“Full marching order, sir?” O’Leary put in seriously.
“No, that’d be a little rough.”
“Aaa-h,” O’Leary said, relieved.
Suddenly Culver heard Mannix’s voice: “Even so--”
“Even so, what?” the Colonel interrupted. Again, the voice was not
hostile, only anticipatory, as if it already held the answer to whatever
Mannix might ask or suggest.
“Well, even so, Colonel,” Mannix went on mildly, while Culver, suddenly
taut and concerned, held his breath, “even without packs thirty-six
miles is a long way for anybody, much less for guys who’ve gone soft
for the past five or six years. I’ll admit my company isn’t the hottest
outfit in the world, but most of them are reserves--”
“Wait a minute, Captain, wait a minute,” the Colonel said. Once more the
voice--as cool and as level as the marshy ground upon which they were
sitting--carefully skirted any tone of reproach and was merely explicit:
“I don’t want you to think I’m taking it out on the Battalion merely
because of you, or rather H & S Company. But they aren’t reserves.
They’re _marines_. _Comprend?_” He arose from the chair. “I think,” he
went on flatly, almost gently, “that there’s one thing that we are all
tending to overlook these days. We’ve been trying to differentiate too
closely between two particular bodies of men that make up the Marine
Corps. Technically it’s true that a lot of these new men are
reserves--that is, they have an ‘R’ affixed at the end of the ‘USMC.’
But it’s only a technical difference, you see. Because first and
foremost they’re _marines_. I don’t want my marines doping off. They’re
going to _act_ like marines. They’re going to be _fit_. If they meet an
Aggressor enemy next week they might have to march a long, long way. And
that’s what I want this hike to teach them. _Comprend?_” He made what
could pass for the token of a smile and laid his hand easily and for a
lingering second on Mannix’s shoulder, in a sort of half-gesture of
conciliation, understanding--something--it was hard to tell. It was an
odd picture because from where he sat Culver was the only one in the
tent who could see, at the same instant, both of their expressions. In
the morbid, comfortless light they were like classical Greek masks, made
of chrome or tin, reflecting an almost theatrical disharmony: the
Colonel’s fleeting grin sculpted cleanly and prettily in the unshadowed
air above the Captain’s darkened, downcast face where, for a flicker of
a second, something outraged and agonized was swiftly graven and swiftly
scratched out. The Colonel’s smile was not complacent or unfriendly. It
was not so much as if he had achieved a triumph but merely equilibrium,
had returned once more to that devout, ordered state of communion which
the Captain’s words had ever so briefly disturbed. At that moment
Culver almost liked the Colonel, in some negative way which had nothing
to do with affection, but to which “respect,” though he hated the word,
was the nearest approach. At least it was an honest smile, no matter how
faint. It was the expression of a man who might be fatuous and a ham of
sorts, but was not himself evil or unjust--a man who would like to
overhear some sergeant say, “He keeps a tight outfit, but he’s
straight.” In men like Templeton all emotions--all smiles, all
anger--emanated from a priestlike, religious fervor, throbbing inwardly
with the cadence of parades and booted footfalls. By that passion rebels
are ordered into quick damnation but simple doubters sometimes find
indulgence--depending upon the priest, who may be one inclined toward
mercy, or who is one ever rapt in some litany of punishment and
court-martial. The Colonel was devout but inclined toward mercy. He was
not a tyrant, and his smile was a sign that the Captain’s doubts were
forgiven, probably even forgotten. But only Culver had seen the
Captain’s face: a quick look of both fury and suffering, like the
tragic Greek mask, or a shackled slave. Then Mannix flushed. “Yes, sir,”
he said.
The Colonel walked toward the door. He seemed already to have put the
incident out of his mind. “Culver,” he said, “if you can ever make radio
contact with Able Company tell them to push off at 0600. If you can’t,
send a runner down before dawn to see if they’ve got the word.” He gave
the side of his thigh a rather self-conscious, gratuitous slap. “Well,
good night.”
There was a chorus of “Good night, sirs,” and then the Major went out,
too, trailed by O’Leary. Culver looked at his watch: it was nearly three
o’clock.
Mannix looked up. “You going to try and get some sleep, Tom?”
“I’ve tried. It’s too cold. Anyway, I’ve got to take over the radio
watch from Junior here. What’s your name, fellow?”
The boy at the radio looked up with a start, trembling with the cold.
“McDonald, sir.” He was very young, with pimples and a sweet earnest
expression; he had obviously just come from boot camp, for he had
practically no hair.
“Well, you can shove off and get some sleep, if you can find a nice warm
pile of pine needles somewhere.” The boy sleepily put down his earphones
and went out, fastening the blackout flap behind him.
“I’ve tried,” Culver repeated, “but I just can’t get used to sleeping on
the ground any more. I’m getting old and rheumatic. Anyway, the Old Rock
was in here for about two hours before you came, using up my sack time
while he told the Major and O’Leary and me all about his Shanghai days.”
“He’s a son of a bitch.” Mannix morosely cupped his chin in his hands,
blinking into space, at the bare canvas wall. He was chewing on the butt
of a cigar. The glare seemed to accentuate a flat Mongoloid cast in his
face; he looked surly and tough and utterly exhausted. Shivering, he
pulled his field jacket closer around his neck, and then, as Culver
watched, his face broke out into the comical, exasperated smile which
always heralded his bitterest moments of outrage--at the Marine Corps,
at the system, at their helpless plight, the state of the world--tirades
which, in their unqualified cynicism, would have been intolerable were
they not always delivered with such gusto and humor and a kind of grisly
delight. “Thirty ... six ... _miles_,” he said slowly, his eyes alive
and glistening, “_thirty ... six ... miles_! Christ on a crutch! Do you
realize how far that is? Why that’s as far as it is from Grand Central
to Stamford, Connecticut! Why, man, I haven’t walked a hundred
consecutive yards since 1945. I couldn’t go thirty-six miles if I were
sliding downhill the whole way on a sled. And a _forced_ march, mind
you. You just don’t stroll along, you know. That’s like running. That’s
a regulation two-and-a-half miles per hour with only a ten-minute break
each hour. So H & S Company is fouled up. So maybe it is. He can’t take
green troops like these and do that. After a couple of seven- or ten- or
fifteen-mile conditioning hikes, maybe so. If they were young. And
rested. Barracks-fresh. But this silly son of a bitch is going to have
all these tired, flabby old men flapping around on the ground like a
bunch of fish after the first two miles. Christ on a frigging crutch!”
“He’s not a bad guy, Al,” Culver said, “he’s just a regular. Shot in
the ass with the Corps. A bit off his nut, like all of them.”
But Mannix had made the march seem menacing, there was no doubt about
that, and Culver--who for the moment had been regarding the hike as a
sort of careless abstraction, a prolonged evening’s stroll--felt a solid
dread creep into his bones, along with the chill of the night.
Involuntarily, he shuddered. He felt suddenly unreal and disoriented, as
if through some curious second sight or seventh sense his surroundings
had shifted, ever so imperceptibly, into another dimension of space and
time. Perhaps he was just so tired. Freezing marsh and grass instead of
wood beneath his feet, the preposterous cold in the midst of summer,
Mannix’s huge distorted shadow cast brutishly against the impermeable
walls by a lantern so sinister that its raging noise had the sound of a
typhoon at sea--all these, just for an instant, did indeed contrive to
make him feel as if they were adrift at sea in a dazzling, windowless
box, ignorant of direction or of any points of the globe, and with no
way of telling. What he had had for the last years--wife and child and
home--seemed to have existed in the infinite past or, dreamlike again,
never at all, and what he had done yesterday and the day before, moving
wearily with this tent from one strange thicket to a stranger swamp and
on to the green depths of some even stranger ravine, had no sequence,
like the dream of a man delirious with fever. All time and space seemed
for a moment to be enclosed within the tent, itself unmoored and
unhelmed upon a dark and compassless ocean.
And although Mannix was close by, he felt profoundly alone. Something
that had happened that evening--something Mannix had said, or suggested,
perhaps not even that, but only a fleeting look in the Captain’s face,
the old compressed look of torment mingled with seething
outrage--something that evening, without a doubt, had added to the great
load of his loneliness an almost intolerable burden. And that burden was
simply an anxiety, nameless for the moment and therefore the more
menacing. It was not merely the prospect of the hike. Exhaustion had
just made him vulnerable to a million shaky, anonymous fears--fears
which he might have resisted had he felt strong and refreshed, or
younger. His age was showing badly. All this would have been easy at
twenty-three. But he was thirty, and seventy-two virtually sleepless
hours had left him feeling bushed and defeated. And there was another
subtle difference he felt about his advanced age--a new awakening, an
awareness--and therein lay the reason for his fears.
It was simply that after six years of an ordered and sympathetic
life--made the more placid by the fact that he had assumed he had put
war forever behind him--it was a shock almost mystically horrifying, in
its unreality, to find himself in this new world of frigid nights and
blazing noons, of disorder and movement and fanciful pursuit. He was
insecure and uprooted and the prey of many fears. Not for days but for
weeks, it seemed, the battalion had been on the trail of an invisible
enemy who always eluded them and kept them pressing on--across swamps
and blasted fields and past indolent, alien streams. This enemy was
labeled Aggressor, on maps brightly spattered with arrows and symbolic
tanks and guns, but although there was no sign of his aggression he fled
them nonetheless and they pushed the sinister chase, sending up shells
and flares as they went. Five hours’ pause, five hours in a tent
somewhere, lent to the surrounding grove of trees a warm, homelike
familiarity that was almost like permanence, and he left each command
post feeling lonely and uprooted, as they pushed on after the spectral
foe into the infinite strangeness of another swamp or grove. Fatigue
pressed down on his shoulders like strong hands, and he awoke in the
morning feeling weary, if he ever slept at all. Since their
constant movement made the sunlight come from ever-shifting points
of the compass, he was often never quite sure--in his steady
exhaustion--whether it was morning or afternoon. The displacement and
the confusion filled him with an anxiety which would not have been
possible six years before, and increased his fatigue. The tent itself,
in its tiny, momentary permanence, might have had all of the appeal of
the home which he so desperately hungered for, had it not been so cold,
and had it not seemed, as he sat there suddenly shivering with fear, so
much more like a coffin instead.
Then it occurred to him that he was actually terrified of the march, of
the thirty-six miles: not because of the length--which was beyond
comprehension--but because he was sure he’d not be able to make it. The
contagion of Mannix’s fear had touched him. And he wondered then if
Mannix’s fear had been like his own: that no matter what his hatred of
the system, of the Marine Corps, might be, some instilled, twisted pride
would make him walk until he dropped, and his fear was not of the hike
itself, but of dropping. He looked up at Mannix and said, “Do you think
you can make it, Al?”
Mannix heavily slapped his knee. He seemed not to have heard the
question. The giddy sensation passed, and Culver got up to warm his
hands at the lamp.
“I’ll bet if Regiment or Division got wind of this they’d lower the boom
on the bastard,” Mannix said.
“They have already. They said fine.”
“What do you mean? How do you know?”
“He said so, before you came in. He radioed to the base for permission,
or so he said.”
“The bastard.”
“He wouldn’t dare without it,” Culver said. “What I can’t figure out is
why Regiment gave him the O.K. on it.”
“The swine. The little swine. It’s not on account of H & S Company. You
know that. It’s because it’s an exploit. He wants to be known as a tough
guy, a boondocker.”
“There’s one consolation, though,” said Culver, after a pause, “if it’ll
help you any.”
“What, for God’s sake?”
“Old Rocky, or whatever they call him, is going to hike along, too.”
“You think so?” Mannix said doubtfully.
“I know so. So do you. He wouldn’t dare not push along with his men.”
Mannix was silent for a moment. Then he said viciously, as if obsessed
with the idea that no act of Templeton’s could remain untainted by a
prime and calculated evil: “But the son of a bitch! He’s made for that
sort of thing. He’s been running around the boondocks for six years
getting in shape while sane people like you and me were home living like
humans and taking it easy. Billy Lawrence, too. They’re both gung ho.
These fat civilians can’t take that sort of thing. My God! Hobbs! Look
at that radioman, Hobbs. That guy’s going to keel over two minutes
out--” He rose suddenly to his feet and stretched, his voice stifled by
the long, indrawn breath of a yawn. “Aaa-h, fuck it. I’m going to hit
the sack.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Fine bed. A poncho in a pile of poison ivy. My ass looks like a
chessboard from chigger bites. Jesus, if Mimi could see me now.” He
paused and pawed at his red-rimmed eyes. “Yeah,” he said, blinking at
his watch, “I think I will.” He slapped Culver on the back, without much
heartiness. “I’ll see you tomorrow, sport. Stay loose.” Then he lumbered
from the tent, mumbling something: _be in for fifty years_.
Culver turned away from the lamp. He sat down at the field desk,
strapping a black garland of wires and earphones around his skull. The
wild, lost wail of the radio signal struck his ears, mingling with the
roar, much closer now, of the lamp; alone as he was, the chill and
cramped universe of the tent seemed made for no one more competent than
a blind midget, and was on the verge of bursting with a swollen
obbligato of demented sounds. He felt almost sick with the need for
sleep and, with the earphones still around his head, he thrust his face
into his arms on the field desk. There was nothing on the radio except
the signal; far off in the swamp the companies were sleeping wretchedly
in scattered squads and platoons, tumbled about in the cold and the
dark, and dreaming fitful dreams. The radios were dead everywhere,
except for their signals: a crazy, tortured multitude of wails on which
his imagination played in exhaustion. They seemed like the cries of
souls in the anguish of hell, if he concentrated closely enough, shrill
cracklings, whines, barks and shrieks--a whole jungle full of noise an
inch from his eardrum and across which, like a thread of insanity, was
strung the single faint fluting of a dance-band clarinet--blown in from
Florida or New York, someplace beyond reckoning. His universe now seemed
even more contained: not merely by the tiny space of the tent, but by
the almost tangible fact of sound. And it was impossible to sleep.
Besides, something weighed heavily on his mind; there was something he
had forgotten, something he was supposed to do....
Then suddenly he remembered the Colonel’s instructions. He cleared his
throat and spoke drowsily into the mouthpiece, his head still resting
against his arms. “This is Bundle Three calling Bundle Able. This is
Bundle Three calling Bundle Able. This is Bundle Three calling Bundle
Able. Do you hear me? Over....” He paused for a moment, waiting. There
was no answer. He repeated: “This is Bundle Three calling Bundle Able,
this is Bundle Three calling Bundle Able, this is....” And he snapped
abruptly erect, thinking of Mannix, thinking: to hell with it: simply
because the words made him feel juvenile and absurd, as if he were
reciting Mother Goose.
He _would_ stay awake. And he thought of Mannix. Because Mannix would
laugh. Mannix appreciated the idiocy of those radio words, just as in
his own crazy way he managed to put his finger on anything which might
represent a symbol of their predicament. Like the radio code. He had a
violent contempt for the gibberish, the boy-scout passwords which
replaced ordinary conversation in the military world. To Mannix they
were all part of the secret language of a group of morons, morons who
had been made irresponsibly and dangerously clever. He had despised the
other side, also--the sweat, the exertion, and the final danger. It had
been he, too, who had said, “None of this Hemingway crap for me, Jack”;
he was nobody’s lousy hero, and he’d get out of this outfit some way.
Yet, Culver speculated, who really was a hero anyway, any more? Mannix’s
disavowal of faith put him automatically out of the hero category, in
the classical sense, yet if suffering was part of the hero’s role,
wasn’t Mannix as heroic as any? On his shoulder there was a raw, deeply
dented, livid scar, made the more conspicuous and, for that matter, more
ugly, by the fact that its evil slick surface only emphasized the burly
growth of hair around it. There were smaller scars all over his body.
About them Mannix was neither proud nor modest, but just frank, and once
while they were showering down after a day in the field, Mannix told him
how he had gotten the scars, one day on Peleliu. “I was a buck sergeant
then. I got pinned down in a shell hole out in front of my platoon.
Christ knows how I got there but I remember there was a telephone in the
hole and--whammo!--the Nips began laying in mortar fire on the area and
I got a piece right here.” He pointed to a shiny, triangular groove just
above his knee. “I remember grabbing that phone and hollering for them
to for Christ’s sake get the 81s up and knock out that position, but
they were slow, Jesus they were slow! The Nips were firing for effect, I
guess, because they were coming down like rain and every time one of the
goddam things went off I seemed to catch it. All I can remember is
hollering into that phone and the rounds going off and the zinging noise
that shrapnel made. I hollered for 81s and I caught a piece in my hand.
Then I hollered for at least a goddam rifle grenade and I caught a piece
in the ass, right here. I hollered for 60s and guns and airplanes. Every
time I hollered for something I seemed to catch some steel. Christ, I
was scared. And hurting! Jesus Christ, I never hurt so much in my life.
Then I caught this one right here”--he made a comical, contorted
gesture, with a bar of soap, over his shoulder--“man, it was lights out
then. I remember thinking, ‘Al, you’ve had it,’ and just before I passed
out I looked down at that telephone. You know, that frigging wire had
been blasted right out of sight all that time.”
No, perhaps Mannix wasn’t a hero, any more than the rest of them, caught
up by wars in which, decade by half-decade, the combatant served peonage
to the telephone and the radar and the thunderjet--a horde of cunningly
designed, and therefore often treacherous, machines. But Mannix had
suffered once, that “once” being, in his own words, “once too goddam
many, Jack.” And his own particular suffering had made him angry, had
given him an acute, if cynical, perception about their renewed bondage,
and a keen nose for the winds that threatened to blow up out of the
oppressive weather of their surroundings and sweep them all into
violence. And he made Culver uneasy. His discontent was not merely
peevish; it was rocklike and rebellious, and thus this discontent
seemed to Culver to be at once brave and somehow full of peril.
He had first seen Mannix the revolutionary five months ago, soon after
they had been called back to duty. He hadn’t known him then. There were
compulsory lectures arranged at first, to acquaint the junior officers
with recent developments in what had been called “the new amphibious
doctrine.” The outlines of these lectures were appallingly familiar: the
stuffy auditorium asprawl with bored lieutenants and captains, the
brightly lit stage with its magnified charts and graphs, the lantern
slides (at which point, when the lights went out, it was possible to
sneak a moment’s nap, just as in officers’ school seven years ago), the
parade of majors and colonels with their maps and pointers, and their
cruelly tedious, doggedly memorized lectures: the whole scene, with its
grave, professorial air, seemed seedily portentous, especially since no
one cared, save the majors and colonels, and no one listened. When
Culver sat down, during the darkness of a lantern slide, next to the big
relaxed mass which he dimly identified as a captain, he noticed that it
was snoring. When the lights went up, Mannix still slept on, filling
the air around him with a loud, tranquil blubber. Culver aroused him
with a nudge. Mannix grumbled something, but then said, “Thanks, Jack.”
A young colonel had come onto the stage then. He had made many of the
lectures that week. He had a curiously thick, throaty voice which would
have made him sound like a yokel, except that his words were coolly,
almost passionately put, and he bent forward over the lectern with a
bleak and solemn attitude--a lean, natty figure with hair cut so close
to his head that he appeared to be, from that distance, nearly bald. “An
SS man,” Mannix whispered, “he’s gonna come down here and cut your balls
off. You Jewish?” He grinned and collapsed back, forehead against his
hand, into quiet slumber. Culver couldn’t recall what the colonel talked
about: the movement of supplies, logistics, ship-to-shore movement,
long-range planning, all abstract and vast, and an ardent glint came to
his eyes when he spoke of the “grandiose doctrine” which had been
formulated since they, the reserves, had been away. “You bet your life,
Jack,” Mannix had whispered out of the shadows then. He seemed to have
snapped fully awake and, following the lecture intently, he appeared to
address his whispers not to Culver, or the colonel, but to the air. “You
bet your life they’re grandiose,” he said, “even if you don’t know what
grandiose means. I’ll bet you’d sell your soul to be able to drop a bomb
on somebody.” And then, aping the colonel’s instructions to the
corporal--one of the enlisted flunkies who, after each lecture, passed
out the reams of printed and mimeographed tables and charts and résumés,
which everyone promptly, when out of sight, threw away--he whispered in
high, throaty, lilting mockery: “Corporal, kindly pass out the atom
bombs for inspection.” He smacked the arm of his seat, too hard; it
could be heard across the auditorium, and heads turned then, but the
colonel had not seemed to have noticed. “Jesus,” Mannix rumbled
furiously, “Jesus Christ almighty,” while the colonel droned on, in his
countrified voice: “Our group destiny,” he said, “amphibiously
integrated, from any force thrown against us by Aggressor enemy.”
Later--toward the end of that week of lectures, after Mannix had spoken
the calm, public manifesto which at least among the reserves had made
him famous, and from then on the object of a certain awe, though with a
few doubts about his balance, too--Culver had tried to calculate how he
had gotten by with it. Perhaps it had to do with his size, his bearing.
There was at times a great massive absoluteness in the way he spoke. He
was huge, and the complete honesty and candor of his approach seemed to
rumble forth, like notes from a sounding board, in direct proportion to
his size. He had suffered, too, and this suffering had left a
persistent, unwhipped, scornful look in his eyes, almost like a stain,
or rather a wound, which spells out its own warning and cautions the
unwary to handle this tortured parcel of flesh with care. And he was an
enormous man, his carriage was formidable. That skinny, bristle-haired
colonel, Culver finally realized, had been taken aback past the point of
punishment, or even reprimand, merely because of the towering,
unavoidable, physical fact that he was facing not a student or a captain
or a subordinate, but a stubborn and passionate man. So it was that,
after a lecture on transport of supplies, when the colonel had called
Mannix’s name at random from a list to answer some generalized,
hypothetical question, Mannix had stood up and said merely, “I don’t
know, sir.” A murmur of surprise passed over the auditorium then, for
the colonel, early in the hour, had made it plain that he had wanted at
least an attempt at an answer--a guess--even though they might be
unacquainted with the subject. But Mannix merely said, “I don’t know,
sir,” while the colonel, as if he hadn’t heard correctly, rephrased the
question with a little tremor of annoyance. There was a moment’s silence
and men turned around in their seats to look at the author of this
defiance. “I don’t know, sir,” he said again, in a loud but calm voice.
“I don’t know what my first consideration would be in making a space
table like that. I’m an infantry officer. I got an 0302.” The colonel’s
forehead went pink under the glare of the lights. “I stated earlier,
Captain, that I wanted some sort of answer. None of you gentlemen is
expected to know this subject pat, but you can essay _some kind of an
answer_.” Mannix just stood there, solid and huge, blinking at the
colonel. “I just have to repeat, sir,” he said finally, “that I don’t
have the faintest idea what my first consideration would be. I never
went to cargo-loading school. I’m an 0302. And I’d like to respectfully
add, sir, if I might, that there’s hardly anybody in this room who knows
that answer, either. They’ve forgotten everything they ever learned
seven years ago. Most of them don’t even know how to take an M-1 apart.
They’re too old. They should be home with their family.” There was
passion in his tone but it was controlled and straightforward--he had
managed to keep out of his voice either anger or insolence--and then he
fell silent. His words had the quality, the sternness, of an absolute
and unequivocal fact, as if they had been some intercession for grace
spoken across the heads of a courtroom by a lawyer so quietly convinced
of his man’s innocence that there was no need for gesticulations or
frenzy. The colonel’s eyes bulged incredulously at Mannix from across
the rows of seats, but in the complete, astounded hush that had
followed he was apparently at a loss for words. A bit unsteadily, he
called out another name and Mannix sat down, staring stonily ahead.
It had been perhaps a court-martial offense, at least worthy of some
reprimand, but that was all there was to it. Nothing happened, no
repercussions, nothing. The thing had been forgotten; either that, or it
had been stored away in the universal memory of colonels, where all such
incidents are sorted out for retribution, or are forgotten. Whatever
effect it had on the colonel, or whatever higher, even more important
sources got wind of it, it had its effect on Mannix. And the result was
odd. Far from giving the impression that he had been purged, that he had
blown off excess pressure, he seemed instead more tense, more
embittered, more in need to scourge something--his own boiling spirit,
authority, anything.
Culver’s vision of him at this time was always projected against
Heaven’s Gate, which was the name--no doubt ironically supplied at first
by the enlisted men--of the pleasure-dome ingeniously erected amid a
tangle of alluvial swampland, and for officers only. He and Mannix
lived in rooms next to each other, in the bachelor quarters upstairs.
The entire area was a playground which had all the casual opulence of a
Riviera resort and found its focus in the sparkling waters of a swimming
pool, set like an oblong sapphire amid flowered walks and a fanciful
growth of beach umbrellas. There, at ten minutes past four each day,
Mannix could be found, his uniform shed in an instant and a gin fizz in
his hand--a sullen, mountainous figure in a lurid sportshirt, across
which a squadron of monstrous butterflies floated in luminous,
unmilitary files. Both Mannix and Culver hated the place--its factitious
luxury, its wanton atmosphere of alcohol and torpid ease and dances, the
vacant professional talk of the regular officers and the constant
teasing presence of their wives, who were beautiful and spoke in tender
drawls and boldly flaunted at the wifeless reserves--in a proprietary,
Atlanta-debutante fashion--their lecherous sort of chastity. The place
seemed to offer up, like a cornucopia, the fruits of boredom, of
footlessness and dissolution. It was, in Mannix’s words, like a prison
where you could have anything you wanted except happiness, and once, in
a rare midnight moment when he allowed himself to get drunk, he got
paper and wood together from his room and announced to Culver in an
unsteady but determined voice that he was going to burn the place down.
Culver held him off, but it was true: they were bound to the pleasures
of the place by necessity--for there was no place to go for a hundred
miles, even if they had wanted to go--and therefore out of futility.
“Goddam, it’s degrading,” Mannix had said, making use of an adjective
which indeed seemed to sum it all up. “It’s like sex now. Or the lack of
it. Now maybe it’s all right for a kid to go without sex, but it’s
degrading for someone like me almost thirty to go without making love
for so long. It’s simply degrading, that’s all. I’d go for one of these
regulars’ pigs if it wasn’t for Mimi.... This whole mess is degrading. I
know it’s my own fault I stayed in the reserves, Jack, you don’t have to
tell me that. I was a nut I didn’t know I was going to get called out
for every frigging international incident that came along. But, goddam,
it’s degrading”--and with a glum, subdued gesture he’d down the dregs
of his drink--“it’s degrading for a man my age to go sniffing around on
my belly in the boondocks like a dog. And furthermore--” He looked
scornfully about him, at the glitter and chrome, at the terrace by the
pool where Japanese lanterns hung like a grove of pastel moons, and a
girl’s shrill and empty laugh uncoiled as bright as tinsel through the
sluggish coastal dusk. It was a silent moment in a night sprinkled with
a dusty multitude of Southern stars, and the distant bleating saxophone
seemed indecisive and sad, like the nation and the suffocating summer,
neither at peace nor at war. “Furthermore, it’s degrading to come out of
the field each day and then be _forced_ to go to a night club like this,
when all you want to do is go home to your wife and family. Goddam, man,
I’ve _gotta_ get out!”
But underneath his rebellion, Culver finally knew, Mannix--like all of
them--was really resigned. Born into a generation of conformists, even
Mannix (so Culver sensed) was aware that his gestures were not symbolic,
but individual, therefore hopeless, maybe even absurd, and that he was
trapped like all of them in a predicament which one personal
insurrection could, if anything, only make worse. “You know,” he said
once, “I think I was really afraid just one time last war.” The phrase
“last war” had had, itself, a numb, resigned quality, in its lack of any
particular inflection, like “last week end,” or “last movie I went to
see.” They had been lying on the beach to which they fled each hot week
end. In that setting of coast and sea and lugubrious solitude they felt
nearly peaceful, in touch with a tranquil force more important, and more
lasting (or so it seemed on those sunlit afternoons), than war. Mannix
had been, almost for the first time since Culver had known him, rested
and subdued, and the sound of his voice had been a surprise after long,
sun-laden hours of sleep and silence. “That’s the goddam truth,” he said
thoughtfully, “I was only afraid once. Really afraid, I mean. It was at
a hotel in San Francisco. I think I really came closer to dying that
night than I ever have in my life. We were drunk, you see, polluted, all
of us. I think there were five of us, all of us boots just out of Dago.
Kids. We were on the tenth floor of this hotel and in this room and I
believe we were about as drunk as anyone could get. I remember going in
to take a shower in the bathroom. It was late at night, past midnight,
and after I took this shower, you see, I came out into the room buck
naked. Two of those drunk guys were waiting for me. They grabbed me and
pushed me toward the window. I was so loaded I couldn’t battle. Then
they pushed me out the window and held me by the heels while I dangled
upside-down buck naked in space, ten floors above the street.” He paused
and sucked at a beer can. “Can you imagine that?” he went on slowly.
“How I felt? I got stone-sober in a second. Imagine being that high
upside-down in space with two drunks holding onto your heels. I was
heavy, man, just like now, you see. All I can remember is those
teeny-weeny lights below and the tiny little people like ants down there
and those two crazy drunk guys holding onto my wet slippery ankles,
laughing like hell and trying to decide whether to let go or not. I just
remember the cold wind blowing on my body and that dark, man, infinite
darkness all around me, and my ankles beginning to slip out of their
hands. I really saw Death then, and I think that all I could think of
was that I was going to fall and smash myself on that hard, hard street
below. That those crazy bastards were going to let me fall. I was
praying, I guess. I remember the blood rushing to my brain and my ankles
slipping, and that awful strange noise. And I was reaching out, man,
clutching at thin air. Then I wondered what that noise was, that high
loud noise, and then I realized it was me, screaming at the top of my
voice, all over San Francisco.” He stopped talking then and scuffed at
the sand with one calloused heel. “They hauled me up somehow. It was
those sober guys--I guess they were sober--the other two. They got me
up. But every time I remember that moment a great big cold shudder runs
up and down my spine.” He chuckled and chewed on his cigar but the laugh
was half-hearted and listless, and he dug his elbows into the sand and
resumed his quiet, placid gaze toward the horizon. Culver watched him:
his bitterness dissolved in the hot salty air, slumped in the sand
gazing wistfully out to sea, sun-glassed, hairy-chested, a cigar
protruding from his face and a beer can warming in his hand, he seemed
no longer the man who could sicken himself with resentment, but relaxed,
pliable even, like a huge hairy baby soothed by the wash of elemental
tides, ready to receive anything, all, into that great void in his soul
which bitterness and rebellion had briefly left vacant--all--the
finality of more suffering, or even death. War was in the offing. A
promenade of waves, snow-crowned like lovely garlands in the dark hair
of girls, swelled eastward toward Africa: past those smoky heights, more
eastward still, the horizon seemed to give back repeated echoes of the
sea, like far-off thunder, or guns. Culver remembered making a quick,
contorted motion in the sand with his body, and being swept by a hot
wave of anguish. It was loneliness and homesickness, but it was also
fright. Across the rim of his memory two little girls playing on the
sunny grass waved to him, were gone, pursued by a shower of uncapturable
musical sounds. Mannix’s resigned silence fed his loneliness. Suddenly
he felt, like Mannix, upturned drunkenly above the abyss, blood rushing
to his head, in terror clutching at the substanceless night....
* * * * *
In the noonday light Sergeant O’Leary, his face brightly pink, was still
talking. Culver snapped awake with a start. O’Leary grinned down at
him--“Damn, Lieutenant, you’re gonna crap out tonight if you’re that
tired now”--and Culver struggled for speech; time seemed to have
unspooled past him in a great spiral, and for an instant--his mind still
grappling with the memory of a hurried, chaotic nightmare--he was unable
to tell where he was. He had the feeling that it should be the night
before, and that he was still in the tent. “Did I go to sleep, O’Leary?”
he said, blinking upward.
“Yes, sir,” O’Leary said, and chuckled, “you sure did.”
“How long?”
“Oh, just a second.”
“Christ, I _am_ tired. I dreamt it was last night,” Culver said. He got
to his feet. A truck moved through the clearing in a cloud of dust.
There seemed to be new activity in the command post, and new confusion.
Culver and O’Leary turned together then toward the operations tent; the
Colonel had come out and was striding toward them, followed by Mannix.
“Culver, get your jeep and driver,” he said, walking toward the road,
not looking up. His voice was briskly matter-of-fact; he strode past
them with short, choppy steps and the swagger stick in his hand made a
quick tattoo, _slap-slap_-slapping against his dungaree pants. “I want
you and Captain Mannix to go with me down to Third Batt. See if we can
help.” His voice faded; Mannix trailed behind him, saying nothing, but
his face seemed to Culver even more exhausted, and even more grimly
taut, than it had been an hour before.
The road was a dusty cart-path that rambled footlessly across scrubby,
fallow farmland. Shacks and cabins, long ago abandoned, lay along its
way. They piled into the jeep, Mannix and Culver in the back, the
Colonel in front next to the driver. They hadn’t far to go--less than a
mile--but the trip felt endless to Culver because the day, by now a
fitful carrousel of sleepy sounds, motions without meaning, seemed
wildly, almost dangerously abstracted, as if viewed through drug-glazed
eyes or eyes, like those of a mole, unacquainted with light. Dust
billowed past them as they went. Above them a blue cloudless sky in
which the sun, pitched now at its summit, beat fearfully down, augured
no rain for the day, or for the evening. Mannix said nothing; his
silence prompted Culver to turn and look at him. He was gazing straight
ahead with eyes that seemed to bore through the Colonel’s neck.
Tormented beast in the cul-de-sac, baffled fury, grief at the edge of
defeat--his eyes made Culver suddenly aware of what they were about to
see, and he turned dizzily away and watched the wreck of a Negro cabin
float past through the swirling dust: shell-shattered doors and sagging
walls, blasted façade--a target across which for one split second in the
fantastic noon there seemed to crawl the ghosts of the bereaved and the
departed, mourning wraiths come back to reclaim from the ruins some hot
scent of honeysuckle, smell of cooking, murmurous noise of bees. Culver
closed his eyes and drowsed, slack-jawed, limp, his stomach faintly
heaving.
* * * * *
One boy’s eyes lay gently closed, and his long dark lashes were washed
in tears, as though he had cried himself to sleep. As they bent over him
they saw that he was very young, and a breeze came up from the edges of
the swamp, bearing with it a scorched odor of smoke and powder, and
touched the edges of his hair. A lock fell across his brow with a sort
of gawky, tousled grace, as if preserving even in that blank and
mindless repose some gesture proper to his years, a callow charm. Around
his curly head grasshoppers darted among the weeds. Below, beneath the
slumbering eyes, his face had been blasted out of sight. Culver looked
up and met Mannix’s gaze. The Captain was sobbing helplessly. He cast an
agonized look toward the Colonel, standing across the field, then down
again at the boy, then at Culver. “Won’t they ever let us alone, the
sons of bitches,” he murmured, weeping. “Won’t they ever let us alone?”