The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps (7 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.