The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps (6 page)

“Where would you put yourself, smart guy?” I said. The twenty-five-cent bourbon had filled me with a soothing melancholy, and Lacy’s game caused me to float between distant annoyance and straightforward fascination. “Nine? Or ten?”

“Oh God, no. Misery-wise, I don’t claim any points. I do have the responsibility of a wife, which puts me ahead of you a bit. And because the housing situation here makes her have to stay in New York, that gives me another small notch. But we have no children—blind chance, but fortunate under the circumstances—and in addition I have a good solid professional who’s running the family business, and it continues to make money nicely in my absence. It would be swinishly presumptuous of me to put my misery any higher than two or three, miserable though I am.”

The bar had begun to fill up with officers—young fellows between twenty-five and thirty-five mostly, lieutenants and captains in sport shirts and slacks, save for a sprinkling of grimy types in green dungarees just in from some field problem, sweatily gulping cans of beer. In twos or threes, in clusters of a half dozen or more, they lolled around the perfunctory Formica tables or stood restlessly at the bar itself as
their voices, not loud but very urgent, filled the air with a passionate monotone of discontent. Sometimes I heard laughter but it sounded bitter, and it was more often than not cut off short, as if whoever had laughed had sensed an impropriety. I was struck by the ease with which I was soon able to distinguish the newcomers like myself from those who had shared with Lacy the routine of several months. The veterans, besides being trimmer and tanner, seemed to bear themselves with a certain casual, glum assurance, as if they had become acclimated to the stress of this new existence, had through slow reacquaintance become finally adjusted to once familiar duties and tensions; their faces wore looks of bemused resignation, and they appeared older than their years. The recent arrivals, most of whom were sallow of hue and who were puffed out in places with telltale sedentary flab, put me in mind of new boys at summer camp—chafing with homesickness, eyes roving in quest of friendship, altogether unstrung.

But whatever our situation, we were all bound to each other by a single shocked awareness, and this was that for the second time in less than a decade we were faced with the prospect of an ugly death. In an abstract way it was possible to say that it was our own fault we were here. Yet suddenly, as my gaze wandered from face to face among this sullen, murmurous assembly of misplaced civilians—these store owners and office managers and personnel directors and salesmen—I was gripped by a foreboding about our presence in this swampy wilderness that at once transcended and made absurd each of our individual destinies, and even our collective fate. For it seemed to me that all of us were both exemplars and victims of some uncontrollable aggression,
a hungry will for bloodshed creeping not only throughout America but the world, and I could not help but abruptly shiver in that knowledge.

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

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

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

“What’s he going to do?” I asked.

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

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

“Fortunes of war,” said Lacy.

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who’s that?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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