The White Album (19 page)

1977: I have never seen a postcard of Hawaii that featured Schofield Barracks
.
Schofield is off the track, off the tour, hard by the shadowy pools of the Wahiawa Reservoir, and to leave Honolulu and drive inland to Schofield is to sense a clouding of the atmosphere, a darkening of the color range
.
The translucent pastels of the famous coast give way to the opaque greens of interior Oahu
.
Crushed white coral gives way to red dirt, sugar dirt, deep red laterite soil that crumbles soft in the hand and films over grass and boots and hubcaps
.
Clouds mass over the Waianae Range
.
Cane fires smoke on the horizon and rain falls fitfully,
buy some collard greens,
reads a sign on a weathered frame grocery in Wahiawa, just across the two-lane bridge from the Schofield
gate
.
MASSAGE PARLOR, CHECKS CASHED, 50TH STATE POOLROOM,
happy hour, cash for cars
.
Schofield Loan
.
Schofield Pawn
.
Schofield Sands Motor Lodge
.
Then, finally, Schofield itself, the Schofield we all know from James Jones’s
From Here to Eternity,
the Schofield that is Home of the 25th “Tropic Lightning” Infantry Division, formerly the Hawaii Division, James Jones’s own division, Robert E
.
Lee Prewitt’s division, Maggio’s and Warden’s and Stark’s and Dynamite Holmes’s division,
Fit to Fight, Trained to Win, Ready to Go
.
All Wars Are Won in the End by the Infantryman
.
Through These Portals Pass the Finest Soldiers in the World
—25
th
infantry division soldiers
.
tropic lightning reenlistment
.
I have never driven into Schofield and seen those words without hearing the blues that end
From Here to Eternity:

Got paid out on Monday

Not a dog soldier no more

They gimme all that money

So much my pockets is sore

More dough than I can use
.
Reenlistment Blues
.

Ain’t no time to lose
.
Reenlistment Blues
.

Certain places seem to exist mainly because someone has written about them
.
Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway
.
Oxford, Mississippi, belongs t
o William Faulkner, and one hot
July week in Oxford I was moved to spend an afternoon walking the graveyard looking for his stone, a kind of courtesy call on the owner of the property
.
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image, and not only Schofield Barracks but a great deal of Honolulu itself has always belonged for me to James Jones
.
The first time I ever saw Hotel Street in Honolulu was on a Saturday night in 1966 when all the bars and tattoo parlors were full of military police and girls looking for a dollar and nineteen-year-olds, on their way to or from Saigon, looking for a girl
.
I recall looking that night for the particular places that had figured in
From Here to Eternity:
the Black Cat, the Blue Anchor, the whorehouse Jones called the New Congress Hotel
.
I remember driving up Wilhemina Rise to look for Alma’s house and I remember walking out of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and expecting to see Prewitt and Maggio sitting on the curb and I remember walking the Waialae Country Club golf course, trying to figure exactly where Prewitt died
.
I think it was in the trap near the fifth green
.

It is hard to see one of these places claimed by fiction without a sudden blurring, a slippage, a certain vertiginous occlusion of the imagined and the real, and this slippage was particularly acute the last time I arrived in Honolulu, on a June day when the author of
From Here to Eternity
had been dead just a few weeks
.
In New York the death of James Jones had been the occasion for many considerations and reconsiderations
.
Many mean guilts had been recalled and exorcised
.
Many lessons had been divined, in both the death and the life
.
In Honolulu the death of James Jones had been marked by the publication, in the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
of an excerpt from the author
’s
Viet Journal,
the epilogue, the part in which he talked about returning to Honolulu in 1973 and looking for the places he had remembered in
From Here to Eternity
but had last seen in 1942, when he was twenty-one years old and shipped out for Guadalcanal with the 25th Division
.
In 1973 the five pillboxes on Makapuu Head had seemed to James Jones exac
tly
as he had left them in 1942
.
In 1973 the Royal Hawaiian Hotel had seemed to James Jones less formidably rich than he had left it in 1942, and it had occurred to him with considerable poignance t
hat he was a man in his fifties
who could walk into the Royal Hawaiian and buy whatever he wanted
.

He had bought a beer and gone back to Paris
.
In June of 1977 he was dead and it was not possible to buy a copy of his great novel, his living novel, the novel in which he so loved Honolulu that he remade it in his image, in any of Honolulu’s largest bookstores
.
“Is it a best-seller?” I was asked in one, and the golden child in charge of another suggested that I try the psychic-science shelf
.
In that instant I thought I grieved for James Jones, a man I never met, but I think I grieved for all of us: for Jones, for myself, for the sufferers of mean guilts and for their exorcists, for Robert E
.
Lee Prewitt, for the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and for this golden nitwit who believed eternity to be a psychic science
.

I have never been sure whether the extreme gravity of
From Here to Eternity
is an exact reflection of the light at Schofield Barracks or whether I see the light as grave because I have read James Jones
.
“It had rained all morning and then suddenly cleared at noon, and the air, freshly washed today, was like dark crystal in the sharp clarity and
somber
focus it gave to every image
.
”
It was in this
somber
focus that James Jones rendered Schofield, and it was in this
somber
focus that I last saw Schofield, one Monday during that June
.
It had rained in the morning and the smell of eucalyptus was sharp in the air and I had again that familiar sense of having left the bright coast and entered a darker country
.
The black outline of the Waianae Range seemed obscurely oppressive
.
A foursome on the post golf course seemed to have been playing since 1940, and to be doomed to continue
.
A soldier in fatigues appeared to be trimming a bougainvillea hedge, swinging at it with a scythe, but his movements were hypnotically slowed, and the scythe never quite touched the hedge
.
Around the tropical frame bungalows where the families of Schofield officers have always lived there was an occasional tricycle but no child, no wife, no sign of life but one: a Yorkshire terrier yapping on the lawn of a colonels bungalow
.
As it happens I have spent time around Army posts in the role of an officer
’s
child, have even played with lap dogs on the lawns of colonels’ quarters, but I saw this Yorkshire with Prewitt’s eyes, and I hated it
.

I had driven out to Schofield in other seasons, but this trip was different
.
I was making this trip for the same reason I had walked the Oxford graveyard, a courtesy call on the owner
.
This trip I made appointments, spoke to people, asked questions and wrote down answers, had lunch with my hosts at the Aloha Lightning NCO Club and was shown the regimental trophies and studied the portraits of commanding officers in every corridor I walked down
.
Unlike the golden children in the Honolulu bookstores these men I met at Schofield, these men in green fatigues, all knew exactly who James Jones was and what he had written and even where he had slept and eaten and probably gotten drunk during the three years he spent at Schofield
.
They recalled the incidents and locations of
From Here to Eternity
in minute detail
.
They anticipated those places that I would of course want to see: D Quad, the old stockade, the stone quarry, Kolekole Pass
.
Some weeks before, there had been at the post theater a special screening of the movie
From Here to Eternity,
an event arranged by the Friends of the Tropic Lightning Historical Society, and everyone to whom I spoke at Schofield had turned out for this screening
.
Many of these men were careful to qualify their obvious attachment to James Jones’s view of their life by pointing out that the Army had changed
.
Others did not mention the change
.
One, a young man who had re-upped once and now wanted out, mentioned that it had not changed at all
.
We were standing on the lawn in D Quad, Jones’s quad, Robert E
.
Lee Prewitt
’s
quad, and I was watching the idle movement around the square, a couple of soldiers dropping a basketball through a hoop, another cleaning an M-16, a desultory argument at the Dutch door of the supply room—when he volunteered a certain inchoate dissatisfaction with his six years in the 25th Division
.
“I read this book
From Here to Eternity’’
he said,”and they still got the same little games around here
.
”

I suppose everything had changed and nothing had
.
A mess hall was now called a “dining facility,” but they still served chipped beef on toast and they still called it “S
.
O
.
S
.
”
A stockade was now called a “confinement facility,” and the confinement facility for all military installations on Oahu was now at Pearl Harbor, but the old stockade at Schofield was now the headquarters for the military police, and during the time I was there the M
.
P
.
’s
brought in a handcuffed soldier, bare to the waist and shoeless
.

Investigators in aloha shirts chatted in the exercise yard
.
Office supplies were stored in some of the “close confinement” cells, but there were still the plain wooden bunks, “plate beds,” beds for those occasions, it was explained to me by a major who had once been in charge of the Schofield stockade, “when a guy is completely berserk and starts ripping up his mattress
.
”
On the wall there were still the diagrams detailing the order in which belongings were to be arranged:
white towel, soap with dish,
DEODORANT, TOOTHPASTE, TOOTHBRUSH, COMB, SHAVING CREAM, RAZOR
.

In many ways I found it difficult to leave Schofield that day
.
I had fallen into the narcoleptic movements of the Army day
.
I had picked up the liquid speech patterns of the Army voice
.
I took a copy of the
Tropic Lightning News
back into Honolulu with me, and read it that night in my hotel room
.
During the month of May the Schofield military police had reported 32 arrests for driving under the influence of alcohol, 115 arrests for possession of marijuana, and the theft of a number of items, including one Sansui amplifier, one Sansui pre-amp and tuner, one Kenwood receiver and turntable, two Bose speakers and the tachometer from a 1969 Ford Mustang
.
One private, two spec fours and one sergeant were asked in the “Troop Talk” column to name their ideal, or favorite, post
.
One chose Fort Hood
.
Another chose Fort Sam Houston
.
None chose Schofield Barracks
.
In the letters column one correspondent advised a WAC who had objected to the shows at the NCO Club to stay home (“We once had it set up where you girls didn’t have to see the entertainment, but the loverly libbers put an end to that”), and another advised “barracks rats” to stop limiting their lives to “erasing Army hatred by indulging in smoke or drink or listening to Peter Frampton at eighty decibels
.
”
I thought about barracks rats and I thought about Prewitt and Maggio and I thought about Army hatred and it seemed to me that night in Honolulu that only the details had changed, that James Jones had known a great simple truth: the Army was nothing more or less than life itself
.
I wish I could tell you that on the day in May when James Jones died someone had played a taps for him at Schofield Barracks, but I think this is not
the way life goes
.