Goodbye, Darkness (18 page)
On Parris Island these and all other customs of the boot's new way of life were flouted at great risk. You were told that there were three ways of doing things: the right way, the wrong way, and the Marine Corps way. The Corps way was uncompromising. Failure to salute your superiors — including privates first class — brought swift retribution. The worst discipline I saw came during floodlit midnight calisthenics. In one common exercise we paired off; each boot hoisted his rifle as you would hoist a battering ram and placed the butt against his buddy's forehead. The buddy would touch the butt and duck. The man with the rifle was supposed to try to strike his forehead before the other man could drop, but since you knew you were going to reverse roles, the sensible course was to let him get out of the way. Enter the vengeful noncom.
He
put a rifle butt against the offender's forehead and slugged him before there was time to dodge. The boot who merely suffered a concussion was lucky.
How could I enjoy this? Parts of it, of course, I loathed. But the basic concept fascinated me. I wanted to surrender my individuality, curbing my neck beneath the yoke of petty tyranny. Since my father's death I had yearned for stern discipline, and Parris Island, where he himself had learned discipline a quarter-century earlier, gave it to me in spades. Physically I was delicate, even fragile, but I had limitless reservoirs of energy, and I could feel myself toughening almost hourly. Everything I saw seemed exquisitely defined — every leaf, every pebble looked as sharp as a drawing in a book. I knew I was merely becoming a tiny cog in the vast machine which would confront fascism, but that was precisely why I had volunteered. Even today, despite the horrors which inevitably followed, I am haunted by memories of my weeks as a recruit. It is almost like recalling a broken marriage which, for one divorced partner, can never really end.
Our platoon was number 618, and our DI was a leathery corporal from Georgia named Coffey. The Marine Corps had always recruited a disproportionate number of men from the South, where the military traditions of the early 1860s had never died. Later I met many Raiders like that, and Coffey was typical: tall, lanky, and fair haired, with a mad grin and dancing, rain-colored eyes full of shattered light. They were born killers; in the Raider battalions, in violation of orders, they would penetrate deep behind Japanese lines at night, looking for two Nips sacked out together. Then they would cut the throat of one and leave the other to find the corpse in the morning. This was brilliant psychological warfare, but it was also, of course, extremely dangerous. In combat these Southerners would charge fearlessly with the shrill rebel yell of their great-grandfathers, and they loved the bayonet. How my father's side defeated my mother's side in the Civil War will always mystify me.
Yankee boys were just the kind of meat this Georgian Caesar fed upon. His appetite was further whetted by the fact that many of us had been university students, a fact which triggered the anti-intellectual in him. He himself was illiterate and, apart from his training duties, startlingly ignorant. Even there he sometimes skidded; while specifying the rigors of our calling, he was supposed to teach us a synoptic history of the Corps, and it turned out that he thought the American Revolution had occurred in “nineteen and ten” and World War I in “nineteen and thirty-four,” with the French as our enemies. After this last, a Dartmouth man unwisely laughed. Our DI flushed and declared his own war on all “wisenheimer college eight balls.” He invented sobriquets, most of them scatological, for boots from New England campuses. For some reason — perhaps because I obviously felt that I had found a home in the Marine Corps — I got off lightly. I was merely “Slim,” a
nom de guerre
which stuck to me throughout my forty-month cruise and was vastly preferable to my fraternity nicknames; I happened to be damned, or blessed, with outsize genitalia, so in college I had been called first “Tripod,” and then “Sashweight.” It embarrassed me then. Not until I joined the Marines did I learn that hefty equipment along that line was admired in some quarters. One day I found myself hip-to-hip at a trough urinal with a former Reno gigolo. He gazed down at me for a long moment and then asked thoughtfully, “Slim, what did you do in civilian life?”
As expected, Coffey's favorite target of opportunity was slope-shouldered, potbellied Larry Dudley. This was partly Dudley's fault. He couldn't help his figure, but he was remiss in other ways, too. The DI liked to say, “God gave you the face you were born with, but I'll give you the face you'll die with.” That was untrue of Dudley. His expression never changed. Even when he was out of step, which was often, he looked bland, nonchalant, slightly pained. His greatest blunder, however, was a spectacular feat of tactlessness. On the evening of the day we were issued our 782 gear, Coffey stood in the doorway of a Quonset hut, facing us vassals, who ranged in a semicircle outside. The only light came from the interior of the hut, at the DI's back. He was holding an M1, fieldstripping it as he talked, naming the parts. Then he reassembled the rifle. “Now,” he said triumphantly, “let's see one of you college kids do it.” He thrust the weapon at the most intent member of his captive audience — Larry Dudley, lately of Garand and Dudley.
Oh, God
, I prayed;
don't let him do it
. But Dudley did it. He took that MI apart so fast we could hardly see the blur of his moving hands; then he put it back together with the same blinding speed and handed it to the DI. There were a few stifled chuckles for the avenged shitheads of Platoon 618. Coffey turned the color of a song then popular: deep purple. His loss of face was immense, but being a DI he could strike back in many ways. He swiftly chose one. “OK, wisenheimers,” he said in a pebbly voice, balancing the weapon on the palm of his hand. “If he can do it, you can all do it. Fall out here at 0500 with your pieces, ready to fieldstrip.”
We were stunned. Our asses were in a sling. None of us had the faintest idea of what Dudley had been doing. We couldn't even tell the difference between the trigger-housing group and the barrel-and-receiver group. Fortunately Dudley, for all his faults, had also learned ingenuity from Garand. Though taps sounded twenty minutes after Coffey had dismissed us, and illumination of any kind was forbidden thereafter, we carried on a night-long seminar with flashlights under blankets. Dudley taught three men, each of them taught three more, and so on. By dawn we were exhausted, but we could do it. At 0450 our DI shrilled his whistle and strode down our line of bunks yelping his usual morning greeting: “OK, shitheads! Drop your cocks and grab your socks!” When we fell out he had already adopted a tragic expression. Clearly he expected us to fail and had rehearsed one of his sinking spells, which were as memorable as the
Titanic
's. Then, as he blinked in disbelief, each of us in turn took his rifle apart, identifying the bolt camming lug, hammer springs, sears and lugs, and the rest, put the piece back together, and smartly brought it to port arms for inspection. Cheated and smarting, Coffey put us through a grueling day: an hour of calisthenics, a second hour of close-order drill, a third hour of lunging, with fixed bayonets, at straw-stuffed dummies; a session of throwing live hand grenades and then rolling out of a fall (never creep), another session of instruction in how to use short-bladed Kabar knives in hand-to-hand combat (always ripping
up
, into the gut; a downward thrust can be blocked more easily); a cruel hundred-yard sprint wearing gas masks, suffering from inadequate oxygen; and the most idiotic drill of all, snapping in with simulated rifle fire at an imaginary enemy warplane flying overhead. Perhaps this had been practical in World War I, when Fokkers drifted lazily over no-man's-land, but since then strafing fighter planes had developed the speed to flash by before an infantryman could set his feet. Yet we were being taught to aim at the horizon, leading hypothetical Zeroes as hunters lead quail. Long before the sunset gun sounded we all knew we were being punished for Dudley's virtuoso performance. He lost a lot of popularity that day.
None of us, I think, comprehended how all this training would end on battlefields, why we were being taught monstrous things. Our thoughts and our life-style were still largely civilian. Flaked out before lights out, or standing around the lister bag, a container of pure water which resembled a seabag suspended from three te-peed poles, we whistled popular songs — the current hits were “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” and “Blues in the Night” — and shot the breeze much as we would have done at home. I remember us talking about a news item reporting America's annual consumption of seventeen billion cigarettes a year, none of us suspecting that it might be unhealthy, and what it would be like to shack up with Betty Grable or prong Hedy Lamarr. We scorned conscientious objectors and other hambos. We said inane things like, “Hello, Joe, whaddya know?” “I just got back from the vaudeville show.” We laughed at pink-toothbrush ads and cartoonist Frank King's frenzied press conference, called to scotch rumors that Gasoline Alley's Skeezix Wallett would be killed in action. The more sophisticated of 618's boots yearned for a roll of moola and a seventy-two in New York, where they could wander along West Fifty-second Street and hear, at spots like the Famous Door, the Onyx Club, and Kelly's Stable, a tumultuous crash of drums heralding “In the Mood” or Harry James leading a wickedly fast “Sweet Georgia Brown,” the brass section on their feet, horns swinging like cannon out across the ballroom.
Yet here, as so often, I dissented from the majority of my generation. Swing's orchestration, its utter lack of improvisation, still bored me; I preferred the brilliant riffs of Wild Bill Davidson, Muggsy Spanier, Eddie Condon, J. C. Higgenbotham, and Jack Teagarden. Neither could I share the growing nostalgia, among my fellow former undergraduates in the Quonset, for suburban New England's trellised verandas and croquet lawns. Sometimes memories of my grandmother's ancient homestead, with its wine-red sumac, its fire-red barberries, and its split silver-birch fence, tugged at my heart, but mostly I wanted to be where I was. And so, I think, did the rest, or at any rate the best, of the other boots. Without having the haziest idea of what combat would be, we wanted, in a phrase which sounds quaint today, to fight for our country. Subsequent generations have lost that blazing patriotism and speak of it, if at all, patronizingly. They cannot grasp how proud we were to be Americans.
Because of that pride, we survived jolts like our DI's torments and the sobering realization that citizen-soldiers are very different from professional soldiers. The peacetime Marine Corps assumed that enlisted men were brutes and treated them accordingly. I recall my shock the first time I saw a private being led away in chains. And I remember our collective horror when we all became suspects in a rape case. The victim was the daughter of a garrison officer. At one point in her struggle, she said, she had bitten her assailant's penis. Therefore, the commanding general decided, every man on the island must submit to a “short-arm inspection.” The inspection was a massive logistic undertaking, involving thousands of loins. We stood in line hour after hour, awaiting our turn. Along the way, several oddities turned up. One exhibitionist, anticipating an inspection of his short arm sooner or later, had submitted to excruciating pain for the sake of a practical joke. He had caused the words “Hi, Doc!” to be tattooed on the inside of his foreskin. He was immediately put under hack — on what charges I neither know nor can imagine. The complex operation, as complicated in its way as an amphibious landing, produced no evidence whatever. Later I learned that the son of another officer had been arrested and charged. Still later, I met a corpsman who had served as one of the inspectors. He said it had been a shattering experience. It still haunted him. “I have these nightmares,” he said hollowly. “All I can see is cocks, cocks, millions of cocks, all of them swarming around me.”
My Parris Island triumph came on the rifle range. On Record Day we fired sixty-six shots, all but ten of them rapid-fire, at targets two hundred, three hundred, and five hundred yards away. Each shot was worth a maximum of five points, for a bull's-eye. Riflemen could qualify in three categories: marksman, sharpshooter, and — very rare, requiring 305 points out of a possible 330 — expert rifleman. I knew I would do well. My M1 was zeroed in to perfection. I had steady hands; I could hold my breath indefinitely, steadying the muzzle; I could fold my right ankle under my buttocks for kneeling shots; and I had 20/10 vision, meaning that what was visible to a man with 20/20 vision at one hundred yards was just as sharp and clear for me at two hundred yards. I was also clever in adjusting my sling. The sling is the leather strap on a rifle, which looks useless to a civilian; it can be extended and looped around the left arm, locking the butt to the right shoulder. Record Day was clear and windless. I hardly missed anything. My score was 317. A colonel congratulated me and told me that 317 was unprecedented. Because of it, because of my adjustment to the Corps, and because of my college education, I was sent directly to the Corps' OCS in Quantico, Virginia. My world brightened a little, as though there were a rheostat on the sun and someone had turned it up a notch. Later I realized that was an illusion — that I wasn't meant to be an officer, at least not by Quantico standards, and that the attempt to make one of me was a grave error.
At Quantico we were quartered, rather grandly, in permanent red-brick barracks, each company with its own squad bays. The chow was excellent. Our rank was private first class, but we wore small brass insignia on our shirt collars, each reading simply “O.C.” Weekends we were usually given liberty in Washington, and the departure of the Saturday noon train from Quantico to D.C. was always bedlam; it was said that the only people to wind up on board were those who had come to see their friends off. In the capital there were about six girls for every man. Saturday night a dollar admitted you to the weekly singles dance on the lowest floor of the Washington Hotel. Girls ringed the walls; a bold Marine O.C. could cruise the ballroom slowly, picking the cutest girl and, if he was really insensitive, firing questions about which had cars and apartments. Back at the base, weekday classes were conducted by decorated officers who spoke lucidly, wittily, and always to the point; a single phrase from one of them was worth more than all of poor Coffey's ramblings. There were courses in mapping, leadership, and tactics. Field exercises included forced marches, perimeter defenses, protection of platoon flanks, and how to deal with such crises as unexpected mortaring. Nobody called you a shithead. Some enlisted men on the streets even sirred you.
