Goodbye, Darkness (20 page)

The rest of my people had never seen a campus but had scored very high on the Corps' aptitude tests. Izzy Levy was from Chicago. He had been a stock boy in a factory; he had told the Walking John that he was a salesman because that, to his knowledge, was the civilian job with the most status. He could, when he chose, look like a half-wit. Yet the tests revealed him as a genius. I have never met anyone else who could add a column of four-digit figures from the
left
. My most supportive lad in those early days was the huskiest and, we all thought then, the most honest man in the section. Although we did not know it, in civilian life Whitey Dumas had been a confidence man. Jailed in Portsmouth on charges of impersonating an officer, he had talked his way out by telling the warden that he could read and speak fluent Japanese. He could do neither, but the lie was so enormous that no one challenged it, and Whitey, knowing that the chances of his encountering a genuine Japanese were minimal, invented a language which looked like, and sounded like, the real article. Our colonel was proud to have an interpreter in the regiment. He ordered Whitey to give Japanese lessons to officers and senior NCOs every day. Whitey did it convincingly, with a blackboard and chalk. I still remember his Jap equivalent for “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” It was “Naka-naka eeda koodasai?” It is meaningless, but we all committed it to memory. His hoax went unsuspected until the last months of the war, when, impersonating an officer once more, he was unmasked by a captain, a graduate of one of the Japanese language schools that had been set up after Pearl Harbor and were finally — too late — bearing fruit.

All that lay ahead as we trained in North Carolina, where already there was a widespread awareness in the battalion that the Raggedy Asses were unsuitably bookish, slack on the drill field, and generally beneath the fastidious stateside standards established in the Corps' 169-year history. If there had been such a thing as a military quotient, the spit-and-polish equivalent of an intelligence quotient, our MQ would have been pegged at about 78. It is fair to add that this rating would have been confined to our parade-ground performance. We were regarded as good combat prospects. All of us, I believe, had qualified as sharpshooters, and one other, like me, was an expert rifleman. It was thought (and, as it proved, correctly thought) that we would be useful in battle. Our problem, or rather the problem of our leaders, was that we lacked what the British called Quetta manners. We weren't properly starched and blancoed, weren't martially prepossessing — weren't, in a word, good for the regiment's image.

We were rarely given liberty, because the skipper was ashamed to let civilians see us wearing the Corps uniform. We looked like a slack-wire, baggy-pants act out of a third-rate circus. Shirttails out, buttons missing, fore-and-aft (overseas) caps down around our ears — these were signs that we had lost our initial enthusiasm for being crack troops, either in OCS or on bases elsewhere, and were playing our roles of incorrigible eccentrics to the hilt. We looked like caricatures in the
Leatherneck
, the Marine Corps equivalent of
Yank
, and the only reasons our betters allowed us to stay together, setting a bad example for one another and damaging battalion élan, were our scores on intelligence tests and our special training. Between our arrival in New River and our assignment to Tent City, we had all attended something called intelligence school. It was largely a repetition of Quantico classes. Theoretically we emerged from the school as experts in identifying enemy units, recognizing the silhouettes of enemy planes (Japanese
and
German; we still didn't know where we were going), reconnoitering behind enemy lines, and so on. It was all very vague. In Tent City we carried out exhausting exercises in the Carolina boondocks, inflating black rubber boats and silently guiding them toward beaches, carrying out simulated missions at night, and becoming snarled in bales of communications wire.

I remember one gigantic ball of wire, about fifteen feet in diameter. The lieutenant commanding the communications platoon, also a part of Headquarters Company, came over and stared at it in utter amazement. He had been an AT&T executive in civilian life, and he told me in an almost reverential voice that never, not even when serving as an adviser to one of Central America's banana republics, had he ever seen such an inextricable tangle. “It would take twenty years for a man to straighten that out,” he said. “Let me get my camera.” He sent the developed prints back to his company's New York office, where, he later told me, they were dismissed as fakes. That was one of our minor disasters. Whenever it was Beau Tatum's turn to keep the map, we were an even greater trial. Our patrols would disappear into the piney woods, subsisting there on K and C rations, utterly lost, until we were found thrashing around in the bush and led back by a rescue party from the battalion's 81-millimeter mortar platoon, our long-suffering neighbors in Tent City.

This sounds, I know, like an American version of Jaraslov Hasek's
Good Soldier Schweik
. It wasn't, really. In our own odd way, we loved the Marine Corps; it was the emperor's clothes, not the emperor himself, that we ridiculed. At the time we thought of this training period as a waste of time. Actually, it was a useful shakedown cruise. Like couples in forced marriages, we were compelled to explore one another's traits. On the whole we liked what we found. Discovering common tastes, our morale rose. Part of the section formed a quintet, built around Przyastawaki; they sang songs like “Moonlight Bay,” “The Old Apple Tree,” “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and “Let the Rest of the World Go By.” Another part, with some overlapping from the singers, played hearts night and day. (Barney, Zepp, and I, intellectual snobs, played chess.) We developed an affected jargon; we said, not “shit,” but “fecal matter from a desiccated yak.” Because, despite the TO, we were after all just heavily laden infantrymen, we groaned, “My aching back,” or, simply, “My back.” Not long before we boarded troop trains for the West Coast, we were all offered seventy-two-hour passes. There would be no second chance, we were warned, but I nevertheless declined, believing my case for leave later would be stronger without it; I was hoping for a few days with my mother and didn't want to jeopardize that. Most of the others took off for New York in an incredible automobile they had bought for twenty-five dollars. It broke down repeatedly on both the trip up and the return — they had just five hours in Manhattan — but afterward it sounded like so much fun that I wished I'd gone.

Meanwhile I was trying to learn to be a leader. It would never be easy for me. I felt bogus. But by giving my people a free rein, and arguing their cases with the skipper and staff NCOs, I was slowly building a reservoir of goodwill. During our North Carolina weeks I had just two problems: Hunky O'Banion and Shiloh Davidson. Hunky thought I was soft. He was a born griper. He was a born griper. He was forever threatening to write his congressman, whose name, unfortunately, he didn't know. Though he was naturally bright, his values were those of the Philadelphia slum in which he had grown up. He expected an iron hand; when I refused to flex one, he kept trying to incite me. Since I knew he had been a Golden Gloves boxer, I was wary of him. I sought appeasement. It didn't work; soon he was taunting me openly, calling me “Priscilla.” The others were enjoying the spectacle, so finally, reluctantly, I invited him to join me in the boondocks. He knocked me down. I rose and he knocked me down again. And again. And again. My nose felt dented and my mouth was full of blood, but with the help of a nearby sapling I labored back upright each time. In the beginning Hunky enjoyed himself, but then it became too easy. After I had been flattened five times, he muttered, “Ah, screw it,” and strode back to camp. I cannot say I gained anything from this one-sided bout, but clearly he had lost something. He started showing up in sick bay each morning, complaining of a strained sacroiliac. Back problems were known as the surest way to a survey; they always puzzled physicians. (Later, whenever we were headed for combat, Whitey Dumas, the con man, would moan and wiggle his shoulder muscles until the sighing corpsman sent him to a base hospital.) So Hunky returned to Philadelphia, to the vast relief of one scrawny sergeant of Marines.

Shiloh Davidson was another matter. He was, and plainly considered himself to be, at the opposite end of the social spectrum from Hunky, though Hunky was too isolated in his own cultural cage to be touched by Shiloh's snubs. The Davidsons were in the Social Register, member of the New York Yacht Club, and given to annual tours of Europe. Shiloh had nothing against me, provided I didn't throw my genealogy at him, but his feelings toward officers continued to border on the homicidal. One day he was routinely assigned to police duty in Officers' Country. This entailed picking up debris, squaring away tents, cleaning up the head, and filling the lister bag. At some point that day he was struck by a mad flash of inspiration. Since officers regarded enlisted men as numbskulls, he reasoned, he would offer them proof of it. Water and gasoline were kept in almost identical green five-gallon “jerry-cans,” distinguished by the color of the X's on the outside, white for water and yellow for gasoline. The lister bag was empty, so Shiloh filled it — with gas. A first lieutenant, returning parched from a training patrol, filled his canteen cup, swallowed once, and spluttered fuel all over himself. The strange thing is that Davidson's assumption was proved right. No one reproached him except me; for the first time in my life I threatened another man and meant it. Lieutenant Colonel Krank, very upset, vented his wrath on the innocent platoon leader. The lieutenant was declared a fire hazard, confined to his tent for three days, forbidden visitors, and ordered to give up cigarettes for a week. The poor victim was a chain-smoker. I thought he, at least, might give me a hard time. He never mentioned it to me. Nobody expected much from the Raggedy Ass Marines then.

Our regimental commander, Colonel Horace F. Hastings, USMC, a.k.a. the Old Turk, was the kind of colorful hard-charger that the Marine Corps has always valued highly. The years had shrunk his slabs of muscle to gristle, and he had a grooved, wind-bitten face with wattles that turned crimson when he was enraged, which was often. I remember his brooding eyes, corded neck, sinewy hands, veined nose, the touch of crimson at his temples, and the way his lips nibbled at each other, like those of a nervous horse. It was reported that he was a native of Vulture's Gulch, Arizona, a community which, I later discovered, does not exist. If the town was bogus, so, in part, was he. Our colonel, though doubtless brave, was not very bright. Inside his second-rate mind, one felt, a third-rate mind was struggling toward the surface. But on one point officers, NCOs, and privates were in full agreement: he was a terrific swordsman. The evening before we sailed for the Solomons I saw him surrounded by young women in the lobby of San Diego's U. S. Grant Hotel, wearing dress blues and all his decorations, striking the lordly pose of a czar carefully choosing tonight's bedmate. (Recently I learned he is living in London, an octogenarian pleasuring English girls who hadn't been born when we fought under him.) In the field he adopted a piratical stance, wearing a bleached khaki fore-and-aft cap pushed rakishly to the back of his head, his hands on his lithe hips, his chin tilted up aggressively. He looked every inch the gifted commander. Alas, he wasn't. He was relieved in the middle of his first battle for incompetence.

He was the most redundant man I have ever known, forever saying things like “Eat lots of food and plenty of it,” “Here in Dixie we're in the Deep South,” and “Keep fit and healthy.” In San Diego he announced: “We're going to sail tomorrow aboard ship.” Our elusive Japanese language interpreter would, he told me, meet officer and senior noncoms on the
General C. G. Morton
's “fantail, in the stern.” On Guadalcanal he predicted: “Sunrise will come at dawn.”

The Marine Corps was his whole life. The Corps birthday is November 10. On such occasions, even when in the jungle, he would wear all his medals — not just the ribbons, but the actual medals — and preside over an officers' banquet. The high moment was always his toast to the Corps, during which he recited all Corps victories, including, erroneously, Bull Run, where leathernecks broke and ran. (Most of their officers had defected to the Confederate Marine Corps.) The United States went unmentioned, and though the regimental colors were there, the Stars and Stripes was conspicuously absent.

The Old Turk had had a strange career. Bit by bit we pieced it together from Old Salts, thirty-year men who had fought with him in World War I. Hastings was a mustang. In 1918 he had been a First Soldier, a Topkick. At the height of the Saint-Mihiel offensive he had misunderstood an order; the word was passed to fall back, but he thought it meant the opposite. So while the others withdrew — he thought they were bolting — Hastings plunged ahead. As it happened, the Germans had just decided to retreat. So he seemed to have taken the position single-handed. He won a Navy Cross and put up second-lieutenant bars. Between wars he picked up a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts in the banana republics. Until he was appointed our commanding officer, he had never led a large body of troops. Indeed, his most notable professional accomplishment was the invention of a device designed to catch insects.

A wit in the Third Battalion spread the rumor that Hastings's middle initial stood for “Flytrap.” Truth is often veiled in myth, and so it was here. Bedeviled by bugs in his Caribbean campaigns, he had devised a complicated cage, with many tunnels, chambers, and mazes, which, he believed, would ensnare flies faster than the stickiest flypaper. The result was a celebrated field manual. Featuring detailed drawings and precise instructions (“… the prey form a cone of dispersion, a beaten zone, with the slope of Plane ‘A’ determining the approximate curve of the trajectories …”), it was adopted by the Navy Department as the “
m1-a1
Flytrap.” All the information necessary to put the contraption together was in the manual, but until he became our leader, neither the inventor nor anyone else had actually built one. Now he ordered it done. Our company constructed a snare, faithfully following the directions, and we were told that the colonel would inspect it at 0900 the following Saturday to count the number of flies ambushed. A day passed, then another. The trap was empty. The regiment confronted its first crisis. If we stayed on course, Saturday would bring catastrophe. It would be as though Odysseus, having said his farewells before leaving for a historic journey, went down to the sea only to find that the boat had left without him. Foreseeing this, Hastings's executive officer grimly ordered that enlisted personnel capture ten flies each and put them in the trap. Mike Powers gave me this appalling directive and threatened to strangle me when I asked for it in writing. I told the section to think of it as a challenge. It was; we barely beat the Saturday deadline, but we did make it. The colonel was obviously pleased. Heartened, he told the exec that if that many bugs could be enmeshed by a trap with one opening, why not catch twice as many with two openings? The exec — for the first, and to my knowledge, the only, time — made a genuine contribution to the war effort. If there were two entries, he discreetly suggested, the quarry could fly in one and out the other. Hastings pondered this. At last he said it was a good idea with lots of merit. A week later the trap was quietly dismantled.