Goodbye, Darkness (7 page)

Like Merlyn in
The Once and Future King
, the old man in my dreams knows the future; it is the past that is unrevealed to him. Thus, in the waning months of 1978 I don my old Raider cap and board a United Airlines flight to Hawaii, the first leg of my journey back to the islands. The huge plane receives us into its belly like some fantastic modern Trojan horse, and presently we rise, effortlessly, above the smog, to a sky as blue as a kingfisher's wing. Eastward, as we turn, I glimpse a range of heavily jowled mountains. Below lies dense L.A., threaded by freeways. Then we glide down the bleak concrete and cinder-block sleeve of Watts and out past Cabrillo Beach. Below, the tide restlessly gnaws at the shore; up here, in pristine cleanliness, I am cosseted with pillows, steak, champagne, a movie if I want it (I don't), and a pretty, young, boisterous, outrageously outspoken stewardess who has my number. Serving me dinner, she drops a fork and mutters, “Shit.” The Sergeant in me says, “Nice girls don't talk dirty.” Her eyes lick at me merrily. She grins and says, “I'm a woman, not a girl. Anyway, you should talk. I saw you giving me the once-over, you dirty old man.” I say, “I'm not a dirty old man, I'm a sexy senior citizen.” She: “Where'd you get that?” I: “Some bumper sticker at the Old Folks' Home.” But the game stops there. She passes on, a member of the Pepsi generation who has deduced that I am on the wrong side of fifty-five, a senescent old-timer, laden with medication for hypertension, antibiotics for rotting teeth, and tricyclics for endogenous depressions — a walking drugstore in no condition for any strenuous activity. Which is as it should be. At my age I ought to feel calm, untroubled, unchallenged by any female or, for that matter, anybody. Yet I am uneasy. A few Japanese soldiers, I have read, still lurk in the bush on the islands; every now and then one emerges. It would be just my luck to be the victim of the last banzai charge. That is ridiculous, of course; still, I am nervous. The fact is that I have no idea of what I shall find Out There.

Then the old war songs begin in my head. All my life I have had one tune or another running through my mind, and I have never been able to control them. Since our takeoff, this internal Muzak has been playing the appropriately assuasive “I'll Be Seeing You.” But now there is a change on the brain's record player. Lyrics stifled long ago come crowding back, first, to the tune of “MacNamara's Band”:

Just now we're all rehearsing for another big affair,

We'll take another island, and the Japs'll all be there
…

And:

Bless ’em all, bless ’em all
,

As back to our foxholes we crawl
…

Then, to the same air, mispronouncing the name of a shocking battle:

Oh, we sent for MacArthur to come to Tarawa

But General MacArthur said no,

He gave as the reason, it wasn't the season,

Besides there was no U.S.O.

Then, to the tune of “Embraceable You”:

Replace me, I can't go home without you …

And:

I don't want no more Marine Corps

Gee, Mom, I wanna go

Right back to Quantico

Gee, Mom, I wanna go home
…

And the haunting:

Say a prayer for your pal

On Guadalcanal,

He needs God's help, it's true
…

What, I suddenly wonder, am I
doing
here? I am headed toward places I vowed never to see again, toward excessive vegetation, away from gentle New England's forsythia, pussy willows, laurel, lilac. I could be deep in the leather chair by my Connecticut fireplace, reading Muriel Spark or Peter De Vries, or listening to Tchaikovsky's musical euphemism of 1812 combat. I don't
need
this, says the old man in me; yes, you
do
, the Sergeant says grimly. And as our silvery tube climbs above rough weather at thirty-five thousand feet, the Sergeant takes over.

Hawaii was the destination of my first airplane ride, but we were coming from the opposite direction, from Saipan, with stops at Guam and Johnston Island. It was a long flight — about four thousand miles — and the best our C-54 could do, with all four engines toiling a-whump, a-whump, a-whump, was under 265 miles per hour. There were twenty-five of us, all on litters. Apparently this had always been a flying ambulance; the bulkheads of its long, cigar-shaped ward were whitewashed, the deck was rubber, trays bearing tubes and syringes were screwed in place, and everything had that unmistakable smell of medicinal chemicals. At least, that is my recollection. I wasn't an altogether reliable witness. I was weaning myself from morphine. The weaning hadn't been my idea in the beginning. I had been on a half grain a day; then an army medical officer had cut it off completely, leaving me to cold turkey. I could have returned to the drug here. But having gone this far without it, I was determined to finish the job. The Doc on the plane knew all this; he thought the cold-turkey decision had been a mistake; he kept asking me if I needed “something.” I shook my head each time and turned my face into the pillow. After he had left, the withdrawal routine would start again: yawning, shaking, sweating, cramps, nausea, tears, gooseflesh, a runny nose, and the chuck horrors. Every hour one of the four corpsmen aboard would check my systolic pressure and my rectal temperature, tracing the rising curves on my chart with his rubber finger. If they went too high the Doc might give me a fix despite my protests.

“Do you need something?”

“No, I'm fine.”

The Doc looked like an Arab. He had that swarthy complexion and ropy mustache. He was balding and trying to hide the fact by brushing his hair where it didn't want to go. The result was that he looked as though he had just risen hastily from bed. His skin was coarse and pitted with acne scars. When he leaned over me I could see the shadowy hollows and recesses in his face and the network of veins around his irises. At less than a foot my vision was fine. Past that it blurred; the bandages had been removed from my eyes just before we took off, and in addition I suffered from the dilation of all addicts. Any bright light made the pupils smart. Luckily the lights here were dim. I could see enough to know that I wasn't the sickest man aboard. At of me was a man with a head wound. It was tightly bandaged, but blood was seeping through the gauze; I could hear the unsteady dripping on the gizmo that was feeding him intravenously. On the port side of the aisle a lieutenant had a chest wound; he was raggedly sucking in air. Below him was the victim of a kamikaze, a chief petty officer bound up like a mummy. His hands were free, however. Each had an anchor tattooed on the back of it. The anchors kept clawing at one another, as though trying to link up.

My blindness had been from shock, and it was passing. My biggest problems just then were a splitting headache and several pieces of shrapnel deep in my back. Shrapnel and something else. The Doc studied my X ray and gave a little cry:

“Why, that looks like a piece of tibia — a shinbone!”

“It is.”

“Jap?”

“One of my men.”

He moved on. Then the real pain in the ass would prowl up, a fat corpsman who seemed to think we all ought to be clowns.

“C'mon, Sarge, grin! Let's see that old grin! That's it! Grin!”

He would go on like that, on and on. The only way to get rid of him was to force a miserable smirk. Then he would depart, beaming himself, his mission accomplished.

Another corpsman, gaunt and lugubrious, spoke in tones of practiced pity. He tried to be cheerful; I found him unbearably depressing.

“You'll make it, Sarge. You're a fighter, I can tell.”

“Yeah.”

“In a month you'll be back giving those yellow bastards hell.”

But I had no hell left to give anyone. My head throbbed as the Douglas engines throbbed. I lay in the half-light, fighting the pain where the fragments of shrapnel and bone were, yearning for the drug, my cigarette tracing glowing trajectories in the air, my stomach churning as I wiped my eyes, my nose, and my brow with the length of gauze dressing they had given me, wondering how many aboard would, in fact, make it. Not all, I knew; too many were in critical condition. Head Wound went first. We had just crossed the International Date Line northeast of Wake when he moaned heavily. Swift shapes darted up, but before they could reach him he sobbed, “Mom!” and was gone. The blood kept dripping, however, until Fatso cleaned up. He drew the sheet over the dead man's face and folded it over in a straight new margin. I dozed off. The Doc awoke me, peering at me from a range of about three inches.

“Have a good nap?”

“Sure.”

“How do you feel?”

“I'm OK.”

“Do you hurt much?”

“Nope.”

“Do you need something?”

“Nope.”

I looked around. Chest Wound had gone, too; there was only a lump under the sheet where his head had been. The next time Fatso appeared I asked how many other men we had lost. He tried to change the subject, but Mummy heard us, and his voice, a rich baritone, rose through his bandages. He said: “Three others, all at this end.” Fatso looked distressed, maybe because he couldn't tell whether Mummy was grinning under all those layers of grease and plaster. Then he brightened and said there wouldn't be any more deaths.

Actually there was another, a man at the far end I hadn't seen. By the time we entered our glide pattern over Hickam Field, I had almost mastered the geography of our C-54 quarters, with one exception. Down near the tail, to starboard, there was a dark place. Squint as I might, I couldn't make it out. I assumed that the lights had burned out there, or that it was used to store gear. But as we touched down, two of the corpsmen entered the place, and when the door opened they emerged carrying a litter — another corpse, hidden under its temporary shroud. As the Doc passed, I called to him. He paused. I asked him who else had died.

“The poor fellow,” he sighed. “He was so quiet that most of the other patients didn't even notice him.”

“Who was he? What was his outfit?”

“He was a private in the Fifth Marines.”

I felt queer. I said, “My father was in the Fifth.”

“Your
father?”

“A long time ago. Another war.”

He said, “Do you want this poor fellow's name?”

“No,” I breathed.
“No!”

He looked at me closely. “You
do
need something.”

“Shove it, Mac.”

Mummy chuckled.

United flight 005 touches down at Honolulu International Airport at precisely 7:35 Hawaiian time, and as I emerge I am instantly wrapped in sheets of hurrying rain, torrents slanting down diagonally, at intervals coming down in waves, like surf. I am unsurprised. It
always
rains when I arrive in the Pacific. If there is ever a drought, they can cable me; I'll come out and fix it. Expecting just such a storm, I have fastened all the intricate buttons in the collar of my Burberry. No protection against cloudbursts can match a Marine Corps poncho, but ponchos are unacceptable in the Halc-kulani, the last of Waikiki's great prewar hotels, where I am soon dining with Jean and Bob Trumbull. In the early 1950s Bob and I were foreign correspondents in India, he for the
New York Times
and I for the
Baltimore Sun
. I have friends scattered through the Pacific, and a fairly good working knowledge of Asia, but Bob's is encyclopedic. On December 7, 1941, he was city editor of the
Honolulu Advertiser
and a stringer for the
Times
. Then the
Times
hired him full-time, and he has been with the paper ever since, mostly around the Pacific basin. He is the last of the
Times
World War II correspondents still on the job.

Hawaii, he tells me, is, for the first time in its pluralistic history, gripped by racial tension. The problem is the Japanese. Although a minority, they are tightly organized, and as a result they control the local Establishment — the politics, industry, unions; even the presidency of the university. The other inhabitants, and particularly the white Americans who have retired here, resent all this. But, Bob adds, Nipponese affluence is not confined to Hawaii. That, or something like it, will appear almost everywhere on my journey. In peace Hirohito's subjects have achieved what eluded them in war: dominance of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. I tell Bob that the Germans have done the same thing in Europe. The victors of V-E and V-J days, we agree, have been outmaneuvered, outsold, and outsmarted by the vanquished.

My own feeling the next morning is that whoever is in charge here has appalling taste. This is a community of honky-tonks. High-rise condominiums, uncannily like Puerto Rico's, have put the famous beaches northwest of Diamond Head in perpetual shade. Aiea Heights Hospital, where I once lay with thousands of other Marine casualties from Iwo and Okinawa, has been razed and replaced by CINCPAC headquarters, but the military seems no longer able to correct pernicious practices of civilian tradesmen. On Hotel Street electric guitars are turned up to incredible sound levels. Aloha shirts are offered at preposterous prices. Muscular transvestites accost you under a marquee which bears the announcement
boys will be girls
. Prostitution is illegal, but the bars and strip joints on Hotel Street are crowded with hookers who, if a man pauses within arm's reach, will caress his crotch with a gentle squeeze. There are more massage parlors, strip joints, and pornographic shops than cafés. Signs ballyhoo
double-bedrooman-tics! male-female sexantics! watch oral sex live
! Japan's December 7 raid thirty-eight years ago was an outrage, but one feels that the destruction of Honolulu's tenderloin would be less outrageous today.