My Generation (29 page)

I
n July 1943, I had just turned eighteen and had been a private in the Marine Corps for about five months. The American war against the Japanese and Germans had not yet reached the halfway point. The look of innocence and optimism on my face, in a photograph I have preserved from that time, reminds me of the similar expressions I've seen on the faces of some of the young marines preparing for combat in Saudi Arabia. I recall having little real fear of being wounded or killed—that fear came later on. The conflict in the Pacific was still far off, and while there had been some terrible battles, with many Army, Navy, and Marine casualties in the Solomon Islands (and large Army losses in New Guinea and the Aleutians), the carnage was a remote abstraction to me; besides, I was eager to test my manhood. I couldn't know that the worst was yet to come.

For most Americans World War II was suffused by an authentic love of country, reflecting matters of necessity and idealism that were far more scrupulously defined than those of the war in the Persian Gulf. There have been grievous moral deficiencies on both sides in the war with Iraq. This was not the case in that other war, a Manichaean collision of good and evil which probably allowed America its last moment of true decency. In those years we felt almost physically defiled: our security had been menaced, our survival was at risk, our national soil had been violated by the Japanese atrocity at Pearl Harbor, which had left nearly 2,500 Americans dead. (There
was Hitler, too, but we marines gave little thought to the European war, which was an Army and Navy operation.) Beautiful ideas like courage and sacrifice and pride had thrilling resonance for American kids, especially one like me who had pined to become a marine long before Hirohito became a household name. Culture and tradition merged in me to generate a surging passion for military honor. But to this day I don't find such passion freakish or even unusual. Despite the niceties concerning peace and peacemaking, our society has always possessed a bloodthirsty streak, encouraging most boys to cherish the arts of war and to relish becoming legal killers.

More than once I heard my father, who sheltered the spirit of a poet-philosopher within the person of a naval engineer, say with acid distaste that America's natural destiny was war. He should have known because war roosted like a bad memory in our family's past—my grandfather had been a fifteen-year-old Confederate soldier, two great-uncles were killed in that conflict—and the steely hand of the military touched every corner of our environment. This was in Virginia, the most bellicose of American states (not excepting Texas) and in a part of the commonwealth so thoroughly militarized that by the mid-1930s it resembled an armed encampment. Within twenty miles from home were the Norfolk naval base and air station, Langley Field (now Langley Air Force Base), the Army Transportation Corps facility at Fort Eustis, the coast artillery base at Fortress Monroe, the naval mine depot at Yorktown, the naval shipyard at Portsmouth. These places, in the midst of the Depression, brought a measure of local prosperity. My father was both dependent on the military and bruised by it—he was basically a peace-lover—and it made him a prophet.

I'll never forget his high moment of prophecy. He was employed by Newport News Shipbuilding, then as now the largest private yard in the nation, where as a middle-level engineer he helped create such behemoths as the aircraft carriers
Ranger, Yorktown, Enterprise, Essex
, and
Hornet
. One of my luscious childhood memories is of being taken to the launching of
Ranger
, the first American carrier built from the keel up, and of watching the wife of the president, Mrs. Herbert Hoover (whose slip was showing), make three attempts at bashing a champagne bottle over the ship's prow before she succeeded, drenching herself in a sacrament of foam. The shipyard adjoined an apartment building where we lived and where the bedlam from riveting hammers and pile drivers and other machinery caused my mother hectic distress. As if this noise weren't enough, there was often the
roar of the new B-17s—the Flying Fortresses—as they climbed out of Langley Field, sometimes joined by the racket of naval fighter planes, and on one such hot summer day my mother had been driven frantic. Ordinarily a patient and reasonable woman, she began to complain bitterly of the ghastly noise, its effect on human beings, the waste of money, the chaos, the futility—all, she said, to maintain a bloated military establishment in peacetime. My father, usually so gentle with my mother, erupted, calling her an ostrich, blind to reality. “We are preparing for
war
!” he exclaimed with a gesture toward me. “For a war which I pray our son will survive and—if we're lucky—wars our grandchildren will survive, too. War, my dear, is the destiny of this nation—was, is now, and ever shall be. We will be fighting wars
forever
—as long as we have the money and the guns!”

Those prescient words still give me a chill. At the time they scared me. Still, my father's rage and apprehension didn't prevent me from signing up as a marine not many years later, making me an eager apprentice in one of the wars he had so accurately predicted. I was an officer candidate. To become a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps seemed to be the most elegant destiny in the world. Much of the giddy crush I had on the Marine Corps derived, of course, from the sheer glamour of the outfit. I longed to be among the toughest and the best, these hellraising leathernecks with their grand history of machismo and martyrdom—and there was also the uniform. Countless young men have been lured to their deaths by the promise of a sexy uniform. The gold bars, the smart blouse of forest green, the mirror-bright cordovan shoes, the trim barracks cap with the braided quatrefoil—such dash would cause a splendid flutter among the bevy of girls one hoped to conquer while home on leave. But that brief lull would be a pathetic trade-off for the reality of Pacific combat, with its dirty dungarees and horror, which loomed more threatfully close when I did finally receive my commission in the summer of 1945. The war against Japan had produced murderous pandemonium, and there were few of us second lieutenants who were not conscious, sick to our souls, of the fate of our fellow fighting men at two recently concluded slaughters: Iwo Jima (Dead: Americans, 6,800; Japanese, 20,000) and Okinawa (Dead: Americans, 12,500; Japanese, 135,000). I became a connoisseur of such appalling statistics.

My comrades and I were spared the fate of so many others by an incandescent event of history: the atom bomb. It was while I was in training to
lead a platoon of riflemen in the invasion of the Japanese mainland that the cataclysm occurred. Had the war not terminated with such a prodigious bang, my platoon would almost certainly have been participants in that final bloodbath (Predicted dead: Americans, 100,000; Japanese, upward of 1,000,000). During the quiescent time that immediately followed my return to civilian life the idea of war seemed so inconsequential that my father's augury faded from my mind. Peace seemed to stretch out into the limitless future. The hiatus, however, was but an historical split second; the conflict in Korea commenced in 1950 and I, who had been reckless enough to remain in the reserves, was called back to active duty. Softened and sweetened by peacetime pleasures, I was no longer the gung-ho marine and in near-disbelief I struggled for long nightmare months in the swamps of North Carolina, relearning infantry tactics I would use in the killing of—or in being killed by—a new and ferocious Asian enemy.

My luck held out. I was released from duty because of an eye defect, and as the upheaval on the Korean peninsula receded in time it seemed significantly less a just war than World War II, and one I felt no guilt in having been excluded from, though good friends died at places like the Chosin Reservoir and though I experienced anguish over the eventual carnage (Dead: American, 33,000; South Korean and U.N., 75,000; all Communist forces, in excess of 2,000,000).

I was too old for the war in Vietnam, but it aged me nonetheless. My father's bleak pronouncement on that summer day returned over and over again as the war in Southeast Asia unfolded throughout a decade. The sons of friends were killed; my soul felt snapped during those ugly years. It was an unutterably sordid catastrophe (Dead: Americans, 58,000; South Vietnamese, 99,000; North Vietnamese, at least 1,000,000) and it so undermined the American Dream that it did seem scarcely possible that we could allow in our lifetime another such death-happening.

But now as I set down these reflections I see the grave faces of the boys in the Arabian desert—faces luminous and attentive like mine was over four decades ago—and I realize with a shock that these kids are the age, not of my father's grandchildren, but of his great-grandchildren, and that if he were alive today he would have lived to see his harsh vision not merely made true but realized in ways beyond his darkest imagining. He would have been verified in his belief that war was the destiny of America and he would have
wondered, as I do now, how many young human beings of whatever nation would ultimately be fitted into those bleak parentheses historians use to list the warrior dead. Perhaps few, perhaps many, but in any case it will be a prophecy fulfilled.

[Previously unpublished. Styron wrote this essay in February 1991 at the invitation of
Life
magazine. It was to be part of a special issue on the upcoming full ground invasion of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War. The issue was canceled when a cease-fire was negotiated in March 1991. The text here is taken from the surviving typescript, preserved among Styron's papers at Duke University.]

T
he Connecticut State Prison at Wethersfield is a huge, gloomy Victorian structure whose very appearance seems calculated to implant in the mind of the onlooker the idea of justice in its most retributive sense. It is one of the oldest prisons in America. Uncompromisingly somber, the penitentiary suggests not only that crime does not pay but that whosoever is a wrongdoer is quite conceivably beyond redemption. On death row, the condemned cells were built for an epoch when, after a man was told he must die, the supreme penalty was administered far more swiftly than in these present days of interminable legal postponements. Each cell still measures only seven by seven feet, implying momentary residence. A strong electric light shines in the face of the condemned all night and all day. The condemned are not allowed to communicate with one another, and until very recently, were denied even the solace of an earphone radio. To live on death row at Wethersfield is in effect to dwell in solitary confinement until the day of one's execution. As I write these words (mid-October 1961) the state of Connecticut is preparing to kill a twenty-four-year-old felon named Benjamin Reid. Reid is no Caryl Chessman.
¹
As a matter of fact, he is subliterate and possesses an intelligence which, if not so low as to be called defective, can only be described as marginal. The condemned at Wethersfield are allowed to read and to write letters, but it is doubtful that Ben Reid has availed himself much of these privileges; and this is a circumstance which
must have made his confinement all the more forsaken, because Reid has lived in the presence of the electric chair for four years and three months.

On a bitterly cold night in Hartford in January of 1957, Ben Reid, who was nineteen at the time, waylaid a middle-aged woman in a parking lot and beat her to death with a hammer. His avowed and premeditated motive was profit (the woman was a friend of his mother's and had been known to carry large sums of money with her), but this aspect of his crime he so ruinously botched that he got nothing. Over $2,000 was discovered on the woman's frozen body, which Reid in his final panic had jammed into a car. It would appear that Reid scarcely bothered to conceal his tracks, fleeing to the home of a relative in New Haven, where he was found in short order by the police. He seemed rather relieved to be caught. He made several confessions, and in the summer of that same year, was brought to trial by jury in the Superior Court at Hartford. The trial was a fairly brief one, as murder trials go. On June 27, 1957, Reid was sentenced to die by electrocution. He was taken to Wethersfield (a suburb of Hartford, and except for the eyesore of its prison and several small factories, a lovely elm-lined New England town) and there in his tiny cell, brightly illuminated night and day, he has been for more than four years, awaiting what must be, for him, the ever present but always undiscoverable moment of his death.

There is, of course, no such thing as absolute justice, but even advocates of capital punishment will grant that when a human's life is at stake, there should be the closest approximation of absolute justice the law can attain. In terms of absolute justice, to make evident the reasonableness of Ben Reid's execution for murder it would have to be proved that his crime was morally more reprehensible than a similar crime for which some other murderer received a lesser sentence. There have been, and still are, murderers whose crimes repel us by their violence and brutality quite as strongly as does Ben Reid's. Some of these criminals have been put to death as creatures past salvation; more frequently sparing their lives, the state has sentenced them to serve a life term, with the possibility of parole, or a number of years, and by this relative leniency has granted, at least theoretically, the rather more lucid assumption that some men's crimes are not so depraved as to place them forever beyond redemption. But the logic of this random choice is as fearful as it is mysterious. The wickedness, the inherent immorality, of any crime is a quality which it is beyond the power of any of us to weigh or measure. Ben Reid's crime, however, has been weighed, and Reid himself has
been found completely and irrevocably wanting. Neither absolute justice nor any kind of justice, so far as the eye can see, has been served. It might be interesting to learn something about this young man, and perhaps discover why the state has judged him irredeemable, past hope of recovery.

Warden Lewis E. Lawes of Sing Sing, an expert foe of the death penalty, once said that in order to be executed in America a person had to be three things: poor, a man, and black. He was speaking of the North as well as the South. He was also admittedly generalizing, if not being somewhat facetious, for a great many white men and a few women of both races have, of course, been executed, and on exquisitely rare occasions the state has taken the life of a criminal of wealth. But the implication of his remark, it is safe to say, is borne out by the statistics—North and South—and Ben Reid fills the bill: he is a poor black man. To read of his background and career is to read not only of poverty and neglect and a mire of futile, petty crime and despair, but, in the end, of a kind of wretched archetype: the Totally Damned American. If one wished to make a composite portrait of the representative criminal upon whom the state enacts its legal vengeance, one's result would be a man who looked very much like Ben Reid. Like his victim, who was also a Negro, he was born in a dilapidated slum area on the north side of Hartford. When he was two his father died, leaving his mother virtually destitute and with several children to support besides Ben. These years toward the end of the Depression were bleak enough for a large number of Americans; for people in the situation of Ben Reid and his family the times were catastrophic and left ineradicable scars. When Reid was almost eight his mother got into a shooting scrape and was grievously wounded; she was left crippled for life and partially paralyzed. At this point Reid was forced to enter the Hartford County Home, and there he remained for eight years. He was not alone among his family to become a ward of the People; during the time he was at the county home his twin brother was committed to the state hospital for the insane at Norwich, while an older sister, adjudged to be mentally deficient, was sent to the Mansfield State Training School. Most children are released from the county home at the age of fifteen, but since no one wanted Reid, he received the dispensation granted, in special cases, to the totally unwanted and was privileged to stay an extra year. One pauses to speculate, hesitates, goes on, feeling presumptuous (there is no other word) as one tries to imagine Ben Reid's thoughts during this weary, bedraggled era. He was never too bright, so probably—unlike other adolescents somewhat
more richly endowed in mind as well as circumstance—he entertained no Deep Thoughts about life at all. To Reid, coming out of oblivion into this existence which, so far as one can tell, had seemed to guarantee the unfulfillment and frustration of every ordinary childish yearning, life must have begun to appear simply and demonstrably lacking in significance. Lacking in significance, it must necessarily have lacked any values whatever, and it is not at all surprising that Reid, soon after he was sent away from the county home, began feloniously and empty-headedly to trifle with those values in life which society so highly regards.

When the county home finally discharged him, the nation was experiencing a time of prosperity such as no country has ever seen, but very little of this abundance rubbed off on Ben Reid. For a year or so he was shunted from one foster home to another; he went hungry again from time to time, and there were occasions when he was reduced to foraging from garbage cans on the backstreets of Hartford. It was during this period that Reid had his first brush with the law, in an involvement which has come to seem numbingly typical of his age and background: he was caught acting as a runner for a narcotics peddler, and for his offense was placed on probation. A few months later he tried to rob a store, hopelessly bungled the endeavor, and was sentenced to serve a term in the state reformatory at Cheshire. It is apparent that he was in no way reformed. However, it may be said that after his release from the reformatory, an episode occurred in Reid's life which tends in some small way to alleviate the harshness and ugliness of his career until then. He met a girl. She was a few years older than he, but they began seeing each other and presumably fell in love, and they were married in 1956. It might have been an answer to Reid's trouble, but it wasn't. He was unable to get a job. Not long after their marriage Ben began to brood about money and commenced hitting the wine bottle. His wife apparently did her best to straighten him out, but these efforts led to nothing. She was pregnant and had just left him when Reid, thinking about money, went out into the snow that night and committed the crime for which he is now scheduled to die.

Often, it seems, what appears to be justice is merely a shadow image of justice, determined by queer circumstances which can only be discerned in retrospect. This sinister element in the law might alone be enough to cast final doubts upon the infliction of the death penalty; for only under conditions of absolute justice—a kind of aseptic legal vacuum completely invulnerable
to fleeting social panic, hysteria, shifts in public temper—could we presume to condemn a man utterly, and absolute justice nowhere exists. It of course cannot strictly be proven, but it seems at least probable that had Ben Reid not come to trial at the particular time he did, he would not have been condemned to die. The reason for this conjecture is the existence in Hartford at that same time of two particularly vicious criminals: a huge, lantern-jawed ex-con and ex-resident of death row named Joseph (“The Chin”) Taborsky and his moronic accomplice, Arthur Culombe. Taborsky, who was a psychopath of fearfully sadistic dimensions, and Culombe, a kind of torpid, blinky-eyed caricature of the dim-witted henchman, had finally been apprehended after a series of holdup-murders which had terrorized central Connecticut and, quite literally, sent many of the people of Hartford in off the streets. A notable feature of their
modus operandi
was to make their victims kneel down at their feet before shooting them. Taborsky and Culombe had been dubbed by the newspapers, with scant originality though in luminous headlines, “The Mad Dog Killers,” and when they came to be tried there can be no doubt that the public, which attended the trial in droves, was in something less than a mood of composure. Ben Reid was tried at the same time and in the same building. His mother, crippled and woefully concerned, was the only spectator on the first day of the trial, when the jurors were sworn in, and except for Reid's wife and one or two interested onlookers, remained the only spectator until the trial's end. The People's interest was in the Mad Dogs, not in Ben Reid. There seems little doubt that the Taborsky-Culombe affair next door, with its public hubbub and its reverberant atmosphere of mass outrage, did nothing to help Ben Reid's case, and in fact subtly contaminated his own courtroom with the odor of vengeance.

The trial, as I have said, lasted only a few days. Reid's defense was almost nonexistent; he had, after all, killed someone with what in the legal sense is surely malice and premeditation. His defense counsel (since Reid had no money, this job fell to the public defender) made strenuous efforts in his client's behalf, outlining his squalid background and the nature of his upbringing. But the jury (Respectability in its pure, concentrated essence, disarmingly mild-eyed and benign, like a Norman Rockwell tableau: five Christian housewives and among the rest, as might be anticipated in Hartford, a clutch of insurance adjusters) was not terribly moved. Testifying in his own behalf, Reid seemed confused. Once when asked why, after his first
blow, he continued to strike the woman, he replied that she had seemed to be suffering so that he wanted to put her out of her pain. Now, asked the same question by the prosecutor, he could only mumble hopelessly, “I don't know. I started to shake. I lost control of myself. I didn't want her to die.” In his final summation, the prosecuting attorney expressed a few personal regrets but went on to add that we must not be swayed by the fact of a person's sordid environment; after all, some of our most valued citizens have struggled up to eminence from the lower depths, fighting their way to fame and fortune, ladies and gentlemen, while people like this criminal sitting here, etc. It had the echo of a thousand courtrooms: Look at Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor. Look at Joe Louis! It was the old American death-cry, and there is no reply to it, save the negative one, to bespoken in a whisper, that when life is an issue we have no God-given right to measure the gallant strength of a few men against the imponderable weakness of a foundling like Ben Reid. The jury was asked if it would like to retire and deliberate right away, or if it would like to have lunch first. It replied that it would like to have lunch. After it fed itself it retired and came back with the verdict in a little over an hour. As happens with rather enigmatic frequency in capital trials, the judge flubbed the reading of the death sentence. In setting the date of execution, he said, “the year 1958,” instead of “the year 1957,” and the entire pronouncement, for the record, had to be read over again. Up until this time Reid had showed very little emotion during the trial, except for the moment when the prosecutor began to describe his crime in its bloody detail, at which point, in a gesture which can only be described as childlike, he furiously clapped his hands over his ears. Now perhaps he felt that the judge was damning him twice. At any rate, he broke down and wept.

One curious fact which tends to underline the basic senselessness of capital punishment is the way in which we are regularly brought into touch with an evil apart from the nagging, chronic, yet somehow endurable distress which the death penalty itself causes us: this is the almost unendurable incongruity it manifests in its choice of victims. If in Caryl Chessman, for instance, we were confronted with a plucky, dogged, intelligent man (so intelligent, in fact, as to have blurred in the minds of many people the nature of his morality, which was that of a cynical, self-justifying hoodlum; he verged as close to an embodiment of the perfect son of a bitch as the mind can conceive) who possessed the right at least to the possibility of redemption, in Ben Reid we are faced with a man so egregiously lacking in gifts, so
totally desolate in circumstance, in quality of mind and spirit, that though he bears an almost antipodean relationship to Chessman as a man, we find ourselves questioning by this very contradistinction his implacable abandonment by society. Of course, the facts of heredity and environment cannot be allowed completely to eliminate responsibility and guilt. Reid's crime was an appalling one—one of such blind ruthlessness that it should have been apparent at the outset that he must be removed from the community until that time when it might reasonably be made certain that he could take his place again among his fellow men. Failing this approximate certainty, it would have to be made sure that he was incarcerated for good. But here we are not speaking of correction. We are not even speaking of that reasonable punishment which might carry with it vitalizing connotations of remorse and contrition. We are speaking of total abandonment. Perhaps not so wise but no less unfortunate than Chessman, Reid too had been judged beyond salvation. It is this abrupt, irrevocable banishment, this preemption by the state of the single final judgment which is in the providence of God alone—and the subtle but disastrous effect this act has upon the whole philosophy of crime and punishment—that wrecks the possibility of any lasting, noble concept of justice and causes the issue of the death penalty to become not peripheral, but central to an understanding of a moral direction in our time.