The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps

  But I had neared the point where I was past caring. Steadied by my mourning Laurel, I wobbled outside into the blinding light of Fifth Avenue. Front pages of the Journal-American sprouted everywhere—GOD BLESS GEN. MACARTHUR! the banner headlines read in feverish crimson—and it was not long before we saw the general himself: in an open Cadillac, flanked by shoals of motorcycle outriders, the ornate headpiece half an inch atilt as he saluted the mob with his corncob pipe, he fleetingly grimaced, gazing straight at me, and behind the raspberry-tinted sunglasses his eyes appeared as glassily opaque and mysterious as those of an old, sated lion pensively digesting a wildebeest or, more exactly, like those of a man whose thoughts had turned inward upon some Caesarean dream magnificent beyond compare. His glory worked like acid on my own sense of vulnerability. I was gripped by a feeling of doom and lonesomeness, and I think I stifled the urge to clout somebody when I heard a nearby voice say: “Hang that bastard Harry Truman!” In the taxi going to Penn Station I ignored the driver, who glanced at my uniform admiringly and called me a hero, and I paused only long enough to give Laurel a hot despairing kiss before plunging onto the train, where I slept stupefied all the way to Fredericksburg, Virginia.

  The camp to which I had been ordered was originally known as New River. Then it later acquired the name Lejeune—after an illustrious marine commandant of a bygone era. Set amid the pinelands of the Carolina coast, the camp was still young as military establishments go; the next day when I arrived it was bustling and businesslike, as I always remembered it. I had spent a few tough months there during the previous war, and on the morning that I reported for duty I was stung by an awful sense of recollection at the sight of the broad asphalt avenues filled with marching men—along with that intimidating tramp of regimented feet that I thought I had put out of my ears for good—and by the vista of brick barracks and headquarters buildings with their phony Federalist cupolas so reminiscent of some callow newly built college campus almost anywhere in the nation. My emotions must have been very close to those of an ex-convict who has savored the sweet taste of liberty only to find himself once more a transgressor at the prison gates, gazing up at the long-familiar walls. It was unseasonably warm. The base had already changed over to khaki uniform and I felt in my green woolens not only awkward and conspicuous but near suffocation. I was also hungover, jittery with exhaustion, and gripped with such foreboding about the future that my mind retreated from all notion of what the next year or years might bring, and in my thoughts I fiddled with the past.

  From the top-floor window of the administration building, where I stood smoking a cigarette, waiting for the division adjutant to receive me, I could see across miles of swampland—fiercely green now in the full tide of springtime—almost to the ocean. Cypress, scrub oak, palmetto, tupelo, and countless groves of longleaf pine—all watered by the estuarial marsh in which they spread their roots, and by evil, slow-running brown streams that had nearly drowned more than one wretched recruit: this was the wilderness which only ten years before the generals had surveyed from the air and, observing its proximity to the sea, had pronounced ideal for training young men in the new amphibious-warfare theory, or “doctrine,” as it was known. Rugged and isolated, far removed from any metropolitan fleshpots, it was the perfect place to harden up troops for what turned out to be the cruelest combat ever known in the annals of war: it was lonely, inhospitable, frigid in winter, a steaming cauldron in summer, and largely uninhabited save for mosquitoes, ticks, and chiggers in stupendous numbers, possums, poisonous water moccasins, a few bobcats and bears, and, on the relatively dry periphery of the fastness, a tiny, scattered community of Negroes who scratched out a poor living on plots of tobacco and peanuts. These people—they had lived on the land for generations—had not been taken into much account by the generals during their aerial survey. As I stood there, I once again recalled hearing how half a dozen of the Negroes had killed themselves rather than face eviction—an outbreak of suicides that caused widespread talk in the region, especially since self-destruction, by the light of southern mythology, is rare among a race of people born to patiently endure their suffering.

  But some had killed themselves, and those who survived them had been “equitably” paid and resettled, transported to another county. Behind them they left scattered along dusty tracks through the pinewoods a dilapidated hodgepodge of tobacco barns, sheds, privies, cabins, and a handful of crossroads stores plastered with signs advertising RC Cola and Dr. Pepper and Copenhagen snuff. Windowless and abandoned, with porches rotting and tar-paper roofs in tatters, they sagged amid overgrown plots of sunflowers and weeds, or became carapaced in sweet jungles of honeysuckle where the drowsy hum of bees only made more pronounced the sense of a final silence of bereavement, of life stilled. Yet not without some value even in their utter desolation, the shacks and stores began to serve as objectives in field exercises, something to be captured; many more became targets for artillery and mortar practice, and as I gazed out over the green roof of the woods I remembered how on a hot summer day in 1944 my own platoon had laid down round after round of mortar fire upon one of these derelict shanties, firing for effect until our barrage had turned the place to splinters and nothingness save for a single crudely painted metal signboard that we discovered amid the wreckage, which read, WHITEHURST’S STORE. And I recalled feeling then a small tug at my heart, not for any damage done to an already ruined hulk, nor even out of conscience, but because White-hurst was the name of my father’s mother, whose family had lived here on this Carolina coast for two centuries and had owned Negroes who bore the Whitehurst name. Thus this storekeeper had most certainly been descended from slaves owned by my ancestors—could it be that he was one of those who had sought suicide in his grief? I never found out—and as I stood on that smoking ruin with its intermingled fragrance of gunpowder and honeysuckle I could not help but feel a pang of morbid regret over the fact that it was I who had presided so efficiently at the obliteration of a place one Whitehurst must have once cherished dearly. It seemed oddly gratuitous on my part, and something of an insult.

  The assistant adjutant was a laconic, mistrustful-eyed major who dealt speedily with my suggestion that my talents might best be suited for the more demanding cerebral activities of the rear echelon—I had murmured something about “public relations”—and assigned me to the command of a mortar platoon in one of the infantry battalions. Later in the day, after reporting to my battalion office, I was shown the place where I would live during the next few months before shipping out to Korea: a room on the second floor of one of the several brick buildings that served as the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. The room, designed for occupancy by two persons, was airy enough and reasonably comfortable-looking, but both it and the quarters themselves—functional, institutional, with dark echoing corridors and a communal washroom filled with the sound of urinals in spasm, the whole place soupily miasmic from roaring showers—reminded me again painfully of college, of a dormitory, and I realized how truly retrogressive my life had become.

  One facility possessed by this B.O.Q., however, which I had never seen in a college dormitory was a serious, full-sized bar fit for a modest hotel: here, where mixed drinks were twenty-five cents apiece (how seductively available are creature comforts in the military service, at least behind the front lines), the recalled reserve officers gathered each afternoon at five, uniforms abandoned, gaudy in sport shirts, drawn together by a camaraderie born in chagrin, resentment, homesickness, anxiety, and a common need to make heard the sound of distress. Certainly not even in the previous war was there ever such easy companionship, such a sense of a community of victims; and it was here at the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters bar that we met most often that spring to discuss our woes. And it may have been that first day—surely it was no more than a couple of days later—that I made the acquaintance of Lacy Dunlop, who, like most of the Bachelor Officers, was no bachelor.

  “Look at them,” Lacy said to me, gesturing around the dark, murm
urous room. “The fellowship of the damned. Did you know there’s a new Chinese offensive expected at the Hwachon Reservoir? By fall I’ll bet half of the poor sods in this place will have their asses shot off. And all because we signed that creepy little piece of paper.”

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “Oh hell, I got here the end of January. I drew a rifle platoon in the Sixth Marines. It was hell for a while. Sheer hell. Freezing cold, you can’t imagine how cold it was out in the swamps. And here I was, hadn’t touched a rifle in six years, and I was supposed to be leading a bunch of eighteen-year-old gung-ho kids just up from Parris Island. Oh Christ, it was awful, those field problems. Physically, I was a nasty old sponge. I’d forgotten how to read a map, and I was expected to be an example, you see, full of esprit de corps and all that silly crap.” He paused and flipped into his mouth the olive from his martini glass. “Really, unless you were out in those swamps for six weeks in the winter you’ll never understand how—well, I mean, blissful a spring like this can be.”

  From the jukebox, abruptly, there boomed forth the words of “My Truly, Truly Fair,” causing me, unaccountably, to feel a sharp sense of imprisonment. When played in a martial setting, popular songs have a way of heightening one’s mood of isolation: dealing with peaceable pursuits like ball games and courtship, they tend to sadden, and to mock one’s ears. In the Second World War, this song for me was “Don’t Fence Me In.” Now I realized I had acquired another: “My Truly, Truly Fair,” loud, lushly orchestrated, infinitely desolating. I would have settled for the Missa Solemnis.

  “No, you see, ever since this stuff in Korea began, the poor old Corps has had to readjust its thinking,” Lacy went on. “Marines before this were always snooping and pooping in the jungle, you know, chasing the Japs in the Pacific or working for Wall Street in Haiti and Nicaragua. Most all of the marine wars have been tropical wars. But after last winter and that ghastly retreat from the Chosin Reservoir, with all those poor guys freezing their peckers off, the brass has gotten what they like to call ‘winter-oriented’ in their thinking—isn’t that an exquisite phrase?—which means that my battalion commander, guy named Hudson who is very shot in the ass with the Corps anyway, made a fetish of walking us through as many frozen creeks as he could find. Oh, my friend, April is the least cruel month I know, and you should count your blessings for getting here now.”

  “When do you think we’ll be shipping out overseas?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. No one seems to know. But the best guess is that we’ll be here at least until midsummer. God, I hope it’s not too soon, or ever. We’ve had our war, for Christ’s sake. I’ve had enough of this bullshit mucking about in the Orient.”

  As it turned out, I got to know Lacy Dunlop better than any of my fellow reserve officers; in fact, we struck up a sympathetic and animated friendship, having more than our un-prosperous future in common. Lacy was a few years older than I—he was twenty-eight or twenty-nine—though he had the blue-eyed, blond, snub-nosed good looks that gave him the appearance of a teenager; at first glance there had been something almost ridiculously regular and conventional about his open, boyish face—I thought of the well-scrubbed American kid in the Coca-Cola and hair-tonic ads—but the impression of unsoiled youth he made was largely superficial, a cosmetic accident: beneath the fresh fraternity-boy countenance lay a temper that was experienced, complicated, sardonic, and wise. Much of this had been acquired at the hard business of war. While barely twenty he had been commissioned a second lieutenant, and had participated as a platoon commander in some of the most ferocious engagements on Okinawa, coming out of it unharmed but with somber memories of those who had been slaughtered all around him—“like termites,” he said.

  After the war he finished up at Columbia, in the city of his birth, taking a degree in philosophy. Later he went to France, where he studied at the Sorbonne, married a French girl, and where—possessed by the same “lunacy,” as he put it, that had affected everyone else—he succumbed to the fatal invitation to rejoin the reserves. Shortly after this he received news of the death of his father, the patriarch of an old Westchester WASP family and the publisher of a small but prosperous list of scientific textbooks, and Lacy returned to New York with his French bride in order to take over the firm and to live a civilized life made up of “good wine, good books and music, orderly children, and two months in France every summer.” But this fantasy had been blown to pieces. As for his present plight, he had faced it neither with sulky rebelliousness, as a few had, nor with supine acceptance, as had some others, but with a kind of controlled and cynical desperation permeated by grisly good humor. About the only truly solemn fear I ever heard him give voice to was that he might get killed without making, with his wife Annie, another summer visit to the small farmhouse he had bought in the hills near Grasse.

  “Of course, you understand there are degrees of misery,” he went on, “and if you are attentive to this fact it will allow you a certain consolation, if only in a relative way. For instance, take your own situation. On an ascending scale of misery, from one to ten, I’d place you around one, or a little less. Why? Well look, in the first place you’re not married, you have no responsibilities or financial obligations, no one to support, so basically your misery index is insignificant. It’s true you’re not getting a regular piece of ass but, tant pis, which of us is? At least you’ve gotten your book written and can hope for some small immortality, also a bit of money, if you live that long. Then too, remember that you’re an officer and, compared to these enlisted reserves, you get to live with some of the amenities. So I’d place you almost as far down on the misery scale as it’s possible to get.”

  “Where would you put yourself, smart guy?” I said. The twenty-five-cent bourbon had filled me with a soothing melancholy, and Lacy’s game caused me to float between distant annoyance and straightforward fascination. “Nine? Or ten?”

  “Oh God, no. Misery-wise, I don’t claim any points. I do have the responsibility of a wife, which puts me ahead of you a bit. And because the housing situation here makes her have to stay in New York, that gives me another small notch. But we have no children—blind chance, but fortunate under the circumstances—and in addition I have a good solid professional who’s running the family business, and it continues to make money nicely in my absence. It would be swinishly presumptuous of me to put my misery any higher than two or three, miserable though I am.”

  The bar had begun to fill up with officers—young fellows between twenty-five and thirty-five mostly, lieutenants and captains in sport shirts and slacks, save for a sprinkling of grimy types in green dungarees just in from some field problem, sweatily gulping cans of beer. In twos or threes, in clusters of a half dozen or more, they lolled around the perfunctory Formica tables or stood restlessly at the bar itself as their voices, not loud but very urgent, filled the air with a passionate monotone of discontent. Sometimes I heard laughter but it sounded bitter, and it was more often than not cut off short, as if whoever had laughed had sensed an impropriety. I was struck by the ease with which I was soon able to distinguish the newcomers like myself from those who had shared with Lacy the routine of several months. The veterans, besides being trimmer and tanner, seemed to bear themselves with a certain casual, glum assurance, as if they had become acclimated to the stress of this new existence, had through slow reacquaintance become finally adjusted to once familiar duties and tensions; their faces wore looks of bemused resignation, and they appeared older than their years. The recent arrivals, most of whom were sallow of hue and who were puffed out in places with telltale sedentary flab, put me in mind of new boys at summer camp—chafing with homesickness, eyes roving in quest of friendship, altogether unstrung.

  But whatever our situation, we were all bound to each other by a single shocked awareness, and this was that for the second time in less than a decade we were faced with the prospect of an ugly death. In an abstract way it was possible to say that it was our
own fault we were here. Yet suddenly, as my gaze wandered from face to face among this sullen, murmurous assembly of misplaced civilians—these store owners and office managers and personnel directors and salesmen—I was gripped by a foreboding about our presence in this swampy wilderness that at once transcended and made absurd each of our individual destinies, and even our collective fate. For it seemed to me that all of us were both exemplars and victims of some uncontrollable aggression, a hungry will for bloodshed creeping not only throughout America but the world, and I could not help but abruptly shiver in that knowledge.