Then it occurred to him that he was actually terrified of the march, of the thirty-six miles: not because of the length—which was beyond comprehension—but because he was sure he’d not be able to make it. The contagion of Mannix’s fear had touched him. And he wondered then if Mannix’s fear had been like his own: that no matter what his hatred of the system, of the Marine Corps, might be, some instilled, twisted pride would make him walk until he dropped, and his fear was not of the hike itself, but of dropping. He looked up at Mannix and said, “Do you think you can make it, Al?”
Mannix heavily slapped his knee. He seemed not to have heard the question. The giddy sensation passed, and Culver got up to warm his hands at the lamp.
“I’ll bet if Regiment or Division got wind of this they’d lower the boom on the bastard,” Mannix said.
“They have already. They said fine.”
“What do you mean? How do you know?”
“He said so, before you came in. He radi- oed to the base for permission, or so he said.”
“The bastard.”
“He wouldn’t dare without it,” Culver said. “What I can’t figure out is why Regiment gave him the O.K. on it.”
“The swine. The little swine. It’s not on account of H & $ Company. You know that. It’s because it’s an exploit. He wants to be known as a tough guy, a boondocker.”
“There’s one consolation, though,” said Culver, after a pause, “if it’ll help you any.”
“What, for God’s sake?”
“Old Rocky, or whatever they call him, is going to hike along, too.”
“You think so?” Mannix said doubtfully.
“I know so. So do you. He wouldn’t dare not push along with his men.”
Mannix was silent for a moment. Then he said viciously, as if obsessed with the idea that no act of Templeton’s could remain untainted by a prime and calculated evil: “But the son of a bitch! He’s made for that sort of thing. He’s been running around the boondocks for six years getting in shape while sane people like you and me were home living like humans and taking it easy. Billy Lawrence, too. They’re both gung ho. These fat civilians can’t take that sort of thing. My God! Hobbs! Look at that radioman, Hobbs. That guy’s going to keel over two minutes out—” He rose suddenly to his feet and stretched, his voice stifled by the long, indrawn breath of a yawn. “Aaa-h, fuck it. I’m going to hit the sack.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Fine bed. A poncho in a pile of poison ivy. My ass looks like a chessboard from chigger bites. Jesus, if Mimi could see me now.” He paused and pawed at his red-rimmed eyes. “Yeah,” he said, blinking at his watch, “I think I will.” He slapped Culver on the back, without much heartiness. “I’ll see you tomorrow, sport. Stay loose.” Then he lumbered from the tent, mumbling some thing: be in for fifty years.
Culver turned away from the lamp. He sat down at the field desk, strapping a black garland of wires and earphones around his skull. The wild, lost wail of the radio signal struck his ears, mingling with the roar, much closer now, of the lamp; alone as he was, the chill and cramped universe of the tent seemed made for no one more competent than a blind midget, and was on the verge of bursting with a swollen obbligato of demented sounds. He felt almost sick with the need for sleep and, with the earphones still around his head, he thrust his face into his arms on the field desk. There was nothing on the radio except the signal; far off in the swamp the companies were sleeping wretchedly in scattered squads and platoons, tumbled about in the cold and the dark, and dreaming fitful dreams. The radios were dead everywhere, except for their signals: a crazy, tortured multitude of wails on which his imagination played in exhaustion. They seemed like the cries of souls in the anguish of hell, if he concentrated closely enough, shrill cracklings, whines, barks and shrieks—a whole jungle full of noise an inch from his eardrum and across which, like a thread of insanity, was strung the single faint fluting of a dance-band clarinet—blown in from Florida or New York, someplace beyond reckoning. His universe now seemed even more contained: not merely by the tiny space of the tent, but by the almost tangible fact of sound. And it was impossible to sleep. Besides, something weighed heavily on his mind; there was something he had forgotten, something he was supposed to do …
Then suddenly he remembered the Colonel’s instructions. He cleared his throat and spoke drowsily into the mouthpiece, his head still resting against his arms. “This is Bundle Three calling Bundle Able. This is Bundle Three calling Bundle Able. This is Bundle Three calling Bundle Able. Do you hear me? Over …” He paused for a moment, waiting. There was no answer. He repeated: “This is Bundle Three calling Bundle Able, this is Bundle Three calling Bundle Able, this is… .” And he snapped abruptly erect, thinking of Mannix, thinking: to hell with it: simply because the words made him feel juvenile and absurd, as if he were reciting Mother Goose.
He would stay awake. And he thought of Mannix. Because Mannix would laugh. Mannix appreciated the idiocy of those radio words, just as in his own crazy way he managed to put his finger on anything which might represent a symbol of their predicament. Like the radio code. He had a violent contempt for the gibberish, the boy-scout passwords which replaced ordinary conversation in the military world. To Mannix they were all part of the secret language of a group of morons, morons who had been made irresponsibly and dangerously clever. He had despised the other side, also—the sweat, the exertion, and the final danger. It had been he, too, who had said, “None of this Hemingway crap for me, Jack”; he was nobody’s lousy hero, and he’d get out of this outfit some way. Yet, Culver speculated, who really was a hero anyway, any more? Mannix’s disavowal of faith put him automatically out of the hero category, in the classical sense, yet if suffering was part of the hero’s role, wasn’t Mannix as heroic as any? On his shoulder there was a raw, deeply dented, livid scar, made the more conspicuous and, for that matter, more ugly, by the fact that its evil slick surface only emphasized the burly growth of hair around it. There were smaller scars all over his body. About them Mannix was neither proud nor modest, but just frank, and once while they were showering down after a day in the field, Mannix told him how he had gotten the scars, one day on Peleliu. “I was a buck sergeant then. I got pinned down in a shell hole out in front of my platoon. Christ knows how I got there but I remember there was a telephone in the hole and—whammo! —the Nips began laying in mortar fire on the area and I got a piece right here.” He pointed to a shiny, triangular groove just above his knee. “I remember grabbing that phone and hollering for them to for Christ’s sake get the 81s up and knock out that position, but they were slow, Jesus they were slow! The Nips were firing for effect, I guess, because they were coming down like rain and every time one of the goddam things went off I seemed to catch it. All I can remember is hollering into that phone and the rounds going off and the zinging noise that shrapnel made. I hollered for 81s and I caught a piece in my hand. Then I hollered for at least a goddam rifle grenade and I caught a piece in the ass, right here. I hollered for 60s and guns and airplanes. Every time I hollered for something I seemed to catch some steel. Christ, I was scared. And hurting! Jesus Christ, I never hurt so much in my life. Then I caught this one right here”—he made a comical, contorted gesture, with a bar of soap, over his shoulder—“man, it was lights out then. I remember thinking, ‘Al, you’ve had it,’ and just before I passed out I looked down at that telephone. You know, that frigging wire had been blasted right out of sight all that time.”
No, perhaps Mannix wasn’t a hero, any more than the rest of them, caught up by wars in which, decade by half-decade, the combatant served peonage to the telephone and the radar and the thunderjet—a horde of cunningly designed, and therefore often treacherous, machines. But Mannix had suffered once, that “once” being, in his own words, “once too goddam many, Jack.” And his own particular suffering had made him angry, had given him an acute, if cynical, perception about their renewed bondage, and a keen nose for the winds that threatened to blo
w up out of the oppressive weather of their surroundings and sweep them all into violence. And he made Culver uneasy. His discontent was not merely peevish; it was rocklike and rebellious, and thus this discon- tent seemed to Culver to be at once brave and somehow full of peril.
He had first seen Mannix the revolutionary five months ago, soon after they had been called back to duty. He hadn’t known him then. There were compulsory lectures arranged at first, to acquaint the junior officers with recent developments in what had been called “the new amphibious doctrine.” The outlines of these lectures were appallingly familiar: the stuffy auditorium asprawl with bored lieutenants and captains, the brightly lit stage with its magnified charts and graphs, the lantern slides (at which point, when the lights went out, it was possible to sneak a moment’s nap, just as in officers’ school seven years ago), the parade of majors and colonels with their maps and pointers, and their cruelly tedious, doggedly memorized lectures: the whole scene, with its grave, professorial air, seemed seedily portentous, especially since no one cared, save the majors and colonels, and no one listened. When Culver sat down, during the darkness of a lantern slide, next to the big relaxed mass which he dimly identified as a captain, he noticed that it was snoring. When the lights went up, Mannix still slept on, filling the air around him with a loud, tranquil blubber. Culver aroused him with a nudge. Mannix grumbled something, but then said, “Thanks, Jack.” A young colonel had come onto the stage then. He had made many of the lectures that week. He had a curiously thick, throaty voice which would have made him sound like a yokel, except that his words were coolly, almost passionately put, and he bent forward over the lectern with a bleak and solemn attitude—a lean, natty figure with hair cut so close to his head that he appeared to be, from that distance, nearly bald. “An SS man,” Mannix whispered, “he’s gonna come down here and cut your balls off. You Jewish?” He grinned and collapsed back, forehead against his hand, into quiet slumber. Culver couldn’t recall what the colonel talked about: the movement of supplies, logistics, ship-to-shore movement, long-range planning, all abstract and vast, and an ardent glint came to his eyes when he spoke of the “grandiose doctrine” which had been formulated since they, the reserves, had been away. “You bet your life, Jack,” Mannix had whispered out of the shadows then. He seemed to have snapped fully awake and, following the lecture intently, he appeared to address his whispers not to Culver, or the colonel, but to the air. “You bet your life they’re grandiose,” he said, “even if you don’t know what grandiose means. I’ll bet you’d sell your soul to be able to drop a bomb on somebody.” And then, aping the colonel’s instructions to the corporal—one of the enlisted flunkies who, after each lecture, passed out the reams of printed and mimeographed tables and charts and resumes, which everyone promptly, when out of sight, threw away—he whispered in high, throaty, lilting mockery: “Corporal, kindly pass out the atom bombs for inspection.” He smacked the arm of his seat, too hard; it could be heard across the auditorium, and heads turned then, but the colonel had not seemed to have noticed. “Jesus,” Mannix rumbled furiously, “Jesus Christ almighty,” while the colonel droned on, in his countrified voice: “Our group destiny,” he said, “amphibiously integrated, from any force thrown against us by Aggressor enemy.”
Later—toward the end of that week of lectures, after Mannix had spoken the calm, public manifesto which at least among the reserves had made him famous, and from then on the object of a certain awe, though with a few doubts about his balance, too—Culver had tried to calculate how he had gotten by with it. Perhaps it had to do with his size, his bearing. There was at times a great massive absoluteness in the way he spoke. He was huge, and the complete honesty and candor of his approach seemed to rumble forth, like notes from a sounding board, in direct proportion to his size. He had suffered, too, and this suffering had left a persistent, unwhipped, scornful look in his eyes, almost like a stain, or rather a wound, which spells out its own warning and cautions the unwary to handle this tortured parcel of flesh with care. And he was an enormous man, his carriage was formidable. That skinny, bristle-haired colonel, Culver finally realized, had been taken aback past the point of punishment, or even reprimand, merely because of the towering, unavoidable, physical fact that he was facing not a student or a captain or a subordinate, but a stubborn and passionate man. So it was that, after a lecture on transport of supplies, when the colonel had called Mannix’s name at random from a list to answer some generalized, hypothetical question, Mannix had stood up and said merely, “I don’t know, sir.” A murmur of surprise passed over the auditorium then, for the colonel, early in the hour, had made it plain that he had wanted at least an attempt at an answer—a guess—even though they might be unacquainted with the subject. But Mannix merely said, “I don’t know, sir,” while the colonel, as if he hadn’t heard correctly, rephrased the question with a little tremor of annoyance. There was a moment’s silence and men turned around in their seats to look at the author of this defiance. “I don’t know, sir,” he said again, in a loud but calm voice. “I don’t know what my first consideration would be in making a space table like that. I’m an infantry officer. I got an 0302.” The colonel’s forehead went pink under the glare of the lights. “I stated earlier, Captain, that I wanted some sort of answer. None of you gentlemen is expected to know this subject pat, but you can essay some kind of an answer.” Mannix just stood there, solid and huge, blinking at the colonel. “I just have to repeat, sir,” he said finally, “that I don’t have the faintest idea what my first consideration would be. I never went to cargo-loading school. I’m an 0302. And I’d like to respectfully add, sir, if I might, that there’s hardly anybody in this room who knows that answer, either. They’ve forgotten everything they ever learned seven years ago. Most of them don’t even know how to take an M-1 apart. They’re too old. They should be home with their family.” There was passion in his tone but it was controlled and straightforward—he had managed to keep out of his voice either anger or insolence—and then he fell silent. His words had the quality, the sternness, of an absolute and unequivocal fact, as if they had been some intercession for grace spoken across the heads of a courtroom by a lawyer so quietly convinced of his man’s innocence that there was no need for gesticulations or frenzy. The colonel’s eyes bulged incredulously at Mannix from across the rows of seats, but in the complete, astounded hush that had followed he was apparently at a loss for words. A bit unsteadily, he called out another name and Mannix sat down, staring stonily ahead.
It had been perhaps a court-martial offense, at least worthy of some reprimand, but that was all there was to it. Nothing happened, no repercussions, nothing. The thing had been forgotten; either that, or it had been stored away in the universal memory of colonels, where all such incidents are sorted out for retribution, or are forgotten. Whatever effect it had on the colonel, or whatever higher, even more important sources got wind of it, it had its effect on Mannix. And the result was odd. Far from giving the impression that he had been purged, that he had blown off excess pressure, he seemed instead more tense, more embittered, more in need to scourge something—his own boiling spirit, authority, anything.
Culver’s vision of him at this time was always projected against Heaven’s Gate, which was the name—no doubt ironically supplied at first by the enlisted men—of the pleasure-dome ingeniously erected amid a tangle of alluvial swampland, and for officers only. He and Mannix lived in rooms next to each other, in the bachelor quarters upstairs. The entire area was a playground which had all the casual opulence of a Riviera resort and found its focus in the sparkling waters of a swimming pool, set like an oblong sapphire amid flowered walks and a fanciful growth of beach umbrellas. There, at ten minutes past four each day, Mannix could be found, his uniform shed in an instant and a gin fizz in his hand—a sullen, mountainous figure in a lurid sportshirt, across which a squadron of monstrous butterflies floated in luminous, unmilitary files. Both Mannix and Culver hated the place—its factitious luxury, i
ts wanton atmosphere of alcohol and torpid ease and dances, the vacant professional talk of the regular officers and the constant teasing presence of their wives, who were beautiful and spoke in tender drawls and boldly flaunted at the wifeless reserves—in a proprietary, Atlanta-debutante fashion—their lecherous sort of chastity. The place seemed to offer up, like a cornucopia, the fruits of boredom, of foot-lessness and dissolution. It was, in Mannix’s words, like a prison where you could have anything you wanted except happiness, and once, in a rare midnight moment when he allowed himself to get drunk, he got paper and wood together from his room and announced to Culver in an unsteady but determined voice that he was going to burn the place down. Culver held him off, but it was true: they were bound to the pleasures of the place by necessity—for there was no place to go for a hundred miles, even if they had wanted to go —and therefore out of futility. “Goddam, it’s degrading,” Mannix had said, making use of an adjective which indeed seemed to sum it all up. “It’s like sex now. Or the lack of it. Now maybe it’s all right for a kid to go without sex, but it’s degrading for someone like me almost thirty to go without making love for so long. It’s simply degrading, that’s all. I’d go for one of these regulars’ pigs if it wasn’t for Mimi… . This whole mess is degrading. I know it’s my own fault I stayed in the reserves, Jack, you don’t have to tell me that. I was a nut. I didn’t know I was going to get called out for every frigging international incident that came along. But, goddam, it’s degrading"—and with a glum, subdued gesture he’d down the dregs of his drink—“it’s degrading for a man my age to go sniffing around on my belly in the boondocks like a dog. And furthermore—” He looked scornfully about him, at the glitter and chrome, at the terrace by the pool where Japanese lanterns hung like a grove of pastel moons, and a girl’s shrill and empty laugh uncoiled as bright as tinsel through the sluggish coastal dusk. It was a silent moment in a night sprinkled with a dusty multitude of Southern stars, and the distant bleating saxophone seemed indecisive and sad, like the nation and the suffocating summer, neither at peace nor at war. “Furthermore, it’s degrading to come out of the field each day and then be forced to go to a night club like this, when all you want to do is go home to your wife and family. Goddam, man, I’ve gotta get out!”