I packed and left the tent. It was still raining, as I returned to the company tent. The crowd had dispersed. The other “shanghais” stood in dejection in the rain, their heads, like mine, sunk lower than was needed to avoid the raindrops, their cringing bodies eloquent of disgrace. Within the company tent there was a buzz of voices and the cackle of McCaustic’s laughter.
We stood there until an E Company sergeant appeared. He cast us a lackluster glance and ducked into the tent, reappearing within a few minutes with our record books in his hands. He stuck these beneath his poncho and examined us with candor. He shrugged.
“Detail, tenn-shun!” he barked. We snapped to clumsily, encumbered by gear. “Right face.” We turned. “Forrr-ward, harch!”
We sloshed away.
The shanghais—or transfers—had gone back and forth between all companies in the battalion, perhaps because the commanders thought that reshuffling would end old family quarrels. In the confusion of it, I sought sanctuary. I decided to go over the hill, but, for once, I would try to get away with it.
My plan was thin and involved. It was based on three events of the morning: I had awakened with my upper arms covered with big red weals; the E Company gunnery sergeant had mistaken me for my friend Broadgrin, who had been shanghaied with me; and in a few hours E Company was to march to Rye for a week of firing weapons. Broadgrin was to remain behind on a wood-chopping detail, as I learned from the gunny. But no one had told him.
I got Broadgrin to agree to go out to Rye and to answer my name at reveille on two mornings. I told him that when Gunnery Sergeant Straight-Talk came around to put me on the wood detail, thinking me Broadgrin, I would tell him who I was and that Broadgrin had gone out to Rye. I would also tell him that I had been ordered to the hospital for treatment of hives. Broadgrin, after two days, was to tell the top sergeant at Rye who he was, pretending to be puzzled that his name had not been called at reveille. He was to say he didn’t know me.
My hope was that the top sergeant at Rye, once he found that I was absent, would hesitate to enter me as A.W.O.L. until he could determine the exact date of my departure. He would not like to admit to either the sergeant major or his company commander that he had been entering an absent man as present. He would wait, I reasoned, until he got back to camp and had the opportunity to pump me. Then, I would bluff him.
It was a slim chance, but I was desperate to be away from the unknown and unloved faces of my new companions. Broadgrin thought poorly of the plan.
“Hell!” he said, gloomily, “if it was me, I’d just take off. But, okay.”
When E Company marched off to the boondocks, I lay on my cot in the tent. I heard Gunnery Sergeant Straight-Talk bellowing in his whiskey bass for the men of the wood detail. I heard him call for Broadgrin twice, and flinched at the ensuing silence. Then Straight-Talk bawled out his instructions and commenced his hunt for Broadgrin. I peeped out and saw him clump along the duckwalk from tent to tent, sweeping back the flap, peering in, clumping on again. A few tents away, I drew back and lay on my cot.
A shaft of daylight preceded Straight-Talk into the tent. I closed my eyes.
“What the damn hell you doing in your sack?” I opened my eyes, feigned surprise, and jumped to my feet. I looked at him blankly. “Ain’t you Broadgrin?” I shook my head silently. “What’s yer name, then?”
“Lucky,” I said. “I came over from H Company.”
“I know, I know,” he mumbled, pulling out a soiled notebook. Peering at it, he fixed me with a bleary look. “You know Broadgrin?”
“Yes.”
“You seen him?”
“Yes—he went out in the field with the second platoon.”
He cursed in exasperation. His breath was fragrant with Aqua Velva, Sergeant Straight-Talk, known the battalion over for his fondness for after-shave lotion, must have drained the bottle that morning. Then he looked fiercely at me.
“What the hell are you doing here? Ain’t you supposed to be out in the field?”
“No,” I said, rolling up my sleeve. “See. I’ve got hives. Top Sergeant told me to go to the hospital.”
Straight-Talk looked at the red welts and recoiled. To an old salt, there is nothing more horrifying than skin disease, any form of bodily uncleanliness; for these are men who have spent a lifetime in communal living and have seen the spread of epidemics. To them, everything is contagious. He left me, without further questioning.
I put on my liberty clothes, stuffed a few clean khaki shirts and field scarfs into a little traveling bag, and lay down again. At noon, while the wood detail was at chow, I retreated down the slope and out the rear of the camp where there were no guards, caught a tram to the Dandenong Station, and from there a train to Melbourne. I spent four restful days in Melbourne, at the home of a friend, doing the crossword puzzle every morning at Dave’s, drinking only a little, reading, even, and returned to camp on the fifth day, a Friday.
It was payday. A desk had been set up in the company street, behind which sat the company commander, who would pay us once we had signed the payroll books spread out before him.
“All right,” bellowed Gunnery Sergeant Straight-Talk, lapsing into the pay call formula, “line up in alphabetical order, irregardless of rank—regulars first, reserves last. Sign the book first-name-middle-initial-and-junior-if-you-are-one.” I had a premonition.
Gunnery Sergeant Straight-Talk called my name and surveyed the line with the fierce stare of the huntsman.
I stepped forward and signed the payroll.
The company commander looked at me steadily, with calm, appraising eyes. He paid me.
I sighed with relief, and turned—but an angry hand caught my shoulder and spun me.
“You Lucky?”
It was Straight-Talk.
“Yes.”
“Get the hell up to the company office.”
His breath was as redolent of Aqua Velva as ever, and I reflected, going up to the company office with sinking heart, that today being payday, the battalion PX would undoubtedly be out of shaving lotion by nightfall. I reflected, too, that I had never dealt with the E Company top sergeant before.
His anger had no conviction in it as I stood there, looking down at him, sitting at his desk. He had not the look of a passionate man, not at all the manner of a hard-boiled top sergeant. His rugged face, with its large nose and larger ears, failed to conceal the fact that he was probably not quite thirty, a tender age for a top sergeant in the Marine Corps.
“You’d better stay here,” he said. “You’re going to see the man.”
“Why?”
“You’ve got a hell of a nerve asking that! For going A.W.O.L., that’s why, and you know it—absent without leave.” He looked at me sternly. “Where were you?”
I remained silent, my heart pounding and my head hoping that Broadgrin had been able to answer one reveille—just one, that’s all—and throw them into confusion.
“Where were you?” he repeated, not so forcefully.
“Out in the field,” I said.
He snorted contemptuously. “Don’t give me that. We know you weren’t there. We know what you told the gunny, too. You went over the hill, didn’t you?”
Silence.
His exasperation melted into cajolery, and he showed himself more adept at wheedling than at wrath. “Look, I know what’s eating you, I know you got a dirty deal from McCaustic. So you got to thinking about it and flipped your lid and went over the hill for a few days. Okay, I don’t blame you—maybe. Why don’t you be smart? Why don’t you admit it, and let me talk to the captain? He’ll go easy on you. C’mon—don’t go doing something stupid, now, and louse yourself up.”
This is the appeal most difficult to resist, this is the other fork of the tongue. But I resisted that siren’s call, and kept silent.
Now the top sergeant became petulant, and at last I said, “I’m willing to face charges.”
“Go back to your tent and stand by,” he snapped.
&nbs
p; I made my departure, half exultant. Broadgrin must have protected me! Obviously, the top sergeant had no wish to bring me before the Battalion Commander, and this could be only because he was reluctant to admit that he had carried me present on his morning report for some days, when I was in fact A.W.O.L. My scheme was working. I sat in the tent and waited. In an hour, a runner appeared: “Top wants to see you.”
Alone, the top sergeant greeted me with a question: “Can you type?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, how’d you like to be my company clerk?”
Who can blame me if I smiled? At last I had seen it! If you cain’t lick ‘em, bribe ‘em!
I agreed, and three days later the top came down with malaria and I became the Acting First Sergeant of E Company.
But it was a boring job, hardly less tedious than the duties of company clerk, which I resumed when the top had returned from hospital. My ten days of managing E Company were almost without incident, except that once a toady offered me a bribe of two pounds to keep him off the weekend guard, which I refused, but which I coerced him into spending on Chuckler, Hoosier, Runner and the rest when we met one night at the slop chute. Otherwise my ludicrous metamorphosis from company culprit into company straw-boss provided only exterior comfort; interiorly, it was a stultifying chore, and that was why I leapt at the chance to transfer to Battalion Intelligence.
The Artist, who had been in my training platoon at Parris Island, was in Battalion Intelligence—B-2, as it is called. He had been transferred there as a scout from G Company, having distinguished himself at the Battle of the Tenaru, where a Jap rashly bayoneted him in the leg.
Not long after the top sergeant had returned, Artist accosted me on the battalion street. Lieutenant Big-Picture, the Battalion Intelligence Officer, was with him.
“Here he is,” he said to the lieutenant, motioning me over. “Here’s the man I was telling you about.” He introduced me. “I hear you used to be a newspaperman,” Big-Picture said. I nodded. “How would you like to put out a battalion newspaper?” I was delighted, and so ended my brief and eventful career as an E Company rifleman, during which I never once shouldered a rifle.
Of course, I never came close to publishing a battalion newspaper either; it was merely one of Big-Picture’s big ideas. It was a notion that flattered his vanity. There was not even a regimental or divisional newspaper; still, Big-Picture might boast of having a potential publisher in his Intelligence Section, might even—this being his nature—consider the wish to be a fact.
Even so, Big-Picture rescued me from the drudgery of the company office, brought me back to the field, and assuaged the pride wounded by McCaustic’s “shanghai.” I owe it to Big-Picture, also, that he cared nothing for my reputation as a rebel, not even that by then I was already a veteran brig-rat.
1
I have heard it said that General Smedley Butler was fond of observing: “Give me a regiment of brig-rats, and I’ll lick the world.”
It may be that Old Gimlet Eye never said this. But it is exactly the sort of thing he might have said, or, if not he, then many another Marine commander. For it is most especially a Marine sentiment, and when analyzed, it turns out to be not shameless or shocking, but merely this: a man who lands in the brig is apt to be a man of bold spirit and independent mind, who must occasionally rebel against the harsh and unrelenting discipline of the camp.
I am not attempting to exalt what should be condemned. I am not suggesting that because of their boldness or independence the brig-rats be forgiven and escape punishment. Brigged they must be, and brigged they were. Nor am I speaking of the habitual brig-rat, the steady malingerer, the good-for-nothing who is more often in the brig than out of it and who seeks to avoid every consequence of his uniform, even fighting. I speak of the young, high-hearted soldier whose very nature is bound to bring him into conflict with military discipline and to land him—unless he is exceptionally lucky—in the brig.
I speak of Chuckler and Chicken and Oakstump and a dozen others—and, of course, of myself.
George Washington’s birthday was the day on which Chuckler and I smudged the purity of our record books. The division was to parade in Melbourne that day. We were to march up Swanston Street, hardly a month after our arrival in Australia, to accept the plaudits of a city and nation still mindful of the Jap threat that had existed on Guadalcanal.
But Chuckler and I did not want to march. We wanted to see the parade, and this, you will understand, is quite impossible to the person who marches in it, rifle glued to the shoulder, eyes straight ahead and unswervingly focused on the nape of the forward fellow’s neck.
By some subterfuge we evaded this odious duty, and so it was that we were firmly entrenched outside the City Club, drinks in hand, when the First Marine Division marched in Melbourne on the afternoon of February 22, 1943. Around us rose the cheerful and delighted calls of the Australians, as our comrades swung past.
“Good on you, Yank!” “Ah, a bonzer bunch, indeed!” “Good-o, lads!” “Hurrah for the Yankee lads!”
The men wore field uniforms, combat packs and full combat dress. Rifles were slung and bayonets fixed; each man wore or carried the weapon which was his in battle. So they were impressive; lean, hard, tanned—clean-limbed and capable-looking. I swallowed frequently, and my eyes were moist as they passed by. Even the Australians—who have inherited the British fondness for heel-clicking, arm-swinging, strutting troops—even they finally fell silent at the noiseless passage of the First Marine Division, walking in that effortless yet wary way that marks the American fighting man moving to the front.
Soon, Chuckler sighted the waving red-and-gold banner of our regiment. We ducked out of sight, moving from our front row position back to the third or fourth. The First Battalion swung by. Then came ours, and our hearts beat faster. E Company, F Company—now, at last, H Company. There they were! There were Hoosier and Runner, Lieutenant Ivy-League and the Gentleman and Amish—all of them! Oh, what a proud sight! It was exhilarating, it was heady, it was as good as reading your own obituary or hearing your own funeral oration—to see them move so confidently and so proudly along, and to mark the admiration in the eyes of the Australians around us. Great day, indeed! We hoped it would never end, but it did, and there was nothing left to do but to substitute for this rare and genuine exhilaration that other artificial sort which is kept, corked and capped, in inexhaustible supply within bottles. So we turned around and re-entered the City Club.
And of course we drank too much.
By nightfall, we had had it. But Chuckler was due to stand guard at the slop chute that night. He took his leave, wavering slightly. But by the time he arrived at the Cricket Grounds, I was sure the waver would be gone. Chuckler had that faculty.
After a time, I too returned to camp, arriving there only by luck or the intercession of my guardian angel. I ran for a tram speeding up Wellington Parade, leapt for the platform, missed it, grabbed the handrail and was dragged for two blocks until a pair of strong-armed Diggers were able to pull me aboard, like a drowning man.
Wavering, I came erect and thrust out my chest: “Tha’s nothin’,” I said. “Las’ night—I got hit by one!” There was laughter until I reached my stop and got off.
I found Chuckler standing glumly outside the slop chute entrance. He had hoped for interior guard, where he might sneak a beer or two.
“I’ll get you one,” I promised.
I returned with a big glass seidel, out of which Chuckler might take a surreptitious sip. There were more seidels, until Chuckler said, “I’ve got to go to the head. Here—cover for me.” He gave me his pistol belt and helmet, and made off.
For a sentry to be drunk, and then to desert his post and surrender his weapon, is to combine cardinal sin with unforgivable offense. I was anxiously hoping that he would hurry back. But then an unfortunate thing happened.
Lieutenant Ivy-League came striding down the corridor.
I say it was unfortunate because Ivy-Le
ague was the officer of the day. More than that, he was still the man who had filched my cigars—the enlisted men’s cigars, if you will. My anger was nourished by the alcohol within me and I drew Chuckler’s pistol and pointed it at him and said, “Stop where you are, you lousy cigar-stealing son of a bitch—or I’ll blow your gentleman’s ass off.”
Or words to that effect.
Whatever the phraseology, the pistol made the point. Lieutenant Ivy-League retreated, returning reinforced by the corporal of the guard (Smoothface, who had rejoined the regiment) and the sergeant of the guard. While Ivy-League engaged me in conversation, Smoothface and the sergeant were infiltrating. Suddenly they sprang. I had been outwitted—now, I was overpowered.
“Get that pistol and pistol belt,” ordered Ivy-League, white with rage. “Now, find that damn fool Chuckler!”
There was no need. He came hurrying up, too late, alas! Ivy-League ordered him imprisoned. Quivering with fury, his hands clenching and unclenching, his lantern jaw so tautly set one could almost hear the molars grinding, Ivy-League surveyed us. Then—
“Brig ‘em!”
Smoothface led us away. Unaccountably, as we neared the forbidding steel-cage façade of the brig, we were given a reprieve. The sergeant said something and Smoothface halted.
“G’wan up to youah sacks,” he said. “Ivy-League’ll see yawl in the mawnin’.” He shook his head sadly, especially sorrowful as his gaze fell upon me. “Ah dunno what the damn hell’s got into yawl, Licky. Tryin’ to shoot the O.D.! Ah know a guy got ten years, just fer sockin’ ‘n officer.”
Someone awakened me roughly in the morning. It was the sergeant of the night before.
“C’mon, get your clothes on. Full green. You’re going to see the man.”
He stood bleakly by as I hastily covered my long underwear with battle jacket and trousers. The sergeant might be bleak exteriorly, but I was positively frozen interiorly. What I had done the preceding night was now upon me: twenty years at hard labor would not be too severe punishment for assaulting the officer of the day!