“Meanwhile I am shot.”
“Well big fucking deal.”
“I am bleeding, Bushnell.”
“You deserve to bleed. You deserve to go white and fucking die. This is a stunt. It is just the oldest stunt in the world. How do you expect them to walk in here and say all right you’re shot, Oswald, so you stay here and the rest of them have to ship their asses out to sea.”
“Because I am shot. That’s how I expect them to say it.”
“Completely ignoring the fact you hit only flesh, which it looks like it to me. It’s a court-martial offense, I guarantee, the minute they see a weapon that’s not authorized.”
“I took the gun out of the footlocker to turn it in when it went off.”
“Tell us how small and cute it is.”
“I am bleeding.”
“You’ll be hit with wrongful conduct, regardless. Same as if you had a riot gun.”
“It went off when I dropped it. I picked it up off the floor, which at the time I felt dizzy and thought to myself I’m in a state of shock so I closed the footlocker in an attempt to sit down, which is how you found me.”
“Don’t tell me. Tell them, shitbird.”
“Just get me a corpsman, Bushnell. Somebody has to treat me. I’m a wounded Marine.”
DIAGNOSIS: WOUND, MISSILE, UPPER LEFT ARM GUNSHOT, NO A OR N INVOLVEMENT #8255
1. Within command—work.
2. Patient dropped 45 caliber automatic, pistol discharged when it struck the floor, and missile struck patient in left arm causing the injury.
NARRATIVE SUMMARY:
This 18 year male accidentally shot himself in the left arm with a sidearm, reportedly of 22 caliber. Examination revealed the wound of entrance in the medial portion of the left upper arm, just above the elbow. There was no evidence of neurologic circulatory, or bony injury. The wound of entrance was allowed to heal and the missile was then excised through a separate incision two inches above the wound of entry. The missile appeared to be a 22 slug. The wound healed well, and the patient was discharged to duty.
SURG: 10-5-57: FOREIGN BODY, REMOVAL OF, FROM EXTREMITIES, LEFT UPPER ARM #926
Postcard #1. Aboard the USS Terrell County in the South China Sea. Ozzie sits on the afterdeck with Reitmeyer, counting the days of ghost maneuvers in the drenching heat, wondering if he’ll ever see land again.
“What do you say I teach you to play chess?”
“Fuck you.”
“It’s for your own stupid good, Reitmeyer. Plus we have to pass the time somehow.”
“Take a flying fuck at the moon.”
“The best players in the world are generally Russian.”
“Fuck them, in spades.”
Men sit dazed in the streaming light.
Postcard #2. Corregidor, among the war ruins. John Wayne comes to visit the homesick leathernecks of MACS-l, interrupting work on a movie being shot somewhere in the Pacific. Ozzie has mess duty, he has mess duty all the time now, but he sneaks a look at the famous man eating lunch with a group of officers—roast beef and gravy that he has helped prepare. He wants to get close to John Wayne, say something authentic. He watches John Wayne talk and laugh. It’s remarkable and startling to see the screen laugh repeated in life. It makes him feel good. The man is doubly real. He does not cheat or disappoint. When John Wayne laughs, Ozzie smiles, he lights up, he practically disappears in his own glow. Someone takes a photograph of John Wayne and the officers, and Ozzie wonders if he will show up in the background, in the passageway, grinning. It’s time to get back to the galley but he watches John Wayne a moment longer, thinking of the cattle drive, in Red River, the great expectant moment when it starts. Stillness, nervous steers, horsemen in dawn light, the rim of hills, the deep sure voice of aging John Wayne, the voice with so many shades of feeling and reassurance, John Wayne resolutely to his adopted son: “Take ’em to Missouri, Matt.” Then rearing mounts, trail hands yahooing, the music and rousing song, the honest stubbled faces (men he feels he knows), all the glory and dust of the great drive north.
He reads Walt Whitman in hospital ruins.
One thing about Konno. He never talked to Lee in a personal way. He seemed to be reciting, talking into a Dictaphone. There was no flexibility in his manner. He didn’t see the individual.
One other thing. He was in over his head, technically speaking. He didn’t know the terminology, all the phrases and labels in aviation electronics, high-altitude reconnaissance. An elevator operator. Ha ha.
Lee didn’t let on that he’d wounded himself with the derringer Konno had supplied. First because the strategy had failed to keep him in Japan. Then, too, he didn’t want Konno to know he’d been under his influence.
No talking.
You stand at attention until assigned.
You do not step on white paint at any time. Segments of the floor are painted white. Do not touch white. There are white lines running down passageways. Do not touch or cross these lines. Every urinal is situated behind a white line. You need permission to piss.
You take your beatings in the area between the chest and groin, so bruises won’t show. This is tradition. Or a guard will put a bucket on your head and whack it with a truncheon.
If you are assigned a cell, your guard will hose out the cell while you are inside it.
There are special punishment facilities called the hole, the box, the cage—names with a vivid history familiar from the movies.
You never walk where there is room to run. You run to and from your storage box. You stop at every white line and wait for permission to cross. You run in the compound, your grub hoe held at port arms.
You are processed naked, holding your seabag above your head at arm’s length, shouting aye aye sir and no sir at the slightest sound. You are permitted to lower the seabag to the back of your neck only when you bend over to allow them to check your anal cavity for printed matter, narcotics, alcoholic beverages, digging tools, TV sets, implements of self-destruction.
This was the brig in Atsugi, a large frame building with cement floors, a number of storerooms, offices and compartments, a turn-key’s area and a large chicken-wire enclosure that contained twenty-one bunks. The enclosure was filled to capacity. New prisoners were lodged in six concrete cells located along a passageway marked with white lines. The cells were designed for single occupancy but summer was the season of misfits, runaways, violent drinkers, born losers, petty thieves, desperadoes, men of every manner of delicate temperament, and Oswald had a cellmate named Bobby Dupard, a slim sad-eyed Negro with a copper cast to his hair and skin.
Oswald, first in, got the stationary bunk. Dupard got a swayback cot and a mattress that was aglimmer with flat-bodied biting things—things you could crack between your fingernails and they’d break into two and become four and then eight, swarming back into their cottony nests to breed some more, so what was the point of even trying, according to Dupard.
They whispered to each other in the night.
“Are you saying when you kill them, they multiply?”
“I’m saying you can’t kill them. Some things too small.”
“Sleep on top of the blanket,” Oswald told him.
“They get on through. They bore through.”
“That’s termites, that bore.”
“Hey, Jim, I live with these things for years.”
“Put the blanket on the floor. Sleep on the floor.”
“Half the floor is white lines, like they foreseen. Which anyway the lice jump down on top of me.”
A nearly bare place, simple objects, basic needs. Oswald’s senses were fearfully keyed. He tasted iron on his tongue. He heard the voices from the chicken wire, guards grumbling like heavy dogs. When they hosed down the floor of the cell block he smelled the earth embedded in concrete—pebbles, gravel, slag and broken stone, all distantly mixed with ammonia, like contempt blended in.
Dupard was from Texas.
“Leads the nation in homicides,” Oswald said.
>
“That’s the place.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Dallas.
“I’m from Fort Worth, off and on, myself.”
“Neighbors. Ain’t that something. How old is a kid like yourself?”
“Eighteen,” Oswald told him.
“You a baby. They throw a baby into prison. How much time you bring with you?”
“Twenty-eight days. ”
“What’s the charge?”
“First I accidentally shot myself in the arm, which they court martialed me for, but suspended the sentence.”
“If it’s accidentally, what’s their point?”
“They said I used an unregistered weapon. I had a private weapon.
“Which they never handed out.”
“Which I found. But that doesn’t matter in their eyes as long as the weapon is not registered.”
“But they suspend the sentence, so then what?”
“Then there was a second court-martial.”
“Sound like somebody push his luck.”
“Based on an incident. That’s all it was.”
“I believe it.”
“There’s a sergeant, Rodriguez, that’s been giving me mess duty all the time. Doesn’t like me, which I guarantee it’s mutual. So we had words more than once. I let him know how I felt about being singled out. He told me it’s the court-martial that’s keeping me out of the radar hut, plus general standards, which he’s saying I don’t dress or behave up to standards. I saw him at a local bar and went right over. I told him. I said get me off these menial jobs. We were standing jaw to jaw. He thought I’d say my piece and back off. But I stood right there. There were people pressing close. My mind was already working. Potential witnesses. I told him what I thought. That’s all. I didn’t wise off. I was simple and clear. I said I wanted fair treatment. I told him. I didn’t bait him. He said I was baiting him. He said I wouldn’t get him to fight. More trouble than it was worth. Lose him a stripe or something. Some guys egged us on. They told Rodriguez whip him good. But I wasn’t trying to get him to fight. I was stating my case in the matter. He called me maricón. He whispered to me, maricón, with a little sweet smile. I told him I know what that means. I heard Puerto Ricans use those words. I know those words. He said he was no Puerto Rican. I told him don’t use Puerto Rican words. It was heated then. They were all around us. Somebody shoved me and I spilled my beer all over Rodriguez. Accidentally spilled. I said you saw I was pushed. I told him. I didn’t apologize or make an excuse. It wasn’t my fault. There was shoving all around. I was only standing up for my military rights.”
“Regulate the voice,” Bobby whispered.
“So that was the second court-martial. But I defended myself this time. I questioned Rodriguez on the stand. I was proved not guilty of throwing my drink on him, which is technically an assault charge.”
“How come here we are, having this talk?”
“They said I was guilty of a lesser charge. Wrongful use of provoking words to a staff noncommissioned officer. Article one seventeen. Bang.”
“Slam the gate,” Bobby said.
He wore faded utilities that still carried the imprint of long-gone sergeant stripes and he worked in the fields, clearing stones and burning trash. The guard wore a .45 and kept his gun side turned away from the prisoners. There was no talking or rest. They worked in the rain. There were great billowing rains that first week, rain in broad expanses, slow and lilting. Smoke drifted over the men, smelling of wet garbage, half burnt. Their useless work trailed them through the day. He thought there was a good chance he would go to OCS. He’d passed the qualifying exam for corporal before shipping out. He’d be in good shape if it wasn’t for the shooting incident and the spilled-drink incident. He could still be in good shape. He was smart enough to make officer. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was would they let him. He cut brush and cleared fields of heavy stones. The issue was would they rig the thing against him.
“I landed here like a dream,” Dupard whispered that night. “I figure I’m already dead. It’s just a question they shovel the dirt in my face.”
“What did they charge you with?”
“There was a fire to my rack, which they accused me. But in my own mind I could like verbalize it either way. In other way of saying it, the evidence was weak.”
“But you did it.”
“It’s not that easy to say. I could go either way and be convinced in my own mind.”
“You’re not sure you really wanted to do it. You were just thinking about doing it.”
“I was like, Should I drop this cigarette?”
“It just seemed to happen while you were thinking it.”
“Like it happened on its own.”
“Did the rack go up?”
“Scorch some linen was all. Like you fall asleep a tenth of a second, smoking.”
“Why did you want to start a fire?”
“It’s a question of working it out in my own mind, the exact why I did it. Because the psychology is definitely there.”
“Then what?”
“Mainly one thing. I deserted.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to book on out of here,” Bobby said. “I am not a Marine. Simple. They ought to see that and just call a halt. Because the longer it goes on, there’s no chance I deal with this shit. ”
In the prison literature he’d read, Oswald was always coming across an artful old con who would advise the younger man, give him practical tips, talk in sweeping philosophical ways about the larger questions. Prison invited larger questions. It made you wish for an experienced perspective, for the knowledge of some grizzled figure with kind and tired eyes, a counselor, wise to the game. He wasn’t sure what he had here in Bobby R. Dupard.
The next day he came back from a work detail and found two guards in the cell pummeling Dupard. They took their time. It looked like something else at first, an epileptic fit, a heart attack, but then he understood it was a beating. Bobby was on the deck trying to cover up and the two men took turns hitting him in the kidneys and ribs. One guard sat on Oswald’s bunk, leaning way over to throw short lefts like a man trying to start an outboard. The other guard was down on one knee, biting his lip, pausing to aim his shots so they wouldn’t catch Bobby’s crossed arms. Bobby had a look on his face like this is bound to end someday. He was working hard to keep them unfulfilled.
They called him Brillo Head. He showed a little smile, as if only the spoken word might perk his interest. They went back to pounding.
Oswald stopped at the white line outside the cell. He thought if he stood absolutely still, looking vaguely right or vaguely left, waiting patiently for them to finish what they were doing so he could request permission to cross the line, they might be inclined to let him enter without a beating.
He hated the guards, secretly sided with them against some of the prisoners, thought they deserved what they got, the prisoners who were stupid and cruel. He felt his rancor constantly shift, felt secret satisfactions, hated the brig routine, despised the men who could not master it, although he knew it was contrived to defeat them all.
When a man was returned to his unit from the chicken-wire enclosure, a man from the cells took his place.
When a man in the chicken wire fouled up, he got a cell of his own, C-rats to eat, close and horrendous attention.
When a man from the cells fouled up, he was thrown in the hole, a junior-size cell with a dirt floor and a cat hole to crap in.
Because of the overcrowding, there was constant shifting of prisoners, many ceremonial occasions at white lines, inspections, friskings, shakedowns, foul-ups.
The night of the beating, Dupard had nothing to say, although Ozzie knew he was not asleep.
He tried to feel history in the cell. This was history out of George Orwell, the territory of no-choice. He could see how he’d been headed here since the day he was born. The brig was invented just for him. It was just another name for the stunt
ed rooms where he’d spent his life.
He’d once told Reitmeyer that communism was the one true religion. He was speaking seriously but also for effect. He could enrage Reitmeyer by calling himself an atheist. Reitmeyer thought you had to be forty years old before you could claim that distinction. It was a position you had to earn through years of experience, like winning seniority in the Teamsters.
Maybe the brig was a kind of religion too. All prison. Something you carried with you all your life, a counterforce to politics and lies. This went deeper than anything they could tell you from the pulpit. It carried a truth no one could contradict. He’d been headed here from the start. Inevitable.
Trotsky in the Bronx, only blocks away.
Maybe what has to happen is that the individual must allow himself to be swept along, must find himself in the stream of no-choice, the single direction. This is what makes things inevitable. You use the restrictions and penalties they invent to make yourself stronger. History means to merge. The purpose of history is to climb out of your own skin. He knew what Trotsky had written, that revolution leads us out of the dark night of the isolated self. We live forever in history, outside ego and id. He wasn’t sure he knew exactly what the id was but he knew it lay hidden in Hidell.
A naked bulb burning in the passageway. He watched Dupard in the shadows, sitting on the infested cot, showing an empty stare. His bony wrists dangled out of the faded shirt. He had a gangliness that made him seem sixteen, rompish and clumsy, but he moved well running—running in the compound, running to the head, eyeing those white lines. A long face, hangdog, sad-sack, and dusty hair, reddish brown. Eyes suspicious and hurt, quick to look away. Oswald lay still, aware of a drone in the block, a heaving breath, grimness, massive sleep. Dupard undressed, got under the blanket and began to masturbate, turned toward the wall. Oswald watched his top shoulder twitch. Then he turned to his own wall, closed his eyes, tried to will himself to sleep.