The Long March (3 page)

The Colonel walked toward the door. He seemed already to have put the incident out of his mind. “Culver,” he said, “if you can ever make radio contact with Able Company tell them to push off at 0600. If you can’t, send a runner down before dawn to see if they’ve got the word.” He gave the side of his thigh a rather self-conscious, gratuitous slap. “Well, good night.”

There was a chorus of “Good night, sirs,” and then the Major went out, too, trailed by O’Leary. Culver looked at his watch: it was nearly three o’clock.

Mannix looked up. “You going to try and get some sleep, Tom?”

“I’ve tried. It’s too cold. Anyway, I’ve got to take over the radio watch from Junior here. What’s your name, fellow?”

The boy at the radio looked up with a start, trembling with the cold. “McDonald, sir.” He was very young, with pimples and a sweet earnest expression; he had obviously just come from boot camp, for he had practically no hair.

“Well, you can shove off and get some sleep, if you can find a nice warm pile of pine needles somewhere.” The boy sleepily put down his earphones and went out, fastening the blackout flap behind him.

“I’ve tried,” Culver repeated, “but I just can’t get used to sleeping on the ground any more. I’m getting old and rheumatic. Anyway, the Old Rock was in here for about two hours before you came, using up my sack time while he told the Major and O’Leary and me all about his Shanghai days.”

“He’s a son of a bitch.” Mannix morosely cupped his chin in his hands, blinking into space, at the bare canvas wall. He was chewing on the butt of a cigar. The glare seemed to accentuate a flat Mongoloid cast in his face; he looked surly and tough and utterly exhausted. Shivering, he pulled his field jacket closer around his neck, and then, as Culver watched, his face broke out into the comical, exasperated smile which always heralded his bitterest moments of outrage —at the Marine Corps, at the system, at their helpless plight, the state of the world—tirades which, in their unqualified cynicism, would have been intolerable were they not always delivered with such gusto and humor and a kind of grisly delight. “Thirty … six …
miles,”
he said slowly, his eyes alive and glistening,
“thirty
…
six
…
miles!
Christ on a crutch! Do you realize how far that is? Why that’s as far as it is from Grand Central to Stamford, Connecticut! Why, man, I haven’t walked a hundred consecutive yards since 1945. I couldn’t go thirty-six miles if I were sliding downhill the whole way on a sled. And a
forced
march, mind you. You just don’t stroll along, you know. That’s like running. That’s a regulation two-and-a-half miles per hour with only a ten-minute break each hour. So H & S Company is fouled up. So maybe it is. He can’t take green troops like these and do that. After a couple of seven- or ten- or fifteen-mile conditioning hikes, maybe so. If they were young. And rested. Barracks-fresh. But this silly son of a bitch is going to have all these tired, flabby old men flapping around on the ground like a bunch of fish after the first two miles. Christ on a frigging crutch!”

“He’s not a bad guy, Al,” Culver said, “he’s just a regular. Shot in the ass with the Corps. A bit off his nut, like all of them.”

But Mannix had made the march seem menacing, there was no doubt about that, and Culver—who for the moment had been regarding the hike as a sort of careless abstraction, a prolonged evening’s stroll—felt a solid dread creep into his bones, along with the chill of the night. Involuntarily, he shuddered. He felt suddenly unreal and disoriented, as if through some curious second sight or seventh sense his surroundings had shifted, ever so imperceptibly, into another dimension of space and time. Perhaps he was just so tired. Freezing marsh and grass instead of wood beneath his feet, the preposterous cold in the midst of summer, Mannix’s huge distorted shadow cast brutishly against the impermeable walls by a lantern so sinister that its raging noise had the sound of a typhoon at sea—all these, just for an instant, did indeed contrive to make him feel as if they were adrift at sea in a dazzling, windowless box, ignorant of direction or of any points of the globe, and with no way of telling. What he had had for the last years—wife and child and home—seemed to have existed in the infinite past or, dreamlike again, never at all, and what he had done yesterday and the day before, moving wearily with this tent from one strange thicket to a stranger swamp and on to the green depths of some even stranger ravine, had no sequence, like the dream of a man delirious with fever. All time and space seemed for a moment to be enclosed within the tent, itself unmoored and unhelmed upon a dark and compassless ocean.

And although Mannix was close by, he felt profoundly alone. Something that had happened that evening—something Mannix had said, or suggested, perhaps not even that, but only a fleeting look in the Captain’s face, the old compressed look of torment mingled with seething outrage—something that evening, without a doubt, had added to the great load of his loneliness an almost intolerable burden. And that burden was simply an anxiety, nameless for the moment and therefore the more menacing. It was not merely the prospect of the hike. Exhaustion had just made him vulnerable to a million shaky, anony- mous fears—fears which he might have resisted had he felt strong and refreshed, or younger. His age was showing badly. All this would have been easy at twenty-three. But he was thirty, and seventy-two virtually sleepless hours had left him feeling bushed and defeated. And there was another subtle difference he felt about his advanced age—a new awakening, an awareness—and therein lay the reason for his fears.

It was simply that after six years of an ordered and sympathetic life—made the more placid by the fact that he had assumed he had put war forever behind him—it was a shock almost mystically horrifying, in its unreality, to find himself in this new world of frigid nights and blazing noons, of disorder and movement and fanciful pursuit. He was insecure and uprooted and the prey of many fears. Not for days but for weeks, it seemed, the battalion had been on the trail of an invisible enemy who always eluded them and kept them pressing on—across swamps and blasted fields and past indolent, alien streams. This enemy was labeled Aggressor, on maps brightly spattered with arrows and symbolic tanks and guns, but although there was no sign of his aggression he fled them nonetheless and they pushed the sinister chase, sending up shells and flares as they went. Five hours’ pause, five hours in a tent somewhere, lent to the surrounding grove of trees a warm, homelike familiarity that was almost like permanence, and he left each command post feeling lonely and uprooted, as they pushed on after the spectral foe into the infinite strangeness of another swamp or grove. Fatigue pressed down on his shoulders like strong hands, and he awoke in the morning feeling weary, if he ever slept at all. Since their constant movement made the sunlight come from ever-shifting points of the compass, he was often never quite sure—in his steady exhaustion—whether it was morning or afternoon. The displacement and the confusion filled him with an anxiety which would not have been possible six years before, and increased his fatigue. The tent itself, in its tiny, momentary permanence, might have had all of the appeal of the home which he so desperately hungered for, had it not been so cold, and had it not seemed, as he sat there suddenly shivering with fear, so much more like a coffin instead.

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.”