The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps (10 page)

“I suppose I should have gotten him out of there the first night,” I said, “pulled rank on his son or something and made sure that he got some proper treatment. But the doctor at the hospital told me that he was already done for.”

“No,” said Paul, “you really had no responsibility in the thing. What was the old fellow’s name anyway?”

“Jeeter,” I said, “regular warrant officer, retired.”

Paul’s jaw dropped and over his face came a look of sudden dismay.
“No,”
he said, in a slow wondering voice. “No, it’s hard to believe—Gunner Jeeter, Stud Jeeter he was called—dead! I can hardly believe it! Fellow with a sort of sad hound dog’s face, melancholy eyes?”

“The same,” I replied. “Yes.”

He shook his head gently and reflectively. “So the Gunner’s gone to his reward,” he said, and his lips were touched with a wry, mischievous smile. “I only hope there are a lot of hot broads in heaven. The Gunner was one of the greatest swordsmen ever to hit the Corps.”

“I’ve heard of the Gunner, haven’t I, Paul?” said one of the other officers. “Wasn’t he a Medal of Honor winner in the First World War?”

“No,” Paul said. “That decoration he got in Nicaragua during the 1920s, fighting the Communist rebels. Although you are right, he had been with the Fifth Marines at Château-Thierry. Stud Jeeter dead and gone, why it’s like the passing of an era!” He sighed and ran his hand through his sandy, close-cropped hair. And an odd expression—remote, searching, reminiscent—came to his eyes, a look that I found unsettlingly brimful of emotion; it was not quite, but manifestly close to, real sorrow, and I discerned a mistiness that for an instant seemed to presage tears. But then he laughed hesitantly and said, “God, he was one of the most colorful characters the Corps has ever seen. Boozer, brawler, whoremonger—and brave as Achilles. Had downed his share of piss and punk, too, but one of the best men with a heavy-machine-gun unit the Corps ever produced. God, I didn’t know he had died!” Again the tone was of real chagrin. “I
wish
I’d known! I’ll have to go to the funeral.”

“I believe the funeral was yesterday,” I put in, “down in South Carolina.”

“Did you know the Gunner, Paul?” one of the officers inquired. The captain and the major, though older than myself by a few years, were considerably younger than Paul, and when they asked these questions about the Gunner, all eager and attentive, I was reminded of something almost tribal—of junior Apache or Sioux braves in the presence of a wiser, more seasoned chieftain, seeking a word of a fabled place and time, of heroes who fought before the reservations existed, when the buffalo thronged the plains and drums beat along the warpath. The Old Corps.

“He was truly one of the Old Breed,” Paul mused. “They don’t make them like that anymore. Hell, yes, I knew him, I knew the Gunner well. My first year of sea duty as a lieutenant,
on the
Maryland
, he was a sergeant in the marine detachment. That was in ’32 or ’33, and he taught me everything about sea duty I ever knew. Then later on, when I was in Shanghai before the war, the Gunner was there—a warrant officer by then—and again he taught me as much about infantry tactics as I ever learned at Quantico. He was too old to get in the fighting in the last war, and not in very good health, either. The liquor eventually got at him. I think he finally developed a diabetes that put him out of commission. He never would see a doctor, even in Shanghai when he was having terrible trouble with his liver. So I don’t wonder that just now he wouldn’t go to the hospital, even when he was coughing his guts up. Son of a bitch! What a
sorry
, pathetic way for the old fellow to go out! I’m sad that I didn’t know he was up here, that I somehow couldn’t have paid a last goodbye.”

Appropriately, as Paul spoke (indeed, with an appropriateness that could only be called banal), the sound of a bugle fell on the late-afternoon air and I glanced outside the club where a flag was being lowered while the bugler blew “Retreat,” and a scattering of marines had paused at momentary attention, their figures casting lean, gangly shadows in the slant of sunset. And for a long instant I was seized—as I always have been when I hear those piercing trumpet notes—with a sense of loss and sadness, a vision of tropic seas and strange coasts, storm-swept distances accompanied always and always in my mind’s innermost recess with the muffled tramp of booted footfalls, as of legions of men being hurried to unknown destinies. Then the sound of the bugle died away and I heard Paul’s voice again through the growing clatter of the bar, where the officers’ wives’ unbridled
laughter and “My Truly, Truly Fair,” booming from the Muzak, battled each other over the incessant churning of the cocktail shakers.

“And so his boy became a marine, did he?” he said to me. “He was so proud of that kid. The last time I saw the Gunner—it must have been ten years ago, in San Diego, just after Pearl Harbor—he said he only wished his boy had been born early enough to fight in the war. But he also said no matter, his kid would be a marine someday. And so he is. How he adored that boy! He’ll get his chance in Korea. Nice fellow?”

“Charming,” I said, misty-eyed.

“That Gunner!” Paul exclaimed. “Christ, you know he wouldn’t salute any officer less than flag grade, and there were even some colonels he wouldn’t give the time of day to. Wore his dungarees everywhere, even at parade. What a character!” He went on with a smile, shaking his head, deeply moved, reminiscent: “You know, in 1942 they had surveyed him out for medical reasons at Pendleton—he must have been over fifty then—yet they couldn’t make him quit. Here he was, technically separated from the service, and he had the gumption, the grit—the
brass
to hitch a ride, I mean literally stow away on a transport going to Pearl Harbor, where he stormed into the commanding general’s office—in his dungarees, mind you—and demanded that he be assigned to duty somewhere in the First Division. He meant Guadalcanal, too, and no rotten office job. Of course, he couldn’t make it, but what
grit
, what splendid
brass!
No sir, they don’t make marines like the Gunner anymore. Did you ever hear how he won that Medal of Honor—”

The Old Corps.
Suddenly I understood that despite
Paul’s vivid anecdotal style I really didn’t give a damn how the old fart had gotten his Medal of Honor—and this was truly still a measure of my disaffection with the Corps and all it stood for. Paul, however, had warmed to his subject with all the vivacity and zeal of one of those pukka sahib types, usually played by David Niven, memorializing vanished exploits on the Afghan border; and just as my disappointment in Paul became sharpest and most vexing I realized how foolish it was for me to feel that way: he was a marine above all, first and foremost,
always
a marine, and for me it had been the dreamiest wishful thinking, goofy as a schoolgirl’s, to see him as truly “literary” or “artistic” when these were merely components of an enlightened and superior dilettantism. It was extraordinary enough that those delicate aspects of his personality had not been obliterated by the all-demanding, all-molding pressures of the military system, had not been trampled by the ruthless boot of an organization insisting of its members that their sensibilities remain male and muscular, their culture sterile, ingrown, and philistine if not mindless. He had read Camus. This alone, it seemed to me, was almost a miracle.

The bugle call still lingered in my mind, suffusing me with a mood both restless and somber, and as I sat there in the twilight listening to Paul’s stories about the Gunner, listening to his warm and feeling panegyric to this old departed mercenary warrior, to these tales of the Old Corps with their memories and echoes of sea duty and shore leave, of jungle bivouacs, of Haitian outposts, Nicaraguan patrols, Chinese skirmishes, and other relics of America’s magisterial thrusts and forays throughout the hemisphere and the world, I realized that Paul was certainly at least as comfortable, if not
more so, when talking of these matters as about French cuisine or the gentle art of fiction. He was a professional, and the ties to the small elite fellowship to which he belonged—ties of nostalgia as well as loyalty and faith—were as strong (and no more to be wondered at) in the end as those ties which bind other men to a vocation in science or the arts or a political belief or—to be more nearly precise—a church.

THE SUICIDE RUN

I
MUST MAKE A SMALL CONFESSION.
Despite my aversion to military things, there are aspects of the life that I have found tolerable—fascinating even, though inferior to chess or Scarlatti. Take mortars, for example. Although I was born with, I’m sure, less than average manual dexterity, the use of mortars in the field—and my ability to supervise the men who handled them—never failed to please me in its neat meshing of teamwork, speed, subtlety of reflex, and mechanical skill. Rather like an athletic ballet with men in almost synchronous motion, the whole process of setting up the long tubes on their bipods and baseplates, locating the aiming stakes, precisely leveling and balancing the weapons with their various little cranks and wheels—all of these comprised a nimble, exciting prelude to the penultimate racket as the rounds popped forth on their lethal journey through the empyrean and to the final, gratifying, earth-jolting
crump-crump
when—a mile away—the shells blew some
poor nigger shack to sawdust. To be sure, it was never so neat and pretty in combat. Nevertheless, I think it all satisfied a thwarted boyish longing in me, a desire for the loudest and fattest firecracker in the world, though in addition there was something unnervingly priapean about those stiff up-tilted tubes poking the air, and my pleasure may have been rooted in a darker source; whatever, the sense of rhythm, precision, and completion I achieved from working with mortars helps provide another reason why military service and infantry combat in particular is such a magic lure for certain men.

Of course it was not unheard of, during training, for a mortar to burst apart with dreadful effect, killing or maiming everyone nearby, and once that summer—in another regiment—several faulty rounds fell disastrously short of the target and blotted out the lives of eight young recruits; such eventualities occasionally caused me to sweat and made my mouth grow dry with fear. But in general I managed to avoid thoughts like these and took pleasure in the work. In fact, rather paradoxically, it was the severely military aspects of my recall to service which I liked the most, or minded the least. My flesh had fallen into soft disrepair in the stews of Greenwich Village; the new routine was strenuous, with many days and nights on training problems, amphibious landings, and sadistic hikes, and after the first shock wore off it was an actual delight to develop a trooper’s appetite and to feel the muscle tone return to my flabby, once-sodden limbs.

I acquired a glorious suntan: a couple of snapshots taken of me at the time record the very figure of a strapping, bronzed, miserable young marine. But I had forgotten how
appealing, how spirit-enhancing sheer physical exertion could be, and as I galloped through the swamps and woods with my merry crew of mortarmen I was curiously relieved of my bitter discontent—as if in a perverse way the closer my proximity was to the grime and sweat of the battle, and the more intent became my preoccupation with the niceties of infantry tactics, the less I was harried by that pitiless anxiety. No, what brought me closest to true despair was not the war games or even the frequent lectures on subjects like field sanitation, cargo loading, and the Communist menace (I could usually sleep through these), but the periods of leisure—in the evenings or on weekends—when the free time I had allowed me to reflect on the awfulness of my future. To gripe bitterly in the company of my fellow sufferers provided some solace, but its cathartic effect was ultimately limited. Therefore, during my off-duty hours at the base I retreated more and more into a private world, seeing my friend Lacy now and then or, locked in my sweltering room, poring over the galley proofs of my first novel with all the finicky vigilance of a medieval scholastic and, finally, indulging myself in epic sessions of both fancy and plain onanism. I am sure that it was during this summer at Lejeune that I shed once and for all whatever guilt I had ever possessed about the unnameable sin, Christendom’s vilest. Having deprived me of an outlet for my needs, the Marine Corps could at least not outwit me when it came to my innermost dreams, and I embarked on a one-man orgy that in slyness and ingenuity would have outstripped the fancy of Alexander Portnoy Certainly enforced sexual famine is one of the most important keys to an understanding of the genius of the military mystique: cause a soldier to ache with such longing for
the odor of a woman’s flesh that it becomes an insupportable rage, and you have often created a man who will grab a bayonet and coolly eviscerate Aggressor Enemy.

To put it simply, I thought the chances were extremely good that I would die without ever getting laid again, and much of my extra-military energy was spent trying to prevent this from happening—even though it occurs to me now that my frantic pursuit of the goal brought me once very close to sudden death. And so a word about this—