Part 3 (2/2)

I kept reading. The structure of the chronicle was clearly established in the first long paragraph: A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died.

I threw off the sheet and propped the hefty magazine against my belly. I'd read Hersey before. Most literate marines who hadn't seen action had been moved to pity and terror, or were sometimes merely worried half to death, by his reports in Life magazine about the grisly combat on Guadalca.n.a.l, and now the clear, precise, understated writing that I remembered from Into the Valley, which I'd read on Saipan, with its excruciating descriptions of young American troops in the toils of battle, was again on display. Only here the sufferers were j.a.panese. I was well into the narrative, five or six pages along, reading about a survivor named Mrs. Nakamura, and her remembrance of the blinding white flash that enveloped her seconds before the blast brought the house down in splinters around herself and her children. Just then from below I heard a horn toot and realized it was my father's car pool group waiting on the street. Hersey's account, filled with suspense and portent, had been so absorbing that I'd forgotten about breakfast. I hopped out of bed and threw on a robe, then hurried downstairs with the New Yorker in hand.

”Mornin', son. What are you going to do today?” said my father. He was standing at the front door in his s.h.i.+rtsleeves, the jacket of his suit draped over one arm. It was ominously hot, hinting at one of those brutal Tidewater days just beginning to build up a head of steam. No wind stirred on the harbor. A couple of electric fans sent a tepid breeze through the hallway. The mockingbird in the locust tree commenced a spiritless chant, as if already daunted by the heat.

”I guess I'll spend most of my time at the library,” I lied, knowing where in fact I most likely would be. ”I'm making my way through Sinclair Lewis.”

”Well, I'll see you tonight,” he said. ”I reckon you'll be having lunch downtown.” What he meant was that as usual we would not be sitting down for a midday meal together here at home. Many white-collar employees at the s.h.i.+pyard still observed the old-fas.h.i.+oned convention of shunning the few greasy-spoon establishments in town and returning to their houses for lunch. Although the trip required at least fifteen minutes in either direction, the s.h.i.+pyard's liberal policy of allowing its office workers an hour-and-a-half lunch break gave my father the chance to enjoy a fairly relaxed meal with Isabel. Small-town southerners frowned on restaurants in general, and so this noontime routine (abandoned throughout most of the barbaric North, my father observed) was a way of observing a civilized amenity long taken for granted in places like France. But, as my father surmised, I would not be sharing this midday pleasure. Given our p.r.i.c.kly relations.h.i.+p, it was hard enough for Isabel and me to get through breakfast and dinner without a spat; the extra meal would be more than either of us could handle. As it was, I truly dreaded breakfast alone in Isabel's company without my father's moderating presence.

”Have a fine day, son,” he said, and hugged me with one arm impulsively as he often did. I could almost feel his love flow into me. I often had the notion that he was still in a state of mild shock, as I was, over my return from the Pacific, not wounded or in a coffin but nimble and breathing. And this despite his abiding belief that G.o.d would watch over me. I was his ”only root and offspring,” as he ceaselessly told people, echoing biblical text, and he had prayed long and hard for my survival, telling me in the many letters he wrote me while I was on Saipan that he knew I would return in good shape, thereby affirming more faith in Divine Providence than I myself even remotely possessed. It would doubtless have shattered him utterly had I been destroyed, after my mother's death only brief years before. So when he hugged me the emotion was still intense, and I hugged him back with feeling. Then I watched as he went down the steps to join his fellow cost estimators, midlevel drones whose dogged labor with slide rules and adding machines, however boring, had been essential in producing such leviathans as the carriers Yorktown and Enterprise and thus helped in disposing of the Yellow Peril.

I had a moment's reverie about those adding machines, and I recalled how utterly devoted he was to his job, often working on his own time and showing up at his office on Sunday afternoon with me in tow. At age ten or eleven I was fascinated by that office. It occupied a grand vaultlike s.p.a.ce on the second floor of the s.h.i.+pyard's headquarters and had a view of the acres of industrial area below. On weekdays the yard was truly a satanic mill, throbbing and smoking and aswarm with thousands of black and white workers who out of habituation or indifference seemed unfazed by the inhuman noise. A terrific clanging erupted from the machine shops and foundries, and there were flashes of fire; out of the hidden guts of huge sheds came inexplicable booming noises and the chatter of riveting hammers, while above the dry docks, where great s.h.i.+ps loomed, there were soaring cranes that made, intermittently, a mysterious aerial screaming. Steam locomotives snaked their way through the yard hauling freight, and their whistles added to the racket. But on those afternoons of my reverie the whole operation was shut down, perfectly still, as if in the grip of an immense anesthesia, and in the Sabbath hush I listened to my father clicking away on his adding machine and felt stirrings of disquiet, the mild nausea of unfocused dread.

Why this fidget and anxiousness? No doubt the contrast between the weekday bedlam and this Sunday silence. But it was also the workplace itself, a gloomy oblong of aching uniformity, row upon row of desks, each desk with its gooseneck lamp, its ponderous black Underwood typewriter, its Burroughs adding machine. Well before my awareness of Kafka or Chaplin's Modern Times, or Karel apek's surreal vision of mechanical doom, I sensed that my father's daily habitat was oppressive and slightly inhuman. I was repelled but also fascinated by the adding machines and I would spend the time punching brainlessly at the keys while my father's own machine kept up its clickety-clack, its monotonous computation. I'd wander around the floor, peering into other offices with more rows of identical desks, gooseneck lamps, Burroughs adding machines. In the echoing sepulchral men's room, with a ceiling as high as a church dome, I'd stand atilt at one of the American Standard urinals, in monumental porcelain, and close my eyes, inhaling the smell from the camphoraceous block of deodorant and listening to the water trickling down. Why am I here? I'd wonder in a pre-existential existential spasm. Back at his desk my father would still be bent over his machine, which unspooled a ribbon of paper tape that reached to the floor. At the office window I'd gaze out at the s.h.i.+pyard's sunlit vastness, at the ma.s.sive piles of sheet metal, at the foundries and shops where nothing stirred, and, in the distance, the hulls of s.h.i.+ps in mid-creation, where the jagged silhouettes of cranes brought to mind the shapes of prehistoric birds I'd seen in The Book of Knowledge. The scene overwhelmed me with a sense of my own smallness, and I'd wonder one more time at my father's connection with this majestic undertaking. I only wished, in my secret self, that his job was somehow more heroic, that he might, for example, be an operator of one of those spectacular cranes ...

This month would mark my father's thirtieth year at the s.h.i.+pyard, and he was proud of having contributed what he called his ”mite” to the war effort. From the open windows of the car I heard his laughter, then a high-pitched No! No! as he absorbed the gentle ribbing the crew gave him each morning, and I felt another warm loving pang even as I hesitated there sweating a little, ready to face Isabel.

Out of the plastic larynx of the table-top radio, perched on a shelf in the ”breakfast nook,” came the subdued squawk of the morning news program, largely items of local (or state of Virginia) interest emanating from station WGH, call letters standing for World's Greatest Harbor-more munic.i.p.al boosterism. Isabel and I exchanged exaggeratedly polite good mornings while she fussed around over the French toast, obviously poised to bring it to the table. I said it was plenty hot. Isabel replied that the weather report predicted ninety-five. I spoke of the humidity: the trouble was mainly the humidity. Isabel said, yes, in someplace like Arizona ninety-five would be bearable. It was such a dry heat there. Even a hundred, I ventured. While we chatted thus, I couldn't help thinking of a climatological fact which my father, always preoccupied with environmental trivia, was fond of pointing out during heat waves: that this area of southeastern Virginia was really, weather-wise, part of a continuum with the Deep South. It had to do in a measure with the influence of the Gulf Stream. That was why, he explained, the region was hospitable to magnolias and cotton and even water moccasins.

”There we are,” said Isabel with what seemed genuine friendliness as she slid the French toast onto the table in front of me, simultaneously pouring a cup of coffee. I was encouraged by this touch of benignity. Maybe we could be chums, after all-at least not perpetually geared up for an enervating quarrel. Nevertheless I was a little relieved to notice that she had already had breakfast, which would eliminate the across-the-table chitchat.

While she cleaned up the other dishes, I addressed myself to the French toast (”Delicious, Isabel!” I exclaimed, adding my own cordial note) and was about to return to the New Yorker when a name uttered by the radio announcer brought me up short. Booker Mason. Last-minute appeals to the United States Supreme Court for Booker Mason, the voice said, had been turned down and the condemned man, a rapist, would die by electrocution in the state penitentiary at eleven o'clock this evening. The pen was familiarly known as The Wall throughout Virginia, and the voice called it that. I put my fork down and stared at the radio. For days I'd followed Booker Mason's fate in the local gazette. Not that there was anything dramatically different between Mason's story and that of the seemingly countless Negroes who had trudged that Last Mile in Richmond before the war, when (nearly always over my breakfast cornflakes, just before the high school bus) I would read with morbid attention of their demise, more often than not in a disappointingly brief paragraph or two on the paper's inner pages. Occasionally a white man would go to his doom, but the felon was far more likely to be black, and I grew accustomed to the somber reports, always feeling a slight visceral thrill at such pa.s.sing details as the last meal (usually fried chicken or spareribs or some other soul food, accompanied by RC Cola or Dr. Pepper) and the last words (”Tell Momma I'm gone to Jesus”). I had never been much bothered by the rightness or wrongness of the electric chair, and while I was not truly a death-penalty enthusiast I possessed, even as a backslid Presbyterian, enough remnant Old Testament vindictiveness to view that awful 2,000-volt launch into the great beyond as probably a just and fitting exit. I say ”probably” because I was not one hundred percent certain; in the case of Booker Mason my uncertainty had been bolstered by circ.u.mstances that made me think the problem through with a new emotion-worry.

What worried me was a matter that had not previously crossed my mind: the condemned man was not a murderer. Even the Commonwealth conceded that. The reason Booker Mason was being put to death was not for causing death but for s.e.xual violation of a woman-pretty nasty stuff, of course, a happening of profound pain and degradation, one regarded universally with outrage and surely occasioning the need for reprisal but never more urgently than in the black-belt backwater of Suss.e.x County, where Mason committed his crime. In that part of the Old Dominion, Negroes walked lightly and talked small. There wasn't much in mitigation of the felony since Mason, twenty-two years old and a farm worker, openly admitted his ”criminal a.s.sault” (delicate newspaperese for rape) of the woman-a fortyish housewife who was also his employer-not only admitting it but, in a fas.h.i.+on described as ”sullen and boastful,” declaring freely that it was at least in part an act of vengeance for past slights and humiliations. Save for the rape itself the victim was not physically brutalized; she told the court she had quiescently submitted out of terror, and there was no attempt on the part of the defense to suggest seduction on her part since Mason's own defiant confession effectively ruled out such a tactic. He had simply, coolly and calculatingly, f.u.c.ked her, hour after hour. So this was an instance where even a sympathetic, racially tolerant white person-one accustomed to a distinct queasiness when a black man was executed despite (as was often the case) manifest innocence, or at least unproven guilt-might compliantly accept the obvious: a bad n.i.g.g.e.r in bad trouble, richly deserving his last ride on the lightning bolt to eternity.

But I was still worried, and I said so out loud, in a spontaneous outburst. ”Jesus! They're putting him to death and he didn't even kill anyone.”

Just as I spoke I wished I'd kept my mouth shut, for Isabel shot back from the kitchen: ”He deserves worse than the electric chair for what he did. He killed her soul.”

The back of my neck p.r.i.c.kled in warning. In our many disputes-a few of which had escalated perilously near out-and-out combat, though always falling just short of that-I had tried to a.s.sess the tonality of Isabel's voice, learning that some subtle s.h.i.+ft of timbre might indicate sudden antagonism toward me apart from the subject at hand. I listened for that tone now, on guard and a touch nervous, not wanting the discussion to turn nasty after our relatively cheerful detente. Her brisk retort to me seemed satisfactorily impersonal, and I might have left it there, dropping the matter. For a moment I really decided to press on, even though there was risk involved. Still, I hesitated, happily ingesting the strong good coffee, which blended in rich harmony with the taste of maple syrup. Terrific, I thought, bidding adieu once again to the Marine Corps' glutinous powdered eggs. I had a mild surge of matutinal euphoria, a mood I would have liked to maintain. I changed my mind: no talk of Booker Mason. Over the hum of the electric fan the radio voice, a plummy drone, intoned the s.h.i.+pping news: arrivals and departures, traffic in and out of the World's Greatest Harbor. S.S. General Henry McIntosh, mixed cargo, bound for Buenos Aires. S.S. Rio Douro, pottery and cork, inbound from Lisbon. S.S. Fairweather, grain and leaf tobacco, bound for Rotterdam. S.S. World Seamaster, coal, bound for Le Havre (the voice p.r.o.nounced it like a guy's name, Harve). With syrup-sticky fingers I leafed my way through the front pages of the New Yorker, found the Hersey piece, and had picked up Mrs. Nakamura's narrative when Isabel added: ”They should take a nigra like that, before they kill him, and impale him with a hot poker like he did to that poor woman.”

”Oh for G.o.d's sake, Isabel,” I blurted, ”lay off it. The nigra was a monster. He should be put away somewhere to rot forever. But there's a simple fact here. Yeah, the woman was raped, and that's horrible. But she's alive!” (I said ”nigra” not in mockery of Isabel but because I too, like most educated denizens of the Tidewater, and the South in general, wasn't vocally conditioned to say ”knee-grow,” and so employed such a p.r.o.nunciation naturally, in an attempt at respect; Isabel was too well-reared to have said ”n.i.g.g.e.r,” the language's most powerful secular blasphemy.) ”I'm not entirely sure I don't believe in the electric chair,” I went on. ”It may be necessary. But it's barbaric to kill a man for rape, no matter how awful the crime is!”

”You're not a woman,” she replied bitterly. ”You can have no idea of the lifelong trauma of such an act-it can destroy a woman, body and spirit.”

I refrained from responding about the obvious possibility of males being raped, a fact of life of which Isabel, as a nurse with E.R. know-how, must have been well-informed. Instead, ratcheting up the tension a bit, I found myself saying irritably: ”You mean a fate worse than death?” I paused for an instant to let the old bromide sink in, meanwhile becoming aware of her tension; working away at the dishes, she had paused midway in a wipe, her fingers trembling, and a flush had spread cross her broad ill-proportioned face, coming out in blotches. It was time to cajole her gently. ”Really, you're an educated lady. It doesn't become someone of your intelligence to hang on to such an idea.”

On the edge of a reply she stopped, c.o.c.ked an ear at the radio, and we both attended to the latest Booker Mason bulletin. It was more doom. Having exhausted all appeals, the condemned man's attorney-speaking yesterday evening from the steps of the state capitol in Richmond-had entreated the legislators to use the tragedy of Booker Mason as a symbol for the need to repeal an inhuman law which made a travesty of the principles of justice enunciated by such great Virginians as Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison ...

”It's just more garbage from that little New York Jew,” said Isabel in a flat exasperated tone. ”He certainly loves the limelight.” Her remark, while fairly typical of her diction, was not as anti-Semitic as it sounded since Isabel was neither less nor more p.r.o.ne to bigotry than numberless nicely bred Virginia women of her place and time. She was far less anti-Jewish than madly pro-everything that Jews were not and that she was blessed enough to be: an alumna of Randolph-Macon Women's College (which had enrolled only Anglo-Saxons) and a member of both the Episcopal Church and the Tidewater Garden Club, two sublimely Virginian and goyish inst.i.tutions. In fact, giving her credit, which I honestly tried to do at every turn, I had noted that from time to time she had spoken with some warmth of various local Jewish citizens whose names cropped up over the dinner table. She was a pa.s.sionate churchgoer and devotee of the Gospels. Southern Baptists and other lower-cla.s.s sects might have bred anti-Semites, but her brand of well-mannered Episcopalianism would have not permitted the vulgarity of overt prejudice concerning Jews. Thus, ”that little New York Jew” was pretty innocuous, and not so much intolerant as ignorant since the New York Jew in question, Lou Rabinowitz (whose picture in the paper she had not seen, as I had), was actually well over six feet tall, towering above his spindly client Booker Mason, the rapist singled out by the National a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Colored People as the princ.i.p.al in a const.i.tutional test case. He really did love the limelight, Lou Rabinowitz, with his cape, his ascot tie, and Barrymore profile, but he fascinated me, and as I followed him in the news I perceived that he was bent on turning the justice system of Virginia upside down.

”It's not garbage!” I answered back, a little too loudly. ”And so what if he loves the limelight! He's trying to bring this dumb state into the twentieth century!” Rabinowitz's incessantly spouted facts and statistics came pouring out of me. ”Did you know, Isabel, that Virginia is one of just five states-all of them southern-that keep the death penalty for rape? And what about this! Did you know that over the years in Ole Virginny four hundred and seventy-five white men have been convicted of rape with no executions, while forty-eight colored rapists have gone to the f.u.c.king electric chair? It's a f.u.c.king scandal!”

”Mind your language!”

”I'm sorry,” I said. Daily life in the marines had been so foul-mouthed that in the aftermath I had trouble curbing my tongue. ”I'm sorry but I don't think you understand, Isabel, how medieval it is to have such a law!”

Over her face there came a drawn and long-suffering expression I had come to know well. It usually foretold commentary that subtly burnished her own image. ”By and large I've had nothing but the most cordial relations.h.i.+p with nigra men. The orderlies at the hospitals where I've served have been mostly hardworking, responsible men with whom I've worked side by side and to whom I've always made the gift of my trust!” (”Gift of my trust.” Jesus! I thought.) ”But you must keep in mind that here in the South male nigras have had some kind of unnatural s.e.xual need to dominate white females-”

”Oh for G.o.d's sake,” I interrupted, aware that the situation was beginning to veer out of control. From my mouth flew a piece of French toast. Fearful that this morning we might, finally, be at each other's throats, knowing that I'd better throttle back my accelerating rage, I nonetheless helplessly charged on. I threw my napkin down and rose to my feet, overturning the coffee cup and the syrup crock, simultaneously, catastrophically, spreading the dark unholy mess across the table. ”This idea I just can't bear! This idea in the head of every cretinous blonde in Dixie-that around the next corner lurks a rampaging black beast ready to get into her hot little t.w.a.t-” I turned and fled.

But I was almost instantly aware of a need to salvage the situation. Standing on the screened-in front porch, pulse pounding and in the throes of hyperventilation, I realized I'd made a mistake. It was I, after all, who had flown off the handle, lost aplomb, and therefore lost the skirmish, and I knew I'd have to make amends. And better now than even a few moments later. I whirled about and returned to the table, whispering my apologies as I clumsily helped her clean up the spill. ”Paul, let's just drop the subject,” she muttered. I sat down again and gloomily resumed chewing and reading. So I'd lost the skirmish. But I felt that neither of us had won or lost important points. We were at our customary tense stalemate.

Silently and, I thought, with a promptness that seemed a little too dutiful, she poured me a fresh cup of coffee. This I sipped with one hand while with the other I flattened the copy of the New Yorker and continued reading. I absorbed the early ordeals of Dr. Fujii, Father Kleinsorge, and Miss Tos.h.i.+ko Sasaki: Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but princ.i.p.ally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her. There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

The first chapter ended there. It was terrific stuff. Hersey's writing was so chiseled, so detailed, and, in its laconically low-keyed way, so urgent that I had to force myself to stop, knowing I'd be able to savor the rest of the text later on in the day. I got up, uttered a ”thank you” to Isabel that was a touch too polite (an unctuousness verging on parody that I really didn't intend) and wandered back out onto the front porch again. The morning was breathless, windless, like the mouth of an oven. Over the vast expanse of the harbor there was a curtain of hot s.h.i.+mmering haze. In the channel five or six freighters and tankers, looking like small model s.h.i.+ps from this distance, moved sluggishly toward the sea. Far beyond them there was a battles.h.i.+p and the outlines of what appeared to be two heavy cruisers, anch.o.r.ed in the calm waters off the naval station. I couldn't be sure but the big one, the leviathan, the battlewagon with its guns jutting in lethal profile, had the look of the Missouri. Hersey's description had left me a little feverish, having tapped into some fragile ancient memory, and I was struck by an immediate a.s.sociation: only last year, less than a month after the ceiling fell on Miss Tos.h.i.+ko Sasaki, two of her midget countrymen, dressed ludicrously in top hats and full-dress suits and looking less like diplomats than undersized undertakers, had stood on the deck of that selfsame s.h.i.+p-the Missouri now riding on the far horizon-and signed papers ending the war that nearly ended the life of Paul Whitehurst ...

I suddenly remembered how f.u.c.king scared I'd been, there on Saipan. I remembered the lagoon beach and the glorious sunsets sliding down over the Philippine Sea. I remembered, too, how the beach itself was still littered with the jagged metal junk from the American a.s.sault the previous summer, although with caution, p.u.s.s.yfooting among the rocks and debris, you could always find a decent enough spot for swimming. The tents of our company bivouac were laid out alongside a dusty road the Seabees had bulldozed through the coral after the marines and army troops had wrested the island from the j.a.ps, months before we replacements arrived. A thousand miles northwest lay Okinawa, and from that battle the wounded were being transferred from huge floating infirmaries with names like Comfort and Mercy to the naval hospital not far down the coast from our encampment. Along the road, night and day, a stream of ambulances came with their freight: the gravely hurt, the paralyzed and the amputees and the head trauma cases and the other wreckage from what turned out to be a mammoth land battle.

Actually, I'd just missed the battle. During the landing in April our division had been employed in a diversionary operation-a feint-off the southeast coast of the island. Our presence had been intended to draw the j.a.ps off balance while our other two divisions went ash.o.r.e (unopposed, as it turned out) on the western beaches. Then we steamed back to the safety, the calm, the virtual stateside coziness of Saipan. Here began to brew my desperate internal conflict. For while the warrior in me-the self-consciously b.a.l.l.sy kid who'd joined the marines for the glamour and danger-lamented not seeing action, there was another, more sensible part of myself that felt immense relief at this reprieve. And reprieve it was. For all of us knew that the invasion of j.a.pan was in the offing and we'd be involved in no more feints or diversions. We'd be in the vanguard. For the first time, I was terribly afraid. And I was ashamed of my fear.

In the evenings we'd spend our last weary moments-our respite from hours of combat training-lolling around in our tents and watching with morbid fixation the parade of ambulances; our eyes tracked these dust-caked vans through a thick haze of cigarette smoke that rose and fell in bluish undulations. My Pocket Book of Verse, which I'd lugged around in my seabag all through my Marine Corps career-from the V-12 unit at Duke to boot camp at Parris Island to Hawaii and, finally, Saipan-had bulged out and was close to decomposition in the humid air, but on these evenings I'd lie on my cot and read again from A. E. Housman and Swinburne and Omar Khayyam or some other moony fatalist or master of Weltschmerz, while the tropical dusk would grow murky blue and Glenn Miller's ”Moonlight Serenade,” or a Tommy Dorsey tune, would sound faintly from a portable record player or radio, drawing forth from my breast a spasm of hopeless, cloying homesickness.

Then I'd get distracted by the ambulances. The cavalcade was hypnotic to watch and just as harrowing. There was a particular hummock of coral that caused the green vans to slow to a crawl, clas.h.i.+ng gears as they s.h.i.+fted down. At first these pa.s.sages over the coral had been uneventful, but the big b.u.mp became more ragged and worn away, and I still had the memory of one ambulance that stalled, then jerked back and forth, jostling its poor pa.s.senger until the voice from within screamed ”Oh Jesus! Oh Jesus!” again and again. I heard screams like this more than once. Poetry was no remedy for such a sound, and so I'd close the book and lie there in a numb trance, trying to shut out all thought, all thought of past or future, focusing on the tent's plywood deck, where usually there was at least one huge greenish snail with a sh.e.l.l the size of a ping-pong ball propelling itself laboriously forward and trailing a wake of mucilaginous yellowish-white slime with the hue and consistency of s.e.m.e.n. Great African snails they were called and they slid all over the island, numberless, like a second landing force; they woke us up at night and we actually heard them dragging, sibilantly, their tracks across the flooring, where they collided against each other with a tiny report like the cracking open of walnuts.

The f.u.c.king snails were always getting squashed beneath our field boots, making a tiny mess that reminded me of the fragility of my own corporeal being. It didn't take long for the instruments of modern warfare to turn a human body into such a repulsive emulsion. Would I be reduced to an escargot's viscous glob? Or did one escape, almost literally, by the skin of one's teeth? One of the riflemen in my platoon, a big muscular farm boy from South Dakota, had seen, strewn on the Tarawa beachhead, a string of guts twelve feet long belonging to the marine who, only seconds before the mortar blast, had been his best buddy. Nearly all the combat vets had endured such grisly traumas. Here during last year's landing on Saipan my new platoon sergeant, a onetime trapeze artist from the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, had survived (with only a cut lip and a lingering deafness) the explosion from a j.a.p knee mortar sh.e.l.l that vaporized the other two occupants of his foxhole. Would I avoid the worst like these guys or would I, when I finally stumbled ash.o.r.e on the j.a.panese mainland, be immolated in one foul form or another, consumed by fire or rent apart by steel or crushed like a snail?

Gazing across the water at the distant outline of the Missouri, I recalled that stifling tent. Such thoughts had been torment. As I lay on my cot, The Pocket Book of Verse would slip from my hand and fear-vile, cold fear-would begin to steal through my flesh like some puzzling sickness. I actually felt my extremities grow numb, as if the blood had drained from my toes and fingers, and the sensation caused me both alarm and shame. Did my tentmates, Stiles and Veneris, the two platoon leaders whose cots lay so closely jammed next to mine, feel the same terror? Did their bowels loosen like mine at the mere thought of the coming invasion? I knew they were scared. We joked, G.o.d how we joked-we joked all the time about our future trial-but this was a form of wisecracking, smart-a.s.s bravado, cheap banter. I could never know the depths of their fear. It was a region I dared not explore. In our smothering proximity we shared everything else-snores and farts and bad breath and odorous feet. Even the clumsy stealth of jerking off was a matter for shared joking-the unsuppressed moan, the vibrating sheet glimpsed in the dawn light. Beatin' your meat again, Veneris! But somehow I knew we could never share real fear. Was theirs as nearly unbearable as mine, this dread that wrapped me in a blanket woven of many clammy hands? Or was their mastery over their fear simple bravery in itself-something I could never possess?

Often I thought it was creepy to feel this fear in such a seductive place. Saipan was really a bowl of tropical Jell-O. Even in the mu

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