The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps Read Online Free PDF Page A

we’ve got over here.”
    “I was,” he said calmly. “They stink. I said so and your fucking gorilla clobbered me.”
    This outspoken audacity so took him aback that Blankenship rose from where he was sitting, strolled to a spot within a foot of McFee, and propped himself on the edge of the desk. “They do, do they? They stink, huh?” As he spoke, confused and casting about for words, he was aware that he was managing to control his voice—a remarkable fact considering the fury he felt rising at this man’s insolence, and which was not so much directed at the insolence itself but at the cool, even fearless self-possession with which he assumed it. Now he was so close to McFee that he could feel the warm steady breathing that crossed the short space of air between them and was aware, for the first time, of the round welt on McFee’s forehead where, indeed, Mulcahy must have swatted him. The welt was an inconsequential blob of swollen pinkish flesh, but it was nonetheless a visible and now accusatory brand, a tiny ensign of oppression and illegal abuse. For the moment it gave McFeea slight but telling advantage, and it aggravated Blankenship’s silent fury.
    He had never had a prisoner face up to him before. Because it baffled him he stalled briefly for time, and altered his tack. “What did you want to get caught fighting for, McFee? You had a nice soft job in the colonel’s house. Now you’ll just be another one of the bums. You must have had a pretty good confinement record to have gotten such a nice job. What are you, a swabjockey?”
    “I wish the fuck I was.”
    “You a hooligan?”
    “I’m a marine,” he said, with a trace of bitterness, and also of disdain. He stood there steadfast and massive, with his irritating animal grace and with his breath coming warmly and steadily from the set contemptuous smile on his lips. Along with his anger, Blankenship felt a chilly shiver of excitement, as if he had received a personal and even physical challenge from this defiance. And although both his conscience and regulations forbade him to, he felt now, too, an irresistible desire to bait and goad—something he’d never lower himself to do with an ordinary prisoner.
    “You’re not a marine, McFee,” he said quietly, “not anymore. You’re a yardbird. A bum. Didn’t you know that?” He paused, while for a second, in an attempt to stare each other down, their eyes met hot and unwavering. “You’re swill. Slop. You’re not any more of a marine than Shirley Temple. You’re lower than whale shit on the bottom of the sea. You know the saying, don’t you, McFee?” Yet while he spoke he felt a mild mean twinge, as if he were degrading not McFee but himself by using all the stale worn-out obscenities employed numbingly and twenty-four hours a day by everybeef-witted sergeant on the island. And staring at McFee while he said them, seeing the look of contempt widen, enlarge, lines of amusement springing into his eyes, Blankenship halted, then said, “What did you do, McFee? Desert? Like all the rest of these patriotic citizens?”
    “If you look in my record book, Gunner, that’s the word they use. I call it something else.”
    “What do you call it?”
    “I call it liberate.”
    “Liberate from what?”
    “How about letting me stand at ease?” McFee said. Instead of a request it sounded like a suggestion, and one so astonishingly bold and crusty that Blankenship heard himself say “At ease” before he had even thought about it. Relaxed, McFee absently fingered the bruise on his forehead and said, in a level cold voice: “If you believe in something you desert from it. When you don’t believe in something anymore you can’t desert from it. You liberate yourself. That’s what I did.”
    His voice had an austere quality, frigid with conviction. It was a voice free of sloppy accents—not cultivated, not even educated perhaps, simply reasonable even when obscene. Without explanation, the sense of