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

authority in the voice stirred in Blankenship a strange and fugitive sort of respect but—possibly because of this respect—sent renewed outrage pulsing through his muscles and bones. He could feel the tension in his rump and in his arms as he sat there and heard the words, saw McFee’s great graceful body go loose, slumped in an attitude of slovenly, insouciant power.
    “You can’t rebel against the Marine Corps, McFee,” he said.
    “Who says you can’t? So they handed me six years for it. But I goddam well rebelled.”
    “Your soul might still belong to God, McFee, but your ass belongs to me. And the penal code of the United States Navy.”
    “So what?” he sneered.
    “So it means you’re double-screwed. Haven’t you got a conscience, McFee? Even a bum has a conscience. It means you didn’t escape anything at all. What makes you think you were liberated when they sent you up for six years? You not only got six years to do but you got the knowledge every minute that some other poor bastard is out there doing the fighting and the dying that you chickened out on. Doesn’t that keep you awake at night?”
    For a second McFee swayed on his heels, lounging carelessly, saying nothing. But the smirk was still there; the irises of his eyes were like thin blue flakes of splintered glass, twinkly with scorn. Then he said, “Semper Fidelis. You people make me laugh. In peacetime you regulars couldn’t get a job swabbing up piss in a poolroom.”
    Blankenship could not remember when he struck. It was certainly not at this moment, for later that evening as he sat in the deserted wardroom he recalled that some other words had passed between them. Of that much he was at least sure, even as he listened vacantly to dance music from the radio and raised his eyes from time to time to watch snowfall sifting a hushed blizzard across the darkened Sound, his mind bewitched by all the whiskey he had drunk—a pint—and fumbling hopefully still for some excuse to mitigate his crushing sense of guilt. There had been the escape itself, it was true, which had made him testy, unhinged him—butChrist, he’d been unhinged before in battles; was this enough to justify such a flagrant sin against the law—the first one he could remember having committed in ten years’ service? As for McFee—well, what about McFee? The knowledge which Blankenship had now (the record book on the radio console before him and the court-martial transcript with its ninety pages of closely typed flimsy) could not nullify the insult and arrogance which had pushed him into the act, nor could he have been expected to know these things then. Yet the facts were unavoidably there (a letter of commendation for “meritorious conduct” on New Georgia, two Purple Hearts) and the circumstances of the court-martial (six years for desertion, but a brutally long six years not because his admirable record had been ignored, which it hadn’t, but because according to the testimony of the M.P.s who had finally tracked him down from San Diego all the way to Tampa, Florida, he had resisted arrest so passionately and with such homicidal fury—backed up in a restaurant where from behind the counter he had fired six shots from a Smith & Wesson .22 revolver at the arresting officers, nicking the ear of the F.B.I. man who had tagged along for the show, and resorting finally to cups, ketchup bottles, and, in a final spasm, even his own wristwatch as “missiles”)—the facts were there, and as Blankenship sat cracking his knuckles in the chilly wardroom, they added to his guilt a vague sense of shame. It was not that, even now, he felt any sympathy for McFee: he had sinned and was being justly punished. He only felt that, having broken regulations by an act so violent that it put himself, at any rate theoretically, in position for a court-martial, it should have been a lesser, meaner man than McFee who had impelled him to do it. And the least he himself could have done was use