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

his fists.
    Then he remembered when he struck. It was no more than a minute later when, with the blood pulsing like hot broth through his temples, he heard McFee say finally, “Gunner, why don’t you people wise up? The whole Marine Corps is one big jail. You’re the yardbird, Gunner,” repeating through the thin infuriating smirk, “You’re the yardbird, Gunner,” that his hand went tight and moist with sweat around Mulcahy’s club on the desk behind him, and he felt the muscles of his shoulders clumping up in a knot of pain as, almost unthinking, he brought the stick down in one heavy crunching blow against McFee’s cheek; even as it struck he saw McFee’s mountainous frame swing back in punch-drunk and deadened collision with the wall, eyes marveling at his own impact but abulge and white with a sort of absolute certitude and defiance, still mouthing as he sagged downward: “You’re the yardbird, you son of a bitch.”

MARRIOTT,
THE MARINE

I
    In the spring of 1951, when I was called back as a marine reserve to serve in the Korean War, I was in my mellow mid-twenties though I felt like a beaten man. A number of years ago I wrote a fictional narrative based loosely on this period in my life, and it is possible that those who may have read that work will, in the account that follows, discern a few familiar echoes, since I am certain to trespass here and there upon that earlier, restless mood. Basically, I am an unaggressive, even pacific type, civilian to the marrow, and the very idea of military life sets up a doleful music in my brain—no fifes, no pipes, no gallant trumpet calls, only a slow gray dirge of muffled drums. In my reveries of the Marine Corps it is for some reason almost always raining. Engulfed in a sweltering poncho, I am standing in a downpour; with absolute clarity I can recall how, once waiting in a chow line during an Hawaiian cloudburst, I watched transfixed as my mess kit slowly filled to the brim with greasy water. Ormy thoughts wander and I ponder the old monotony, the waiting—the truly vicious, intolerable waiting—then the indecent hustle, the offensive food, the sweat and the flies, the lousy pay, the anxiety and fear, the fruitless jabber, the racket of rifle fire, the degrading celibacy, the trivial, evanescent friendships, the whole humiliating baggage of a caste system calculated to bring out in men their basest vanities. I am capable of brooding on such matters with self-punishing persistence, with mixed anguish and pleasure, as one relives so often some ugly ordeal successfully endured.
    No, the Marine Corps is no place for a man of my sluggish, contemplative stripe. Yet any such prolonged experience is likely to generate its own unique nostalgia, if that’s the proper word (many ex-convicts, I’ve learned, confess to dreaming ambivalent dreams about their past incarceration), and besides, the Marine Corps is not the army or the navy but something intransigently itself. Maybe I should own up to an awful, private truth and this is that, despite the foregoing strictures, the Marine Corps has left me with a residual respect—certainly fascination—which, demeaning as it may be, I find it impossible to uproot after all these years. The result is that compulsively, like a voyeur who fights his urge yet is from time to time drawn to public bathhouses, I am led back to those lucidly recollected scenes, forced despite myself to try to make that fearsome institution give up one or two of its innermost secrets.
    Anyway, the second call to duty nearly wiped me out. I had served three years in the marines during the Second World War. I had been a fire-eater then, a real trooper, and possessed the loutish devotion to duty that belonged to the extremely young of my generation. A volunteer, I had workedmy way up from buck private to second lieutenant, spending most of my time at camps in the United States but receiving enough of a dose of misery in the Pacific near the war’s end to