The Suicide Run Part 3

Lacy flapped his hand in limp rea.s.surance and after a pause shouted, "Sorry, man!" in a hoa.r.s.e, broken voice. Then he put his head down against the steering wheel. I heard a m.u.f.fled giggle, and what appeared to be shudders of hysteric relief coursed through his shoulders. Finally without another word he sat erect and started the car, and we proceeded again through the dawn, moving at a dignified old lady's pace.

After several miles I managed to find words to speak, something ba.n.a.l and hollow like the ugly little episode itself. I cast a sidelong glance at Lacy, who for a long while had said nothing. The sensitively drawn, almost pretty face in profile had suddenly taken on a pinched and bitter cast: through the unblemished tan the boyish features were not really boyish but haggard, aging. When at last he spoke it was in a grave tone edged with anguish, and it was filled with marked, unsettling intensity, as if our dangerous escape had unloosened in him some fear long held in precarious restraint.

"I saw that motherf.u.c.king dog again," he said.

"What dog?" I said. "Again?" For an instant I thought he might have been made temporarily addled. "Where?"

He drove on for a while without speaking. Then he said, "See that?" and held up his right hand. There small shiny mounds of scar tissue, perhaps five or six of them, traversed the palm in a ragged crescent. I had seen these marks before. a.s.suming they were scars from a combat wound, obviously not now incapacitating, I had never bothered to ask him how they had come about, nor had Lacy ever volunteered an explanation-until now.

"It was toward the end of the fighting on Okinawa in '45," he said. "I had a rifle platoon in the Sixth Marines. It was in June, I remember, around noon on a June day and hotter-as an old gunny friend used to say-than the downtown part of h.e.l.l. Our battalion had been on the a.s.sault for two days, trying to wipe out a d.i.n.ky little town where the j.a.ps had set up an especially strong position. They had artillery in there, a lot of heavy stuff, lot of mortars, and we'd been taking a terrible pounding. But we managed to break them down pretty well with our own big guns and several air strikes, and my company moved up, as I say, around noon, to mop up along a couple of the streets of the town."

He paused and I saw him reflectively rub his scarred palm along the edge of his cheekbone. "Well, just as we moved out of the fields toward the edge of the village we began to get clobbered from a j.a.p mortar position which had somehow missed getting finished off by our guns. They were suicidal little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, you know-this was also along about the time of the kamikaze attacks-and they were determined to take us with them; that's why it was such miserable fighting. Anyway, we hit the deck at the edge of the road, I slid into a shallow little ditch full of muck, and that mortar began to pound the s.h.i.t out of us. It was as dirty a barrage as I'll ever want to go through. They were zeroed in on us, firing for effect, and why or how I didn't get hit I'll never know. It must have gone on for a full five minutes or more when suddenly I looked up from where I was lying and saw, on the other side of the road, directly opposite and no more than four or five yards away, a big black skinny dog, standing there with his four legs sort of akimbo, simply out of his mind with fear at this bombardment going on around him.

"I must have made some sort of motion with my body then, raising up slightly. Although of course I fire from my right shoulder, I'm left-handed and was holding my carbine in my left hand, trying to keep it out of the muck. As I raised up then, the dog just flew at me from the road, and before I knew it he had his jaws clamped down and completely through the palm of my free hand. It was utterly insane, a nightmare, you see-this mortar barrage, with guys getting chopped up all around me, and here this wild terrified dog had sunk his fangs into my hand, so tight that I could not make him let go, as much as I struggled and yanked and pulled. The dog didn't make any noise, didn't growl, didn't snarl, simply glared at me with these mad wet eyes and chomped away at my hand. The pain was-well, beyond description; I don't recall whether I screamed or not. My platoon sergeant was not far away but even if he had seen all this he couldn't have done anything, pinned down like all the rest. Ah Jesus, every time I think of it my hand begins to ache all over again."

"What in G.o.d's name did you do finally?" I asked.

"I knew I had to shoot the dog, but it's d.a.m.ned hard to fire a carbine, you know, or at least aim it well with one hand, and besides for some dumb reason I had the weapon on safety. Yet I knew I had to shoot him. And G.o.d knows I was trying to. And I kept looking at that G.o.ddam dog, kept looking into those crazy eyes. There was something-something, well, retributive, demonic about those eyes. How can I say it? It was as if for a moment I felt I was getting in a curious way my just deserts-that this dog represented all those innocent victims who are crazed and mutilated by war and finally have to lash out at their tormentors, seizing upon the first poor uniformed slob that comes to hand. A fantasy, of course-the poor beast was simply berserk with terror-but that's what did flash through my mind."

"And of course you finally got him?" I said.

"Yeah," he went on, "I finally got that carbine around, and somehow worked it off safety, and shot him through the head. It was sickening, ghastly. And after the j.a.p mortars slackened off and the company could move ahead it took the corpsman at least five minutes to pry that dog's fangs out of my hand. And that was the end of the war for me, because that same afternoon I was evacuated to the rear and sent out to a hospital ship for precautionary anti-rabies treatment. It was while I was getting this long course of shots-a b.l.o.o.d.y painful business, I might add-that the campaign ended on Okinawa."

He fell silent for a moment. We were not far now from the camp, and the early-morning traffic had begun to fill the roads-farmers in pickup trucks, tourists with Florida license plates heading north for the summer, marines commuting to work at the base. Lacy drove very slowly, and with extreme care.

"Ah G.o.d," he said at last, in a somber, grieving tone. "We'll never make it through this war."

MY FATHER'S

HOUSE.

ONE MORNING IN THE YEAR AFTER the end of the war (the Good War, that is, the second War to End All Wars) when I had returned to my father's house in Virginia, and had slept long merciful hours, I woke up after completing a weird megalomaniacal dream. Not that I was unaccustomed to dreams touched with megalomania. A few years before, for example, when I was a writing student at college, I had a dream about James Joyce. In this particular reverie I was sitting at a cafe table somewhere in Europe, probably Paris, having a cup of coffee with the Master. There was no hesitancy in the way he turned his purblind gaze upon me, no embarra.s.sment in the sudden light touch of his hand on the back of my own, nor was there anything but nearly mawkish admiration in his Hibernian brogue as he uttered these words: "Paul Whitehurst, your writing has been such an inspiration to me! Without your work I could not have finished Dubliners!"

I never thought I'd recapture the mad glee that seized me upon waking from such a c.o.c.keyed fantasy. And during the war I had no similar visitations. But the end of that exhausting conflict brought me such relief that I suppose it was inevitable that another such dream should return, rescuing my near-drowned ego. In this sequence I was seated next to Harry Truman as we cruised in a limousine down Pennsylvania Avenue. "Paul Whitehurst"-once again the full name, precisely enunciated-"the best advice you ever gave me was to drop the atom bomb." Amid pennants snapping in the wind and the blare of military music, I nodded left and right to the adoring throng. "Thank you, Mr. President," I replied. "I gave it much thought."

And waking, I lay there for a while, helplessly disgorging cackles of laughter. At last the dream faded away, as dreams do. Then I made my mind a blank. Finally, the sound of breakfast being made was borne upstairs and I inhaled the good smell and prepared for the new day.

Except for a central drawback, which I'll soon deal with, I was fairly contented in my father's house. The house itself inspired a kind of contentment. My father had never been a rich man, but the war with its naval contracts had brought prosperity to the sprawling shipyard where he toiled nearly all of his life; his share in the prosperity had allowed him to move from the cramped little bungalow of my childhood to an unpretentious, comfortable, locust-shaded house whose screened porch and generous bay windows faced out on a grand harbor panorama. The enormous waterway, several miles across, was always afloat with an armada of naval ships or seabound tankers and freighters-all distant enough to be dramatic-looking rather than unsightly-and the harbor was forever being touted by the local boosters as the rival or the superior of San Francisco or Rio or Hong Kong, though to my mind they were exaggerating badly since the panorama was really too monotonous, too horizontal, to be "breathtakingly scenic," as was claimed.

Nonetheless, it was impressive in its way. Certainly I would concede that my father had bought himself a million-dollar view-he called it that at nearly every opportunity-and so I considered the fine expanse of water, sparkling in the sun or swept by rude squalls or echoing at night with mournful horns, to be one of the more amiable bonuses of my homecoming from the war. Tidewater summers were fiercely hot and dank but the harbor often bestowed on the house an early cooling breeze-"a million-dollar breeze," my father would say on the more h.e.l.lish days. I'd awake beneath the sheet and stretch while the odor of coffee and pancakes filled my nose, and then I'd smile. What I mean is that I was conscious of making a genuine, broad, cheek-dimpling smile while I marveled over and over at my healthy living state, in which the primitive ability to smell warm pancakes and coffee was like a surprising gift. There is no mystery why these first waking moments were so luxuriously free of anxiety, why a shiver of pleasure-no, real bliss-ran through me when I blinked awake on the sun-splashed bed, listening to the mockingbird in the locust outside my window or, farther off, the gulls and sh.o.r.ebirds piping over the water, a Negro flower peddler, a horse cart creaking (there were still a few horses and carts in those days, though fast vanishing), clip-clopping hooves, the cry of "Flowers, flowers!" skewering my heart as it had done when I was a child. My happiness, my bliss, was quite simple in origin: I was alive. I was alive and home in bed instead of being a moving target on the Kyushu plain, or in the rubble of an Osaka suburb, praying for one more day of life in the cauldron of a war without ending-what a miracle, what a gift! So many times, only months before, death had seemed such a certainty that my very aliveness became a recurrent marvel.

It was hard, however, to avoid a shiver of guilt when I reflected on my luck. Over three years before, when I was seventeen, bravado mingled with what must have been a death wish made me enlist in the officer training program of the Marine Corps. Since those in my age group were considerably too callow to lead troops into battle, it was decided at the Navy Department that we be sent to college, where as book-toting privates we would gain a little learning and seasoning, also a year or two of physical and mental growth, before our fateful collision with the j.a.ps. My cla.s.smates and I, being the youngest of the young, remained uniformed college students for the longest period, while those who were only a year or so older went off for the officer training and preceded us into those terrifying island battles that marked the last stages of the Pacific war. No group among all the services had so high a casualty rate as we Marine Corps second lieutenants. This is firmly on the record. A harrowing book by an enlisted combat veteran, E. B. Sledge, called With the Old Breed, described the situation concisely: "During the course of the long fighting on Okinawa ... we got numerous replacement lieutenants. They were wounded or killed with such regularity that we rarely knew anything about them ... and saw them on their feet only once or twice. ... Our officers got hit so soon and so often that it seemed to me the position of second lieutenant in a rifle company had been made obsolete by modern warfare."

Thus had I been older only by a year or so I would have been immersed in Iwo Jima's bloodbath; a mere six months and I would have been one of Sledge's Okinawa martyrs, obliterated in what turned out to be the deadliest land engagement of the Pacific war, and among the worst in history. I actually escaped this horror by a hair, coming to roost not so many miles away on the island of Saipan, where I began to prepare for the invasion of j.a.pan and where I had ample time to reflect on both what I'd barely missed on Okinawa and Iwo Jima and what I was likely to encounter when I helped storm the fortress beaches of the mainland. The killing grounds of the recent past were for me merely a foretaste of things to come, and the sorry fate of all those scared but uncomplaining guys we'd said good-bye to seemed to foreshadow my own.

At any rate, there in bed I'd begin to grope and caress myself, getting a huge load of tactile satisfaction from the mere act of a.s.sessing my body's well-being. This was not the idle feeling up of one's self that preoccupies people alone in bed; it was a deliberate, meditative inventory of my precious parts. Consider hands and fingers alone, for example, and place them in the context of the Iwo Jima I so narrowly escaped. Everyone had heard about the landing beach at Iwo: bodies cut in half in the volcanic dust, legs and arms from a single corpse separated by forty feet, a puree of brains splattered among the mess kits and knapsacks. Nearly every marine who survived the war had fixed in his mind the number of Iwo Jima casualties-twenty-six thousand (of which nearly six thousand were deaths)-the entire population of many an American large town or small city, a chilling total of which thousands of components had to be hands and fingers, given the tendency of the hand, with its constant diligence and exposure, to be so vulnerable. Pondering the tally of fingers lost or mutilated on that infernal ash heap, I'd concentrate on one of my own, extend it, wiggle it, stroke it with my thumb, suck it, rub its tip gently against the skin encasing my rib cage, all the while reflecting on what pleasure it was to be able to perform any one of these small, innocuous, monkey-like operations.

Another matter was the loss of limbs. Leg loss and arm loss had been epidemic in the Pacific. What a delight it was, then, to be able to palpate the supple b.u.t.tery flesh of the biceps, pressing in so deeply with the thumb that I could feel the st.u.r.dy arterial flow of healthy blood as it coursed down the arm, or to vigorously pat the muscles of the thigh-the joy momentarily fading, replaced by a stab of guilt as I wondered what it must be like, at that very instant, to be lying without a thigh in some naval hospital, racked by the phantom pain of the amputee.

You could lose incredible parts of yourself, and be hideously mutilated, yet still live. In college I had known this guy named Wade Hoopes, from a small town in Tennessee, who was also a platoon leader at the time of his calamity. He and his little group had been reconnoitering the outskirts of a sh.e.l.l-shattered village on Okinawa when he stepped on a b.o.o.by-trapped grenade and instantaneously lost a leg. Only the miraculous ministrations of a medical corpsman saved him from bleeding to death. He had wanted to get a law degree when the war ended and make it big in Tennessee politics like his daddy, a onetime lieutenant governor. Wade was generous and sweet-natured, with an incipient politician's chatty bonhomie; I don't think he was brilliant, but that too fitted the political mold. One thing I recall achingly about Wade Hoopes was the idiot crush he had on June Allyson, and the alb.u.m of publicity photographs of her that he carried around everywhere-probably even to Okinawa-of June in swimsuits and bobby sox and dirndls, smiling her enchantingly bucktoothed, germ-free smile. It was amazing to think of him whacking off day in and day out over this squeaky-clean sweetheart. A blade of shrapnel from the same b.o.o.by trap that removed his leg had neatly destroyed his brain's speech center and he would never utter a word again-not a word, not a sound, not a peep. Literally struck dumb. When news came back to our training base on Saipan about Wade Hoopes we were shocked, and our speculation was that when the war was over an amputee might easily make it as a candidate-the sympathy vote. But a politician without a voice? It was like a beauty queen without t.i.ts. Otherwise his vital signs were excellent, which may or may not have been a blessing. But we all thought: At least he made it.

I listened to my stepmother, Isabel, clattering and banging away down below in the kitchen while my father, in the nearby bathroom, performed his operatic ablutions. He had a creditable tenor voice, a little reedy but resolute, and as he went about his bathroom business he warbled s.n.a.t.c.hes of Verdi and Puccini and Mozart operas that he'd picked up from old Caruso recordings and the Sat.u.r.day afternoon Metropolitan broadcasts on the radio. These he tried to duplicate in wildly misp.r.o.nounced phonetic Italian. The language is not meant to be sung by Anglo-Saxons. It took me a long time to realize that the words I heard above the flushing toilet or blurted halfway through a gargle were Dalla sua pace and Il mio tesoro. More often what I heard was invented Italian, fruity vocables such as lalalala-Dio! or lalalala-amore! I regularly had breakfast with my father before we went our separate ways, I to school and he to the shipyard in an automobile full of his white-collar brethren, known as cost estimators, who were members of a car pool. All this was long before the death of my mother and before he met Isabel, a lady who had become a small but piercing nail thrust into my psyche. I listened to her kitchen commotion. Isabel was a good cook and her talents extended well beyond putting together an appetizing breakfast-there was no way I could begrudge her that. It was one of her contradictions, really, since it was hard for me to accept the idea that this straitlaced, pleasure-shunning person, a professional nurse with a palate anesthetized by hospital food and the chicken croquettes served at the Bide-A-Wee Tearoom, where she and her fellow spinster nurses dined in the years before she snagged my father, could prepare not merely an edible but a, by G.o.d, truly flavorsome meal. I suspect it was due to my father's influence. While scarcely a gourmet he had been reared on traditional southern cooking, which at its best is delectable; despite the fact that she had him pretty well under her thumb he had made it clear, I think, that he expected her to set a good table and she had risen to the challenge. So I had to chalk one up for Isabel. Her labors downstairs at breakfast-at least considered from my vantage point in bed, before we came face to face-always left me better disposed toward her than at any other time of the day. Even though she made a lot of noise. She was an ungainly woman, angular and raw-boned, and she tramped about the kitchen with a kind of hulking agitation; I wondered how she had succeeded at her nursing ch.o.r.es, which I conceived as requiring a low-keyed gentleness, an adagio grace beyond this woman's capacity.

Lying there, I occasionally reflected with a chill upon what might have happened to me had my father married her, say, five years earlier than he did, when I was a child of ten or so; she would have gobbled me up. As it was, I was fifteen when they tied the knot, and so I was able to avoid any real damage she might have inflicted, chiefly because school and college claimed me, and then the marines. So I wasn't at home all that often. I racked my head in an attempt to figure out the cause of our mutual hostility, but came up with nothing. From the beginning I was not so naive as to be unaware of the wicked stepmother myth. A stepmother was supposed to be a termagant, a ball-breaker. Lucky was the boy or girl (especially an only child like me) who drew a sweet and loving stepmother; they were supposed to be ungenerous, jealous, spiteful, suspicious, uncompromising, judgmental, and so forth. Still, I thought I might escape, and the problem for me was that Isabel, with certain modifications, was all of these, a living, breathing validation of the archetype. What prevented me from truly hating her-what caused me, rather, to squelch the upwelling of extreme dislike that her charmless character traits called forth-was my devotion to my father, whom I loved despite the baffling absence of taste that caused him to choose this homely middle-aged dominatrix for a wife. His love for me was obvious, transparent, and it would have been a body blow to him had I given her the snarling comeuppance I thought she deserved and slammed out of the house for good.

So Isabel and I maintained a frosty politeness and I tried hard to repress my rage at what I conceived to be her irrational antagonism. Likewise, I'm sure she put a stopper on the resentment she felt whenever she regarded her stepson: the ungenerous, self-indulgent, supercilious, arrogant, potentially alcoholic, masturbating, parasitical, egomaniacal young lout who lolled around the house with his b.a.l.l.s hanging out of his green marine skivvy drawers. G.o.d knows-especially given the emotional upheaval I was going through at the time, my unheroic though spellbinding escape from death, my survivor's guilt, my s.e.xual insecurity-I was no prize myself. Anyway, only a few months after the end of one war I was in another one-a cold war, to be sure, like the one that had begun to engulf the world (just recently annunciated by Winston Churchill at some Missouri cow college) but no less ominous and nasty.

Supine, gazing gravely across my midriff, I blessed the tent-post rigidity that made a modest canopy of the sheet that covered me, and I worked at pushing back the urge to dally a bit. I did, however, give the upright a token stroke, more like a benediction, and saved for the last the luxury of a.s.sessing that part of me that took priority over hands, fingers, legs, arms, even eyes-even brains. Especially brains! Who needed brains? Marines had shed seas of sweat before a Pacific landing, tormented with fear over the safety of their adored apparatus. Nature had positioned the whole works in a relatively sheltered place; wounds there were relatively infrequent, yet young men in battle had sometimes been converted into instant eunuchs. It was another piece of myself whose survival was something to praise.

Well, just one more squeeze, I thought-a thought that coincided with a flash of flesh (what part of her I could not tell, though she was clearly unclothed); the translucent gauze of her curtained window prevented anything but a rouged phantom that as always nearly stopped my heart. Mamie Eubanks, right on time to the dot, toweling off after her morning shower. The Eubanks house, next door, was disturbingly near, Mamie's bathroom at such close remove from my bedroom window that, were it not for the intervening curtain and its frustrating semi-opacity my marine sharpshooter's eyes would have been able to discern each pore on her beautifully proportioned twenty-year-old bottom. As it was, the voyeur's antic.i.p.ation in me, whetted by the sound of splashing water and Mamie's larky voice, usually warbling a hymn, was always ruined by the drapery beyond which she would float, revealing a distant rosiness or an instant's smudge I a.s.sumed was pubic hair, and that was all. Most of this to such inspiring tunes as "Blessed a.s.surance, Jesus Is Mine" or "Shall We Gather at the River."

It was a routine that had gone on for several weeks. My father had moved into a neighborhood which, despite the elegance of the view, would have to be described as "mixed income." He was not rich but richer than his neighbors. The Eubanks family were hardworking and respectable people from some remote rural area across the James River, uneducated, decent folk with whom my father got along amiably, especially since his own origins were humble enough. But as there was nothing much in common between the Eubankses and my father and Isabel, the house next door remained largely an undefined presence and nothing more, though its proximity caused certain vague irritations. Mrs. Eubanks cooked constantly for a tribe of poorer relatives spread across the town, and the smell of her heavy country cuisine-ham, gravy, snap beans, black-eyed peas-often invaded our rooms. We inhaled a perpetual atmosphere of warm collard greens. Mr. Eubanks, a sometime preacher and part-time undertaker, had a deviated septum; his snores on still summer nights, when the windows were wide open, were often vibrant and alarming. On those nights my father, sleepless, would moan and call Mr. Eubanks "King Kong." Mamie Eu-banks had become my own personal thorn. When, some years before, I had gone off to boarding school, she had been an awkward and nondescript tyke with an unattractive pink frosting of acne.

Now I could scarcely believe the transformation. In those days the phrase that defined a young woman who had achieved an obvious s.e.xual potential was "sweater girl," and this Mamie was beyond question. Her complexion had the sheen of a gardenia, and beneath the cashmere she was all delicious bounce when she skipped up the walkway next door and sent me an inviting "Hi!" This had been several weeks before, just after she had returned from summer session at some Bible college in North Carolina, and from the instant of our reacquaintance I harbored an ineluctable craving to do with her what I had been deprived of doing for so many months in the Pacific. I was surprised that I'd held off so long. I didn't know whether she was a virgin or not-as a Southern Baptist, member in good standing of the Baptist Young People's Union, she was most likely utterly unsullied-but it excited me to think that discovering whether she really was or wasn't could be part of an imminent erotic adventure. Lying there, I resolved to give her a phone call, as soon as my tumescence subsided, and arrange for a date, if possible that evening. She was of course so close I could just as easily knock on her door and ask her in person, but I was still a bit shy, and the telephone might provide the right margin of distance.

I glanced at the alb.u.ms which I'd been leafing through the night before, and had left on the bed beside me just before nodding off to sleep. One of my recent delights had been that of encountering anew some of my boyhood mementos and treasures, items that had been stored in closets ever since I'd gone off into the marines. I'd remembered a number of these possessions at odd moments while on Saipan or on some troopship or other, but I'd never thought I would see them again; to look at them now, to touch them and ponder them, connecting them to mementos of bygone experience, gave me a rich feeling of privilege, as if I'd come back from the dead (which I had) to reclaim objects made immeasurably more precious because they once seemed forever lost. There was my Remington .22 rifle, still rust-free and smelling of oil, which I'd shot squirrels with in the woods near the C&O tracks. There was a set of bound mimeographed editions of the Seahorse, the literary magazine I'd edited at boarding school. A silver cup I had won racing my Hampton One-Design, the little wooden-hulled sloop I'd helped build with my cousin. The twelve volumes of The Book of Knowledge, published in England circa 1910, which I'd read tirelessly between the ages of eleven and thirteen, brooding over its photographs of children my age on the beaches at Blackpool and Brighton, and playing cricket, and eating things like bubble and squeak and scones and other confections that American boys had never heard of. There were my Charles Atlas lessons, mailed to me weekly during the summer of my fifteenth year, when I was anxious about my attenuated physique and had ordered (for the then-prodigious sum of twenty-five dollars) these dozen booklets, sent at two-week intervals, instructing me in "dynamic tension," a weight-free technique whereby the ninety-eight-pound weakling would grow biceps the size of melons if he opposed his own muscles against each other long enough and hard enough; I had abandoned the regime after the second week, worn out from standing, jockstrap clad, in front of a mirror, futilely pulling and stretching my skinny limbs.

Then there was my alb.u.m of photographs. On Saipan, during the days and nights when I was most certain that my death was foreordained, I longed for this alb.u.m with a sorrowful sense of loss I'd never thought possible. The alb.u.m was the collective memory of my early youth, containing the images of those who had been dear to me, family and friends locked away in a closet ten thousand miles from the island where I was stranded in a near paralysis of fear. And so, having been persuaded that I would never see these likenesses again, much less their flesh-and-blood avatars, I pounced on this tacky leatherette volume with greedy pleasure. Looking at these dozens of snapshots was like re-entry into a boyhood where all my friends and companions had been brought back to life even as I had been granted a commutation from a sentence of death. But because that morning I would not, try as I might, rid myself of a nagging prurient fever, I returned once more not to my boarding school pals or buddies from grammar school days but to my cousin Mary Jane. There she was, four and a half feet tall, too cute for words, mugging shamelessly as she always did whenever I hauled out my Kodak during that summer before the war, in the aftermath of my mother's death, when I was sent to estivate with my nice aunt and her nice state cop husband in a tiny Carolina town just over the border. My stay there, asphyxiatingly lonely, produced one ineffaceable memory: the onset of my hormone supply, like the Johnstown Flood.

I had just turned fourteen. I'd half-forgotten the worst of that interminable summer-the loafing around in the airless bungalow, the radio's hillbilly strumming, the afternoon sacrament of ice cream, the forlorn moviegoing-but I couldn't possibly forget my l.u.s.t, a brand-new sensation (late bloomer that I was, I'd not begun to practice the Secret Vice) and oddly scary, inasmuch as I found it focused on the loudmouthed moppet of the house, Mary Jane. How could I have such feelings about a relative? And one so young? Consanguinity, I thought, and fear of incest were supposed to prevent the desires that were overwhelming me for my maddening kinswoman, age eleven, with the Juicy Fruit breath and the precocious b.o.o.bs who would plop herself, giggling, into my pajama-clad lap and howl, Momma, Paw-ul's teasin' me! Little did she know who was teasing whom, nor the effect she had one morning when, prying herself out of my now eager clutches, she innocently grasped my engorged rod and demanded, "What's that?" Hysterically I replied, "I don't know!" and bolted to the bathroom for the sweet cataclysm of my first o.r.g.a.s.m. Lucky for us both, no doubt, my sojourn ended soon afterward. But that noisy little hoyden would remain my Circe forever, and Ahoskie, N.C. (pop. 4,810), my unforgotten Babylon.

I heard my father clomp down the stairs on the way to breakfast, and I was about to jump out of bed, as I usually did, throw on my bathrobe, and join him at the table. But at that instant my eye was caught by the copy of the New Yorker I'd bought at a downtown newsstand the night before. I had gone to sleep while just beginning to browse through the cartoons and now, plucking the magazine from the pillow next to me, I perceived something I hadn't noticed before, something utterly remarkable. The text of the issue was unbroken from beginning to end, column after column of print weaving through the advertis.e.m.e.nts, the entire story or narrative or whatever it was marching on inexorably without interruption until it terminated on the final page just above the byline: John Hersey. It was amazing-a whole issue devoted to a single article. I turned back to the beginning and the t.i.tle "Hiroshima" and began to read: A NOISELESS FLASH.

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, j.a.panese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.

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 shirtsleeves, 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 shipyard still observed the old-fashioned 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 shipyard'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 relationship, 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 shipyard'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 ships 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 shipyard'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 ships 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 shipyard, 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 fashion 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 shift 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 shipping 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 relationship 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 Toshiko 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 shimmering haze. In the channel five or six freighters and tankers, looking like small model ships from this distance, moved sluggishly toward the sea. Far beyond them there was a battleship 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 Toshiko 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 ship-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, clashing gears as they shifted 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