The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps by William Styron Read Free Book Online

final silence of bereavement, of life stilled. Yet not without some value even in their utter desolation, the shacks and stores began to serve as objectives in field exercises, something to be captured; many more became targets for artillery and mortar practice, and as I gazed out over the green roof of the woods I remembered how on a hot summerday in 1944 my own platoon had laid down round after round of mortar fire upon one of these derelict shanties, firing for effect until our barrage had turned the place to splinters and nothingness save for a single crudely painted metal signboard that we discovered amid the wreckage, which read, WHITEHURST’S STORE . And I recalled feeling then a small tug at my heart, not for any damage done to an already ruined hulk, nor even out of conscience, but because White-hurst was the name of my father’s mother, whose family had lived here on this Carolina coast for two centuries and had owned Negroes who bore the Whitehurst name. Thus this storekeeper had most certainly been descended from slaves owned by my ancestors—could it be that he was one of those who had sought suicide in his grief? I never found out—and as I stood on that smoking ruin with its intermingled fragrance of gunpowder and honeysuckle I could not help but feel a pang of morbid regret over the fact that it was I who had presided so efficiently at the obliteration of a place one Whitehurst must have once cherished dearly. It seemed oddly gratuitous on my part, and something of an insult.
    The assistant adjutant was a laconic, mistrustful-eyed major who dealt speedily with my suggestion that my talents might best be suited for the more demanding cerebral activities of the rear echelon—I had murmured something about “public relations”—and assigned me to the command of a mortar platoon in one of the infantry battalions. Later in the day, after reporting to my battalion office, I was shown the place where I would live during the next few months before shipping out to Korea: a room on the second floor of one of the several brick buildings that served as the Bachelor Officers’Quarters. The room, designed for occupancy by two persons, was airy enough and reasonably comfortable-looking, but both it and the quarters themselves—functional, institutional, with dark echoing corridors and a communal washroom filled with the sound of urinals in spasm, the whole place soupily miasmic from roaring showers—reminded me again painfully of college, of a dormitory, and I realized how truly retrogressive my life had become.
    One facility possessed by this B.O.Q., however, which I had never seen in a college dormitory was a serious, full-sized bar fit for a modest hotel: here, where mixed drinks were twenty-five cents apiece (how seductively available are creature comforts in the military service, at least behind the front lines), the recalled reserve officers gathered each afternoon at five, uniforms abandoned, gaudy in sport shirts, drawn together by a camaraderie born in chagrin, resentment, homesickness, anxiety, and a common need to make heard the sound of distress. Certainly not even in the previous war was there ever such easy companionship, such a sense of a community of victims; and it was here at the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters bar that we met most often that spring to discuss our woes. And it may have been that first day—surely it was no more than a couple of days later—that I made the acquaintance of Lacy Dunlop, who, like most of the Bachelor Officers, was no bachelor.
    “Look at them,” Lacy said to me, gesturing around the dark, murmurous room. “The fellowship of the damned. Did you know there’s a new Chinese offensive expected at the Hwachon Reservoir? By fall I’ll bet half of the poor sods in this place will have their asses shot off. And all because we signed that creepy little piece of paper.”
    “How long have you been here?” I asked.
    “Oh hell, I got here the end of January. I drew a