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

rifle platoon in the Sixth Marines. It was hell for a while. Sheer hell. Freezing cold, you can’t imagine how cold it was out in the swamps. And here I was, hadn’t touched a rifle in six years, and I was supposed to be leading a bunch of eighteen-year-old gung-ho kids just up from Parris Island. Oh Christ, it was awful, those field problems. Physically, I was a nasty old sponge. I’d forgotten how to read a map, and I was expected to be an example , you see, full of esprit de corps and all that silly crap.” He paused and flipped into his mouth the olive from his martini glass. “Really, unless you were out in those swamps for six weeks in the winter you’ll never understand how—well, I mean, blissful a spring like this can be.”
    From the jukebox, abruptly, there boomed forth the words of “My Truly, Truly Fair,” causing me, unaccountably, to feel a sharp sense of imprisonment. When played in a martial setting, popular songs have a way of heightening one’s mood of isolation: dealing with peaceable pursuits like ball games and courtship, they tend to sadden, and to mock one’s ears. In the Second World War, this song for me was “Don’t Fence Me In.” Now I realized I had acquired another: “My Truly, Truly Fair,” loud, lushly orchestrated, infinitely desolating. I would have settled for the Missa Solemnis.
    “No, you see, ever since this stuff in Korea began, the poor old Corps has had to readjust its thinking,” Lacy went on. “Marines before this were always snooping and pooping in the jungle, you know, chasing the Japs in the Pacific or working for Wall Street in Haiti and Nicaragua. Most all of the marine wars have been tropical wars. But after last winter and that ghastly retreat from the Chosin Reservoir,with all those poor guys freezing their peckers off, the brass has gotten what they like to call ‘winter-oriented’ in their thinking—isn’t that an exquisite phrase?—which means that my battalion commander, guy named Hudson who is very shot in the ass with the Corps anyway, made a fetish of walking us through as many frozen creeks as he could find. Oh, my friend, April is the least cruel month I know, and you should count your blessings for getting here now.”
    “When do you think we’ll be shipping out overseas?” I asked.
    “Oh, I don’t know. No one seems to know. But the best guess is that we’ll be here at least until midsummer. God, I hope it’s not too soon, or ever. We’ve had our war, for Christ’s sake. I’ve had enough of this bullshit mucking about in the Orient.”
    As it turned out, I got to know Lacy Dunlop better than any of my fellow reserve officers; in fact, we struck up a sympathetic and animated friendship, having more than our un-prosperous future in common. Lacy was a few years older than I—he was twenty-eight or twenty-nine—though he had the blue-eyed, blond, snub-nosed good looks that gave him the appearance of a teenager; at first glance there had been something almost ridiculously regular and conventional about his open, boyish face—I thought of the well-scrubbed American kid in the Coca-Cola and hair-tonic ads—but the impression of unsoiled youth he made was largely superficial, a cosmetic accident: beneath the fresh fraternity-boy countenance lay a temper that was experienced, complicated, sardonic, and wise. Much of this had been acquired at the hard business of war. While barely twenty he had been commissioned a second lieutenant, and had participated asa platoon commander in some of the most ferocious engagements on Okinawa, coming out of it unharmed but with somber memories of those who had been slaughtered all around him—“like termites,” he said.
    After the war he finished up at Columbia, in the city of his birth, taking a degree in philosophy. Later he went to France, where he studied at the Sorbonne, married a French girl, and where—possessed by the same “lunacy,” as he put it, that had affected everyone else—he