A Tidewater Morning Read Free

wanted to make the landing, aborted as it might be, with a reasonably unstubbled face and could be too busy all the rest of the day and night to complete his toilet. I suspect that he also liked to keep his handlebar graphically emphasized. I admired this touch of panache, and I recalled that he had ordered the rest of the battalion to shave themselves, too, whether they needed it or not—and some were young enough not to need to. With Halloran this was not chickenshit but class, and the kids ate it up. I felt passionately that Stiles and I would not have been half the platoon leaders we were had it not been for the example of Halloran. It was total infatuation.
    “Hiya, Dougie,” he said to Stiles, then to me: "Hiya, Paul, how’s your hammer hangin’? Sit down and take a load off.”
    “Thank you, sir,” we said in unison, easing ourselves down on his bunk.
    “So the long-awaited confrontation with our reptile foe, me laddies, is going to be but a wee scuffle, without a shot fired in anger.” He continued to shave while he uttered these words, which were intended to sound Scottish, I supposed, but resembled no dialect or accent I had ever heard. To me it was a small wart, but such an attempt at mimicry marked the height of his sense of the comic. Even now, through the lather, he was grinning at what he had just said. He had a touch of swarthiness—I supposed he could be described as black Irish—and the dimpled smile that plumped up his cheeks, and his hearty midwestern voice, gave a distant impression of Clark Gable. With whimsical affection I once thought that if you could distill the sheer masculinity he exuded, make of it some volatile essence, you would have an adman’s triumph—a cologne called Cock and Balls, smelling of leather, sweat, and gunpowder. At that time he was for me the matchless Marine officer. He was a graduate of the Citadel, where he had focused on engineering and had been made to read Longfellow. He had never heard of Franz Joseph Haydn, Anton Chekhov, or William Blake. But because I was one of his votaries, this ignorance was a virtually uncorrectable defect that made no difference.
    Dropping the brogue, he glanced by way of the mirror at Stiles’s book and said: “What learned pundit are you sticking your nose into now, Dougie?”
    “Hobbes, sir,” Stiles replied, “an English philosopher of the seventeenth century. The book’s called Leviathan. It’s probably his chef d’oeuvre.”
    In the mirror I could see Halloran grinning. “Give me an abstract. Is he Bolshie or anti-Bolshie?”
    After a hesitation, Stiles said: “Well, it’s hard to be specific, sir, since his historical context was so complicated, and he predated Marx by so many years. I suppose you could say that in his concept of the State as a kind of supermonster he was providing us, willy-nilly, with one of the earliest critiques of the Communist form of totalitarianism. But then at the same time you could hardly call him an advocate of democracy.”
    “He’d be to the right of that other guy, then—what’s his name, John Locke?”
    “Oh, certainly,” Stiles said. “By comparison Locke would be a true liberal.”
    Halloran ruminated for a moment, holding his straight-edge razor poised in midair. “How much influence did this guy have on Marx? As much as Hegel?”
    “Oh, God, no,” Stiles said, “no one influenced Marx so much as Hegel. Oh, I’m sure Marx had read the great English social philosophers—Hobbes, Locke, Bentham—but he pretty much discarded their ideas and created his own system.”
    “That Marx,” said Halloran, shaking his head, “that fucking Marx. What a shitload of trouble.”
    He paused and flipped a blob of foam from his razor, the straight-edge blade murderous-looking and slender, the only nonsafety razor in the outfit, to my knowledge, and nearly the only one I had ever seen. It was among the colonel’s trademarks, like the handlebar mustache or the silver-inlaid Colt .38