A Tidewater Morning Read Free Page B

now there’s this phony operation tomorrow just to tease us. That wouldn’t be so bad if we knew we were at least being held in reserve, that we’d be landed sooner or later. But this To go back to Saipan and turn into zombies! It’s”—his voice rose querulously—“it’s intolerable!”
    “Calm down, Douglas, me boy,” Halloran said amiably, lapsing into an Irish brogue now, excruciating but somewhat more convincing than the Highland cadence; he was, after all, of Irish descent. “In the Corps ye’ll learn to endure frustration and take orders like the foine young lad you are. If you don’t make Okinawa, you’ll surely make the mainland. Then on the mainland, it’s me foine belief, ye’ll get to kill yourself half a dozen of the little ringtail baboons—maybe half a hundred. Also,” he added with a lewd wink, “you’ll get a lot of that sidewise nooky.” He was alluding to the Marine Corps pleasantry, exhaustively repeated, that the Japanese pudendum was horizontal.
    “But the mainland! God knows when that’ll be. Anything could happen. We could get sick, have an accident—anything!” Stiles stopped for a moment, resumed in a milder voice: “With all due respect, sir, and no offense, but you’ve personally taken care of a bunch of those baboons. We haven’t.” He spread his arm in a gesture that included me, wearing an expression that made him seem embarrassingly close to grief. “We haven’t laid eyes on a Jap!”
    There was another dullish crump crump, closer now, near enough to make the colonel’s eyebrows twitch. “Kamikaze,” he said, and stretched out his body toward the porthole. “Fucking Japanese lunatics,” he murmured in a flat, emotionless voice, searching the ocean. “Insane sons of bitches. Fucking dogs, whole fucking empire. Eighty million animals with rabies.” He drew back from the porthole, licked his lips, inhaled, strove to say something else, then trailed off with a valiant but somehow inadequate “Dog fuckers.” Suddenly a sparkle lit in his eyes—it was plain he was finished with Stiles’s spunky dissidence—and he said: “Well, let’s have a drop of whiskey, me boys, and I’ll tell you a little story.”
    And suddenly I didn’t want to hear a story. I was seized once again by the despondent, haunted mood that had overtaken me on the deck. I felt that sharp homesickness again and yearned to return to sleep. But I had to hear (or pretend to hear) the story, even though Halloran was one of the worst storytellers I had ever listened to. Someone (it may have been Stiles) remarked that when Halloran got halfway through a story, even Halloran began to go to sleep. Lest I be misunderstood, this had nothing to do with intelligence but arose from a particular deafness—not just a lack of savoir faire but deafness to all social nuance, like a hymn singer caroling with glorious self-confidence Sunday after Sunday in just noticeably the wrong tempo and a halftone flat. Halloran was such a splendid fighting man that everyone pardoned his buffoonery. Stiles, who revered Halloran as much as I did, but who like wise wondered what made the man tick, once laid it all out to me in what I thought was a deft analysis. Happy Halloran was a professional Marine. He was 101 percent Marine Corps—member of a fellowship of knights, professor of a faith, a way of life to which he had consecrated himself as fiercely as any guardian of the Grail. Okay, Stiles went on, this Illinois knight served his squire’s discipline at Culver Military Academy. Then the Citadel, where the intellectual level was on a par with that of a night school for the mentally retarded. Then the time served with the Fourth Marines in Shanghai just before Pearl Harbor. The Americans, along with the British and the French, had made a playground of Shanghai for years. Probably the only time as an adult he’d had any taste of a civilian atmosphere—eating wonton soup and trying to make out with all that fabled