The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps Read Free

the same idea.”
    Even as he spoke Blankenship had almost parted with the words, having stored them up a half hour before, having sensed, somehow, that he would be asked. Yet now he chose his manner of speaking, avoiding brusqueness and, above all, condescension: “One, sir, I’d double the guard on foggy nights. Two, I’d suggest securing and lock-bolting all those old window frames. Then I’d shake down—right now—every barracks and cell block on the island and get rid of any old stored-up pipes and crowbars. As for boats, sir, that’s a bit outside my experience, but I’d certainly keep a tight watch on my tools and lumber.”
    The words were out, the advice delivered. Blankenship felt a vague sense of shame, almost as if, a child, he had been beset by his own father for some scrap of wisdom. He wished the interview were over.
    “And they were—who, Gunner?” Pencil poised, the colonel waited while Blankenship said all he knew, giving him the same dry and tedious details—the names of the twomen, their home addresses, convictions and sentences and conduct in confinement—that he had hastily that morning memorized from the record books and had already told the colonel not five minutes before. He had prepared himself for this, too, with casual almost unthinking efficiency born out of ten years’ habit which forced him to consider in times of crisis not only the crisis itself but its future complications. It was one of the talents he had which had gotten him his warrant, and he knew it—a reflex as effortless as breathing which caused him to grasp an emergency at its core while aware each second of its all but invisible growths and tendrils, too, its imminent threats and its chances for exploitation. It was a talent which applied in this situation—an exasperating flight of two yardbirds who should never have been allowed to be in a position to escape at all—with no more or less fitness than it had applied on Guadalcanal, where with a mortar-blasted hunk of flesh as big as a small fist gouged out of his leg, flat on the ground with the hot funky stench of jungle in his nose, he had kept up for a night and a day a telephoned hourly situation report to Division, “thus contributing substantially to interunit liaison and to the success of the operation,” his Silver Star citation had read, and thus being, as General Stokes had afterward told him himself, “the only goddam operations chief in the goddam division who ever remembered to let us know what the hell was going on.”
    Blankenship felt the wound now, as he had ten times a day in whatever damp weather and probably would for the rest of his life, an icy trembling twitch like electric voltage pulsating in his thigh: for a brief dolorous instant it battened cruel teeth down to the marrow of his bone; then the tremblingceased. He shifted his leg, with the pain vexing him all the more because he had had to repeat these things to the colonel, and as he finished his report and the colonel began fussily to rummage through a drawer, Blankenship felt his irritation grow and grow, along with a frustrated and powerless outrage at this morning’s mess, which could have been so easily prevented but which, more importantly, had left him feeling so cheated and unfulfilled. Nor was it an anger directed so much against the colonel now, or the two escaped prisoners (whom he had never laid eyes on except for their record-book pictures), but against some totally abstract concept of order, an order which—for the moment at least—had allowed itself to become corrupted and in default. For when the corporal of the guard had aroused him hours before, breathing into his ear the word “escape,” the word had shocked him from slumber like ice water and, even as he methodically but without one second’s hesitation drew on his clothes, heavy scarf and gloves and field jacket, had made him feel a slow mounting thrill of anticipation so intense and freighted with promise that