Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

He thought maybe that would satisfy Hickock, to have stirred up some of the new guys to pick on him along with Rostrovitz, a Pole from Chicago with whom he had never got along. Two days would pass and he would think Hickock had finally let him go. Jack stuck up for Murray and so did Tiny and Slo Mo Mazzini, a big kid who had been a replacement before Saipan, and he knew Reardon and Gunny Zeeland liked him. But in the Marines, an NCO could use any religious or ethnic or racial slur. That was the Marine way.

  He tried to hold himself together. He had a deaf great-aunt on his father’s side who wore a hearing aid. When she found conversation boring or inconvenient, she shut it off. Murray tried to pretend to himself that he had a hearing aid he could turn off. He tried to pretend he didn’t understand, that that thin-lipped mouth was moving in some strange incomprehensible tongue. But he heard every word.

  There was a lot of liquor on Saipan. There wasn’t supposed to be, but the marines traded battleflags for it. Jack would sit around sewing up Japanese flags out of parachute silk and dipping them in iodine to look like blood and then they’d trade them to the Navy or the fliers for booze. There was also a hot market in Jap souvenirs, from canteens to swords to helmets and even skulls. Besides, every platoon had a still hidden. Murray didn’t drink till he got drunk, but his fever had been coming back, and the booze helped. Otherwise sometimes he got the shakes. It was better not to stand out from the men in any way. Tiny drank too, against his upbringing, although he wouldn’t gamble or shoot craps or visit whores.

  A league of ball teams was set up, enlisted men versus officers in the various outfits. It passed the time. Murray had caught on his high school team, so he played catcher. Books were distributed in special armed forces editions. All the guys lined up for Forever Amber because it was supposed to be hot. He was reading A Bell for Adano. On Saipan they had movies regularly and shows every couple of weeks. In January they had the Andrews Sisters; in February, Joe E. Brown and Carmen Miranda.

  He knew he was relatively lucky, because if he had come in as a replacement now, Hickock could have turned everybody against him. They could have driven him to despair and perhaps suicide, as had happened with a PFC a sergeant had decided was a fruit in Charlie Company.

  As it was, he had more time with the company than Hickock did and he had his buddies. Hickock would drop fruit jokes on Jack and him and try to isolate him, but it did not take with enough guys to make life entirely miserable. Slo Mo was loyal to them because he thought Murray had saved his life on Saipan, which was debatable and if true, true of everyone of them. He was a big rangy kid of eighteen, deliberate in his movements, his thoughts, his words. You’d say something to him and maybe twenty minutes later when you were talking about something entirely different, he’d answer what you’d forgotten you said. That’s what gave him the nickname. Murray decided he was not slow mentally but thoughtful, a decent kid who tried to understand what was put before him. Tiny stayed loyal too. He liked them, Murray suspected, because they did not make up sex exploits all the time and did not shoot craps constantly. Tiny had had a strict Protestant upbringing that had left him wary of sin but had not seemed, amazingly, to make him intolerant. He clung to them because they were quiet, Murray thought, and did not frighten him.

  Murray was the oldest and played a casual father to Tiny and Slo Mo. They brought him their questions and their bruises and he gave advice, which was free. He was easily protective of them but he could not protect himself. Hickock was always after him, waiting to catch him in some minor infringement and put him on latrine duty or set him to scrubbing the camp stove every day for a week. He knew that regulations forbade that, but he knew nobody gave a damn for regulations when it was the sergeant doing it to a corporal. Sergeant Major Reardon might like Murray, but he would never interfere with what Sergeant Hickock, a regular marine like himself, felt like doing to one of the men.

  One Saturday he came back from guard duty and Rostrovitz was hanging around grinning. On his cot was a picture of a fat lady, naked, with Ruthie’s face stuck on her body. Rostrovitz or one of the other goons had cut up his photo, which made him angrier than the obscene picture. He ripped it up and set fire to it with his new Zippo.

  “Hey, Prickstein. Jew-boy. Your girlfriend sent me that picture. Don’t you like it better than the one she sent you?”

  Murray stamped out the burning paper and wiped up the ashes. He wanted to push Rostrovitz’s teeth down his throat. He wanted to squeeze his fat neck until he smashed his voice box. He made himself say, as he sat down on his cot, “Asshole, cutting up the pictures of pretty girls is the closest you’ll ever get to one. Taking her face and sticking it on the body of some old whore like you’re used to made you feel right at home, didn’t it?”

  “She’s a whore too or she wouldn’t fuck you. All Jew bitches are whores. They do it for fifty cents.”

  Murray wrote to Ruthie for new photos, telling her a story about losing them in battle. The 8th Marines could tell from the visible preparations that they were about to be sent into action again. They had been hearing scuttlebutt about Iwo Jima, so maybe they were going to be added to the carnage there. Some guys thought they were heading for Formosa. They’d be told when they were on board.

  It was grade school again, he thought. Waiting for the bully to jump you, a big kid who is two years older and twenty pounds heavier and has it out for you, Christ killer. It’s the Polish gang waiting to catch you when you have to cross the alley on the way home. If they actually slugged it out like a barroom brawl in the movies, he did not know what would happen. Hickock was four inches taller than him and had a longer reach, but he was lightly built, not a powerful man. Murray had watched him on the ball field and lifting loads. They both knew equally well how to fight dirty by now. The Marines will make a man of you: providing a man smelled like a pig and acted like a dog. He could never forget someone was out to get him, someone with power of life and death over him.

  If there was a bad duty to be drawn, Murray drew it: something heavy to load, something filthy to clean, something sticky to wade through. He was Cinderella, but where was his fairy godmother to call out the ants to help him pick grains of rice from the ashes? Or rather, where were the elephants to help him carry crates of mortars he could scarcely drag? It went on and on. It smelled more and more like blood. How much could anybody take? How often could he bow his head and pretend not to hear, pretend he did not speak English, pretend he was standing in a snowstorm on Campus Martius, the big square in Detroit where rallies were held?

  The precipitating incident was no different than twenty others. Maybe the effect had been cumulative. He swallowed his rage, he held it in and felt it become pain and cold fury, and he lowered his head and blindly persisted. It was a Saturday night and there was plenty of booze flowing. He went to a movie with Jack and Slo Mo. Tiny did not approve of most movies and did not go. When they were on their way back to the rough barracks that had been their home for the last months, Tiny was sitting outside waiting for them.

  “Murray, they went in your stuff and took out your letters. They’re reading them and laughing.”

  Jack tried to catch his arm but Murray pushed past him and flung open the screen door of the barracks. Sergeant Hickock was doing the reading, to Rostrovitz and about six of the kids, all laughing and too drunk at first to notice he had arrived. Hickock noticed at once and raised his voice, adopting a falsetto version of Molly Goldberg.

  “Naomi is working in the Fennimans’ bakery every day after school and all day Sunday, and the baker is pronging her with his kosher salami, and me too when I drop by, right on the counter in my big hot kosher oven.”

  He felt ripped open. He felt scalded all down his front. That they would even touch her letters was not something he could endure, that their fat dirty fingers should touch those letters drove him crazy, that they would read and make fun of her simple hardworking life and her gentle and loving nature, worrying about everybody but herself. He had punched Hickock before he even knew he
had hit him. The sergeant flew back with the force of the blow and landed with a crash on the floor behind the cot. There was complete silence for a moment before everyone began punching and pushing each other and yelling, Jack rushing in with Tiny to pull Rostrovitz off Murray.

  Then Hickock stood. “Calm down, boys,” he said, wiping the blood from his mouth. “Hitting your superior is one fucking long time in stockade, Jew-boy. You’re going to love stockade and I’m going to love knowing you’re doing hard, hard time.”

  Sergeant Major Reardon intervened and finally there was no court-martial, no stockade. There was punishment detail, the work Hickock had been making him do anyhow. Reardon had persuaded Hickock that since they were going to sea in two days, they ought not to send Murray up. Murray was not sure Reardon had done him a favor. Stockade was hell, but Hickock was not going to forgive him for punching him in front of everybody.

  He was demoted and lost his stripe, but about that he did not give a damn. What was bad was that he was under Hickock, going into action and helpless. His violent response had improved nothing. In fact Hickock hated him more and he had forfeited the tiny bit of Reardon’s protection he had. Reardon told him he had the brains of a pile of dogshit and that if they were not shipping out and going into action, he would have spent the rest of the war in stockade and pulled a dishonorable discharge.

  A dishonorable meant trouble getting jobs. It meant no GI Bill, no payments to finish college. He despised himself for striking Hickock. That was what Hickock had been goading him to do, and he had fallen into the trap. He would be in stockade now, except that Reardon had stood up for him and the new looey had backed up Reardon. The Marines were running short of men and the upcoming invasion was rumored to be tough. Reardon didn’t want to lose one of his experienced marines just before the battle.

  He despised himself above all for striking Hickock because it was the sort of John Wayne fisticuffs that were all show and push and shove and left him worse off than before. He had fought back out of weakness, not out of strength. Now Hickock had him just where he wanted him, a marked man who was not only expendable but slated to die on whatever stinking island awaited them. Jack and Tiny and Slo Mo all kept saying he sure was lucky, but he knew he had signed his death warrant with that stupid goyischer punch.

  BERNICE 9

  Taps

  The tension about the WASP program that had built up during the spring continued all through the summer and into the fall. Congress did not approve their militarization; instead they lost in the House by nineteen votes. When Congress came back after summer recess, the mood seemed even less open to granting the WASPs military status, but still they waited. Every official notice about logbooks or attire was received with seething hope and fear, that it would be the news that would finally resolve their status.

  In late August she found a telegram waiting for her when she arrived back in Long Beach. It was a Friday night and the chatter level in the barracks was high. “Did anybody else get one of these?”

  Nobody had. She was up for officer training if the WASP militarization bill went through. She could not help wishing that this would turn out to be that notification.

  It was not. The Army regrets to inform you. Jeff was dead. No date was given, and no information except that he had died under fire in France.

  She sat on her cot with the telegram in her lap. She had to call her father, because Jeff had put her down as next of kin to be informed. Her father wouldn’t even know. It had to be a mistake. It was so vague. People didn’t die like this, on a piece of yellow paper, and simply disappear. Even with her mother, there had been a body. Where was the body?

  She longed for Flo so fiercely that she stood and in one stride reached Flo’s cot and lay on that instead. Flo was off ferrying a P-47 East. She would not be back for three days and Bernice would be long gone by then. She had to call her father. When it came to it, she found she could not. Her hand would not take the receiver down. She could not speak to the operator. No.

  Finally she sent him a telegram and then she found herself driven to walk and walk, through the hot night trying to grasp her loss. Jeff had always been her male part. For all the years after Viola died until just recently, his had been the only affection in her life. He had been her foot in the world, her window into adventure. For those years of her confinement while Jeff was wandering around the country dissatisfied and footloose, neither had formed any lasting attachment beyond each other, halves of some unreconcilable whole.

  War had severed them. She had not seen him since that summer weekend in Bentham Center.… Did Zach know? He was in France too. She could not bring herself to write about Jeff to that London address he had her use.

  Flo will never meet Jeff, she thought, and he will never meet her. That seemed to her terribly wrong, a failing in the universe. For all of the rest of her life, she was going to miss him. Now there was only Flo. She had to find in herself the courage to take hold of Flo and hold on. To make her love real. If she lost Flo, she would kill herself. It was worth any risk to keep her.

  It was early October when both Flo and Bernice, plus all the other WASPs stationed at Long Beach, got an official letter from AAF Headquarters in Washington. Nobody seemed in a hurry to read the letter. Either they had their commissions, or they were about to be washed out. Bernice could not open the envelope. The other women were standing around in a similar paralysis. Finally Flo ripped her envelope and read out loud:

  To All WASP:

  General Arnold has directed that the WASP program be deactivated on 20 December 1944. Attached is a letter from him to each of you.…

  Flo stopped reading.

  Everybody opened the damned envelopes and yanked out the mimeographed letters. It was true, they were being forced out. They were thanked briefly by Cochran and profusely by Arnold, and told to kiss off. They could apply to the Civil Aeronautics Administration for a civilian rating on a par with their military rating, and good luck in the future.

  They were still delivering planes. Bernice tried to tell herself that Congress or General Arnold would realize it was a huge mistake and that they could not be thrown away before the war was over, pushed into idleness. Flo and Bernice, like most of the other women, ran around to every aircraft manufacturing plant in Southern California looking for jobs as test pilots, but no companies were hiring. They sent their résumés to airlines. The airlines did not bother replying.

  A pall of depression hung over the barracks. A few of the women were not affected, those who had other plans and knew they could not have gone on flying indefinitely. The married women whose husbands were overseas took it best. One was planning to go into business with her husband crop dusting in California’s Central Valley. They had been writing back and forth about their plans for two years. She got an early discharge and went off to start arrangements, sure the war must be over by Christmas with the good news in the papers and the WASPs being sent home.

  Bernice heard Flo crying at night, but she did not know what to do. She felt helpless. They wouldn’t even receive the veterans benefits being talked about, preferences for jobs or help starting businesses or getting an education. They had only the money they had saved from their pay. The women at Long Beach signed a petition offering to go on flying for nothing, for a dollar a year, because they were still fiendishly busy. One of the reasons that Bernice hoped was because the fighters kept coming in, and few pilots were qualified to fly them besides the WASPs.

  They knew that the head of the West Coast ferrying division had put in a special plea to Arnold on their behalf, saying that he simply could not do without the WASP pursuit pilots. Then the news filtered down: Arnold absolutely refused to grant a reprieve. The pursuit pilots had most infuriated the American Legion and Congress, for that was considered a job with too much panache for a woman. After December twentieth, no women pilots were to remain with the Army Air Corps.

  A WASP newsletter appeared with job information, but mostly it contained news of wha
t was not open. TWA sent an interviewer, offering to hire WASPs as stewardesses. Schools offered jobs as counselors. Some of the women went for interviews as air controllers and were hired.

  One night when fog kept her on the East Coast after she had delivered a Mustang to Newark, she wandered the streets of Greenwich Village, searching for something that she feared did not exist. Yet now and then she saw women on the streets who eyed her as the colored nurse had long ago, women who when she looked at them, looked right back.

  It was eleven that night when she found a bar full of women, although at first she was not sure all of them were female. But they were, they were. She admired the style of some: jaunty, tough. She could look like that, if she tried. She had been drinking at the bar for half an hour, nursing a beer, when a woman her own height, a little thinner in a black turtleneck and overalls, leaned on the bar next to her and asked in a low-pitched voice, “Are you lonely, honey? I haven’t seen you around here before. What’s the uniform? Oh, you fly planes? That’s exciting. I have a sweetheart who’s a WAC, but she’s overseas.… You can call me Frankie.”

  Bernice went home with Frankie, not because of any instant attraction but because she had to learn what she was and how to make love to Flo. She was terrified of making a mistake, of hurting Flo. It turned out to be easy to make love with a woman. That facility astonished her. She could have figured it out if she had not been so frightened, but maybe she needed the permission to be what she was from other women like herself—just knowing that women who loved women had lives and jobs and apartments. Went on living and did not combust with pleasure and joy. She also learned what to call herself: she was a lesbian.

  “The poor bastards,” Flo said. She was talking about the last class of Avenger Field, who were receiving their wings on December 7 and graduating into nothing. “At least we had the life for a while. They’ve knocked themselves out getting through training, and for what?”