Night Train

by Thom Jones

  My partner had a constant can of Coke going, which he referred to as “sar’dah”; I believe something in that popular beverage’s secret ingredients had stripped the enamel off #22, making it amenable to stains. Mississippi smoked enough straight Camels to color it a kind of Boston Baked Bean brown. To watch Mississippi finger #22 or caress it with this thick tongue was just about enough to put me off the fried rabbit or grilled liver let alone a cold can of ham and limas. He said there was a cavity in it and he liked to keep it wet, like a beached whale, otherwise it hurt like shit. Since he was shy about twenty-five teeth, he wasn’t the world’s best enunciator, and because of his thick southern accent, I was able to ascertain little else of what he said. Nonetheless it took only about forty-five minutes before I was hating him as much as or more than I hated Captain McQueen.

  Just before lunch the breakfast pots and pans were finished and one of the cooks signaled for us to grab some chow—bolt it down in the upright position, actually, since in the few moments we were away a new mountain of stainless-steel, brass, and aluminum cookware filled the pot shack. By midafternoon I was moving back and forth on the pot shack’s slippery duckboard at all times very much aware of where my partner was standing and as I began to match his output, he began to hate me just a little less whereas my loathing for this lowlife hillbilly had no bounds.

  We took the early supper and then worked until midnight finishing up the dinner pots and pans and the green marmite hot food containers that the mess crew brought in from the field where they had been serving the grunts on night maneuvers.

  I staggered back to the barracks and put in a piss call with the night watch, fell asleep in my clothes, and when a Marine with a flashlight tapped me on the shoulder at two A.M., I jumped out of bed and made my way through the dark back to Mess Hall Number Three. A new guy, fresh from San Diego, was standing guard and called out, “Halt, who goes there!”

  I was no seasoned Marine but neither was I in the mood for this kind of Mickey Mouse, so I said, “Bugs Bunny, motherfucker!” I heard the private chamber a round and thought a bullet in the back of the head wouldn’t be so bad the way things had been going ever since I joined the fucking Crotch. The question “Why did you join? Why did you join? Etc. Why did you fucking join?” came up a lot in my interior monologues. It was my impenetrable Zen koan. I had not been coerced to join by the court; I was not a psychopath and I did not join because I became temporarily insane after a girl two-timed me. The pay was something like eleven cents an hour, so it wasn’t for the money. I was not drafted but actually joined—of my own free will, sober and in full possession of all my mental faculties—the United States Marine Corps. I was convinced that such a fool as myself had never lived.

  Mississippi was already dripping with sweat as I stepped inside the pot shack on my second day and pulled on my rubber gloves, which I later realized were useless and gave up altogether. “Whar th’ fuck ya been? We nine mahls b’hind!” Liked to have smashed him in the face for about the ninety-fifth time in the last seventeen hours I had known him, but I reminded myself that the Marine Corps has some very bad places for people who don’t get with the program. There was the brig McQueen threatened me with, which was pretty much like hell without the fires. There were the chain-link dog cages behind the brig where they threw you in naked except for your drawers, cotton, and where they cooled you off with a fire hose if you complained about the accommodations. Rations in the dog kennels consisted of three slices of stale bread and two canteens of water supposedly followed by a full meal every third day and then back to bread and water. My recruiting sergeant didn’t exactly promise me a rose garden, but I certainly wish he would have told me about those dog kennels and the brig chasers with big biceps and billy clubs, most of whom looked like close relatives of Charles “Sonny” Liston, the then current heavyweight champion of the world. I wondered if my recruiter had any colored glossy brochures entitled “The Brig and Its Environs”; I would have liked to have seen them before I joined. I might have changed my mind and done something more sensible like joining the Foreign Legion.

  Mississippi was sweating so bad he had his shirt and apron off. He was a redhead with plenty of freckles. There was no gut on him. He was rangy and muscular from humping the boonies. He had the standard USMC tattoo on his left deltoid and above that, emblazoned on his arm, was the name “Nudey.” I took note, grabbed a fresh Brillo pad, and got busy. Just at the very moment the last of the jerricans were done, the cook’s assistants bore down on us with sadistic grins and huge pots and kettles from morning chow. Some of these kettles, had they not been scrubbed so fastidiously, day after day, year after year—had they been blackened with soot, they would have put you in mind of kettles out in the dark jungles of Africa or the Amazon in which cannibals could cook two or three missionaries, a dog, and a mess of root vegetables all at once. And there were so many of them. And they kept coming! I tried to emulate Lieutenant Baker and get into the Tao of the pot shack. I tried to become a part of its essence, lose my identity, become a molecule or an atom—detach and just flow with it all, but that second day, all twenty-two hours of it, was just a complete motherfucker, pure and simple. Seventy-nine thousand, two hundred seconds of motherfucker.

  I was back to the rack at midnight. After a suitable dose of self-pity, about 4.0 seconds, I fell asleep to the lullaby, earth-shaking sound of 220 artillery fired by grunts running night maneuvers. Dreamed I slid from Southern California all the way down to Patagonia and fell off the bottom of the globe into an abyss of dragons, toothy lizards, Gabon vipers, and black Norway rats crawling with typhus fleas. There were scorpions, Tasmanian jumping spiders with sharp ivory teeth, and various other eight-legged, predaceous arachnids with bad attitudes. Horrible as it was, this dream was preferable to the flashlight in the face at two A.M. I got up, took a quick piss, and then ran through the chill night air to Mess Hall Number Three watching red tracers arc across the skyline. An illumination round lit up the night like a full moon and I spotted the private fresh from San Diego standing guard again. I caught him smoking and told him to fuck off before he even challenged me. He just gave me a sly grin. We were both just a couple of shitbirds and we knew it, so why jack around? There was enough hassle for everybody as it was.

  Inside I expected green marmite cans up-the-ass and I was more than right. The ensuing shift in the pot shack was very much the same as the preceding, except that I was even more tired and the color was leached out of my hands as they were filled with dozens of stainless-steel slivers. I began to long for the dull, sluggish, futile, languorous and aimless days of life on the boxing team. The pot shack was nothing but hustle.

  That afternoon, Sergeant Myers, the boxing coach, showed up while I’m struggling with a grungy-ass pot caked with mashed potatoes. “Where in the hell have you been?” he says.

  I started to explain about my underuse of Kiwi shoe polish, Brasso, and rifle-cleaning gear when Mississippi shot me a look of hatred for my falling output. Myers said he would talk to Captain McQueen and after he left, like a prisoner on Death Row, I began to entertain the slight hope that the governor might be a commie liberal opposed to the ultimate punishment. Or that Joan Baez would sing a sweet song to Lyndon Johnson, have him crying his eyes out and soon dispatching Air Force One to pick up such an intelligent, sensitive, and promising young man as myself, and send me to Harvard College on free government scholarship after a two-week vacation at Camp David.

  That night as per usual, I went to bed at midnight. Piss call at two. The green marmite cans, followed by aluminum bowls used to whisk scrambled eggs, mix pancake batter, and concoct hamburger and white gravy on toast, i.e., “shit on a shingle.” There were frying pans from the officers’ mess filled with crusted egg, bacon and sausage grease, empty pans of biscuits ’n’ gravy, and an endless supply of hot greasy bakery trays the size of solar satellite panels. There were large ladles, spoons, carving knives, and peculiar little dagger utensils that looked like Pygmy spears. The
n came the marmite cans again and the beginning of the lunch mess. If you were lucky and you really hustled you could squeeze in a piss and a cigarette about three in the afternoon. The heavy shit came down after that—the supper mess was worse than both the breakfast and lunch jobs together. Mess Hall Number Three was feeding a couple of thousand men a day. We were doing double duty since the Fifth Regiment was ready to ship out to Vietnam and their chow hall was already secured. Mess Hall Number Three was feeding those troopers as well as our own. Still, the Marines working the scullery could clean up the mess hall exactly two hours after the last Marine was served chow and they could go back to their barracks, smoke cigarettes, and grab an hour of sleep before reporting back. They could take a shower or have a game of volleyball. The action in the pot shack, however, was unending. I began to fantasize on the various ways I would like to murder Captain McQueen.

  To the Marines pulling mess duty in the scullery, Mississippi and I became objects of mystery, fascination, and much speculation. We looked like a couple of Haitian zombies, only we moved faster. Even the worst of the shitbirds were never condemned to more than three days in the pot shack. Geneva Convention. Soon I was pushing my second straight week and Mississippi, I don’t know how long. There was no salvation from Sergeant Myers and of course, no intervention from that wonderful, talented, and elegant entertainer, Ms. Baez.

  I really began to think it would have made more sense to join the French Foreign Legion. They had better uniforms and the thought of a posting in Sidi bel Abbes, Algeria, had a certain romance to it. I mean North Africa, check it out: the Atlas Mountains, desert sands, the pyramids, the Sphinx, Berber nomads, camels, date palms, and a policy of “no questions asked.” There was the tradition of General Patton, Field Marshal Rommel, and T. E. Lawrence. Of course all I know of Patton came after the fact, when I saw George C. Scott in the role, slapping some poor soldier across the face for cowardice in an otherwise boring movie. Peter O’Toole’s movie Lawrence of Arabia, which I saw prior to my enlistment, was a lot better. Lawrence, like Baker, seemed to have discovered the elusive Tao of the military arts. The harder things were, the better he liked them.

  I decided the best way to murder Captain McQueen was by sleep deprivation. I heard it took about three months to kill a man in such a fashion. I would force McQueen to stand at attention in a brightly lit cell. Whenever he blinked his eyes more than twice in a week, I would order one of my legionnaires to hoist him up by his heels and whip the soles of his bare feet with a sackful of centimes. “How long are you going to make me stay awake, mon Commandant?”

  “I’m going to make you stay awake until you die.”

  In 1964, Camp Pendleton was nothing but a hundred square miles of Quonset huts and lots of scorched foothills with names like “Little Agony” and “Big Agony” and “Sheepshit Hill.” These were hills the Marines humped and were named accordingly. Big Agony was very bad, Little Agony could half kill you, and a run up Sheepshit Hill required rock climber’s gear. It was nothing but foothills and Quonset huts and one shade of green. There were no camels or palm-infested oases choked with humid vegetation. There were no magnificent sweeps of desert with buzzards flying high in the arid blue sky. There were no nights when you could see magnificent soul-inspiring constellations of stars. There was just the fucking pot shack where every day was a repeat of the day before.

  Mississippi kept awake on Coca-Cola. I did so by drinking thirty-plus cups of coffee. I had my head in so many pots and pans for so many days, I was beginning to hallucinate. Once when I accidentally knocked over a full can of Mississippi’s sar’dah, he grabbed me by the throat with his left hand while he dug his thumb in my eye and squeezed my face with his right. “You ever do that again, I’ll kill your fuckin’ Yankee ass, you Yankee cocksucker.”

  “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” I said.

  Mississippi was a scary guy. On a prior occasion I tried to get neighborly and he took a swing at me for calling him “Nudey.” It was a good punch and I was tired but because of trained reflexes I was just able to give him a head slip. He tried to follow up with a left hook but I had my hands up by then and stepped away from the punch as Mississippi slipped on the soapy duckboard and knocked himself cold when he banged his head against the sharp edge of the steam compressor’s floor brace. I let him lie there as I resumed my activities. When he got up about ten minutes later, he had a goose egg on his forehead and there was no more fight in him. I told him to get his fucking hillbilly ass in gear. “Sleeping on the job, why mercy me,” I said. “Get up. We’re nine mahls behind. Get the cob outcher ass!”

  Mississippi liked to talk to himself. He liked to refer to our beloved Corps as a “goddamn, green, sumbitch, cocksuckin’ motherfucker.”

  On this matter he got no argument from me. But his negativity was infectious. By the third week I had passed through the anger stage and became a neutral Haitian zombie. While I was used to the marvelous nuance, versatility, and precision of the word “fuck” and lived in a universe where “fuck” was every other word, more or less, all of Mississippi’s “cocksucks” and “motherfucks” delivered in a toothless drawl were making me a very depressed zombie. I could see no light at the end of the tunnel.

  One afternoon just into the fourth week Second Lieutenant Baker poked his head into the pot shack and said, “Who did this to you?”

  I said, “It ain’t no biggie, sir. Just pulling a little mess duty here.”

  Lieutenant Baker said, “Go back to the barracks, take a shower, and get some rest.” He turned to Mississippi and said, “The same goes for you, Marine.”

  The way it turned out, the way Lieutenant Baker got past Captain McQueen was this: everybody from the Fifth Regiment who hadn’t qualified at the rifle range in less than a year was pulled off the line and sent to the range. Lieutenant Baker went to the colonel with a list of men who had not qualified from our own platoon and although it should not have been, my name was on that list. The reason I had a chevron on my collar had to do with the fact that I shot the highest score in my boot-camp platoon. That chevron separated me from being the lowest thing on the planet, a private in the Marine Corps. Being a private in the USMC is a couple of notches lower than being an untouchable in India—lower than a harijan haricot with a case of AIDS, wet leprosy, and halitosis. You could be an E-1 in the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, or Air Force but you would not be so low. In 1964 a private in the Army could just as well be some guy from Yale who just earned a doctorate in astrophysics and got drafted. A man could join the Navy and actually see the world, or a man might join the Air Force because of the food or training—but the Marines? I already listed the reasons: forced by law, insanity, and two-timed by your woman.

  The next morning a troop transport left for the range at 0510 hours. Lieutenant Baker, Mississippi, and myself were on that truck and as we waited for dawn in the freezing chill, huddled in our lined field jackets and blowing on our frozen fingers, a range coach came by with a carbide lamp to blacken our rifle sights and flash suppressors. As soon as the sun cracked the horizon, the field jacket came off and sweat began to bead on my forehead. Two hours later it was running down the crack of my ass.

  The one thing the Marines can do better than anyone is shoot. To qualify at the range you must be able to shoot in the prone position, the seated position, and in the standing offhand position. You must shoot in rapid fire, and within the context of a more relaxed time frame, at various distances up to five hundred yards. Using your rifle sling, it is possible to hold the rifle steady and draw a bead. The Marine Corps shooting technique involves four phases. Breathe, relax, aim, squeeze. This is known by the acronym BRASS. It works for just about everyone. I mean, it’s got a far higher success rate than Alcoholics Anonymous. As we practiced our shooting I could immediately see what the problem was with Lieutenant Baker. He would take the deep breath, blow it out, and then aim. But instead of squeezing the trigger, he would jerk. The reason for this had to do with the BRASS technique. Just after you
take a deep breath and blow it out, relax and aim, time stops. Your concentration becomes so intense that all of time stops from here to the farthest reaches of the Milky Way. From here to all hell and gone. The next part should be easy, you just squeeze, but in the millisecond of stop-time, Lieutenant Baker’s eyes would glaze over as he went past the Tao of military science and entered the realm of cosmic consciousness. When his brain finally screamed for him to inhale, he would jerk off a round and miss the target altogether and then look at you with a stupid blank stare.

  Mississippi, who turned out to be a pretty decent fellow after a good night’s sleep, and who happened to feel rightfully grateful to escape the pot shack, tried to teach Lieutenant Baker a method of shooting he learned plunking squirrels, possum, and deer in the sloughs and piney woods of his homeland. He had Baker line his finger along the edge of his M-14 barrel, point it at the target and then let his eye follow his finger to the target. This worked very well for the officer until we got back to the five-hundred-yard line. There, in spite of his thick G.I. glasses, which were so ugly they were known as “birth control devices,” Lieutenant Baker simply could not see. But he was shooting so well in the closer ranges, we figured he could kiss off the five hundred and still qualify. On that day, at showtime, Baker, who had failed so many times in the art almost every Marine excelled at, panicked and shot high, missing his target completely at the two-hundred-yard prone-position rapid fire. By the time we moved back to the five hundred, Baker was pale with the knowledge that he would have to shoot a perfect score to qualify in the least of categories, that of “marksman.” No doubt he was also thinking of the refrigerator and appliance department at the Sears & Roebuck Company in Topeka, Kansas.