Sparta

by Roxana Robinson

  On the first day, when the new recruits boarded the shabby white bus that would take them from the airport to Quantico, a young second lieutenant stood up and came down the aisle. He set his gaze into the distance and began to shout over the noise of the engine. There was no preamble.

  “Honor, courage, and commitment are the Marine Corps values,” he called out. “If you can’t be honest at OCS, how can the Corps trust you to lead men in combat?”

  No one answered. No one had any idea of what to say. No one their age in the civilian world talked like that. Popular culture was driven by irony; the Marine Corps was driven by earnestness. By belief. It had something to do with the fact that Marines stood so straight that their shirts had no wrinkles. That their gaze was so fixed.

  At Quantico, they lost everything.

  The first to go was appearance: they lost their faces. Not really their faces, only their hair, but the change was so extreme it seemed to affect their faces. Conrad saw himself in the mirror after his hair was gone: without the face he knew, he felt vulnerable and strange.

  Everything familiar was taken away. The candidates became objects of derision and contempt, and so did their families, their backgrounds, their education, any source of pride they might have had. Mockery and abuse were the tools.

  Once, the sergeant stopped dead in front of Conrad, who stared past him, his hands rigid at his sides. The instructor folded his arms and glared, rage leaking upward.

  “Candidate, you’re nothing but a skinny piece of trash, you know that?”

  There was no swearing at Quantico, and no physical contact—lawsuits had ended those. But the instructors were still ferocious.

  “Yes, Sergeant Instructor!” Conrad shouted.

  “How the frig do you think you’re going to pass this course, candidate?”

  “I don’t know, Sergeant Instructor!” Conrad bellowed back. Big mistake: he’d used the personal pronoun. He should have said This candidate instead of I.

  “‘You’ don’t know? You?” the sergeant roared. “Who the heck are ‘you,’ candidate?” He stuck his face right into Conrad’s. A big vein in the side of his neck moved under the skin like a snake. “You think you’re some kind of special piece of lowlife trash?”

  His face closed in under the hat brim, his nose nearly touching Conrad’s. A gob of spit landed on Conrad’s eyelashes, and Conrad blinked instinctively and met the sergeant’s eyes for an instant.

  “Get your eyeballs off me, candidate!” he screamed. “What the fug are you looking at?”

  “Nothing, Sergeant Instructor!” Conrad screamed back, his eyes now on the barracks wall.

  “Are you looking at me, candidate? Why are you looking at me? Are you in love with me? Do you want to date me, candidate?”

  “No, Sergeant Instructor!” Conrad screamed.

  “Don’t you ever, ever look at me, candidate. I’ll make you sorry you were born. I’ll make your miserable self into grass. I know what you’re like, candidate. I can see right through you. Do you think I want a nasty piece of trash like you in my beloved Marine Corps?”

  “No, Sergeant Instructor!” Conrad shouted.

  The contempt from the instructors aroused a kind of answering rage. In fact, during training, rage was the ruling emotion. It was always present, though the level ranged from simmering resentment to throat-choking fury.

  They had to yell their responses, which meant an investment of energy. The word they had to yell most was “Kill!” They yelled that all the time—on their way to meals, when an instructor walked into a classroom, and when they drew their chairs out to sit down. At first they focused only on volume. Later, when they were more confident, they concentrated on gusto, zest.

  One day in the barracks the instructor went after a candidate named Thomas. They were lined up in front of their racks, which was what they called beds. He’d been not quite fast enough in lining his bare feet up along the painted line on the floor. The instructor came over and stood in front of him.

  His face red and swollen, he yelled, “What the fug is wrong with you, candidate? How long do you think you have to obey my order?”

  “I’m sorry, Sergeant Instructor!” shouted Thomas.

  “Sorry isn’t enough,” yelled the instructor. “You think that’s all you have to do? Say you’re sorry? You think you can get into the Marine Corps by saying you’re sorry?”

  “No, Sergeant Instructor!” shouted Thomas.

  There was a silence. The instructor folded his arms on his chest and stared at Thomas.

  “What the heck is wrong with you, candidate? You still dreaming of having sex with those sheep on the farm at home? Is that what you’re thinking of?”

  In fact, Thomas had come from a farm somewhere in Ohio. He stood still, staring straight ahead, but a deep red began to stain his neck, rising up to his face.

  “No, Sergeant Instructor,” he yelled.

  “This is no place for sheep lovers, candidate!” yelled the instructor. “Do you have sex with sheep?”

  “No, Sergeant Instructor!” yelled Thomas. His face had turned a deep brilliant red. The thought of it was in everyone’s mind now. You couldn’t help but wonder why this was so painful for Thomas. Had he actually ever fucked a sheep? It was an interesting idea. But they didn’t have sheep anymore on those mega-farms in the Midwest, did they? Only two hundred miles of corn.

  The drill instructor went on yelling, now about Thomas’s sexual activities with other farm animals.

  “Maybe it was a cow, candidate. Maybe you’re dreaming about a cow.”

  Thomas was glowing with red. They were all trapped at attention, arms at their sides, eyes straight ahead. All of them were watching Thomas with their peripheral vision.

  “No, Sergeant Instructor!”

  The instructor unfolded his arms. “Then maybe it’s your parents who are dreaming, candidate. Maybe you’re thinking about your mother and that horse!”

  Thomas stood rigid, arms at his side, head erect. “Shut the fuck up, Sergeant Instructor!” he screamed. “Leave my mother out of this!”

  The instructor’s face went dark. He threw himself into Thomas’s face, almost touching him. Thomas threw himself backward against his rack. His head made a clanging sound against it. What the instructor wanted to do was kill Thomas with his bare hands; everyone could feel it. He leaned into Thomas’s face and shouted at him.

  “What the fug did you say to me?” he screamed, so loud and with such an explosion of violence that it seemed that he’d kill Thomas just with his voice.

  The rest of them, motionless and silent, watching with their peripheral vision, were all part of this. Secretly they took both sides. They reveled in Thomas’s throttling rush of adrenaline, his brave and suicidal rebellion, but they also reveled in the awful excitement of the instructor’s swollen face pressed so close to Thomas, Thomas pressed against the rack.

  The instructor did not kill him, but Thomas did push-ups out on the deck for most of the night. Somehow the rest of them felt as though he had been killed, as though they’d watched it. Been in on the final, slavering moments. There was no call to civility or reason. Conrad thought of that later, that no one in charge insisted on restraint. There was no sense of restraint. When the instructor lunged at Thomas, there was no sense of limits.

  They lived in the barracks, a nondescript two-story brick building with rows of bunks under a low ceiling. They marched for hours at a time. They drilled on the drill deck, a huge flat rectangle of trampled earth. They learned to call cadence, the singsong marching rhythms in which the leader lays out a line and the others respond.

  Born in the woods, born in the woods,

  Raised by a bear, raised by a bear.

  Double set of sharks’ teeth, triple set of hair.

  I’m lean and mean, I got my M16, I’m a U.S. Marine.

  The cadence song dates back to an evening in 1944 at Fort Slocum, when a black soldier named Duckworth began a call-and-response chant with his tir
ed fellow soldiers as they marched back to base. Spirits rose, marching became unified, and the cadence song was born. The first ones were made up of numbers, but soon they became narratives and spread quickly through American military culture.

  The song, with its call-and-response form and stereotypical characters, derives from black culture. It harks back to secretly subversive work songs sung by slaves, and later by black prisoners toiling at prison farms. But the subversion in the Marine songs is deliberate and outspoken. It’s not directed at the Marines’ masters, but at their old civilian lives and all their values.

  There were cadence calls about everything, and if The Marine Officer’s Guide was the official source of Marine culture, cadence calls were the unofficial source. Some of the calls were about the home front and a stock character called Jody. Jody was the sneaking, lying rat who’d steal your girlfriend or your wife and your car as soon as you were out the door. Suzy Rottencrotch was the girlfriend who’d betray you before you even climbed onto the bus, who fucked everyone she knew the second your back was turned. You hated her, and you hated Jody. These calls told the candidates not to trust civilians. According to the calls, there was no one a Marine could trust except another Marine.

  Some of the calls praised the Marines and some trashed the other services.

  I don’t know, but it’s been said

  Air Force wings are made of lead.

  One afternoon they marched along a dirt road beside a swamp. The air was sultry and hot. Mosquitoes drilled into Conrad’s face and hands as he marched along, and sweat inched its way down his forehead into his eyes. It was the first time he’d heard the napalm song.

  Gather kids as you fly over town,

  By throwing candy on the ground,

  Then grease ’em when they gather ’round,

  Napalm sticks to kids!

  Napalm sticks to kids,

  French-fried eyeballs and baby ribs—

  Marine Corps!

  Burn the town and kill the people

  Throw some napalm in the square

  Do it on a Sunday morning,

  While the people are at prayer

  Throw some candy in the schoolyard

  Watch the kiddies gather ’round

  Slap a mag in your M16

  And mow those little fuckers down.

  They marched in a long double line, boots thudding in the soft dirt, voices chanting in rhythm. They sang things together they would never say alone, in a speaking voice.

  Go to the market where the women shop.

  Get out my machete and I start to chop.

  Go to the park where the children play.

  Get out my machine gun I begin to spray.

  One day in class, an instructor walked up and down at the front of the room. The classroom was large and bare, and the candidates sat at desks that descended in tiers to a platform at the bottom.

  The instructor that day was short, with a big chest, grizzled hair, and a gap between his front teeth. He talked about the rules of engagement that governed military behavior during combat. The ROEs changed according to conditions, varying from engagement to engagement. Fighting a uniformed military unit on a battlefield was very different from fighting nonuniformed insurgents in a city. But fundamentally, the ROEs defined a military code of honor: targets were to be clearly identified as the enemy and clearly engaging in hostile activity. Civilians were not to be targeted for lethal fire.

  Conrad wrote this down in his notebook.

  The notebooks they were issued were small and cheap, hinged at the top with a metal spiral. The paper was greenish white, with wide horizontal lines and one vertical line down the middle. He had to ignore the vertical line when he took notes, writing across it. While he wrote down the part about not targeting civilians for lethal fire, Conrad thought about the napalm song, but he said nothing about it, nor did anyone else. The napalm song and the ROEs about civilians were like dinosaurs and Christianity: they seemed mutually exclusive, but somehow you could believe in them both.

  5

  Conrad aimed his seabag ahead of him, up the steep back stairs. The bag itself nearly filled the stairwell, and he went slowly, walking diagonally on the narrow steps. At the landing he turned, heading up the next flight to the third floor.

  While he was growing up, Conrad had shared a room with Ollie. They’d been on the second floor, with Jenny and their parents. But at the age of fourteen he’d asked for his own room, and he’d moved up, alone, onto the third floor. There he had the larger of the two bedrooms and his own bathroom. The third floor was his territory.

  It was May 2006, and he was home. He was through EAS, the end of active service, home for good. He stood in the doorway. Nothing had changed: His room, tucked under the roof, was long and narrow, with a low ceiling and slanting eaves along one side. At the far end, two small arched windows gave onto the willow trees. Two single beds, with mismatched iron bedsteads and sagging tan spreads, stood against the wall. Between them, on a table, was a big copper lamp, the yellowing shade still crooked, ever since he and Roddy Blodgett had knocked it over, wrestling. In the corner was the small leather-topped desk that had been his father’s as a child, where Conrad had never sat doing his homework. Facing the beds was the tall, battered bureau. The top was crowded with sports trophies, tiny gold-colored figures in heroic poses, standing on plastic plinths. There were the photographs: Conrad wearing his dress blues at his induction; Conrad and Pam Outerbury (not his girlfriend) at the high school prom. Conrad at the end of a ski race, grinning, his poles raised in triumph. On the walls were tattered band posters and a large, blurry color photograph, overexposed, of the huge amphitheater at Ephesus.

  On either side of the doorway stood tall bookcases, crammed with his people. Tacitus, Ovid, Homer. Pliny and Seneca. Thucydides. Marsilius. He could feel their voices, the presence of that ancient, dusty, sunlit world. The clamor of swords.

  He was surrounded by his earlier life. Outside was the dirt road where he’d ridden his bike up and down in seventh grade, doing wheelies and wiping out. In this house he’d called girls for the first time, he’d hidden porn magazines and jacked off. Here, downstairs in the kitchen, he’d argued with his father, shouting, slamming the refrigerator door so hard the shelf inside broke, and when he opened the door, the mayonnaise jar fell out and shattered greasily on the floor. Here he’d stayed up late reading, surrounded by silence. This was the house from where he’d entered the world.

  It was strange to know that everything was now in the past. He couldn’t change anything. The fact that he was back here where he’d started made it feel almost as if he could choose to start over, undo things.

  He remembered going downstairs that morning, to tell his parents he was joining the Corps. He remembered their alarm and his excitement. The more concern they showed, the more elation he felt. He’d thought he’d made a brilliant maneuver. He’d believed that he’d outsmarted the system, that he was about to enter the adult world through a secret door.

  Conrad moved to the bureau, looking at the photographs. There was his induction, which had taken place at college, in the library. His parents behind him, smiling, their eyes on him. He stood waiting to receive the ornate Mameluke sword, the symbol of the Marines’ campaign in Tripoli; he remembered the surprising weight on his outstretched arms.

  That photograph was the only link between the person who’d lived in this room and the person he’d become. There was the time before it and the time after it, no connection between the two. There were two pasts, the past of his childhood and the past he’d just come from. The recent one seemed, here, not like the real past, but some dreamed state. Or maybe this was the dream. They had no connection. He was the connection, but he felt like someone different now.

  He set his duffel on the bed and began to unpack, shirts and khakis, cammies, things from the last four years. He opened a bureau drawer to put his clothes away, but it was full of neatly piled sweaters. The next was full, too. They all were
, the whole bureau overflowing with the clothes from his other life, clean, preserved, as though ready for him to slide back into them. He looked in the closet: it was full, too. There was nowhere to put what he had brought, the clothes of his current life, and he felt a sudden red pulse of irritation. More than that: rage. He had arrived home, and there was no room for him.

  Standing still, the clothes in his hands, he saw himself in the dim mirror—his angry face, the knitted eyebrows, tight mouth, a dark line of vein running up his neck. Behind him, on the wall, was a Led Zeppelin poster, ripped halfway up and mended with yellowing tape. A furious Marine, standing in a kid’s room: he was embarassed at himself.

  He took everything from his duffel and set it out in piles on the second bed. He folded the empty bag and put it in the closet. Tomorrow he’d go through all his clothes and decide what to keep. What he was going to do right now was stay in control. He got down on the rug and did fifty, fast, pushing off against his hands, thrusting himself upward on the count, his body rising and falling. He whispered the numbers, hissing them fast and loud. When he was finished, he did fifty more.

  After that he checked his email—messages from some of the men who were out, home: Molinos, Jackson, Anderson. They were just checking in, Hey LT, but it gave him a lift to see their names, to answer, to feel the network still there.

  * * *

  As he went downstairs for dinner, his spirits rose. He thudded fast down the steep, narrow stairs, grabbing the railings and making them creak from his weight, swinging down the last few steps as he’d always done.

  The stairs led abruptly to the little ell off the kitchen, the breakfast room. It was small and square, with three windows, side by side, overlooking the back garden. Against the wall stood an old maple table, polished to a warm honey color, and six blond bentwood chairs. On one wall hung a bright patchwork quilt; across from it was a pastel, by Jenny in first grade, of the animals’ Christmas tree. Beside that was a bulletin board jammed with cards, messages, a big calendar. Beneath the bulletin board stood a narrow black oak drop-leaf table, holding the telephone. Conrad’s parents still had a landline. All this raised Conrad’s spirits: the clumsy phone on the table beside a small pad of paper, his mother’s battered address book, and an old marmalade jar full of pointless pencils and inkless pens. It was exactly as it always had been, which cheered him.