by Andre Dubus
He did not, at Boot Camp, have wet dreams. But often he dreamed of his Drill Instructor and one night the recruit who had fire watch duty found him crouched in front of his steel wall locker, still asleep, murmuring in a forlorn and desperate voice: “I can’t find it; I can’t find it.” Then he gripped the bottom of the wall locker and with his arms that had so much trouble with chin-ups and push-ups and the obstacle course, he lifted the wall locker and stood, holding it tottering above their heads until the firewatch said: “Goddamn, what are you doing, Freeman?” And he said: “I lost my blanket roll strap.” The firewatch helped him lower the wall locker, and led him to his bunk, assuring him that his blanket roll straps were on his pack and he could see them in the morning. Next day they told him about it and he was surprised. He had never walked in his sleep before, he said. Later, when no one was watching, he tried to lift the wall locker. He could not
The trip to Tijuana was after Boot Camp, on a bus. When Ted and the four others were high on beer (which they drank boisterously, watching strippers, their language tougher now, less awed than it might have been before their enlistments) they took a taxi to a whorehouse. Passionless, Ted followed a girl as far as her room; then he looked down the corridor and saw that all his friends were in rooms now, and he told the girl he was sick, he had drunk too much, and he had to go outside and throw up. She started cursing him, so he paid her, then went out and waited. On the ride back he told them it was a good piece but he had come too fast. “That’s ’cause it was your first time,” one of them said.
From Boot Camp he was sent to the Infantry Training Regiment at Camp Pendleton. He had thought his legs and lungs were in good condition, but at Camp Pendleton there were hills. The steepest of them was Old Smoky, which seemed to rise straight into the sky above Southern California. Ted’s platoon sergeant prepared them for it with the usual Marine Corps warning: “You people maybe think you’re in good shape, well we’re going to climb Old Smoky tomorrow”—turning to point at its brown peak, the wavering fire trail up its slope; Ted looked away from it, at the sergeant who was still pointing, looked at his green starched utilities faded near white, at his profiled red-brown face, and beyond him, at the other brown and treeless hills; and he thought that for the past three months, which now seemed his entire life, men had been telling him that tomorrow or next week he was going to have to do something that he could not do—the sergeant turned, faced them again—“and you people are going to wanta crap out, but you better forget it ’cause I’ll be kickin’ asses all the way.” He did. On the march he used a walking stick, a long shaved branch, and after a third of the climb he jabbed Ted’s back: “Close it up, Freeman, or you’ll be running all the way.”
The platoon was formed in two columns, the tallest men in front setting the pace, the shortest in the rear, and Ted was at the end of one column. So to keep up he had to walk faster—or take more steps—than the pacesetters; and when someone at the head of the column momentarily lagged, then increased his pace to catch up, the whole column felt it: each man in turn stretching his legs farther and faster to regain those two yards, the yards increasing toward the rear of the column so that when it was Ted’s turn to catch up he had to cover five or six yards and he could only do it by running. He began to hate marchers with long legs.
Halfway up the hill he thought he would not finish. The muscles in his calves were burning; and each time his weight shifted to his forward leg, he felt that its horizontal thigh would stiffen, that he would not be able to straighten that leg or thrust his rear leg forward and up the slope. And he was winded, his lungs demanding oxygen again even before he finished exhaling, his mouth and throat dried by his rapid open-mouthed breathing so that he at once cursed and longed for the two canteens on his hips. In the squad bay before the march the canteens had seemed weightless but now they rubbed his flesh and pulled at his cartridge belt like the hands of a boy, tugging him backward. The haversack had been an alien weight—but not heavy—even in the squad bay, and its shoulder straps were tightened so that it rode high on his back. Now it was heavy too. He bent under it, leaning into the angle of the slope, and its sliding pressure and his soaked utility shirt chafed his back. He hooked his thumbs under the shoulder straps to keep them—he felt—from cutting through his flesh. But when he did that with his right hand he released his rifle sling and the stock bumped his leg, so he grabbed the sling and pulled the rifle tight against the back of his shoulder, then stretched out his thumb and hooked it under the shoulder strap again. He looked fearfully at a man ahead of him carrying a BAR. His rifle was only half as heavy as that and already it seemed too heavy for any sensible man to consider it a good weapon, to consider it a good thing at all—
And that was it: his personal equipment—the steel helmet squeezing and pressing his head, the rifle, the haversack which contained his food and mess gear and socks and underwear and poncho, the canteens with two quarts of water that he so badly needed—all these things were suddenly impersonal, or worse: they were devised by someone who wanted to show him another thing he could not do. And they had won. He could not: not another stride up that slope—
This time, if he could have heard anything but his own breathing, he would have heard the platoon sergeant’s stick swinging toward him. The sergeant had swung like a baseball player, striking Ted’s pack, jarring him so he stumbled, then straightened himself and found that his legs had taken him ten yards farther up the hill before he felt their pain and heard his breath again in the silence after the sergeant’s hoarse and angry and also tired cry: “Goddamn I said close it up”—
The sergeant did not have to hit him again. He would not, Goddammit, drop out; would not be the only one who didn’t make it or didn’t keep up, because if he couldn’t get up this hill, then people at home, the people from high school who were probably thinking he could never get through Marine training, would be right: and he would be a phony. So he went up, not daring to look at the peak for he did not want to see how much farther he had to go, his eyes on the pack and helmet in front of him, and when someone in the column dropped back then caught up, forcing him to run, he yelled, expending the little oxygen he had, his voice breaking shrill and petulant through the sound of the march—stocks bumping against legs and canteens, and booted feet climbing slowly but still too fast, and small rocks kicked loose and rolling downhill—“Goddammit keep it closed up!” After yelling and running those few paces to gain on the forward-tilted haversack and helmet ahead of him, he knew that his lungs would lose: they would never get the oxygen they wanted, not until he reached the peak; and now with tears as well as sweat dripping from his cheeks, he climbed, his eyes on the hard dirt of the fire trail, the muscles of his legs burning and swelling as if they meant to burst through his taut flesh—
He made it. At the top he stood on quivering legs and drank while, as if in shock, his body cooled rapidly, his sweat drying in the breeze which passed them on its way to the bright ocean. Out there he saw grey ships and, around his uptilted canteen, he stared at them.
After four weeks of combat training, when he was ordered to Sea School at San Diego, he was happy—although he recognized a certain cowardice in his reaction to the orders, and that shamed him. But he got over it. He did well at Sea School where tailored uniforms, shined brass, polished leather, and learning shipboard duties were all that counted. At night, on liberty in San Diego, he wore his uniform, and after a couple of beers he felt tough, competent with his hands and knees and feet, remembering the hand-to-hand combat classes in Boot Camp. In those classes he had learned—or had been introduced to—several judo throws; more important, he had been taught the vulnerable parts of a man’s body, and he now believed that lacking the strength and speed of a boxer he could still disable another man with his knee or one chop from his open, stiff-fingered hand. He had not thought it odd when the hand-to-hand combat instructor had so often referred to barroom fighting, as if that were the course’s reason or goal (You’re out with your girl
, and this swabbie’s giving you a hard time and he shoves you like this—). In fact, because of those references, he was more interested in hand-to-hand classes than in bayonet training. So drinking in San Diego bars, the hills and marches and Camp Pendleton well behind him now and knowing the next day at Sea School would be neither difficult nor especially challenging, he imagined himself disarming a knife-threatening Mexican or kicking a large sailor in the groin. Then Sea School was over and he was sent to the Vanguard, home-ported at Alameda, across the bay from San Francisco.
Shortly after he came aboard, the Vanguard went to sea for five days. On the third night, while he was lying in his bunk and waiting for sleep, they came for him: Hahn and Jensen and McKittrick, who was still a Pfc. They lifted him from the bunk and, holding his feet and arms, carried him toward the head. He was conscious of grinning faces watching as he passed. Inside the head, when they lowered him to the deck, he was smiling too and only half-struggling. But he was afraid he would cry. He had not expected this, had even—during his months of training—forgotten that it existed, forgotten that during his twelve years of school he had always been a victim of bullying, even in high school where it took subtler forms, questions like: You coming out for football? You got a hot date for the prom? Now here it was again.
Then someone—Jensen—pulled his T-shirt up to his armpits, pressed his arms to the deck and, behind his head, kneeled on Ted’s biceps.
“Come on, get off now Goddammit—”
But Hahn was pulling his shorts down, over his thighs, past his knees; and McKittrick was laughing now, falling backward against a shower stall, holding his belly and pointing. Hahn was looking at Ted with a bemused smile; but his eyes were more savage than any Ted had ever seen, and he looked away, struggling now, arching his back and trying to move his legs under Hahn’s weight.
“Hey, I think it’s a cunt,” Hahn said.
Then Ted screamed, cursing them all: Hahn and Jensen and McKittrick and the ones who stood watching and laughing. His eyes were shut on tears and all that he felt or heard was his own screaming and once, at the height of a cried-out curse, he saw as in a dream Captain Howard, on the bridge, hearing that final curse shouted far below him. Then Jensen’s hand was on his mouth. Another voice had replaced his own but he could not distinguish it, understand it, and he opened his eyes. Through his tears he saw Hahn’s face, the mouth savage now too:
“You wake up the First Sergeant and your ass is mine, Teddy-Baby.”
He stopped struggling. He smiled. People made jokes and he responded with good-natured grunts as Hahn spread shaving cream on his groin, shaved the hair, and painted his flesh with Mercurochrome. Then on his chest and belly, which were already hairless, Hahn carefully painted something. When he was finished they were all laughing and Ted smiled up at them, then felt the weight going off his arms and thighs and now he had to get up. He pulled up his shorts, pulled down his T-shirt, and quickly left the head.
In his bunk he waited until the berthing area was quiet, until the last flap-flap of shower shoes had gone from the head to a bunk, then he got up and, barefooted, went to the head. The lights were on. At the mirror he pulled up his T-shirt. The words were reversed and it took him several moments to read them:
I
LOST
MY
PRICK
Later, after he met Jan, he would think: Jack Burns is my best friend. For it was Burns who, from the opposite bunk, began talking to him the night after he had been shaved and painted. After another day at sea, when the Vanguard returned to Alameda, it was Burns who asked him to go on liberty. And it was Burns who, two weeks later, brought him to the party where he met Jan and where, because he and Burns were the only Marines and even the boys at the party were impressed, and because he was a bit drunk as well, he was able to talk to her without timidity, to laugh naturally and joke and tease. By the time she went home with her date—a young sullen civilian with long hair—Ted had arranged to take her out later in the week. That first date was easier, less discomforting, than one had ever been; because he already knew she liked him.
On their third date, three months before Vanguard’s deployment to the Western Pacific, he arrived to find her in bed, watching television, and she told him she had the flu or something and she had tried to call the ship but it was too confusing, all those different extensions, and finally she had given up. So he went out and bought two six-packs of beer, having carried only one to the cash register before—on impulse—he went back for another. Even walking back to her apartment with twelve cans of beer cradled in one arm and an overnight liberty card in his billfold he did not allow himself to think of seduction. For if he considered that, he would have to consider the rest: his total lack of experience and therefore confidence, and the jokes he had heard, jokes which convinced him that female pleasure was all a matter of a man’s size. He re-entered her apartment, where both of them knew—and had known since he first appeared that night—they would make love.
She sat with two pillows behind her back, the sheet and pale green spread covering her bent-kneed legs, making a tent containing that sweetness he had never touched in his nineteen years—and though he averted his eyes he was aware of nothing else in the room, in his life. The sheet and spread were pulled up to her waist; above that, her breasts and shoulders and arms to the wrists were covered by a light blue nightgown: her body not hidden but assuming a subtle form of exposure because all its coverings were those of bed and night, the trappings of his fantasies. After her fourth beer she was grinning and patting the small available portion of mattress beside her; he left his chair, moving dry-throated to the bed, and he sat there and with his palm touched her cheek, hot with fever, and she stopped smiling.
Then he kissed her: what seemed one long deliciously maddening unbroken kiss, his hands going downward from her shoulders, pausing unchecked at her breasts where he did what he had been told by other boys he would like to do, his hands actually stopping at her breasts only because he had been told that—and down again, one hand now sliding over the nylon nightgown and the loose yielding flesh of her belly. Then her hand was on his, pressing, stopping him. He pushed hard and her hand was gone, somewhere on his back now, but her legs were together: in turn squeezing and relaxing until finally his hand was there, pulling the nylon away and still he would not allow the final image of lovemaking to form in his mind, not even when her legs spread and she moved against his hand and whispered or exhaled: “The light,” and as he turned to reach the lamp on the bedside table he felt her moving, shifting, and when he turned to her in the dark she was sitting up, the nightgown rising from her raised arms, then dropping to the floor. He was suddenly out of his clothes. Still he would not think: I’m going to—He was on top of her, starting to kiss her, when she whispered again or made that sound of urgent breath which alone was more than he had ever heard, ever experienced: “Do you have something?” At first he did not understand, for by refusing to think of lovemaking he had fled from any thought of its consequences too. Then he shook his head and was rising on his elbows when her arm slid under his ribs and belly and her hand nested beneath what had shamed him, guiding it forward: and without shame or fear he entered—poised then for a motionless and startled instant. It was scalding hot, beyond prediction and belief, and still in that instant of nonmovement, he remembered a high school boy who had gone to a whorehouse and had this for the first time and had told him it was like sponge rubber and Ted almost told Jan now, almost sang out how wrong that boy was—But instead he began to move, opened his mouth to speak but there was not time: and with a soft boyish cry that he did not even hear, he spent himself, collapsed, seemed to melt and spread over the length of her body, which settled under him, warm and reposeful, and he was aware of sounds again, of her breath and heart.…
Wrapped in manhood as tangible as the heat from her naked feverish body, he slept with her that night. After a couple of hours he woke, confused until he felt her body against his; then he mad
e love to her again, taking longer this time, knowing he pleased her.
In the weeks after that, when he had to stay aboard ship for guard duty, or when the ship was at sea for five or six days, or sometimes even when he lay in her bed, sapless and sleepy, he thought sorrowfully of all those girls in high school who might have been his if he had only tried hard enough, if he had only been confident of his good looks and personality (he could always make Jan laugh) but he had not been confident, he had not tried, and now they were gone: sweaters and perfume and tossing hair, up in Washington, lost. .. . But he had this.
Hahn and Jensen and McKittrick, though, took it away from him a second time: in July, when the Vanguard was conducting air operations off the coast of Southern California, they held him down and shaved his groin again. He could not stop the tears and they trailed down his flushed cheeks as he silently submitted. He had believed the first time would be the last: that he had been initiated as a new man in the Detachment. But, held to the deck for the second time, he saw this happening again and again, as often as they wanted.
He did not tell Jan. In those last weeks before the ship deployed to the Western Pacific, he kept hoping something would happen to them. When the ship was in port and he saw them leaving for liberty, the three of them walking down the long concrete pier, slapping backs, laughing, faking left hooks, he wished he would never see them again: that they would get involved with dope peddlers that night or would roll someone in San Francisco and go to jail, staying there while the Vanguard deployed.
But nothing ever happened to them, or nothing really bad. Hahn and Jensen were court-martialed once, but got light sentences. In August, while the ship was on its way to Japan, McKittrick was promoted to corporal. Ted stood in the formation on the mess deck and watched him going front and center and saluting and taking his warrant from Captain Schneider, and Ted thought even the First Sergeant and a mustang like Captain Schneider were snowed and if they really wanted to know who rated promotions they ought to ask the troops.