Free The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps by William Styron

luminous across the robust chest. Lacy bent forward across the table to ask Paul about some coming field problem. As he did so, I was belatedly overcome by a kind of tickled, boozy wonderment over the fact that for more than an hour I had been engaged in a delicately articulated, absorbing, even scholarly conversation not with a literary critic, not with some rarefied denizen of an academic tower nor even the kind of bright dilettante one is likely to meet on a long ocean voyage but somebody else: a man of formidable experience who had managed to find in the muted and lilac-scented province of nineteenth-century France harmonies that were compatible with a career in the deafening, bloody universe of modern warfare. It was quite difficult to believe, but then again, I thought, maybe I was always too quick to sell the Marine Corps short.
    The heat was fierce that summer; actually, it was sometimes beyond belief, surpassed reason. Situated as we were on the periphery of a vast swamp, the marines at the camp suffered as much from the humidity as from the sun, so that on certain awful days the effect was that of an inhuman steam bath which one could not turn off or escape from. One simply gasped, and groaned, and felt one’s khakis or dungarees become limply awash, like wet flour sacks, the instant one put them on. It was bad enough out in the field; there we hiked and hustled under the baking sun, maneuvered in the woods, set up mortar positions in stifling gullies, and more than one of my boys had to be carried off to the infirmary,alarmingly dehydrated and in the near coma of heatstroke. But out of doors there was often some relief: the shade of the trees offered protection now and then, a sudden breeze might surprise us with its fresh and cooling breath, and everywhere there were tidal streams to swim in. It was back at the main base, in the unventilated confines of the squat brick building which served as battalion headquarters, that the heat became insufferable, past description, so that I could compare it to nothing in my experience and was reminded only of legends I had once read concerning the boiling and benighted city of Villahermosa, in the tropical Mexican state of Tabasco, where even priests went mad with the heat and died railing at a deity heartless enough to create this inferno on earth. There at the office I was forced periodically to spend a morning or an afternoon hunched over a desk, where I would whimperingly go through the motions of some necessary paperwork and swill numberless Coca-Colas, and sweatily absorb for the fourth or fifth time my most recent letter from Laurel, all horny and asprawl upon Fire Island’s halcyon strand.
    It was after one such session, on a day in late June, that I made my troubled way back to the B.O.Q. Having risen at dawn, I thought I would take a nap before lunch and then go out to join my company in its training area. While I was climbing the stairs to my floor, I heard the sound of hillbilly music coming from a radio or phonograph, a raucous female plaint overlaid with a lot of corny fiddles and electronic vibrato, the entire racket far too loud and certainly an affront to the decorum of an officers’ quarters, even though at the moment the place was virtually deserted.
    Now, quite seriously I pride myself even today on havingbeen an early devotee of country music, which has only recently come into its own and earned some respectful attention from musical annotators. Perhaps one has to be southern-born to truly appreciate this homely, untamed genre, but from the time I was a boy I found in the music, at its best, a woebegone loveliness and simplicity of utterance, a balladry—sometimes wrenchingly haunting and sad—that was an authentic echo of the poor soil from which it had sprung, and I cannot even now hear the voices of Ernest Tubb or Roy Acuff or the Carter Family or Kitty Wells without being torn headlong from my surroundings and into a brief bittersweet vision of