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

South Carolina), I considered myself already too sensitive to this new and, on my part, desperately unwanted intimacy to compound my discomfort by having to say things like “Darling, would you mind handing me the soap?” or, God forbid … well, the possibilities were too numerous to contemplate.
    Anyway, I introduced myself to Dee, and while I was groggy with the need for a short nap, I felt it only proper that the two of us—officers, gentlemen, southerners at that—sit down and at least go through the motions of getting acquainted, especially when it looked as if we were destined tobe cheek by jowl for some time that summer in a climate not really suited for harmonious relations at close quarters. Dee, as it turned out, was a hand-to-hand-combat expert, his specialty knife fighting “close in”; the reason I had enjoyed several weeks of grace without his company was because this period he had spent in California, at the marine base at Camp Pendleton, where he had learned all the tricks of his trade. He had been sent back to Lejeune as an instructor, and was looking forward enormously to his vocation, brief as he hoped it would be.
    “I’ll go anywhere the Corps sends me, that’s muh duty you see, but if you want to know the God-durn real truth what I really want to do is get over to Korea and stick about six inches of cold steel in as many of those God-durned gooks I can get holt of.”
    “How long have you been in the Corps?” I asked.
    “Nine months and eight days,” he replied. “I was in ROTC”—he pronounced it “Rotacy”—“at Clemson and then I took a commission and they done sent me to Quantico. Couldn’t fire a rifle worth a shit on account of muh eyes”—he gestured toward his spectacles, and peered out at me from behind them with an expression that seemed peculiarly faraway and dim, like a rodent’s, not aglint with the fervor of a knife fighter but somehow mossed over with the glaze of arrested development, or perhaps only fifteen years or so of slow fruition in the schools of South Carolina—“but I got me a waiver on the eyes, and I volunteered for knife fightin’, which is the thing I truly come to love. Sometimes I think that a knife is the God-durned prettiest thing in the world. Stick that ole thing in, twist an’ shove, twist an’ shove—shee-it, man! Care for some pogey bait?”
    Not since my early days in the Corps in World War IIhad I heard the words “pogey bait”—old-time marine and navy slang for candy—and as he reached for the box of Baby Ruths I declined, saying that the weather was too hot and that, besides, my stomach felt rather poorly. Most of the reserves had made a point, generally, of not using the accepted seagoing vocabulary; I soon learned that Dee employed a salty locution whenever possible—“deck” for “floor,” “bulkhead” for “wall”—which did little to further weld our relationship.
    “Ordinarily,” he went on, “I relish an Almond Joy or two along about this time of the morning, but the PX run out of Joys. Had to settle for the Ruths.”
    “Tell me,” I said, honestly curious, “have you ever killed anybody with one of those knives?”
    He took the question with equanimity. “Naw,” he replied, “at Pendleton we practiced on dummies—and on each other, but with rubber blades. Naw, I ain’t killed anybody yet —I’ll have to confess.”
    I could not help but pursue the tack I had embarked upon and I said: “Dee, listen, don’t you think killing people with a knife might just sicken you? I mean, just to watch some guy’s guts fall out, and the blood and everything—well, I know knife fighting is sometimes necessary and damned useful when the chips are down, but Jesus, how can you actually think you’re going to like it?” He had gnawed off the end of a Baby Ruth and was masticating it thoughtfully; the candy was sweetly odorous on the close hot air, and for an instant, vaguely nauseated, I was borne away in a