The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps Read Online Free Page A

of the one length that was fair and just, and to this excessive advantage had been added the ultimate merciless ridicule of cunningly strewn debris, like soup boxes, in the wake of their victory. He had been tricked, all right, and as he strode toward the blockhouse entry he felt suddenly so abortively hollow and outmaneuvered that the feeling was close to exhaustion. Something else troubled him, too—something he knew he should be worrying about—but this, whatever it was, he banished from his mind when, at the entry to the blockhouse, he saw the look on Sergeant Mulcahy’s face and knew that more trouble was in the air.
    Mulcahy’s chronically jaundiced expression was only in part due to the sourness of his nature, for he was still recovering from malaria. He was gaunt, ugly, with a crooked nose—a regular with fifteen years’ service. His contempt forthe prisoners was both artless and profound. It was based simply, as he had expressed it to Blankenship, on the fact that the convicts, whom he referred to categorically as “skunks,” had all been experiencing blissful sexual connections in New York or Chicago while he was “out contracting the jungle rot.” He might have been a bully, except that his spleen had become so enfeebled by malaria and general world-and war-weariness that his only cruelty was an occasional drowsy prod or poke. “A little goosin’ don’t hurt ’em none,” he had said to Blankenship, but it was something which now and then he had to be called down on. At this moment his dilapidated, sulfurous face wore a look of the plainest disgust.
    “What’s up?” Blankenship said.
    “Ah, there’s some guy here thinks he’s top dog.”
    “New man?” The gate swung open slowly, eased to behind Blankenship with a pneumatic hiss.
    “Did you get those two birds this morning, Gunner?”
    Mulcahy’s irrelevance, together with the renewed reminder of his failure, so annoyed him that he turned and snapped: “I said , goddammit, Mulcahy, is he a new man?”
    Mulcahy drooped. “Yes, sir. Five days piss and punk.”
    “For what?”
    “Fighting. He just come in from B Company. Colonel had him up for office hours this morning.”
    Blankenship entered the office, a corner room with enormous barred windows, while Mulcahy shambled in behind. “So what’s the trouble, then?” he said, sitting down. “What cell’s he assigned to?”
    “Fifteen, sir. Well, Gunner, he just wouldn’t cooperate. This skunk comes in here with a bunch of smart-guy crap,saying how much he didn’t like the smell in here and all and how it ‘irritated’ him—that’s the word he used, Gunner, I swear to God—to have an outside cell where there was no view and only blower ventilation, and all. He was just running off at the mouth, that’s all. I mean I never saw such a smart son of a bitch—”
    “So—” Blankenship, staring Mulcahy down, felt the blood rushing to his eyes in anger, and saw the sergeant’s freckled, sallow face sheepishly begin to crumble. “So—” he repeated.
    “Well, Gunner, it was just a little tap right over the eye—”
    “Goddammit , Mulcahy!” His fist thumped hard, painfully, on the desk, in a fury made thrice potent by the events of the morning. “I told you to keep your goddam Irish paws off these prisoners—”
    “Gunner, I swear before God—” Protectively, Mulcahy rolled back his bleary yellow eyes. “It didn’t even make a br—draw blood,” he stammered. “I put a—”
    “Quiet!”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “I’ve told you for the last time. You lay hands on these birds anymore and I’ll have you up before the colonel in two seconds. Do you understand that?”
    “Yes, sir,” he said glumly.
    “O.K. Now go get that man and bring him here.”
    “Aye-aye, sir.”
    “And give me that club,” he added, holding out his hand. “Some of you people are so goddam Asiatic you’d beat your own grandmother.”
    Mulcahy exited in gangling, clumsy haste. Blankenshipsank