Katie’s dad wouldn’t let me in. Katie was home but he refused to tell her I wanted to see her. He didn’t like anyone male, liked anyone interested in his daughter even less, and me least of all. I’ve never been real good on any musical instrument so I couldn’t get her attention with a serenade. Grumping, I stood around in the street wondering, “What now?” I could wander over to the Tate compound and see if Tinnie was talking to me this week. I could try a couple of other young and incredibly attractive women of my acquaintance, though it was getting late of a workday evening to be turning up on anybody’s doorstep. Or I could go somewhere and hang out with other guys like me—dateless and not wanting to stay home—and pay five times retail price per mug of Weider beer not bought at home by the keg.
Laziness and a long lack of the companionship of men who remembered drew me toward Grubb Gruber’s Leatherneck Heaven. Which is as fat a misnomer as the one that used to hang on Morley’s place back when he called it The Joy House. Grubb’s joint isn’t exactly a pit of despair where lost souls go to drink in solitude, perhaps in search of oblivion, certainly nurturing a sad pretense that camaraderie might break out at any moment. But you don’t hear a whole lot of laughter in there. As the evening progresses the reminiscing turns inward, private, and maudlin, to memories that as individuals we cannot easily share. And I’m always surprised when there isn’t any of the whimpering and screaming that had so often come around in the darkest hours of the night, down in the killing zone.
When those memories come, and somebody in Gruber’s place starts wrestling with them, somebody else will hoist a mug and summon a ghost. “Banner-sergeant Hamond Barbidon, the meanest mortarforker what ever . . . ”
And the cups will rise up. And ten thousand ghosts will rise with them.
“Corporal Savlind Knaab.”
“Lance Fanta Pantaza.”
“Andro Pat.”
“Jellybelly Ibles.”
“Mags Cooper.”
And each name will remind somebody of another. “Cooper Away, the best damned platoon sergeant in the Corps.”
Plenty of men would be prepared to dispute that because everybody remembered a particular sergeant who brought him along. The sergeants are the backbone of the Corps. And if you lived very long out there you grew up to become one.
Chances are you never heard of any of the toastees because they’d fallen in different places and different times. But they were Corps, so you honored them. You remembered them and you wanted to weep because those people out there in the street didn’t know, didn’t have any idea, and already, just months after the long war’s end, were beginning not to care.
Sometimes it isn’t that difficult to understand why the really ugly, militant, racist veterans’ organizations have so much appeal for men who survived the Cantard.
Nobody who wasn’t down there will ever really understand. Not even those who shook our hands when we left. Not even those who welcomed us back with mighty hugs and no conception whatsoever what it was like to sit there watching the life bleed out of a man whose throat you’d cut so you could go on, undetected, to murder some other poor boy whose bad luck had placed him in your path at the wrongest time possible in the entire history of the human species. So that someday, somewhere far away, some woman would cry because she no longer had a son.
I decided that what I wanted was to spend an evening at Grubb Gruber’s place. But, apparently, I never arrived.