Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Something clammy hits him on the forehead: it is the makeup artist taking a swipe at him. Shaftoe finds himself back in the nightmare within which the lizard nightmare was nested.

“Did I tell you about the lizard?” Shaftoe says.

“Several times,” his interrogator says. “This'll just take another minute.” Ronald Reagan squeezes a fresh three-by-five card between thumb and forefinger, fastening onto something a little less emotional: “What did you and your buddies do in the evenings, when the day's fighting was done?”

“Pile up dead Nips with a bulldozer,” Shaftoe says, “and set fire to 'em. Then go down to the beach with a jar of hooch and watch our ships get torpedoed.”

Reagan grimaces. “Cut!” he says, quietly but commanding. The clicking noise of the film camera stops.

“How'd I do?” Bobby Shaftoe says as they are squeegeeing the Maybelline off his face, and the men are packing up their equipment. The klieg lights have been turned off, clear northern California light streams in through the windows. The whole scene looks almost real, as if it weren't a nightmare at all.

“You did great,” Lieutenant Reagan says, without looking him in the eye. “A real morale booster.” He lights a cigarette. “You can go back to sleep now.”

“Haw!” Shaftoe says. “I been asleep the whole time. Haven't I?”

He feels a lot better once he gets out of the hospital. They give him a couple of weeks of leave, and he goes straight to the Oakland station and hops the next train for Chicago. Fellow-passengers recognize him from his newspaper pictures, buy him drinks, pose with him for snap shots. He stares out the windows for hours, watching America go by, and sees that all of it is beautiful and clean. There might be wildness, there might be deep forest, there might even be grizzly bears and mountain lions, but it is cleanly sorted out, and the rules (don't mess with bear cubs, hang your food from a tree limb at night) are well-known, and published in the Boy Scout Manual. In those Pacific islands there is too much that is alive, and all of it is in a continual process of eating and being eaten by something else, and once you set foot in the place, you're buying into the deal. Just sitting in that train for a couple of days, his feet in clean white cotton socks, not being eaten alive by anything, goes a long way towards clearing his head up. Only once, or possibly two or three times, does he really feel the need to lock himself in the can and squirt morphine into his arm.

But when he closes his eyes, he finds himself on Guadalcanal, sloshing around that last headland, racing the incoming tide. The big waves are rolling in now, picking up the men and slamming them into rocks.

Finally they turn the corner and see the cove: just a tiny notch in the coast of Guadalcanal. A hundred yards of tidal mudflats backed up by a cliff. They will have to get across those mudflats and establish a foothold on the lower part of the cliff if they aren't going to be washed out to sea by the tide.

The Shaftoes are Tennessee mountain people—miners, among other things. About the time Nimrod Shaftoe went to the Philippines, a couple of his brothers moved up to western Wisconsin to work in lead mines. One of them—Bobby's grandpa—became a foreman. Sometimes he would go to Oconomowoc to pay a visit to the owner of the mine, who had a summer house on one of the lakes. They would go out in a boat and fish for pike. Frequently the mine owner's neighbors—owners of banks and breweries—would come along. That is how the Shaftoes moved to Oconomowoc, and got out of mining, and became fishing and hunting guides. The family has been scrupulous about holding on to the ancestral twang, and to certain other traditions such as military service. One of his sisters and two of his brothers are still living there with Mom and Dad, and his two older brothers are in the Army. Bobby's not the first to have won a Silver Star, though he is the first to have won the Navy Cross.

Bobby goes and talks to Oconomowoc's Boy Scout troop. He gets to be grand marshal of the town parade. Other than that, he hardly budges from the house for two weeks. Sometimes he goes out into the yard and plays catch with his kid brothers. He helps Dad fix up a rotten dock. Guys and gals from his high school keep coming round to visit, and Bobby soon learns the trick that his father and his uncles and granduncles all knew, which is that you never talk about the specifics of what happened over there. No one wants to hear about how you dug half of your buddy's molars out of your leg with the point of a bayonet. All of these kids seem like idiots and lightweights to him now. The only person he can stand to be around is his great-grandfather Shaftoe, ninety-four years of age and sharp as a tack, who was there at Petersburg when Burnside blew a huge hole in the Confederate lines with buried explosives and sent his men rushing into the crater where they got slaughtered. He never talks about it, of course, just as Bobby Shaftoe never talks about the lizard.

Soon enough his time is up, and then he gets a grand sendoff at the Milwaukee train station, hugs Mom, hugs Sis, shakes hands with Dad and the brothers, hugs Mom again, and he's off.

Bobby Shaftoe knows nothing of his future. All he knows is that he has been promoted to sergeant, detached from his former unit (no great adjustment, since he is the only surviving member of his platoon) and reassigned to some unheard-of branch of the Corps in Washington, D.C.

D.C.'s a busy place, but last time Bobby Shaftoe checked the newspapers, there wasn't any combat going on there, and so it's obvious he's not going to get a combat job. He's done his bit anyway, killed many more than his share of Nips, won his medals, suffered from his wounds. As he lacks administrative training, he expects that his new assignment will be to travel around the country being a war hero, raising morale and suckering young men into joining the Corps.

He reports, as ordered, to Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C. It's the Corps's oldest post, a city block halfway between the Capitol and the Navy Yard, a green quadrangle where the Marine Band struts and the drill team drills. He half expects to see strategic reserves of spit and of polish stored in giant tanks nearby.

Two Marines are in the office: a major, who is his new, nominal commanding officer, and a colonel, who looks and acts like he was born here. It is shocking beyond description that two such personages would be there to greet a mere sergeant. Must be the Navy Cross that got their attention. But these Marines have Navy Crosses of their own—two or three apiece.

The major introduces the colonel in a way that doesn't really explain a damn thing to Shaftoe. The colonel says next to nothing; he's there to observe. The major spends a while fingering some typewritten documents.

“Says right here you are gung-ho.”

“Sir, yes sir!”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Sir, it is a Chinese word! There's a Communist there, name of Mao, and he's got an army. We tangled with 'em on more'n one occasion, sir. Gung-ho is their battle cry, it means 'all together' or something like that, so after we got done kicking the crap out of them, sir, we stole it from them, sir!”

“Are you saying you have gone Asiatic like those other China Marines, Shaftoe?”

“Sir! On the contrary, sir, as I think my record demonstrates, sir!”

“You really think that?” the major says incredulously. “We have an interesting report here on a film interview that you did with some soldier ( 6) named Lieutenant Reagan.”

“Sir! This Marine apologizes for his disgraceful behavior during that interview, sir! This Marine let down himself and his fellow Marines, sir!”

“Aren't you going to give me an excuse? You were wounded. Shell-shocked. Drugged. Suffering from malaria.”