Robert Stone - Dog Soldiers

Each evening, he played chess with Gaylord X in the crew’s lounge. The civilian crew of the Kora Sea observed strict social segregation, so Hicks and Gaylord played in nearly total silence. After each game Gaylord would say, “Ah, thenkew ,” and Hicks would reply, “ Mah pleasure.” His pleasure was quite genuine for, on this trip, he won every game. There had been one match during which Gaylord had rallied superbly in the end game — but at that point several of his fellow nationalists had sauntered by to kibitz and his counteroffensive collapsed under the strain of rep resenting the race. Gaylord was the second cook, a Black Muslim and a secret Rosicrucian.

After the game, Hicks would brew a pot of verbena tea and turn in early.

He was trying to read Nietzsche again. To his annoyance, he found that he could not get with it at all.

“Whither does it move? Whither do we move?”

“Does not empty space whirl continually about us? Has it not grown colder?”

His copy was from the Seaman’s Service library and the last reader had marked many passages with underlinings and exclamation marks. Hicks smiled when he came to them.

Some punk, he thought. Like I was.

He had read Nietzsche over twelve years before at the Marine Barracks in Yokasuka — Converse’s book — and it had overwhelmed him. He had marked passages in pencil and underlined words that he did not understand so that he could look them up. Before his meeting with Converse in Yokasuka, the only books he had ever finished were The Martian Chronicles and I, the Jury .

Hicks knew very few people for whom he had ever felt anything like love, and Converse — whom he had not seen for twenty hours in the past ten years — was one of them. Seeing Converse again had made him feel good and young again in a simple-minded way; as though all the plans and adolescent fantasies they had shared in the service might take on some kind of renewed near-reality.

Effectively, their friendship had ended when Converse was discharged and Hicks became, as he thought, a lifer. Once while he was still married to his Yokasuka girl, Etsuko, Converse had come to Camp Pendleton without his wife, and the three of them had eaten sushi together. Very rarely they had met to go drinking in the city. But he was aware that Converse for the most part avoided him, and he was rather hurt by the fact.

He was hurt as well by what Mary Microgram had said that Converse had said. And he had been hurt further by Converse’s sneering at his copy of Nietzsche and calling his reading of it piquant — presumably in the sense of appealingly provocative, pleasantly disturbing, rather than spicy, having a pungent odor.

At the same time that Hicks had come to know Converse, he had encountered Japan, and Japan — as he perceived it — had been immensely important to him. He had brought a Japanese woman home with him, and he had come, during his years as a professional marine, to think of himself as a kind of samurai. Although he had never approached satori, he was a student of Zen and he had once had a master, a German who could read the texts and was said to be a roshi. Even dealing, he endeavored to maintain a spiritual life.

In the course of his third hitch, after years of base and embassy duty, of shining shoes and saluting automobiles, he had gone ashore at Danang to face an armed enemy for the first time. His disciplines had served him well.

He had been older than all of them — older than the teen-aged riflemen, older than the Princeton former football player who commanded his company. They expected that he be better and more professional at war than themselves, and he had been. He had never let himself question the necessity to be.

But it was not a war for a man who maintained a spiritual life, and who had taken an Asian wife. Many marines there were stronger against it than he; he declined to speak against war, any war. Yet people in the line who had come to hate the nature of the thing did not hesitate to talk to him about it. When one of the regimental communications companies in the grip of dope spirituality formed itself as a commune and declared for Joan Baez, the kids in it expected a certain sympathy from him.

One day, when the company was out of the line, he had, in a mood of vague disgruntlement, allowed a number of his people to walk into town and see Bob Hope, who was playing there. It was not, in the circumstances, a serious dereliction but it called for reprisal; reprisal came in the

form of an undesirable patrol, which resulted in what Hicks had come to call the Battle of Bob Hope. Almost every man in his platoon who had seen Bob Hope died in it. He himself was shot and flown to Okinawa. At the end of the year his hitch expired and he walked.

It was a source of pride to Hicks that he was at home in the world of objects. He believed that his close and respectful study of Japanese culture had enabled him to manipulate matter in a simple disciplined manner, to move things correctly. He believed it was all in your head.

When, eighteen hours ahead of schedule, the Kora Sea tied up at Oakland, he did his exercises and meditated briefly on the righteous arrow and the inevitability of its union with the target.

Early in the afternoon, the yardbirds trucked Dempsey Dumpsters — huge mobile garbage cans — to the Kora ’s after gangway. Hicks waited until the last Dumpster was almost full and then personally conveyed two cardboard barrels of bakery refuse to its maw. The package was inside in its cornmeal sack together with some yeast cartons, the bin oculars and the souvenir flag. Attached to the sack was a length of pennant rigging, which he left adrift within reach of the opening chute. This much done, he returned aboard and took lunch. As he did so, the yardbirds responsible trucked the Dumpsters off to stand with their like in front of the A-dock welding shop. While the-shore-bound sections changed into their shore clothes, Hicks busied himself with a scrupulous cleaning of the bakery.

Shortly after four o’clock, he went on the pier again and bought a bottle of Coke at a geedunk trailer at some distance from the welding shop. At four-fifteen the welders secured and washed their hands. At four-thirty the head cleaning crew signed in and their first stop was the men’s room of the welding shop. They were silent somber blacks; one of them carried the tin refuse can from the toilet to a Dumpster and shoveled the contents into it — paper towels, empty half-pint bottles, cigarette wrappers. At this point, Hicks applied his only tool, which was a key to the welding shop toilet. He had an extensive collection of keys to various buildings and offices at the Army terminal, acquired over a number of years. When the head cleaning crew went round to the other side of the building, Hicks let himself into the toilet and waited until there was no one close at hand. As soon as things appeared suitable, he picked up the tin refuse can and carried it to the mouth of the Dumpster in which his bag was hidden. He held it up against the Dumpster’s chute and with his right hand seized the flag line to pull the package up and shove it into the tin receptacle. He then carried it back to the welding shop toilet, where it would spend the night. There were very few functionaries, however mean, who would stoop to inquire into the maintenance of toilets. Only agents would do so — and although there were plenty of agents about, right thoughts and right actions enabled one to move discreetly. Blacks troubled him most because the sight of a white worker emptying shit cans engaged their attention.

Then Hicks changed clothes, packed his bag, and went to the terminal sick bay to make an early morning appointment for his mandatory chest x ray. He planned to return in the morning with his appointment slip, driving through the gate nearest the sick bay, pick up his package from the trash can before the morning cleaners emptied it, and then drive out through the gate he had entered with the package concealed under a fender.