The Steel Cocoon

Bentz Plagemann

THE STEEL COCOON

Producer's Note

About Internet Archive Daisy Books

This book was produced in DAISY format by the Internet Archive. The book pages were scanned and converted to DAISY format automatically. This process relies on optical character recognition, and is somewhat susceptible to errors. These errors may include weird characters, non-words, and incorrect guesses at structure. Page numbers and headers or footers may remain from the scanned page. The Internet Archive is working to improve the scanning process and resulting books, but in the meantime, we hope that this book will be useful to you.

P.S. Текст по возможности вычитан, но могут оставаться пропущенные (нераспознанные) ошибки. 

* * *

Text from Reader's digest condensed books : volume 4, 1958, autumn selections.

"The Steel Cocoon," copyright © 1957 by Bentz Plagemann, is published by The Viking Press. Inc . 625 Madison Ave. New York 22. V. V.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bentz Plagemann was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1913. For about eight years before the outbreak of World War II he was a bookseller in Cleveland, Chicago and New York. From 1942 to 1945 Plagemann served in the Hospital Corps of the U. S. Navy, as a pharmacist's mate on a destroyer, and later on an LST where he was in charge of the ship's medical department, without a doctor, but with two assistants.

While his LST was fitting out for the second Normandy landings, Mr. Plagemann contracted polio. One week before his illness, after a formal inspection, his LST was chosen medical flagship of its group and later acquitted itself well in removing the wounded from France to England.

After receiving a medical discharge from the Navy, Mr. Plagemann turned to writing. His story of his own battle with polio, My Place to Stand, was well received in 1949. The hilarious This Is Goggle was a Condensed Book Club selection in the autumn of 1955.

Mr. Plagemann enjoys travel and plans to go to Italy or France with his wife to work on his next—it will be his sixth—book.

THE STEEL COCOON 

CHAPTER 1 

IT IS possible that the condition of war is agreeable to most men. Aside from the killing and the being killed, and the long periods of enforced idleness, almost everything about it is pleasant. It was a long time after World War II before Tyler Williams allowed himself to accept this reflection. But he discovered that when he could not sleep at night, or when he awoke in the darkness, he would take up his memories of the Navy with a secret pleasure.

It seemed to him that he could hold these memories in his hand, so to speak, as a child might hold an old-fashioned Easter egg of papier-mache, and that, if he narrowed his eyes in the darkness and looked into the small aperture in the end, he could see the complete world of his memory, all cut paper and gilt and brightness, waiting there, never changing, alive in another dimension of time.

Most especially did he possess in this private way his memories of the USS Ajax, the destroyer on which he had served in the North Atlantic and the North Sea. At such a moment the Ajax still existed, the green seas still streamed, salt-glistening, from the weather deck, as the bow climbed from a wave through into the sparkling sun. "Never go to the weather deck when the green seas run!" he would hear McNulty shout, and in the darkness his eyes would ache quickly from the remembered brilliance of those days.

Oddly enough, the memories he relived most vividly were those of the shakedown cruise in 1942, while they were being prepared and preparing themselves, to go into action. For the fulcrum of his memories was not the action of war itself, but a man, his old chief, Alexander Bullitt. The pleasure of his recollections was troubled by that presence. A man must live with himself, man who respects himself must feel that he has behaved with honor. Had he, Tyler Williams, done so? With his stubborn loyalty to Bullitt had he failed the others, and even helped to bring about the tragedy that followed? He needed to resolve that in his mind.

Often, on these nights, his sleeplessness would force him out of bed, and he would feel guilty, standing in the moonlit bedroom, as if his preoccupation with the past betrayed his present happiness. In the bed beside his, Maria would be beautiful in sleep, and vulnerable, so that his heart went out to her in a quick rush of tenderness. She had no part in this story of the past. He had not even known her then, and there were moments when he had thought never to find his own life again, much less this fulfillment of marriage. C^h, he was a man who had blessings to count. Thinking this, he would leave the room quietly and look in at Billy's room. And Billy would be sleeping as only a boy of nine can sleep, with his arms curled upward, and a blessed look on his face, the immortal purity of childhood.

But old ghosts are hard to lay, and sometimes, on these wakeful nights, Tyler Williams would find himself, trousers and sweater pulled over his pajamas, sneakers on his bare feet, pacing the walks of the college campus he loved. He had found his life there, in teaching, even before the war. He was a man born to teach, and he loved the classrooms by day, and now the campus at night, with the dark, arching elms, and the moon-gilded clock tower, and the chapel spire. The memory of the limited, narrow man he had been when he was young haunted him, but, more than that, the past haunted him —distilled, on troubled nights like this, into the memory of a single night, and he was on the deck of the Ajax again, kneeling beside Bullitt, bathing his broken face, and looking into the dark void behind his eyes. Time, and the war, had made him the man he was, but —oh, God! —not, he hoped, at the sacrifice of other men. And he would walk the campus in the moonlight, until the chimes in the clock tower intervened with present reality, to diminish the echoes of the past.

In the sick bay on the AJax, order existed, and every day was very much like any other day. It was one of the few quarters of the ship where a man might shut a door behind him. In the morning, after an early mug of coffee, Williams began the preparations for the day as Chief Bullitt had instructed him to do. On the treatment table, and on the narrow shelves that ran about the compartment, he arranged the equipment, the bottles, the trays of instruments in antiseptic solution, the sterile gauze and the bandages.

When everything was in order he would take his place on a high stool in the corner, where the sick-call book lay open on a small metal lectern. On the sea shelf above this lectern were his Hospital Corps Manual, his notebooks from Hospital Corps School, and copies of the Bible and Thoreau's IValden, the only personal books he had room for in his sea bag. His duty during the hours of sick call was to assist in treatment, and to enter each man's complaint, diagnosis and treatment in the sick-call book.

By eight a.m. Chief Bullitt would have appeared, lounging in the doorway in his impeccably clean, starched khaki, his chief's cap fixed to one side of his lean, saturnine head, probing his gold-filled teeth with a gold toothpick, in the same way his skeptical eyes probed for psychic faults in the ailing men who came to him. In those early days he did not acknowledge Williams, or even speak to him, aside from instructing him in the performance of his duties.

Williams had first met Chief Bullitt on the dock at Norfolk, where the chief sat on a packing case filled with bottles of blood plasma, smoking a cigarette. There was something about the chief which suggested the nervelessness of some large, articulated insect, a praving mantis, perhaps, in Navy khaki. Physically he was slender, browned, ageless. He held himself with an elegant, angular erectness, and his attitude showed that he knew himself to be superior. When Williams presented himself as his new assistant on the Ajax, Chief Bullitt acknowledged him with a look of insolent contempt, one knee crossed over the other, his cigarette held at a right angle to his thin, tanned hand. "And what are your qualifications for the Hospital Corps?" he asked. "A job in a Liggett's drugstore?"

"No," Williams said. "I was an English instructor."

"Mercy," Bullitt said. He shook his head as if he had been beset by flies. "I thought I had seen everything. Well," he went on, with an air of resignation, "we may not be able to set broken bones together, but at least we can always split an infinitive."

Williams said nothing.

"I suppose you have a wife somewhere," Bullitt said, drawing at his cigarette, "and one and a half children."

"No," Williams said, stifling his anger, "I am not married,"

"Well," Bullitt said, "at least I will be spared the boring details of your domestic life."

Williams reminded himself that presumably there was nothing personal in this attitude of contempt. He had encountered it before. It was the instinctive withdrawal, he told himself, of the career military man who finds the enforced company of civilians tiresome, with their untidy thoughts, and their undisciplined attachment to families ashore, Williams had yet to learn of the larger area of Chief Bullitt's contempt. Nineteen years in the enlisted ranks of the Navy, the absence of the mature responsibilities of family life, the endless, intimate association with men lesser than himself, in a daily life where no major decisions were required of him, had given him a contempt which embraced nearly all men. The fastidious withdrawal, the almost fierce detachment which Williams found in him was there not only for Williams, but for all the world as well.

But Tyler Williams had cultivated his own brand of detachment. He had come to the dock at Norfolk from long months of service in a wartime Naval hospital. He had seen too much of suffering and death; the long wards filled with casualties from battles oil North Africa, the amputees, the maimed, the halt, the blind. He had heard too often the cries in the dark of hospital nights; and, in defense, he had girded himself with what he thought was a sublime indifference to the sufferings and the problems of others, in order that he might not be destroyed.

And with an indifference even to their crotchets, he told himself, looking at the set, proud, ugly face of Alexander Bullitt; for with his distinction he was yet one of the ugliest men Tyler Williams had ever seen, with a great beak of a nose, a wide, thin, arbitrary mouth, and deep-set, exhausted eyes. It is possible at that moment, in their mutual withdrawal, that they underestimated each other. Here was a military man, Williams thought, a man limited by the circumstances of his experience, yet with pride arising from that experience: pride both in Navy tradition and in the military tradition of excess. From the look of him it was obvious that he must have spent a good part of his Navy years in the bars of Hong Kong, Pearl Harbor and Norfolk; and an almost equal part of that time tapering off with medical alcohol in the sick bay. Yet he would be pitiless with himself, as well as with others. A Navy man had to be able to drink and roust about all night, if he liked, and yet stand muster, with merciless self-discipline, in the morning.

But Williams would, in this troubled year of 1942, with half the world in flames, accept Bullitt on his own terms. He had no choice.

In the mornings, on the Ajax, Chief Bullitt would take his place silently, with a certain implicit arrogance, in the one chair in the sick bay, a light chair of aluminum, upholstered in noncombustible plastic. He did not rise when Doctor Claremont appeared, but if Doctor Claremont spoke to him first he would, without rising, remove his chief's cap with a sweeping gesture, bow his head and say, "Good morning. Doctor,'" his tone laced with a subtle mockery. Doctor Claremont, with his young, tired, unhappy face, stood through sick call, leaning backward, diffident, with the hesitation of an intern just turned doctor. Doctor Claremont looked at the area of a patient's complaint; Chief Bullitt looked at the patient's eyes. And because Claremont had not challenged Bullitt on that first day, when Bullitt failed to rise and offer him the chair, and did not now know how to rebuke him for the mockery of his address, the order of precedence in the sick bay had been irrevocably established. It was Bullitt who filled the small room with authority, as if even the possession of a medical degree were secondary here, in the closed, private world of the Navy.

When everything was ready, the upper half of the sick-bay door was opened into the midship passageway. On the lower half of the door was a shelf which could be raised, and on which a man might lean his elbows while he waited. If a closer scrutiny was necessary, the lower half of the door was opened and the man came inside, to stand uncomfortably in the small, cleared space between the three men, regarded with skepticism by Chief Bullitt, with scientific detachment by Claremont, with curiosity and ignorance by Williams.

"My back aches, Doc. Down here somewhere. I musta pulled it on a ladder."

"Mister Claremont," Chief Bullitt said, removing the gold toothpick, and uncrossing and crossing his legs, "is a doctor and a gentleman. No familiarity is permitted from a slob like you."

"Yes, sir. Yes, Doctor."

The lower door was opened. The unhappy, nervous boy came in. He pulled out his shirt as instructed and turned, feeling on his back the thin, cool, tactile fingers of Doctor Claremont, the cynical eyes of Chief Bullitt.

D.U. (Diagnosis undetermined.) Discomfort in lumbar area.

Medication: aspirin.

"Next!" Chief Bullitt would call.

"I haven't gone in three days, Doctor."

"Remove your hat, boy," Chief Bullitt said. "And stand at attention when you speak."

The man entered, nervously, and was examined, his shirt pulled out, his abdomen cautiously explored by the fingers of Doctor Claremont. "Any pain here? . . . Here? . . . Here?"

Diagnosis: constipation.

Medication: one ounce of mineral oil with 5 cc. of cascara.

When it was apparent that nothing serious would be reported. Doctor Claremont would leave, with relief, to be called when needed.

It was not often that the crew complained of anything more serious than backache or constipation or athlete's foot. There were mornings when the whole sick bay was crowded with lonely boys from the prairies, all with athlete's foot, sitting around on overturned pails with their feet soaking in other pails of potassium-permanganate solution, and with thermometers in their mouths. "Keeps the yardbirds quiet," Bullitt would say.

The men had learned not to complain of anything serious. If they came in speaking of fever, or dizziness, or any other than generalized discomfort, Chief Bullitt, in Doctor Claremont's absence, would spring into action. "How awful!" he would say. "Mercy, lie down on the deck! How did you make it this far? Oh, my, what a hero!"

The muffled, involuntary hysteria this set off among the thermometers and pails would send the young victim running, to nurse his grievance, and his hatred for Bullitt, alone. "Homesick," Bullitt would say. "Sympathy would only make it worse."

And when they had all gone, the real pleasure of the day began for Chief Bullitt, behind the closed door. There was the daily form to be made out, the beautiful official report, on which all the ills that flesh is heir to were set down with a number which corresponded to a diagnosis in the Diagnostic Nomenclature of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. Every complaint, no matter how nebulous, had to be fitted in somehow. And when the form was complete, neat and shipshape, Williams was sent off with it for Doctor Claremont's signature. Doctor Claremont, brooding alone in the wardroom, would examine the report in silence. He rarely spoke to Williams during this daily exchange. He was courteous and non-military, but completely indifferent to Williams as a person, as he was to everyone else about him.

Afterward,' Williams would take the signed form to Captain Thompson's cabin. The captain had it on his desk then, the relentless statement of the crew's condition. Did a man say he felt too ill to stand watch? Look for his name on the list. It would be there if he had been able to produce a temperature of one hundred or more. Ninety-nine point five would not do. Let him be silent and stand watch until next sick call, at noon, or at eight in the evening.

"After more than nineteen years in the Navy," Bullitt said to Williams, "just when I'm about ready to go home covered with glory, what happens? They give me a war, and they give me you to work with! If we had a soda fountain on board you might be of some use turning out banana splits. But in the sick bay! Get your book down," he would say. "Break out the scales. It may kill you, or it may kill me, but I'll teach you what I can."

Rule: Normal blood clots in three to five minutes. Arterial blood is bright red; venous, dark.

"And if a shell hits the deck, and a man lies there torn apart, what will you do, swoon? Or have the vapors?"

Rule: Do not cease artificial respiration for at least two hours.

"Would you believe it, sometimes we get so far out to sea we can't even call an ambulance!"

Shortly before lunch Chief Bullitt would leave the sick bay to go back to the chief's quarters, worn out, as he said, by the effort of trying to pull Williams up by his bootstraps. Williams would be relieved to see him go, but he told himself, as he had told himself over and over again in the Navy, that the issues at stake were too large to allow for any personal feelings. Someday, God willing, the war would be over, and if he was alive he would go home again. Meanwhile he must try hard to do his chosen job in the best way he could.

When he was quite certain that Bullitt had gone, Williams would open the top half of the sick-bay door to the more cheerful world outside. On the deck the work went ahead loudly and with good humor. The sun shone. The smell of good, strong coffee filled the ship, coming from open hatches which led to the engine rooms below, coming from the gun mounts, and even from the boatswain's locker. And the ship moved forward through the sea, sighing, rising and falling gently from side to side with a kind of ancient majesty, as if it had a soul and a character and instincts of its own.

A pharmacist's mate is a sailor to his shipmates only by courtesy. He is not required to know anything about knots or lines or navigation; he does not have to swab decks or chip paint. In time of war he is not even required to stand watch. These regulations set Williams apart from the others whether he liked it or not. In the Navy hospitals and dispensaries where he had been on duty before, he had not felt set apart: he had swabbed latrines and carried bedpans along with everyone else. But it was a very different thing now to be a lone pharmacist's mate among sailors on a destroyer.

The ship's company of the Ajax had been salted by the Bureau of Personnel with old hands. About one third of the crew were men who had survived Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal or the lava Sea; men like Radioman Kerensky, Boatswain's Mate McNulty, Chief Wins-low, Lieutenant Palazzo. Many of them were even legally men, having successfully passed the age of twenty-one; Boats McNulty himself was all of twenty-three. These were magnificent figures indeed, men of expansive humor and appetites, capable of great, warm condescension for younger men of their own sort who had come into the Navy as they had, on the deck. Tyler Williams was so unsuccessful a sailor that he could not even think of the Ajax as "she." To him the Ajax was a boat, and he was a working passenger, tolerated, without proprietary rights. But from the open door of the sick bay, as the ship sailed on toward the Bay of Argentia, off Newfoundland, to the first practice rendezvous in its shakedown cruise, he watched with growing curiosity and wonder the relationships of the other men.

Every old hand on the Ajax had his "boy." It was a satisfying relationship to the man and to the boy —the sort of relationship men fall into when their lives are lived apart from women. It must not be assumed that there was anything unnatural in it. It was merely a normal expression of the need of all men for love of one another. Strong men have a need to love, protect and guide someone younger or more vulnerable than themselves, just as younger men need a guide and a model for their behavior. Simple, uncomplicated men found it much easier to give and receive this rough affection than did less spontaneous men, such as Tyler Williams.

Even Captain Thompson had his boy, a young towheaded seaman named Stewart Brown. At eighteen Brown was so clean, so healthy, so vital that sometimes in the early morning it was rather difficult for any older man to look at him.

Captain Thompson was essentially an uncomplicated man. He was a powerfully built, sturdy man, who had been the best boxer in his class at Annapolis. He had a pretty young wife ashore; her smiling picture stood in his cabin above his desk. He had two small daughters but no son. The members of the crew watched silently and with some concern when at sea his affection turned toward Brown.

It was Brown who stood messenger watch when the captain was on the bridge. In idle moments they talked together, the captain passing on to Brown the lore of the sea which is best passed on in this way. It was a satisfaction to see the look of quiet and amused affection that lighted the captain's eyes when Brown was on hand.

But the crew feared that Brown did not appreciate the subtleties of the relationship. In his pride at having been singled out, he might go too far to demonstrate his privilege, and, while the captain was amused by his impertinence and by the casual way he sometimes addressed him, he would be amused only to a certain point. The crew wanted Brown to rise to the captain's regard and appreciate its value. They could not and would not spell it out for him, but, if he failed, the whole ship would be poorer for his failure.

In the meantime, in those early days in 1942, Williams watched other, more successful relationships being established.

The strongest man of the crew was Boatswain's Mate First Class James McNulty. He had been born in city slums; he grew up in the gutter, a good street fighter, a rebel. But hke all men he longed for order and purpose in his life, and when he found it in the Navy his devotion to that life was complete.

Although he was only twenty-three years old, McNulty had been in the Navy almost six years. He was absolutely immaculate in his personal habits. His fitted dungarees were tailored for him in a shop in Norfolk, and, like his blue work shirts, they had been faded by salt spray and softened by repeated washing to a texture and shade that was the envy of every man. His fair skin was burned by the sun to the color of a good Burgundy wine, and his fair, close-cropped hair looked like the clipped, frayed ends of salt-bleached twine. His hats, scrubbed with a stiff brush, and soaked in brine for whiteness, rode the side of his head like a challenge, and no man had ever seen the wind carry one away.

McNulty rarely smiled, and seldom raised his voice. He did not need to. He was never out of the range of worshiping young eyes. The merest turn of his head would bring two or three seamen to his side, but if it was anything in particular he wanted done he would look over the heads of the others for "Stud" Clancy. "Where's my boy?" he would say. "Where's my boy, Clancy?"

And, "Yes, Boats," Clancy would say breathlessly, coming on the double. "I'm here, Boats. What can I do for you. Boats?"

From the tone of Clancy's voice, and the open look in his clear, boy's eyes, it was obvious that he wanted to be asked to do something really worthy, such as scrub the deck with a hand brush, or paint the whole ship, singlehanded, before sundown, just to demonstrate to every man on board that he, Stud Clancy, was good enough to be McNulty's boy.

When the Ajax had left Norfolk, after the commissioning, McNulty could be found in the afternoon at the boatswain's locker, or at the forward hold, or, in fine weather, out on the open forecastle, with his boys in a circle about him, while they earnestly tried, with solemn faces and stubborn fingers, to tie a Turk's-head knot, or to make a lanyard like the one McNulty wore around his neck. On this lanyard McNulty proudly wore his badge of office, his boatswain's pipe, which he had touched here and there with lead, and molded with his fingers until it produced for him his own sweet, sad note, his own personal cry of discipline, defiance and joy in the face of life. And here McNulty counseled his boys, answering their questions gravely, so that no boy was ashamed to ask any question of him.

Walking on the deck, Williams would see this group in the sun, and his steps would lag a little, almost against his will. Sometimes McNulty would look up with one of his rare smiles, and say, "Come on, sit down. Even a pill pusher ought to know how to tie a few knots."

Half angry, half amused, Williams would smile and pass on, saying he had work to do. Damn it all, he was too old to be McNulty's boy!

CHAPTER 2

LIFE ABOARD the Ajax required adaptability, a love of discipline for its own sake, and an instinctive sense of the inevitable, so that a man would find nothing strange, for example, in being required to sleep in a bunk directly below a length of steam pipe, as Williams had to do. A man suited to that world knew where he belonged, but Tyler Williams couldn't find his place; he kept bumping his head on the steam pipe.

Still, he kept his days full. He worked hard. Although Bullitt never acknowledged his industry with even a hint of approval, he was scornful if Williams was too solicitous about the welfare of the men. When Billy Becker, the yeoman striker, Sullivan's boy, was taken off the watch list because he had a severe cold with a temperature of one hundred and three, Williams took him a bowl of soup. A strong wind was blowing off Cape Sable, and Williams lost the first bowl of soup he started out with. The wind lifted it right out of the bowl; he saw the mass of it suspended for an instant in the air before it was flung over the side. He went back to refill the bow'l, and this time he put a heavy crockery plate on top. Bullitt met Williams when he came back with the tray. "They have finger bowls in the officers' galley," he said. "Why don't you take him one after the soup?"

Chief Radioman Benson heard the remark in passing. "Boy," he said, shaking his head, "there's a guy who is really asking for it."

It was true that Bullitt was not very popular in the chiefs' quarters. Only Benson and Chief Boatswain's Mate Kronsky had, like himself, worked themselves up from the lowest rating. Winslow, the chief quartermaster, Calder, the chief machinist's mate, and Tomkins, the supply chief, were civilians who had been given the rating of chief petty officer because of their peacetime background and experience. Presumably, this division should have created a balance, without friction, but Bullitt had thrown it off. Benson was young for a chief in the regular Navy, and it was a sensitive point with him. Bullitt enjoved baiting Benson, who, in return, hated Bulhtt.

Kronsky, like many another old boatswain, had a vague dislike for members of the Hospital Corps, regarding nursing and hospital administration as the province of women. However, he generally put up with the men who did this work. But Kronsky had become fond of Chief Winslow, the quartermaster, who had come to the Navy from the Merchant Marine. When Bullitt had sneered at the Merchant Marine as unmilitary and unheroic, he had alienated Kronsky.

That left Tomkins and Calder, and for them Bullitt reserved his special contempt. Tomkins, the young supply chief, had worked in the catering department of a large hotel. He did an excellent job; if the Ajax was a "happy" ship, as indeed it was, a not inconsiderable factor involved was the quality of the food served. Calder, the chief machinist, had had some practical engineering training, and the Navy had sent him to damage-control school. He was an extremely important member of the crew of the Ajax.

Both Tomkins and Calder were fair, confident young men, who laughed a great deal. I hey were the sort of men who grow up in the suburbs of our large cities, and go to good high schools; excellent examples of middle-class America. No one knew what Bullitt's background had been, but after nineteen years in the Navy he had become so indoctrinated in the stratification of Navy life, where a man is either an officer or an enlisted man, an aristocrat or a commoner, that he could find no ground on which to meet Tomkins or Calder. Their open, happy, untroubled faces irritated him. Their easy, relaxed way with officers made him angry and jealous. He baited them with questions, trapped them by their ignorance of Navy ways, and then laughed sardonically at their confusion and anger. "Oh, so it's 'dinner,' is it?" he would say, when Tomkins was discussing the day's menu with Butler, the cook. Or, to Chief Calder, "Did you say 'pick that up off the^oor'?" He shook his head. "You civilians may win the war," he said. "But it will take years for the Navy to recover."

The Ajax arrived at Argentia during the time of the midnight sun, when, day or night, it was never wholly light nor wholly dark. With a sister fleet of destroyers, they rode anchor in the harbor, in an endless world of gray water, off a bleak, gray shore. Suddenly it was impossible to imagine that anything else existed, as if they had managed to sail off the edge of an ancient map into the unknown world.

On the morning of the first day, a liberty list was posted and Williams saw his name there. In the late afternoon, when Bullitt had finally left him alone, he closed the door of the sick bay, got out his shaving gear, and propped a small hand mirror above the sink. In the glass even his own lean, intelligent, not unpleasant face seemed unfamiliar to him. His past life, his study, his teaching, all seemed part of life in another incarnation. The Navy had run over him with its machinery until everything else was flattened out of him, as if its indifference to and ignorance of the values by which he had lived had suddenly rendered those values meaningless. Perhaps here lay the distinction that separated the civilian from the military man. A man who would choose a military life for a career was a man who welcomed or needed in some way the security of a narrow berth in a world of arbitrary limitations. He, Williams, was not such a man. And here he was now, trapped in a world which could not possibly be more alien to him, in which he was alone because he could not identify himself with any of its loyalties. He felt a sense of depression, loneliness and detachment. Even the conviction that had brought him to war seemed momentarily shaken.

Wearing clean undress whites, he went ashore with the liberty party. In the unchanging gray light, scrub-pine growth struggled up low hills, which seemed not hills so much as piles of glacial moraine. The Navy buildings lay beyond the port community itself, whose few structures, in this land beyond the timber line, looked as if they had been built of orange crates and bits of driftwood.

Williams walked heavily over the stony ground to the recreation building, a large Quonset hut, where beer was to be had. At the long, crowded bar his ration of six cans was given to him all at once, all opened at the same time, and Williams scooped them up gratefully in his arms and made his way to an unoccupied table in a far corner. He sat sideways, with his feet up on the bench, and quietly, in a businesslike way, he began to drink the six cans of beer.

After the third or fourth can he began to hold a conversation with himself. It had been so long since he had spoken outside of the performance of his duty ("Where does it hurt?" "Does it itch between the toes of the other foot, too?") that he had almost forgotten the conversational tone of his voice. He was a fool, he told himself pleasantly, his voice softened and relaxed by the beer, unheard in the general din which filled the echoing, barnlike hall. Any idiot could do better than he was doing. He was almost twenty-six years old, and he had passed other hazards in his life. Couldn't he just mark time, and do his duty, and wait until this damned war was over, without working himself up like a second-string Hamlet?

Well, maybe six cans of beer wouldn't do it. He went back to the bar and scooped up six more, paying no heed to the harried boy behind the bar who wanted to know if he hadn't been there before. Then he went back to his corner bench again and stretched out full length, holding the fresh beer carefully to his mouth. He had read too much, he decided. He had spent too much of his life in libraries. He was a sort of semi-animated encyclopedia who knew Greek verbs and the minor poets of the Restoration, but aside from that —why, hell, boy, he said to himself, you couldn't be relied on to give the right time of day.

At this point the arched ceiling above him began to waver in a curious, sickening way, and he sat up abruptly. He stood up, and unsteadily made his way toward the door.

When he awoke the next morning he sat on the edge of his bunk and tried to hold his head together with his two hands until he could see clearly. It was very early; reveille had not yet sounded. But he was fully, painfully awake, his heart thumping, every nerve on edge.

In a moment he struggled into his clothes, went topside and made his way to the sick bay. There he closed the door behind him and got the jar of powdered coffee down from the shelf, boiled water in a medical beaker, and made himself a cup of coffee. While he was holding the steaming mug to his face with trembling hands, the top half of the sick-bay door was suddenly thrown open, and framed there in the opening was the ruddy, smiling face of Boats McNulty.