The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [182]
Dalleson mopped his forehead, turned back to his desk, and began to work on the embarkation and debarkation timetables for the invasion battalion. As he progressed he chewed his cigar with relish, pausing every now and then to probe his mouth with one of his large fingers whenever some tobacco leaves had lodged in his teeth. From time to time, out of habit, he would look up and stare about the tent to check whether the maps were in place and all the men were working at their desks. When the phone would ring, he would pause, waiting for someone to answer, shaking his head blackly if it took too long. His own desk was set at an angle to one of the corner uprights, and whenever he wished he could have a fair view of the bivouac. A little wind had sprung up, and it quivered faintly the trodden grass under his feet, cooled all the red spacious areas of his face.
The Major had been one of many children in a poor family, and he considered himself lucky to have finished high school. Until he had joined the Army in 1933 he had been bogged down by a series of missed opportunities and plain bad luck. His ability for hard sustained work and complete loyalty had been relatively unnoticed because as a young man he had been shy and taciturn. But in the Army he had made a perfect soldier. By the time he became a noncom he brought a painstaking thoroughness to all the details he supervised, and his further promotions came quickly. But if the war had not started, Dalleson would probably have remained a first sergeant until retirement.
The influx of draftees made him an officer, and he moved quickly from second lieutenant to first lieutenant to captain. In training he had commanded his company well; they had good discipline, they turned out well for inspections, and their marching was precise. Above all, it was said that they had pride in their outfit. Dalleson always harped on this, and his speeches on the company street had been a source of much mockery. "You're the best fuggin soldiers in the best goddam company of the best goddam battalion of the best goddam regiment. . ." and so forth, but behind their mockery the soldiers realized his sincerity. He had a way with a cliché. It was only natural he should have been promoted to major.
Only it was as a major that Dalleson's troubles had begun. He found that he seldom had any direct contact with enlisted men, he had to deal almost exclusively with officers, and it left him somewhat beached. For the truth was that he was uncomfortable with officers; even as a captain he had considered himself three-quarters an enlisted man, and he missed the days when his easy profanity was appreciated by the men. As a major he had to watch his manners, and he never was quite certain what to do. He felt himself at last -- secretly, without admitting it to himself -- miscast for the job. He was a little overwhelmed by the high rank of the men with whom he collaborated; he was depressed at times by the responsibilities of his work.
The fact that he was the G-3 had contributed to his discomfort. The G-3 of a division is in charge of operations and training on the division commander's staff, and to be completely effective he must be brilliant and thorough, quick and yet capable of a great deal of detail work. In another division Dalleson probably would not have lasted, but General Cummings had always taken a more direct interest in operations than the average division commander; there were very few plans he did not initiate, practically no military actions no matter how small which he did not personally approve. In such a situation, the Major's stint of blacking in the shadows in the General's drawings did not demand all the talents of a G-3. The Major had been able to survive; indeed, he had the example of his predecessor, a lieutenant-colonel, who had been masterfully suited for the job, but had been transferred precisely because of that -- he had begun to assume some of the functions the General preferred to keep for himself.
The Major floundered through his work, or more exactly, he sweated through it, for what he could not supply in brilliance he was determined to produce in hard work. In time he mastered the daily procedures, the mechanisms of Army planning, the forms he had to fill out, but he was always uneasy. He feared the slowness of his mind, the unconscionable time it took him to make a decision when he had no paper before him and time was pressing. Nights like the one he had spent with the General when the Japanese attacked tormented him if he allowed himself to think of it. He knew that he could not have disposed his troops with even a fraction of the ease and dispatch with which the General had managed it over the field telephone, and he wondered how he would have managed if the General had left it to him. He was always afraid that a situation would develop in which he would have to call upon the more dazzling aptitudes that his position demanded, and which he did not have. He would have preferred any other job but that of G-3.