The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [183]
Yet the Major never thought of asking for a transfer; nothing could have been more repugnant to him. He had always possessed an intense loyalty to his commander if he felt the man was a good officer, and no one had ever impressed him more than the General. It was inconceivable to Major Dalleson that he should desert the General unless he was ordered to; he would, if the bivouac had been overrun by Japanese troops, probably have died defending the General in his tent. It was the only romantic attitude in his heavy mind and body. And besides this, the Major had his ambition to sustain him. It was, of course, a very backward ambition; the Major had no more hope of becoming a general than a rich merchant in the Middle Ages might have dreamed of becoming king. The Major wanted to make lieutenant-colonel, or even conceivably colonel before the war ended, and in his position as G-3 he was entitled to that. His reasoning was simple; he had every intention of remaining in the Army after the war and he judged that if he rose as high as lieutenant-colonel the chances were very good that in the postwar Army he would be demoted no lower than captain. Out of all the ranks it was the one he preferred the most next to top sergeant, and he felt a little wistfully that it would not be very correct for him to become an enlisted man again. So, unhappily, he continued to wrestle with his job as the chief of operations.
Now as he completed the timetables he turned with reluctance to the march orders that would be necessary to remove a battalion from the line and divert them to the beach. In itself it was not too complicated a process, but since he didn't know which battalion would be removed, he had to draw up four sets of withdrawal orders and work out the subsidiary movements of the troops who would have to fill the gap in each case. It kept him busy through most of the afternoon, for, although he assigned part of it to Leach and his other assistant, it was necessary to check their work, and the Major was very thorough, very slow.
He finished that at last, and sketched a tentative march order for the invasion battalion once it had landed at Botoi. Here there was no precedent for him to follow -- the General had sketched the outline of the attack, but he had been a little vague. From experience, Dalleson knew he would have to submit something and the General would proceed to rip it apart and give him the movement in detail. He hoped to avoid this but he knew there was little likelihood of it, and so, sweating profusely in the heat of the tent, he indicated a route of combat march along one of the main trails, and estimated the time it should take for each portion of it. This was unplotted terrain of his mind as well, and he halted many times, wiped his forehead, and tried unsuccessfully to conceal his anxiety from himself. The steady murmur of voices in the tent, the steady bustle of men moving from desk to desk, or the draftsmen humming over their work, irritated him. Once or twice he looked up, glared balefully at whoever was talking, and then returned to his work with an audible grunt.
The telephone rang frequently and despite himself Dalleson began to listen to the conversations. Once for several minutes, Hearn chatted with some other officer over the phone, and Dalleson finally threw down his pencil and shouted, "Goddammit, why don't you men all shut up and get to work?" It was obviously directed toward Hearn, who murmured something into the receiver and hung up after staring thoughtfully at Dalleson.
"Did you give those papers to Hobart?" he asked Hearn.
"Yes."
"What the hell you been doing since then?"
Hearn grinned and lit a cigarette. "Nothing in particular, Major." There was a subdued titter from a few of the clerks in the tent.
Dalleson stood up, surprised to find himself suddenly in a rage, "I don't want any of your goddam lip, Hearn." This made it worse. It was bad to reprimand an officer in front of enlisted men. "Go over and help Leach."
For several seconds Hearn stood motionless, and then he nodded, sauntered carelessly over to Leach's desk, and sat down beside him. Dalleson had trouble in getting back to work. In the weeks that had elapsed since the division had stalled on the line, Dalleson had expressed his concern by driving his men. He would worry frequently that his subordinates were slacking off and the work was becoming sloppy. To correct that, he was after his clerks all the time to make them retype papers in which there was one error or even one erasure, and he consistently bullied his junior officers to produce more work. It was basically a superstition. Dalleson believed that if he could make his own small unit function perfectly the rest of the division would follow his example. Part of the discomfort Hearn had caused him until now had come from Dalleson's conviction that Hearn cared very little about the work. It was a dangerous business. "One man can louse up an outfit," was one of Dalleson's axioms, and Hearn was a threat. It was the first time he could ever remember a subordinate telling him that he had been doing nothing. When that started happening. . . Dalleson fretted through the rest of the afternoon, outlined the march order very uncertainly, and an hour before evening chow had finished enough of the battle plan to present it to the General.