The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [34]
At least Conn would be having indigestion too.
The General stood up quietly, and walked out of the tent. It gave permission for the rest of them to leave. Conn's eyes met Hearn's for a moment and they both looked away in embarrassment. After a minute or so, Hearn slid off the bench, and strolled outside. His clothing was completely wet, the air caressing against it like cool water.
He lit a cigarette and strolled irritably through the bivouac, halting when he reached the barbed wire, and then pacing back underneath the coconut trees, staring morosely at the scattered clusters of dark-green pup tents. When he had completed the circuit, he clambered down the bluff that led to the beach, and walked along through the sand, kicking abstractedly at pieces of discarded equipment still left from invasion day. A few trucks motored by, and a detail of men shuffled in file through the sand carrying shovels against their shoulders. Out in the water a few freighters were anchored, yawing lazily in the midday heat. Over to his left a landing craft was approaching a supply dump.
Hearn finished the cigarette and nodded curtly to an officer passing by. The nod was returned, but after a doubtful pause. He was going to be in for it now, there was no getting away from that. Conn was a bloody fool, but he had been a bigger ass. It was the old pattern; when he could take something no longer he flared up, but that was weakness in itself. And yet he could not bear this continual paradox in which he and the other officers lived. It had been different in the States; the messes were separate, the living quarters were separate, and if you made a mistake it didn't count. But out here, they slept in cots a few feet away from men who slept on the ground; they were served meals, bad enough in themselves, but nevertheless served on plates while the others ate on their haunches after standing in line in the sun. It was even more than that; ten miles away men were being killed, and that had different moral demands than when men were killed three thousand miles away. No matter how many times he might walk through the bivouac area, the feeling was there. The ugly green of the jungle beginning just a few yards beyond the barbed wire, the delicate traceries of the coconut trees against the sky, the sick yellow pulpy look of everything; all of them combined to feed his disgust. He trudged up the bluff again, and stood looking about the area at the scattered array of big tents and little ones, at the trucks and jeeps clustered together in the motor pool, the file of soldiers in green sloppy fatigues still filing through for chow. Men had had time to clear the ground of the worst bushes and roots, to establish a few grudged yards out of the appalling rifeness of the terrain. But up ahead, bedded down in the jungle, the front-line troops could not clear it away because they did not halt more than a day or two, and it would be dangerous to expose themselves. They slept with mud and insects and worms while the officers bitched because there were no paper napkins and the chow could stand improvement.
There was a kind of guilt in being an officer. They had all felt it in the beginning; out of OCS the privileges had been uncomfortable at first, but it was a convenient thing to forget, and there were always the good textbook reasons, good enough to convince yourself if you wanted to be quit of it. Only a few of them still kicked the idea of guilt around in their heads.
The guilt of birth perhaps.
There was such a thing in the Army. It was subtle, there were so many exceptions that it could be called no more than a trend, and yet it was there. He, himself: rich father, rich college, good jobs, no hardship which he had not assumed himself; he fulfilled it, and many of his friends did too. It was not true so much for the ones he had known at college. They were 4-F, or enlisted men, or majors in the Air Corps, or top-secret work in Washington or even in CO camps, but all the men he had known in prep school were now ensigns or lieutenants. A class of men born to wealth, accustomed to obedience. . . but that made it incorrect already. It wasn't obedience, it was the kind of assurance that he had, or Conn had, or Hobart, or his father, or even the General.