A DISTANT VICTORY
against the pall of waiting I cannot now recall, but we often sat late
in the corpsmen's quarters drinking beer and we talked or we did
not talk. Many of the men who were certainly more reckless would
take off on rambling, sometimes drunken, jaunts through the neigh–
boring villages. They had found themselves women-"bizzness ladees"
as the decorous Filipinos called them-and soon there were several,
half-hearted it seemed to me, empty attachments.
One of our men, a brutal and muscular blond, had fallen in
love with a pretty young girl named Maria Teresa, and he made
her quit prostitution, and he had someone in the States send him
three expensive blue dresses for Maria. He made her stop drinking,
too, although often he would return to the hospital late at night,
raging drunk. Once, in the quarters, when he must not have known
anyone else was awake
in
the dark, I heard him sob two or three
times. Only when the drunk-cases were brought into the hospital
for treatment, and they were always violent, did he show
his
secret
eagerness for brutality. He was the first man to throw himself upon
the heaving chests of the unmanageable, slapping them across the face
while he repeated mechanically, "Give me a bad time, will ya, give
me a bad time, will ya," over and over. He was never happy at the
hospital until they assigned
him
to assist in the operating room and,
later, the other corpsmen of the O.R. told me he was damned efficient.
Two "Silver Star boys" who had been in combat with the
Marines were attached to our staff, and for their sullen sense of
defeat, whether it was a pose or not, I had a hidden admiration
even while intellectually I jeered silently at the romantic way they
cut themselves off from all connections with "home," as if their pasts
were really rich nightmares of evil and the floating faces of the
wronged. Those men were the only ones who talked seriously of
staying in the islands for life, and they had petitioned that they be
discharged from the service there. Fats, our Negro cook, who used
to muse upon the same idea, had a Filipino woman who made money
on the black market and she, he told us, "Would gimme all that
money
if
I was to come back here after the war and helps her run
a big cafe, gamblin' and whore house all put together in one." But
he dreamed of the Harlem bars and the subway trains.
As
the days of peace piled up, the routine work of the hospital
became less heavy and, except for long, pointless conversations, there
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