greatest loneliness I have ever known.
So it was that I came to stand that morning, a few days later, on the platform of our railway station, where my grandparents and Laura, with her box lunch, waited to see me off. I shook hands with my grandfather and he stood smiling and nodding at me through his tears, his lips compressed in an effort to control his feeling. I saw with a clarity that I had never known before the aged roundness of his shoulders and the sagging gray flesh of his jowls; he seemed suddenly piteous to me, and I felt a strange and generous elation, as if all that he had said to me on the evening of our walk were transcended by the fineness of the act that had proceeded from it. I felt for a moment truly glad to be going away to war, convinced of my own valor and full of a glowing sense of chivalry which shed upon the world and all of its events a warm, apocalyptic light of beauty and benevolence. My grandmother embraced me tremulously—a warm little woman who smelled of wax and soap and the great cool kitchen of the house where I was raised—murmuring, “God bless you, Sonny,” while I patted her plump rounded back. I held Laura’s hand for a moment, looking smilingly into her eyes, and went away to war.
THIS is the last picture of my childhood. Of the war, which follows, I shall say little, for all this which occurs before my return to Stonemont is, in a certain sense, a prelude; and feeling that both my time and determination for the telling of this story are limited, I must hurry on to what is perhaps more properly its beginning.
I do not know exactly how long that sudden luminous sense of dedication which I had felt on leaving Stonemont endured, but as a conscious sensation it was very soon diminished by a succession of training camps in the desert heat of Utah and California and the bitter cold of a Dakota winter, and then dispelled entirely by the realities of combat duty in the South Pacific. I was assigned to the Air Corps, trained as a radio operator and attached to a bomber squadron of the 13th Air Force, which was stationed at that time on the island of Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides.
Yet there must have been a period, early in the war, when I was still responsive to that glowing sense of chivalry with which I had departed, for I remember experiencing, when the name of my first station was disclosed, not the irony which I should surely have felt at a later period of the war but a kind of mystic delight at its significance. It seemed to me that there was something unmistakably providential and symbolic in my having been sent forth to defend the Holy Spirit. This was an illusion which was soon dispelled, as I have said, by years of tedium, dirt, brutality, fatigue and fear.
Over the next two years we moved, as the Japanese retreated, to Guadalcanal, Hollandia, Biak, Leyte and Tacloban, through steaming muddy jungle stations, blasted coral atolls and the shattered, stinking, misery-laden cities of the Philippines. There were alternate periods of degrading, slothful idleness and, when the heavy offensives were in progress, of exhausting, concentrated duty, during which we flew missions almost around the clock, snatching a few hours of sleep in the shelter of a wing while our bomb bays were reloaded. There were also occasional furloughs in Australia, which I remember with almost equal abhorrence for the savage recklessness with which they were spent—the primitive drunken violence, the bitter lovemaking with prostitutes or avid, pathetic children barely into their teens and full of the hysteria of war, who used to roam the streets of Sydney in search of “Yanks”—and for the remorse and self-disgust which followed them.
This whole period of my life has about it the quality of a dream, lurid and grotesque, whose bizarre intensity has nevertheless a kind of demented splendor, like a heap of shattered stained glass from a ruined cathedral window which I saw once in the rubble of a Manila
So it was that I came to stand that morning, a few days later, on the platform of our railway station, where my grandparents and Laura, with her box lunch, waited to see me off. I shook hands with my grandfather and he stood smiling and nodding at me through his tears, his lips compressed in an effort to control his feeling. I saw with a clarity that I had never known before the aged roundness of his shoulders and the sagging gray flesh of his jowls; he seemed suddenly piteous to me, and I felt a strange and generous elation, as if all that he had said to me on the evening of our walk were transcended by the fineness of the act that had proceeded from it. I felt for a moment truly glad to be going away to war, convinced of my own valor and full of a glowing sense of chivalry which shed upon the world and all of its events a warm, apocalyptic light of beauty and benevolence. My grandmother embraced me tremulously—a warm little woman who smelled of wax and soap and the great cool kitchen of the house where I was raised—murmuring, “God bless you, Sonny,” while I patted her plump rounded back. I held Laura’s hand for a moment, looking smilingly into her eyes, and went away to war.
THIS is the last picture of my childhood. Of the war, which follows, I shall say little, for all this which occurs before my return to Stonemont is, in a certain sense, a prelude; and feeling that both my time and determination for the telling of this story are limited, I must hurry on to what is perhaps more properly its beginning.
I do not know exactly how long that sudden luminous sense of dedication which I had felt on leaving Stonemont endured, but as a conscious sensation it was very soon diminished by a succession of training camps in the desert heat of Utah and California and the bitter cold of a Dakota winter, and then dispelled entirely by the realities of combat duty in the South Pacific. I was assigned to the Air Corps, trained as a radio operator and attached to a bomber squadron of the 13th Air Force, which was stationed at that time on the island of Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides.
Yet there must have been a period, early in the war, when I was still responsive to that glowing sense of chivalry with which I had departed, for I remember experiencing, when the name of my first station was disclosed, not the irony which I should surely have felt at a later period of the war but a kind of mystic delight at its significance. It seemed to me that there was something unmistakably providential and symbolic in my having been sent forth to defend the Holy Spirit. This was an illusion which was soon dispelled, as I have said, by years of tedium, dirt, brutality, fatigue and fear.
Over the next two years we moved, as the Japanese retreated, to Guadalcanal, Hollandia, Biak, Leyte and Tacloban, through steaming muddy jungle stations, blasted coral atolls and the shattered, stinking, misery-laden cities of the Philippines. There were alternate periods of degrading, slothful idleness and, when the heavy offensives were in progress, of exhausting, concentrated duty, during which we flew missions almost around the clock, snatching a few hours of sleep in the shelter of a wing while our bomb bays were reloaded. There were also occasional furloughs in Australia, which I remember with almost equal abhorrence for the savage recklessness with which they were spent—the primitive drunken violence, the bitter lovemaking with prostitutes or avid, pathetic children barely into their teens and full of the hysteria of war, who used to roam the streets of Sydney in search of “Yanks”—and for the remorse and self-disgust which followed them.
This whole period of my life has about it the quality of a dream, lurid and grotesque, whose bizarre intensity has nevertheless a kind of demented splendor, like a heap of shattered stained glass from a ruined cathedral window which I saw once in the rubble of a Manila
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