The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer Page B

a flower on the field of red.
                I got him.
                You're a good old bastard, Martinez.
     
                Martinez made sergeant. Little Mexican boys also breathe the American fables. If they cannot be aviators or financiers or officers they can still be heroes. No need to stumble over pebbles and search the Texas sky. Any man jack can be a hero.
                Only that does not make you white Protestant, firm and aloof.
     
     
     
    3
     
                An argument was about to break in officers' mess. For the last ten minutes Lieutenant Colonel Conn had been conducting a tirade against labor unions, and Lieutenant Hearn was getting restless. It was a bad place to hold one's temper. The mess had been set up with a great deal of haste, and it was not really big enough to feed forty officers. Two squad tents had been connected, but even then it was rather cramped, not nearly roomy enough to hold six tables, twelve benches, and the equipment of the field kitchen at one end. Moreover, the campaign was too young for the food to show any real improvement over the enlisted men's mess. A few times the officers had had pie or cake, and once there had been a salad when a crate of tomatoes was purchased from a merchant ship off the peninsula, but the average meal was pretty bad. And since the officers were paying for their meals out of their food allowance, it made them a little bitter. At every course there would be a low murmur of disgust, carefully muted because the General was eating with them now at a small table set off at one end of the tent.
                At midday, the annoyance was greater. The mess tent had been erected in the least prepossessing area of the bivouac, several hundred yards from the beach, without any decent shade from the coconut trees. The sun beat down and heated the inside until even the flies ambled sluggishly through the air. The officers ate in a swelter, sweat dripping from their hands and faces onto the plates before them. At Motome in the division's permanent bivouac the officers' mess had been set up in a little dell with a brook trickling over some rocks nearby, and the contrast was galling. As a result there was little conversation, and it was not exceptional for a quarrel to start. But at least in the past it had not cut across too many ranks. A captain might argue with a major, or a major with a lieutenant colonel, but no lieutenants had been correcting colonels.
                Lieutenant Hearn was aware of that. He was aware of a great many things, but even a stupid man would have known that a second lieutenant, indeed the only second lieutenant in Combined Headquarters, did not go around picking fights. Besides, he knew he was resented. The other officers considered it a piece of unwarranted good fortune that he should have been assigned to the General as his aide when he had joined the outfit only toward the end of the Motome campaign.
                Beyond all this, Hearn had done little to make friends. He was a big man with a shock of black hair, a heavy immobile face. His brown eyes, imperturbable, stared out coldly above the short blunted and slightly hooked arc of his nose. His wide thin mouth was unexpressive, a top ledge to the solid mass of his chin, and his voice was sharp with a thin contemptuous quality, rather surprising in so big a man. He would have denied it at times but he liked very few people, and most men sensed it uneasily after talking to him for a few minutes. He was above all the kind of man other men love to see humiliated.
                It would only be common sense for him to keep his mouth shut, and yet for the last ten minutes of the meal, the sweat had dripped steadily into his food, and his shirt had become progressively damper. More and more he had been resisting the impulse to mash the contents of his plate against the face of Lieutenant Colonel Conn. For