LAST CALL: Combat Rock: The Birth of a Marine
Beston, Paul
LAST CALL Paul Beston Combat Rock: The Birth of a Marine START WITH A KID who always seems a bit behind, the fifth and youngest from a boisterous Irish family. He inhabits another world...
...They live in pine boxes, I'll only sleep in one...
...his supervisors are untrustworthy and speak about him in Korean while he is in the same room...
...He wonders...
...They talk of rights, what about responsibilities...
...Slowly, he leaves Burroughs and Ginsberg behind and immerses him-self in the Greeks, Shakespeare, Milton...
...The kids laugh and jeer...
...Career opportunities," the singer growls, "the ones that never knock" Everything changes then...
...But Joe Strummer makes him curious for a wider world, and he becomes a reader...
...Eventually, writing exhausts him, and the East Village no longer fascinates...
...he has the body fat of a sparrow, outruns platoons of 18 year-olds, does pull-ups and sit-ups like a young man trying to impress his first lover...
...They are aspiring playwrights, artists, musicians, but their aspirations are buried in talk "Congratulations," one of them says...
...Special classes, special buses to take him home...
...The youthful demonstrators remind him of the young South Koreans who sneer at their protectors as doom dangles overhead...
...He's in...
...It is Joe Strummer and the Clash...
...Paul: When I became a man, I put away childish things...
...Working a night job, he had just gotten to sleep that morning and missed the entire thing, and as the country mourns he feels ashamed by his detachment...
...LAST CALL P A U L B E S T O N Combat Rock: The Birth of a Marine START WITH A KID who always seems a bit behind, the fifth and youngest from a boisterous Irish family...
...He retains his love for Joe Strummer, but his punk rock days now seem best encapsulated by the words of St...
...Even worse is the anti-Americanism of the young...
...He spends a year at a vocational school...
...Do none of these people have any humility, any sense of citizenship...
...He writes for years with ascetic devotion...
...He takes a cue from Melville and decides to see the world...
...The sergeants are impressed...
...He won't go to college, the professionals say...
...One day, struggling to impart the meaning of the word "disaster," he refers to September ll...
...In high school, he plays sports and tries to fit in, but nothing inspires...
...Others concur, speaking from their vast knowledge of the universe encompassing Manhattan and the outer boroughs...
...He is a poet, a sketcher of fractured pictures in the mind, but he struggles to make the images cohere...
...He should get into something where his poor reading skills won't hurt him...
...It's a learning disability, the professionals say...
...Books obsess him, and so he goes to college at last...
...He graduates with a bachelor's in English...
...My brother, now a Marine Lance Corporal, was activated in January and shipped out for duty in the Horn of Africa...
...Back home in the Spring of 2003, he walks past furious anti-war protests in Union Square...
...Long before he meets his first recruiter, he thinks like a Marine...
...Even when the planes hit in September, he can't shake the numbness...
...Before departing for Parris Island, he does some temp work, and his colleagues are stunned by his decision...
...For the rest of his time in South Korea, he is most comfortable at bars with his new American military friends, including a classicist with whom he spends hours studying Latin...
...He moves to New York and spends a few years in punk rock bars...
...No matter how things go, I never want to be like them...
...He inhabits another world in the back-yard, an entire universe with explosions and characters and mythic places...
...In school, the alarms sound quickly...
...Now you're qualified to come home in a pine box...
...At 32, he needs a special waiver to qualify...
...An old restlessness returns: Isn't there something else...
...In South Korea in 2002, he teaches kids in 70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR February 2005 a Korean hogwan...
...For the first time, he does not feel alone...
...One day he hears a searing sound in a record store, a raw guitar and a ragged voice that sounds drunk with dissociation...
...It starts predictably enough, with urban poetry and the Beats, dark tales of postmodern woe...
...The school's environment is miserable...
...The East Village is a feverish place, overheated with radical politics, scandalous art, and single women...
...That's when I knew I made the right decision," he tells me later...
Vol. 38 • February 2005 • No. 1
