The Tragedy at Parris Island
Mailer, Norman
OVER THE YEARS, I have had a few mixed feelings about the Marine Corps. It is not easy for me to defend them, yet in a curious way I suppose I respect the Marine Corps more than the Army....
...Let us see if we ever get the answer...
...Trilling managed to drag into her article...
...As a leading official of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom (ACCF) , an organization largely de...
...Trilling is really convinced that DISSENT is engaged in a large-scale "emotional intimidation" of the "liberal community," there are ready means of correction at her disposal...
...And it is noteworthy of DtsSENT that there is no reasonable opinion it assaults more violently than the opinion that American democracy, for all its faults, war rants our defense unless it be the equally reasonable opinion that the single greatest threat to freedom is Soviet Communism...
...Some Critics Of Dissent THE SUPPORTERS OF DISSENT, it is pleasant to know, tend to be skeptical, dissatisfied, critical...
...Boot training in the Marine Corps is notorious for its sadism, psychological and physical...
...McKeon was probably as driving and sadistic as any other D. I.—a D. I. can hardly be anything else given his kind of work—but I wonder if the explanation behind the death of these six trainees will not come down to something so simple and yet so large as a poorly made bed, a platoon restricted to quarters, an enraged D. I., smarting under the fear and humiliation of a mark against his training record, and therefore so angry as to mete out the unusual punishment (on himself as well, of course) of a long hike on a Sunday night...
...If one is going to be a good soldier, one has to have a little self-respect, and cringing inwardly like a whipped dog over such inconsequentials as whether my cot had been made tautly, or if my footlocker had every piece of equipment laid out at perfect right angles, remained as a humiliating memory for many years...
...Now, at Parris Island, the accident covers a mystery...
...So, too, with the Marine Corps...
...The subsequent whitewash of the high Marine brass at Parris Island will ignore completely the one real mystery in the affair: why was McKeon's platoon out on a Sunday night march...
...For anyone who has not been in the Armed Forces, the psychological terror of a Saturday inspection in training can hardly be explained...
...Because what in the name of heaven was a training platoon doing on a SUNDAY night march...
...we have today the spectacle of a magazine Iike DISSENT, whose polemic is based not upon intellec tual cogency but upon the emo tional intimidation of its readers, creating more anxiety in the lib eral community than our continu ing efforts at liberal reason can allay...
...I know I never felt so insignificant and so without dignity as I would feel in the five minutes before the inspecting officer reached my bunk, and I believe I ended up a poorer soldier for the experience...
...Written before the widely-reported trial of Sgt...
...If it will soothe her nerves, we can reassure her that she greatly overestimates our influence...
...McKeon is going to be the seventh victim ol] this, and will be courtmartialed for one reason or another...
...If his platoon is inferior to the platoon in the next barracks or the next company street, the D. I. is in trouble, no doubt about that, and of course in compensation for his low salary and hard work, the D. I. has only his power, threatened from above and below...
...Unless they had been restricted to their quarters for the weekend, Sgt...
...THE MARINE Cost's, however, is as devoid of moral courage as it is fertile in physical courage, and the latest demonstration of our national vice has been the abominable hypocrisy of the Marine brass about the death of six Marines in a tidal stream in one of the marshes on the Parris Island base...
...A critic of another kind is Mrs...
...Trilling seems often to behave like the "general secretary" of a radical sect whose main joy in life is hunting for deviations among the other sects and chastising those who stray from the proper "line...
...Sgt...
...My guess is that Sgt...
...McKeon, the above appeared originally in the Village Voice...
...It is the question to ask, and I would like to know the answer...
...Diana Trilling...
...Trilling is answered by Rahv quite as she deserves to be, but what interests us at the moment is a remarkable passage about DISSENT which Mrs...
...She need merely write an article, saying whatever she pleases and with whatever vehemence she feels necessary, which we of DISSENT would guarantee in advance to print in our pages...
...A D. I. has to be a tough man—the pressures on him are enormous...
...McKeon, is made the sole villain for an accident which was sooner or later inevitable, given the way the Marine Corps trains its men...
...In that way, she will be performing a useful service—perhaps even a therapeutic actl—for both the "liberal community" and our readers...
...In any case, our readers should examine his article for themselves...
...Still, if Mrs...
...And the kind of stories one hears, allowing for all due exaggerations, are as psychologically fascinating as some of the back pages in Psycopathia Sexualis...
...It is not easy for me to defend them, yet in a curious way I suppose I respect the Marine Corps more than the Army...
...Since what was left out of account was precisely the fact that not every man who has such a fixation is capable of the stamina, the will, and the courage to drive a platoon of unwilling men up a mysterious and forbidding mountain, I was left a little more aware of how the new faith can strip from anyone exactly their most striking and admirable human qualities...
...Granville Hicks, in the summer issue of the American Scholar, devotes a long article mainly to a critical analysis of DISSENT and its editors...
...Thus in the July Commentary she has rushed into a reckless polemic against Philip Rahv simply because Rahv, in a previous review of a Graham Greene novel, had not belabored Greene's "anti-Americanism" to the extent she thinks proper...
...Of course, I don't know what is going to happen as a re suit of this, but it would surprise me very little if the drill instructor, Sgt...
...McKeon could never have rounded them up on Sunday evening for a Sunday-night hike...
...For example: a man shaved with a rusty razor by his D. I. because he had not been perfectly clean-shaven at morning inspection, or again a group of five or six Marines forced to strip while their fatigue uniforms, unclean only by military standards, were stamped into mud or sand by the D. I. When the fatigues had been sufficiently ground into the dirt, they were thrown back at the naked recruits, who were told to wash them well enough in half an hour to pass inspection again...
...After all, it is no small responsibility to be able to ease the anxieties of human beings who otherwise face only the prospect of continued intimidation...
...Discounting the overdeveloped and often nauseating public relations of the Marines, and the professional braggadocio which makes them our institutional equivalent of Texans-on-a-tear, one can still hardly pride oneself at knowing much about life if one tries to deny that the Marines have been probably our best combat soldiers, and that they have a high number of courageous men in their ranks...
...voted in this country to cold-war publicity among intellectuals, Mrs...
...Even in boot training, when the men are restricted to their base, they would at least be allowed to wander around the post on a Sunday night...
...They do not permit us to relax into self-satisfaction, and there are times when I have a vision in which they line up before our door, insistently demanding answers, answers .. . But we can take comfort of a kind from the fact that our critics and opponents find DISSENT interesting or at least irritating...
...I can dislike an institution, I can fear its ultimate dangers, I can detest its moral values, but I feel I give way to the anti-human plague of our time if I fail to recognize such obvious virtues as courage where courage indeed exists...
...Of course, our generation of sensitive people has begun to deny the proper existence of such virtues as courage, and I would declare this to be one of the abuses of psychoanalysis...
...OVER THE YEARS, I have had a few mixed feelings about the Marine Corps...
...As for our capacity to arouse "anxiety in the liberal community," she is simply letting her fantasies run away with her...
...Trilling need only say the word...
...I. H...
...Years ago I remember a psychology student telling me that the platoon sergeant in The Naked and the Dead, Sam Croft, had exhibited an infantile fixation toward the maternal breast in his compulsion to climb a mountain...
...That it ended in death was an accident, and in the military sense just sheer bad luck—the Marines at Parris Island have been led across more than one strange river by night—but if one wants to look for the blame, why not place it where it belongs...
...All basic training is characterized by its psychological sadism, and while this is hardly the place nor the space to discuss whether there could be a less inhuman method of developing first-rate soldiers, I think the Marine Corps could at least have the supposed American virtue of defending its actions by the honest argument that the results work, rather than pretending that all disciplinary excesses are regrettable and untypical accidents...
...I have never met a Marine yet who does not alternately brag and rage about what a son of a bitch his D. I. (Drill Instructor) had been...
...Two or three men in the platoon had probably come up with small flaws in...
...He has not only to impose his will on a training platoon of anywhere from 20 to 50 reasonably rough men and boys, but he is under enormous pressure from his officers— every failure of his training platoon is considered his responsibility...
...The Marine Corps gives free rein to its D. L's, encourages their sadism while officers turn their backs, and then the brass has not the moral courage to defend its methods head-on...
...To argue this passage would be pointless, since Mrs...
...If I'm right, and McKeon's platoon had been restricted to quarters for the week-end, then the probable reason is that they failed to pass their Saturday-morning inspection...
...A crime...
...Trilling is far too sophisticated in these matters not to realize that her description of DISSENT is deficient in good faith...
...their equipment...
...Written with his usual sense of fairness, the article attacks DISSENT from what might be called the position of Uncomfortable Liberalism: Hicks retains some radical impulses but very few radical opinions...
...There is a psychological destruction in so humiliating men which is far greater than the worst rigors of long cruel training marches, where at least one can have the selfrespect of having endured, of having made it...
Vol. 3 • September 1956 • No. 4
