A Marine and Moscow on the Mind

As Ernest Hemingway’s surrogate writer and big game hunter Harry lay dying on an African plain, gazing up at the Snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro, he remembered all the stories in him that had gone unwritten and now would never be told.

Every aging writer knows the curse. One of my lost stories is about my boot camp drill instructor, Staff/Sgt. Robert Caulkins. Of course, next to the coming-of-age story, every writer is tantalized by the notion of writing about his military experience. That’s one of the reasons I never tried. I could feel the fungicide of banality running over my hands and into my typewriter with the speed of kudzu.

Still, the taut, somewhat diminutive figure of Caulkins occasionally pops up on the edge of memory, just the way he used to step out nimbly at the head of the squad bay of us sleeping Marines before securing it for the night. He was light on his heels, like a dancer. His uniform was impeccably fitted and pressed. If he caught you eyeballing him, he’d return your look with his wry, crooked Richard Widmark grin. It was an eerie, absurdist grin, sometimes positively sinister, as when he slipped on his black leather gloves and you knew some luckless recruit was in for added misery to his day.

Now that the phrase “Tell it to the Marines” has been amended with “and a couple of them will relay it to the Russians,” I wonder what Caulkins is thinking. He had had a tour of embassy duty in Germany before becoming a drill instructor. In the way he alluded to it, you knew it was a plum for an enlisted man who had come out of a poor background with little chance for formal education. He never said so openly, but you sensed his pride in having completed the assignment.

For a time I hated and feared Sgt. Caulkins. He wasn’t a bull DI. He wasn’t especially physical (though, when he pulled on those gloves, you cringed; he knew the body’s weakest points of resistance, and his hands struck like cobras). Caulkins worked on your head. He’d try to smoke out your fears and suspicions, and get to the flashpoint of your temper. He liked to see how much psychological pressure you could take.

When the other DIs were on duty, you knew the routine and suffered their harassment with disinterest. With them, it was a physical matter of shaping a platoon of kids from all over the country into a unit. When Caulkins was on, you grew leaden with depression. He bullied your mind and emotions. The more sullen you grew, the more oppressive that insinuating grin became.

Mine was the closest bunk to the DI’s office. One night after lights out, I woke to the sound of a voice issuing from the office. It had the unmistakable tone of a lover’s voice, low, fond, warm, intimate. It was Caulkins, speaking fluently in German, which for once didn’t sound harsh and militant. More amazingly, he was talking to his wife with a lover’s romantic, playful protectiveness. I never suspected he was capable of such tenderness.

That was one of the moments that led me to change my attitude toward him. Others involved the day he told of the battle of Chosin reservoir in Korea, where he had fought, and where a lot of soldiers had frozen to death. And of the Marines’ invasion of Tarawa in World War II, where intelligence had failed to take the seas into consideration and the invading force, wading through a coral reef at low tide, was decimated by the gunfire of defending Japanese forces.

The image of a blood-reddened reef, and of helpless Navy pilots weeping in their cockpits as they reported the carnage, reminded us of why we were at Parris Island. We were going into the death business. We were being trained for efficiency at it, but the training would never have come about had we not entered into a blood pact with Corps and country first. Caulkins knew the terms of the pact; he’d already lived them.

I began watching Caulkins the way I’d once been watched. I discovered subtle evidence of his compassion. Somehow he caught on, and a covert bond developed between us.

On the day after my platoon graduated, I helped him process records. It was a balmy South Carolina day; I’d never seen him relax before. He offered me a cigar and lit up for both of us. “Why’d you join the Corps, Christon?” he asked. I never quite knew myself. There were many reasons, not a lot of them particularly noble. “I don’t know. Some friends said I’d never make it. . . . “

I wanted to say more, but Caulkins cut me short. “Friends, eh?” I could feel the weight of his disappointment moving against anything more I had to say. “Why’d you join?” I asked. “It was a way out,” he said. “It was something I could believe in.”

The Marine Corps judiciary will take care of those Marine Moscow embassy guards who (as early reports have it) turned, and Congress will no doubt further investigate the causes of how the most sensitive American diplomatic post in the world came to be so deeply compromised. But neither will get to the deeper social and psychological reasons of why betrayal in almost any form is no longer a serious obstacle in our post-Me Decade’s rush to clamber aboard the nearest gravy train.

It’s absurd to think that the Marine Corps is immune to the corrosive cynicism eating through our social fabric--where there’s a human heart there’s always potential for mischief.

Nonetheless the Corps, despite its pigheadedness and macho swaggering, has traditionally been bound up with ideals of courage, discipline and self-sacrifice--even if most Marines know how these words have been cheapened. The wisdom of the grunt is to know that truth is dispossessed in utterance. You bury your dead, as in Khe Sanh and Beirut, with public rite and private ceremonies of the heart. At bottom, the myth is bound up with some half-glimpsed ideal of what is beautiful and good about America--another vision that blackens in the light of public exposure.

Whenever I’ve thought of writing about Sgt. Caulkins, I’ve assumed that whatever I came up with would be a story of how I grew to love someone I initially hated. But now, as I envision him out there somewhere, picking up a newspaper to get the latest on how a spiffy figure in dress blues opened the door to hostile inspection of an American sanctuary, I know what he’s feeling.

It might as well have been yesterday, and not 24 years ago, that I shook hands with him, said goodby, and boarded the bus to Camp LeJeune with the rest of my platoon. But I know now that this story cannot have a happy ending.