Scout’s Honor: Chapter 18

Where the difference began

Nestled between the mouths of the Broad and Beaufort Rivers in South Carolina, Parris Island is a sand spit a few miles across, its salt marshes held together by water oaks, palm trees, and sawgrass, home to alligators, shore birds, mosquitoes, and Marines. While Vietnam burned, Parris Island hummed with thousands of boys on their way to Southeast Asia.

One steamy afternoon, the sixty-six members of Platoon 198 of the 1st Recruit Training Battalion stood at parade rest while a water-survival instructor lectured them. “If y’all can’t swim, you’re gonna die,” the lance corporal drawled, opening his talk about stroke technique while weighted down with utilities and boots. Each recruit had to jump from the ten-foot tower into the deep pool and then swim twenty-five yards while in field dress. 

Soaked through with sweat, Private Parson Shoer was eager to jump. The platoon’s best athlete, he was so light-skinned that a spindly kid from Detroit named Malik Harris teased him relentlessly about his open-minded grandmothers. That Shoer could laugh at himself and shrug it off charmed his fellow recruits. He’d cemented his popularity the second week in camp when, after lights-out, Harris stage-whispered, “Who this? ‘Mother, please pass the cream. I desire some for my oatmeal.’” Recognizing the stuffy white voice as his own, Shoer laughed harder than anyone else, emboldening the comedian Harris to add, “I seen polar bears, hell, I seen snow blacker than Private O-reo.” Overnight, the platoon called Shoer nothing but O. 

Shoer felt rather than saw gunnery sergeant Phil Dorland tiptoeing through the ranks behind him and knew the drill instructor was searching for daydreaming, butt scratching, and other acts of mutiny.

“Four-eyes,” 198’s DI bellowed. “Tenn-hut.” The corporal paused his lecture while Dorland bellowed at a lanky recruit for endangering every life in the platoon by failing to learn vital military procedures, for being the weakest link in a chain of steel, for insulting the Corps by joining it. “Give me fifty, you miserable shithead.” 

Richard Austen dropped to the asphalt and began his straight-backed push-ups, chanting, “One for the Corps, sir, two for the Corps, sir, three for the Corps, sir.”

Dorland signaled the instructor to continue. With a fist screwed into each hip, he half-watched Austen while scanning for other signs of insurrection. Of unremarkable height, Dorland was thicker around the waist than Marine standard, his face marred by a bulbous drinking nose and pocked skin. 

“I can’t hear you.” The sergeant prodded his polished boot into Austen’s side. 

Austen finished and sprang to his feet. Dorland resumed his prowling, muttering about the impossibility of his task, of turning the druts of 198 into men, fighting men who could think and act as a unit.

A dozen boys were in the steamy barracks shower room, their best opportunity for sneaking forbidden talk. As usual, Harris held court. 

“About time you gave the man fifty. About time he kicked some white butt for a change,” Harris snapped. Someone muttered “right on,” while Austen regarded the comedian for a moment, wiped his fogged glasses, then turned away.

“You miserable shithead,” Harris barked, imitating their DI’s tobaccoed gravel voice to near perfection. The boys laughed. “Give me another fifty, you worthless turd. Son, you know what a turd is?” He paused to let his soapy audience savor what was coming, his dead-on rendering of Dorland’s favorite speech. “A turd is a Trainee under Rigid Discipline, son, and that’s what you are: my turd. One misstep and I’ll flush your sorry ass down the can.”

Austen blinked at Harris, managing a small smile, apparently neither offended nor amused. No one was surprised by Austen’s silence; he’d said scarcely a hundred words since stepping off the sweltering South Carolina bus. Harris grabbed him by the arm. “I’m talking to you, four-eyes. Give me fifty.” 

Austen shrugged his arm free. 

“I’m talking to you, Mr. My-Shit-Don’t-Stink. Maybe it’s time for some ass-kicking,” said Harris, raising his fists. 

“Leave him alone, Tweeter,” growled Shoer, clamping onto Harris’s neck.

“Ow, ow, ow. Let go, man,” cried Harris. “Come on, O. We buds.”

“You want to fuck with somebody, it’s going to be me,” Shoer said. “You want to fuck with me, I’ll stuff your head upside your black ass.” With only a towel around his slender waist, Shoer looked as though he modeled gym equipment. Harris’s cronies melted away. From an educated family, Shoer’s everyday speech had no trace of the street or New Jersey, but he had a good ear and a gift for adapting his speech to his surroundings. 

“OK, O. OK, you the man. Let me go. Forgot you two was qu—OK, OK.”

Shoer pushed him without enthusiasm and returned to his shaving. Austen walked out. 

“Who this?” Harris asked after recovering some of his dignity. Mimicking Austen, he stood as straight as he could and assumed a faraway look. “Scout this, motherfucker,” he said, grabbing his crotch.

 In his mockery, Harris was putting a different spin on the night the platoon was on maneuvers, sleeping in the field in two-man tents when an Atlantic storm roared in, blasting rain, collapsing one tent after another. Each time Harris’s tent blew apart, he looked at Austen’s with envy. He crawled over to learn the secret. “Pay attention,” Austen had said. “Use a loop knot on the tent’s eyelet. Then take the stake and wrap the line round it once like this and put a couple half hitches in it.” Harris got it right after several misfires. “Set the stake at a forty-five-degree angle from the tent and counterweight it with something heavy.”

“I’ll use my dick. Where’d you learn this shit?”

“Scouts.”

“Used to buy their cookies.” Harris scuttled off. 

When the bleary-eyed boys had returned to barracks and were showering off mud and crushed mosquitoes, Harris proclaimed Boy Scout as his main man. “BS knows more knots than Houdini.” Everyone laughed with Harris, whom many would remember as the funniest man they ever met.

Shoer lay awake in his upper bunk in 198’s squad bay, a long, narrow white room with two rows of metal bunk beds on either side of a center aisle. The 198’s quarters were on the second floor of a two-story wood-frame building that formed a part of First Battalion’s barracks, a series of “H” shaped buildings on the grinder’s north side. The bay was bare and immaculate. The recruits’ few possessions were arranged in a precise, identical pattern in their foot lockers in front of their bunks. 

Ignoring the cacophony of snores, moans, and night moves, Shoer was thinking about girls, about the locals he wanted to meet in Beaufort, about the ones he’d impress with his uniform back in Jersey. From the moment he’d discovered girls—not long after they discovered him—he’d been addicted to love. He was fondling one dream girl when Austen sneezed. 

“Hey, Aus,” Shoer leaned over and whispered to his bunkmate below, “you asleep?” 

“No.”

“Why’d dickbrain jump you? What’d you do?”

“Don’t know.” Austen did know. He’d been rocked by the news that the next and final phase of their Marine education—advanced infantry training—would occur in Southern California. Had he known earlier, he would have enlisted in the Army. He would never have voluntarily returned to California. “Did you know we were going to Pendleton?”

“Not till this morning. Isn’t that wild? Beach chicks, endless summer, Hollywood. No more dickbrain Dorland.”

“It’s near San Diego, not LA,” Austen whispered, his words sour. 

“Wish they all could be California girls. Hey, how’d you know that?”

“Freshman geography.” A geography that had terrorized Austen all day. Camp Pendleton lay forty-five minutes north of San Diego. Positive he was the most wanted man in that city’s history, his heart had raced all day as he agonized over his new odds of capture. What if there were “Wanted” posters everywhere in San Diego County? What if a fellow Marine happened to see his picture in the Oceanside post office? Was his comic book disguise—crewcut and horn-rimmed glasses—worth a tinker’s damn? What if the Union were still running articles about the crime of the century? Grasping for hope, he’d comforted himself with the bitter knowledge that no one had bothered taking his picture for years. The police had only his fuzzy driver’s license photo—a picture in which his then pimpled face was overwhelmed by wild hair. He’d dismissed going AWOL in the same breath he considered it, knowing it would only set another government arm clawing after him, one that had his fingerprints and excellent photographs. After a day of misery, he had no plan save not stepping a foot off base for the duration.

“My ass. Like they teach base locations in geography.” In those few moments when he was neither sleeping nor sweating, Shoer had become curious about his preternaturally silent bunkmate. When Austen uttered even a few words beyond “yes, sir,” Shoer could hear he was middle class and not, as he’d first suspected, another cracker bent on upholding his family’s martial record.

“Tell me how you got nailed,” Austen asked, deflecting Shoer. He had overheard others repeating the sad tale about the all-state running back who’d ended up in the Corps and not the Ivy League. “Is that stuff about the white girl and her racist father true?”

Warming to his favorite subject—himself—Shoer whispered that he had grown up color-blind, the teacher’s pet, and perennial brightest student, the star of every game, the beloved baby of a prosperous family, only to discover he was black the night a Middletown cop caught him with his jeans down with a fourteen-year-old with her skirt up. 

“If I was white, those cops would’ve laughed and I’d be at Harvard—I’d already committed. But Debbie tells the cop she’s fourteen—she told me sixteen—and the pig cuffs me. Cuffs me. Blew my mind. Wouldn’t do that to a white halfback. See, the only blacks I ever knew were my own family. From kindergarten on, I was the only one in the class. But I wasn’t black or white, just me. Get it? You don’t, do you?”

“Maybe not. But how did you get here?” Austen asked. 

“Easy, your boy parked with the wrong freshman. Her old man was a lawyer. He was at the jail demanding they hang me before my parents even got a call.”

“Whoa.”

“This Debbie’s so afraid, she tells her old man she’s a virgin and she didn’t know what was happening—shit, she nearly broke my zipper yanking on it—and he makes her repeat that to the cops.”

“But… but you’re here?”

“The prick was old Corps—a top—and must have known Debbie was a slut, because everybody else sure did. So he does some private deal with the judge and they give my dad the choice. Jail or the Corps. Know what’s funny?”

“What?”

“My old man had to think about it.”

“One more week,” Austen whispered to Shoer, as the platoon lay panting against their thirty-five-pound packs, seven miles into a ten-mile march—incentive physical training Dorland had deemed restorative after deciding his boys were drilling like Italians. Splattered with pluff mud, the boys lay strung along a trail that wound through a forest of replanted pine. They swatted at the flying teeth, the sand fleas that bedeviled them. Sweat-thinned mud painted their exhausted faces and so balled up their boots that each step was a struggle. 

Drenched with sweat as though river-baptized, Shoer said, “Six and a half days.”

“I’d like that, you know, what you were talking about.” 

“What? Oh, coming home to visit my folks? Cool.” Shoer had written home about Austen, bragging on him as the only recruit who could outshoot him. He charmed his family by detailing one breakfast when the S.O.S. was truly inedible, the recruits in the mess hall amusing one another with gagging gestures, only to spy Austen shoveling it in, cleaning his plate. Mrs. Shoer had urged him to bring his new friend home. 

“Saddle up, girls.” Dorland flicked his cigarette into the mud. “Beauty rest’s over. Don’t gulp that goddamn water. Move out.”

Every boy chugged what he could while throwing on his pack. They slipped into step in two long columns and marched toward their waiting sergeant, passing him in silence, the mud sucking at their boots the only sound. Dorland hung back, observing his platoon with a measure of satisfaction.

A mile from barracks and the platoon was on an asphalt access road, scuffing their left heels every other stride to mark time. Harris sang out in rhythm with their scuffing:

Hey, Laudie, Laudie, Laudie
Hey Laudie, Laudie Low
I know a girl named Buffalo Bill
She won’t do it, but her buffalo will

Sixty-five voices answered him with a chorus of “Hey Laudie, Laudie, Laudie.” Another recruit sang: 

I know a girl from ol’ Kentuck
She sure can’t dance but 
She sure can fuck. 

A third sang and then another. The boys seemed to know girls of doubtful virtue from Timbuktu to gay Paree. With a nod, Shoer urged Austen to try a verse. Austen shook his head, a gap-toothed smile. Shrugging, Shoer lifted his chin and sang in a pleasing tenor:

I know a gal in Tia-wanna
Hey, Laudie, Laudie, Low
She know how but
She don’t wanna

Pleased with his platoon’s spirits, a grinning Dorland ordered, “OK, ladies. Dub-time, harch.” Like horses smelling the barn, the boys broke into a trot.

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