by Philip Roth
the flamethrowers, had cut down hundreds and hundreds of young marines,
eighteen-year-olds, nineteen-year-olds, boys barely older than he was. He had a
map up in his room with pins sticking out of it, pins he had inserted to mark
where the marines, closing in on Japan, had assaulted from the sea a tiny atoll
or an island chain where the Japs, dug into coral fortresses, poured forth
ferocious mortar and rifle fire. Okinawa was invaded on April 1,1945, Easter
Sunday of his senior year and just two days after he’d hit a double and a home
run in a losing game against West Side. The Sixth Marine Division overran
Yontan, one of the two island air bases, within three hours of wading ashore.
Took the Motobu Peninsula in thirteen days. Just off the Okinawa beach, two
kamikaze pilots attacked the flagship carrier Bunker Hill on May 14—the day
after the Swede went four for four against Irvington High, a single, a triple,
and two doubles—plunging their planes, packed with bombs, into the flight deck
jammed with American planes all gassed up to take off and laden with ammunition.
The blaze climbed a thousand feet into the sky, and in the explosive firestorm
that raged for eight hours, four hundred sailors and aviators died. Marines of
the Sixth Division captured Sugar Loaf Hill, May 14, 1945—three more doubles for
the Swede in a winning game against East Side—maybe the worst, most savage
single day of fighting in marine history. Maybe the worst in human history. The
caves and tunnels that honeycombed Sugar Loaf Hill at the southern end of the
island, where the Japs had fortified and hidden their army, were blasted with
flamethrowers and then sealed with grenades and demolition charges. Hand-to-hand
fighting went on day and night.
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Jap riflemen and machine gunners, chained to their positions and unable to
retreat, fought until they died. The day the Swede graduated from Weequahic
High, June 22—having racked up the record number of doubles in a single season
by a Newark City League player—the Sixth Marine Division raised the American
flag over Okinawa’s second air base, Kadena, and the final staging area for the
invasion of Japan was secured. From April 1, 1945, to June 21, 1945—coinciding,
give or take a few days, with the Swede’s last and best season as a high school
* * *
first baseman—an island some fifty miles long and about ten miles wide had been
occupied by American forces at the cost of 15,000 American lives. The Japanese
dead, military and civilian, numbered 141,000. To conquer the Japanese homeland
to the north and end the war meant the number of dead on each side could run
ten, twenty, thirty times as great. And still the Swede went out and, to be a
part of the final assault on Japan, joined the U.S. Marines, who on Okinawa, as
on Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Guam, and Guadalcanal, had absorbed casualties that were
stupefying.
The marines. Being a marine. Boot camp. Knocked us around every which way,
called us all kinds of names, physically and mentally murdered us for three
months, and it was the best experience I ever had in my life. Took it on as a
challenge and I did it. My name became “Ee-oh.” That’s the way the southern
drill instructors pronounced Levov, dropping the L and the two v’s—all
consonants overboard—and lengthening out the two vowels. “Ee-oh!” Like a donkey
braying. “Ee-oh!” “Yes, sir!” Major Dunleavy, the athletic director, big guy,
Purdue football coach, stops the platoon one day and the hefty sergeant we
called Sea Bag shouts for Private Ee-oh and out I run with my helmet on, and my
heart was pounding because I thought my mother had died. I was just a week away
from being assigned to Camp Lejeune, up in North Carolina, for advanced weaponry
training, but Major Dunleavy pulled the plug on that and so I never got to fire
a bar. And that was why I’d joined the marines—wanted more than anything to fire
the bar from flat on my belly with the barrel elevated on a mount. Eighteen
years old
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and that was the Marine Corps to me, the rapid-firing, air-cooled .30 caliber
machine gun. What a patriotic kid that innocent kid was. Wanted to fire the tank
killer, the hand-held bazooka rocket, wanted to prove to myself I wasn’t scared
and could do that stuff. Grenades, flamethrowers, crawling under barbed wire,
blowing up bunkers, attacking caves. Wanted to hit the beach in a duck. Wanted
to help win the war. But Major Dunleavy had got a letter from his friend in
Newark, what an athlete this Levov was, glowing letter about how wonderful I
was, and so they reassigned me and made me a drill instructor to keep me on the
island to play ball—by then they’d dropped the atomic bomb and the war was over
anyway. “You’re in my unit, Swede. Glad to have you.” A great break, really.
Once my hair grew in, I was a human being again. Instead of being called
“shithead” all the time or “shithead-move-your-ass,” suddenly I was a DI the
recruits called Sir. What the DI called the recruits was You People! Hit the
deck, You People! On your feet, You People! Double time, You People, double time
hup! Great, great experience for a kid from Keer Avenue. Guys I would never have
met in my life. Accents from all over the place. The Midwest. New England. Some
farm boys from Texas and the Deep South I couldn’t even understand. But got to
know them. Got to like them. Hard boys, poor boys, lots of high school athletes.
Used to live with the boxers. Lived with the recreation gang. Another Jewish
guy, Manny Rabinowitz from Altoona. Toughest Jewish guy I ever met in my life.
What a fighter. A great friend. Didn’t even finish high school. Never had a
friend like that before or since. Never laughed so hard in my life as I did with
Manny. Manny was money in the bank for me. Nobody ever gave us any Jewboy shit.
A little back in boot camp, but that was it. When Manny fought, the guys would
bet their cigarettes on him. Buddy Falcone and Manny Rabinowitz were always the
two winners for us whenever we fought another base. After the fight with Manny
the other guy would say that nobody had ever hit him as hard in his life. Manny
ran the entertainment with me, the boxing smokers. The duo—the Jewish
leathernecks. Manny got the wiseguy recruit who made all the trouble
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* * *
and weighed a hundred and forty-five pounds to fight somebody a hundred and
sixty pounds who he could be sure would beat the shit out of him. “Always pick a
redhead, Ee-oh,” Manny said, “he’ll give you the best fight in the world.
Redhead’ll never quit.” Manny the scientist. Manny going up to Norfolk to fight
a sailor, a middleweight contender before the war, and whipping him. Exercising
the battalion before breakfast. Marching the recruits down to the pool every
night to teach them to swim. We practically threw them in—the old-fashioned way
of teaching swimming, but you had to swim to be a marine. Always had to be ready
to do ten more push-ups than any of the recruits. They’d challenge me, but I was
in shape. Getting on the bus going to play ball. The long distances we flew. Bob
Collins on
the team, the big St. John’s guy. My teammate. Terrific athlete.
Boozer. With Bob C. got drunk for the first time in my life, talked for two
hours nonstop about playing ball for Weequahic and then threw up all over the
deck. Irish guys, Italian guys, Slovaks, Poles, tough little bastards from
Pennsylvania, kids who’d run away from fathers who worked in the mines and beat
them with belt buckles and with their fists—these were the guys I lived with and
ate with and slept alongside. Even an Indian guy, a Cherokee, a third baseman.
Called him Piss Cutter, the same as the name for our caps. Don’t ask me why. Not
all of them decent people but on the whole all right. Good guys. Lots of
organized grabass. Played against Fort Benning. Cherry Point, North Carolina,
the marine air base. Beat them. Beat Charleston Navy Yard. We had a couple of
boys who could throw that ball. One pitcher went on to the Tigers. Went down to
Rome, Georgia, to play ball, over to Waycross, Georgia, to an army base. Called
the army guys doggies. Beat them. Beat everybody. Saw the South. Saw things I
never saw. Saw the life the Negroes live. Met every kind of Gentile you can
think of. Met beautiful southern girls. Met common whores. Used a condom.
Skinned ‘er back and squeezed ‘er down. Saw Savannah. Saw New Orleans. Sat in a
rundown slopchute in Mobile, Alabama, where I was damn glad the shore patrol was
just outside the door. Playing basketball and baseball with the Twenty-second
Regiment.
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Got to be a United States Marine. Got to wear the emblem with the anchor and the
globe. “No pitcher in there, Ee-oh, poke it outta here, Ee-oh—” Got to be Ee-oh
to guys from Maine, New Hampshire, Louisiana, Virginia, Mississippi, Ohio—guys
without an education from all over America calling me Ee-oh and nothing more.
Just plain Ee-oh to them. Loved that. Discharged June 2,1947. Got to marry a
beautiful girl named Dwyer. Got to run a business my father built, a man whose
own father couldn’t speak English. Got to live in the prettiest spot in the
world. Hate America? Why, he lived in America the way he lived inside his own
skin. All the pleasures of his younger years were American pleasures, all that
success and happiness had been American, and he need no longer keep his mouth
shut about it just to defuse her ignorant hatred. The loneliness he would feel
as a man without all his American feelings. The longing he would feel if he had
to live in another country. Yes, everything that gave meaning to his
accomplishments had been American. Everything he loved was here.
For her, being an American was loathing America, but loving America was
something he could not let go of any more than he could have let go of loving
his father and his mother, any more than he could have let go of his decency.
How could she “hate” this country when she had no conception of this country?
How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the “rotten system” that had
given her own family every opportunity to succeed? To revile her “capitalist”
parents as though their wealth were the product of anything other than the
unstinting industry of three generations. The men of three generations,
including even himself, slogging through the slime and stink of a tannery. The
family that started out in a tannery, at one with, side by side with, the lowest
of the low—now to her “capitalist dogs.” There wasn’t much difference, and she
knew it, between hating America and hating them. He loved the America she hated
and blamed for everything that was imperfect in life and wanted violently to
* * *
overturn, he loved the “bourgeois values” she hated and ridiculed and wanted to
subvert, he loved the mother she hated and had all but murdered by doing
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i’f
what she did. Ignorant little fucking bitch! The price they had paid! Why
shouldn’t he tear up this Rita Cohen letter? Rita Cohen! They were back! The
sadistic mischief-makers with their bottomless talent for antagonism who had
extorted the money from him, who, for the fun of it, had extracted from him the
Audrey Hepburn scrapbook, the stuttering diary, and the ballet shoes, these
delinquent young brutes calling themselves “revolutionaries” who had so
viciously played with his hopes five years back had decided the time had again
rolled around to laugh at Swede Levov.
We can only stand as witnesses to the anguish that sanctifies her. The Disciple
Who Calls Herself “Rita Cohen.”They were laughing at him. They had to be
laughing. Because the only thing worse than its all being a wicked joke was its
not being a wicked joke. Your daughter is divine. My daughter is anything and
everything but. She is all too frail and misguided and wounded—she’s hopeless!
Why did you tell her that you slept with me? And tell me that it was she who
wanted you to. You say these things because you hate us. And you hate us because
we don’t do such things. You hate us not because we’re reckless but because
we’re prudent and sane and industrious and agree to abide by the law. You hate
us because we haven’t failed. Because we’ve worked hard and honestly to become
the best in the business and because of that we have prospered, so you envy us
and you hate us and want to destroy us. And so you used her. A sixteen-year-old
kid with a stutter. No, nothing small about you people. Made her into a
“revolutionary” full of great thoughts and high-minded ideals. Sons of bitches.
You enjoy the spectacle of our devastation. Cowardly bastards. It isn’t cliches
that enslaved her, it’s you who enslaved her in the loftiest of the shallow
cliches—and that resentful kid, with her stutterer’s hatred of injustice, had no
protection at all. You got her to believe she was at one with the downtrodden
people—and made her into your patsy, your stooge. And Dr. Fred Conlon, as a
result, is dead. That was who you killed to stop the war: the chief of staff up
at the hospital in Dover, the guy who in a small community hospital established
a coronary care unit of eight beds. That was his crime.
· 214 ·
Instead of exploding in the middle of the night when the village was empty, the
bomb, either as planned or by mistake, went off at five a.m., an hour before
Hamlin’s store opened for the day and the moment that Fred Conlon turned away
from having dropped into the mailbox envelopes containing checks for household
bills that he’d paid at his desk the evening before. He was on his way to the
hospital. A chunk of metal flying out of the store struck him at the back of the
skull.
Dawn was under sedation and couldn’t see anyone, but the Swede had gone to Russ
and Mary Hamlin’s house and expressed his sympathy about the store, told the
Hamlins how much the store had meant to Dawn and him, how it was no less a part
of their lives than it was of everyone else’s in the community; then he went to
the wake—in the coffin Conlon looked fine, fit, just as affable as ever—and the
following week, with their doctor already arranging for Dawn’s hospitalization,
the Swede went alone to visit Conlon’s widow. How he managed to get to that
woman’s house for tea is another story—another book—but he did it, he did it,
and heroically she served him tea while he extended his family’s condolences in
the words that he had revised in his mind five hundred times but that, when
* * *
spoken, were still no good, even more hollow than those he’d uttered to Russ and
Mary Hamlin: “deep and sincere regrets … the agony of your family … my
wife would like you to know….” After listening to everything he had to say,
Mrs. Conlon quietly replied, displaying an outlook so calm and kind and
compassionate that the Swede wanted to disappear, to hide like a child, while at
the same time the urge was nearly overpowering to throw himself at her feet and
to remain there forever, begging for her forgiveness. “You are good parents and
you raised your daughter the way you thought best,” she said to him. “It was not
your fault and I don’t hold anything against you. You didn’t go out and buy the
dynamite. You didn’t make the bomb. You didn’t plant the bomb. You had nothing
to do with the bomb. If, as it appears, your daughter turns out to be the one
who is responsible, I will hold no one responsible but her. I feel badly for you
and your family, Mr.
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Levov. I have lost a husband, my children have lost a father. But you have lost
something even greater. You are parents who have lost a child. There is not a
day that goes by that you won’t be in my thoughts and in my prayers.” The Swede
had known Fred Conlon only slightly, from cocktail parties and charity events
where they found themselves equally bored. Mainly he knew him by reputation, a
man who cared about his family and the hospital with the same devotion—a hard
worker, a good guy. Under him, the hospital had begun to plan a building
program, the first since its construction, and in addition to the new coronary
