Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

by Norman Mailer

  From San Diego, Oswald went on to combat training at Camp Pendleton in California—full menu—infantry assaults in coordination with tanks, bayonet drill built around hand-to-hand combat, training for amphibious landings—it is a little painful to think of this mother’s boy, over-loved and much neglected, Hamlet to Marguerite’s much-mortified Gertrude, conceiving in his fantasies of great and noble Marine glory (to accompany his Marxism), now reduced to the spiritual rank of shit-bird. He had begun to toughen up in New Orleans, but hardly enough to be prepared for the kind of tests that the Corps would lay on him. He had to feel feminized by his failures. It must be repeated: In the mind-set of the 1950s, a century away from the prevailing concepts of the 1990s, to be weak among men was to perceive oneself as a woman, and that, by the male code of the times, was an intolerable condition for a man.

  Such a set of values hardly helped Oswald to balance the opposites in himself. Hysterical and timid, he still has an ego ready to judge the world around him. The form it takes in his personality is to be cool, reserved, and sardonic whenever and wherever he can—his first nine months in the Marine Corps offer little opportunity for that. Powers describes how Lee, on the boat over to Japan (following aircraft and radar control school in Jacksonville, Florida, and at Keesler, in Biloxi, Mississippi), would play chess with him all day and virtually do a war dance of delight when he would win: “‘Look at that. I won. I beat you.’”4

  On September 12, 1957, two years and one month before he will enter Russia, Oswald lands at Yokosuka, Japan, close to Tokyo. He and Powers have read Leaves of Grass on the troopship, and he gives the book to the big Marine.

  At Atsugi airbase, thirty-five miles southwest of Tokyo, where he was now based in a two-story wooden barracks, Corporal Thomas Bagshaw was his roommate. Bagshaw, who was making a career in the Marines, told Epstein that Oswald was “very thin, almost frail, shy and quiet.” At that time, he was five feet nine inches tall, and may not have weighed 135 pounds.

  [Bagshaw] also recalls feeling sorry for him when other Marines in the barracks began “picking on him.” The rougher Marines in the barracks, who generally preferred spending their liberties carousing in Japanese bars and finding women, considered Oswald (who spent his early liberties in the television room of the barracks alone, watching American Bandstand and replays of football games) a natural object of derision. They called him Mrs. Oswald, threw him in the shower fully dressed and hassled him in every other conceivable way. Oswald would not fight back; he would just turn away from a provoker and ignore him.5

  To this should be added a keen observation by another of Epstein’s Marines, Jerry E. Pitts, who pointed out that there was an unspoken rite of passage for every new recruit, and the initiation took different forms.

  . . . [Pitts] explained that savvy Marines could breeze right through such treatment, laughing off the insults and swapping them back. But Oswald was the exception. He seemed to take each insult seriously and responded with a quiet fury that he was incapable of converting into physical violence . . .

  Pitts . . . remembers . . . “certain areas—such as indecent references to his mother—that really set Oswald off . . .”6

  There is one sympathetic portrait of Oswald in this period. Gator Daniels, who had been an alligator wrestler in the Florida swamps, a huge man who had spent his first eighteen years fishing and trapping, described Lee as “‘simple folk, just like I was . . . we were a bunch of kids—never been away from home before—but Oswald came right out and admitted that he had never known a woman . . . . It was real unusual that a fellow would admit that. Like me, he was naïve about a lot of things, but he never was ashamed to admit it . . . . He was just a good egg,’ Daniels remembers. ‘He used to do me favors, like lending me money until payday . . . the sort of friend I could count on if I needed a pint of blood.’”7

  Nonetheless, hazing continued, and one day Oswald discharged a pistol into the wall while a few Marines standing nearby were riding him mercilessly.

  It is a complex account and well worth avoiding; the descriptions vary a good deal. One of the more sinister versions, as described by Edward Epstein, has a Marine, Pete Connor, insisting that “the derringer which Oswald was playing with as he sat on a bunk, discharged and sent a bullet seven inches above Connor’s head to slam into a wall locker.”8 Since Connor, by his own admission, was one of the Marines ridiculing Oswald, a suspicion arises that the shot was no accident.

  Then there is another episode, perhaps a couple of weeks later, when Oswald wounds himself with the same derringer. Oswald’s outfit had been alerted that they were shipping out in a few days from Japan to parts unknown, and scuttlebutt had it that he nicked himself purposely to avoid going. By the record, Oswald grazed his upper left arm with a .22 caliber bullet from his mail-order derringer, and then said to the several witnesses who rushed in, “I believe I shot myself.”

  He could have faced an immediate court-martial, but his outfit was getting ready to ship out from Japan and the legal proceedings were put on hold. As soon as Oswald was discharged from the hospital, he was put on mess duty as an interim punishment. His outfit (MACS-1—Marine Air Control Squadron-1) left Atsugi on November 20, 1957, to embark on an old World War II LST that would wallow past Okinawa toward the Philippine archipelago. While their mission was as yet undetermined, the Marines heard talk of military intervention, possibly in Borneo. Meanwhile, MACS-1 never saw a coastline for a month. It was hot and monumentally boring in the South China Sea as they moved in convoy with thirty or more ships of the Seventh Fleet. Finally, after a hot and dreary Christmas at sea near the equator, they made camp at a place called Cubi Point off Subic Bay, set up a radar tent, and stood guard duty in the awareness that many of the Filipinos in the area might be hostile to them and friendly to the Hukbalahap—Communist guerrillas.

  The football season now over, and the Far East Armed Services bowl games having all been played, his friend from early Marine training, Daniel Powers, rejoined MACS-1.

  MR. JENNER. Now, was the same group . . . still together at Cubi Point when you rejoined the squadron?

  MR. POWERS. [Of] the people in my particular group that originated in Jacksonville, the only [ones] left were Schrand, Oswald, and myself . . .

  MR. JENNER. And did an incident occur with respect to Mr. Schrand?

  MR. POWERS. [Schrand] was on guard duty one evening and he was shot to death. Now, I have never seen the official report or anything, but the scuttlebutt at that time was that he was shot underneath the right arm and it came up from underneath the left neck, and it was by a shotgun which we were authorized to carry while we were on guard duty . . . he was either leaning against the shotgun or was fooling with it, but he was shot anyway . . . we could never realize how a guy could have shot himself there other than he was leaning on it this way [indicating], and “boom,” it went off.9

  From an affidavit by Donald Peter Camarata: “I heard a rumor to the effect that Oswald had been in some way responsible for the death of Martin Schrand.”10

  Schrand and Powers and Oswald had traveled in the same car from aviation school in Florida to radar school in Biloxi, Mississippi, and all three had gone on together to Atsugi and then to Cubi Point. Epstein offers the account of another Marine, named Persons, who

  . . . heard an explosion, which he instantly knew was a shotgun blast, and bloodcurdling screams from the area that Schrand was patrolling. “The screams were like some wild thing . . . . I knew I wasn’t supposed to leave my post, no matter what happened, but I just said, ‘Hell, the guy’s in trouble,’ and took off over there,” he later recounted.

  About 50 yards away he found Schrand in a pool of blood, mortally wounded. His shotgun was about six feet away on the ground behind him . . . It was determined that Schrand had been shot under the right arm by his own shotgun. Suicide was ruled out because the barrel of the gun was longer than Schrand’s arm and no object with which he could have pulled the trigger was found at the scene.

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bsp; At first . . . it was assumed that he had been attacked by a Filipino guerrilla and, in the scuffle, shot with his own weapon. But when no other evidence of infiltrators could be found, the death was ruled “accidental,” on the assumption that the weapon had accidentally gone off when Schrand dropped it. The enlisted men, continuing to suspect that something more was involved in Schrand’s death, grew increasingly nervous about guard duty.11

  To this, Epstein adds the following note: “A number of Marines asserted that Oswald was on guard duty that night and was possibly involved in the Schrand incident,” but adds, “After questioning nine officers and enlisted men who were at Cubi Point that night, I was unable to find any corroborating evidence . . .”12

  There is an uneasy gap in scattered details. How can a man be in position to get killed by a shotgun blast that enters under his right arm and exits by his neck? An undeclared possibility is that someone was being forced to kneel and commit fellatio and so was in position to pick up the shotgun from where it had been placed on the ground at his feet.

  There is no record whether Schrand, after all his travels with Oswald from Florida to Mississippi to California to Japan to Cubi Point in the Philippines, is to be characterized as his friend or his tormentor, but given Oswald’s sexual reputation, there is no wonder that his name became vaguely attached to this event.

  In World War II, it was not uncommon for many a combat veteran in the Philippines, hardened, mean-spirited, and never in doubt about his heterosexuality, to use Filipino boys while on guard duty and brag about it later. He was being serviced.

  What was current practice in early 1945 on Luzon had probably not altered a great deal by early 1958; Schrand could have been killed by a Filipino.

  If it was Oswald, however—and let us assume that the probability of that has to be small but not inconceivable—then what a sense he would have had thereafter of being forever an outlaw, an undiscovered and as yet unprosecuted criminal.

  Of course, it is wholly questionable to base any serious interpretation on such an assumption: Other events, however, will soon occur which might also have a large and secret effect upon him.

  MACS-1 would move from Cubi Point all the way over to Corregidor, and there Oswald would spend hours exploring the old tunnels and fortifications of World War II. Still assigned to mess duty for the illegal possession of his derringer, he seems to have found a sense of balance by comporting himself like a clown. Working breakfast in the mess, he exhibits his own method for scrambling dozens of eggs. A fellow Marine, George Wilkins, told Epstein: “Ozzie . . . [would] take a mess tray and slide it under the puddle of eggs [on the griddle] and flip them all at once. It was quite a sight.”13

  When his outfit returned to Atsugi in March, Oswald began drinking with other Marines. On return from a liberty, he would wake up his end of the barracks by shouting, “Save your confederate money, boys; the South will rise again!”14 If only for this brief hour, he has come into union with American life: He is a Marine, and happy when shit-face drunk. Soon enough, according to Epstein, his drinking buddies

  . . . introduced him to the vast array of cheap bars near the base and the girls who worked in them. From neonrise to neonset the bars served as bargain-basement brothels for enlisted men from the base. And they cheered him on when he finally had his first sexual experience with a Japanese bar girl.15

  Powers remarks that he was now “more aggressive, and outgoing in his manner . . . now he was Oswald the man rather than Oswald the rabbit.”16 Of course, Powers knew less about thesis and antithesis than did Oswald:

  Epstein: Several witnesses recall a wild place in Yamato pronounced “Negashaya,” where men wore dresses and lipstick. One witness described the place as a “queer bar” and reported that he and Oswald once went there—at Oswald’s suggestion—and took out two deaf-mute girls. “Oswald seemed to know his way around the place,” the witness, who prefers not to be identified by name, recalls. “I don’t remember that he knew anyone by name, but he was comfortable there.”17

  Part of Oswald’s bravura may have come from a reasonably successful resolution of his court-martial for owning a derringer. He was found guilty on April 11, a month after they had come back from the Philippines, and he was sentenced to hard labor for twenty days, a $50 fine, and loss of his PFC stripe, but the judgment was not operative, and would be canceled in six months if he got into no more trouble.

  That proved unworkable. He could flip three or four dozen eggs at once, but mess duty was still demeaning. He wanted to go back to the work for which he had been trained, which was to recognize on radar all incoming aircraft, friendly or hostile. In class at Keesler, he had finished seventh in proficiency in a training group of thirty enlisted men with high IQs. He liked the work; it was a job that required a security clearance. Oswald’s erect posture and quiet voice, the frequently stiff-lipped set to his mouth, suggested a divinity student, and everything that was priestly in him must have resented the greasy routines of a military kitchen.

  “Oswald finally took his resentment out on the man who had reassigned him to mess duty, Technical Sergeant Miguel Rodriguez . . . [who] saw Oswald at the Bluebird Café, a local hangout for Marines . . .”18 and “in the course of complaining to Rodriguez about his mess duty, Oswald spilled a drink on him, Rodriguez shoved him away and Oswald then invited the sergeant outside to fight. When Rodriguez refused, Oswald called him yellow.”19

  Oswald, by general consensus, was no match for Rodriguez, but friends who were with the Marine sergeant talked him out of any visceral response. Rodriguez and his fellow Marine NCOs had recently been warned that there were too many fights in the local bars, and non-coms could be demoted if they were involved. So, Rodriguez held off long enough to file a complaint next day. At his summary court-martial, Oswald was judged guilty for using provocative language and given four weeks in the brig.

  If the Marines prided themselves on basic training that could not be equaled by any other major branch of the military, their brigs were ready to compete with the punitive capacities of maximum-security prisons.

  Epstein: Prisoners were not allowed to say a solitary word to one another. Except for sleeping and eating periods, [they] were made to stand at rigid attention during every moment they were not performing menial duties . . . when a prisoner had to use the toilet, he had to toe up to a red line and scream his request over and over again, until the turnkey was satisfied and granted permission.20

  By the time he was released from the brig, Oswald, according to a fellow Marine, Joseph D. Macedo, was “cold, withdrawn and bitter. ‘I’ve seen enough of a democratic society here . . . ’ Oswald said. ‘When I get out I’m going to try something else . . . ’”21

  Somewhere around this time Oswald could have gotten in touch with, or been approached by, Japanese Communists. Atsugi airbase, given its high security clearances, its U-2 flights, and its warehousing of nuclear materials, was a focus for hostile espionage efforts in the Far East.

  Epstein: Two lawyers for the Warren Commission, W. David Slawson and William T. Coleman, Jr., suggested in a report which was released under the Freedom of Information Act: that “ . . . there is a possibility that Oswald came into contact with Communist agents at that time, i.e., during his tour of duty in the Philippines, Japan, and possibly Formosa. Japan, especially because the Communist Party was open and active there, would seem a likely spot for a contact to have been made . . . . Whether such contacts, if they occurred, amounted to anything more than some older Communist advising Oswald, who was then eighteen or nineteen years old, to go to Russia and see the Communist world is unclear.” The Warren Commission did not, however, pursue this in its final report.22

  It may not be unfair to say that what the Warren Commission lawyers call a possibility is a probability. It certainly explains a good deal about Oswald’s actions then and later.

  Let us begin by noting that Oswald had learned to use a 35 mm camera, an Imperial Reflex, and was seen taking many a photograp
h of objects and buildings on the Atsugi base, including the radar antennae with which he worked.

  Epstein: He frequently went to Tokyo or otherwise disappeared on his passes. One of Oswald’s Marine friends recalls meeting him at a house in Tamato with a woman who was working there as a housekeeper for a naval officer. He was impressed at the time that Oswald had found a girlfriend who was not a bar girl or prostitute. In the house was also a handsome young Japanese man for whom Oswald had apparently bought a T-shirt from the PX on base. While the girls cooked sukiyaki on a hibachi grill, the men talked, but the Marine was unable to understand exactly what Oswald’s relation was to the group.23

  So far, it is a small matter. He takes photographs on base, and could be sharing a ménage-à-trois with a Japanese man and woman. He states to Joseph Macedo that he doesn’t care to return to the United States. He will never forgive the Marine Corps for what those four weeks in the brig have done to his pride. On such a flimsy note, we can hardly bring in a case against him, merely a suspicion.

  He forms, however, one relation that is virtually without explanation unless it is a quid pro quo between Oswald and a beautiful Japanese woman who is working at one of the best and most expensive nightclubs in Tokyo, the Queen Bee. Any hostess one chose for a night would cost more than Oswald could earn in a month. The Queen Bee was for officers, not enlisted men. Yet Oswald was seen going out with her often: