Compass Points by Edward Hoagland

Author:Edward Hoagland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307425331
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

CARDINAL POINTS

A part from “falling in” at reveille at sunrise, with a survivor of the Bataan Death March disdainfully calling our roll, my army posting was easy duty. I enjoyed barracks life, too, for the first year, but by the time my seven hundred thirtieth day in the service rolled around, I was teary at the prospect of release. I’d hung out with two pharmacists, Jerry Davis from Brooklyn and Larry Abrams from Baltimore; Dick Hitt from Dallas, the post newspaperman; Burrell Crohn, a hip student of jazz from New York City; and Pierre, an aspiring painter from Philadelphia. Pierre (named for the capital of South Dakota) was sincere, intelligent, and gloomy. He worked in the linens department of the hospital, and now that I think of it, resembled my best friend in prep school, an aspiring poet named Eddy, in his fragile sensitivity—even to the nervous breakdowns they both suffered a few years after leaving the institutions where our friendships were close.

I witnessed part of Pierre’s, when his spirit was smothering, like the goldfish in choked tanks in his vegetating apartment, and he took me on a terrifying spin in his car, spurting forward, jerking back. Eddy’s mad epiphany happened cross-country, as he slept under the tables of hotel ballrooms, whenever his hitchhiking brought him to a city (once waking up in the middle of a banquet in Denver, seeing hordes of feet surrounding him), or in a meadow with the deer. In supermarkets, he would get into fracases with the employees because they were dressed in brown, a color that mysteriously alarmed him. But then if the police were called, he would turn into the politest person because a uniform benignly blue somehow lulled him. By the greatest stroke of luck, he had his culminating episode while wandering east again from the Pacific’s beaches, on the highway in Kansas that runs past the Menninger Clinic, where he was taken and received enlightened care.

Our hospital specialized in tuberculosis and mental patients, though neither wing was fun to be sequestered in. Radical surgery was the recommended treatment for bad TB, in the absence of effective drugs in the 1950s, plus a year or two of isolation from one’s family; and still some of the people wasted away and died. Electric shock was the primary course of therapy for our mental patients, which resulted in some horrible scenes that corpsmen retold in the barracks. The “nuts” in specially marked pajamas who later tried to escape were chased down in the woods by MPs and clubbed for their pains. We had starchy, gung-ho MPs because a military madhouse does pose risks. Their crisp stockade was near our barracks, and I also dealt with them whenever I released an eviscerated body to an undertaker—helping him tote the stretcher to his hearse, then carrying the two bucketloads of organs that the pathologist had removed to the incinerator, under MP escort, where I dumped them directly down into a leaping fire.

I’d enjoyed drilling at Fort

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