Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy

Author:Marge Piercy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504033435
Publisher: Open Road Media

MURRAY 2

A Little Miscalculation of the Tides

In the hospital, the doctors decided that Murray had hepatitis—not apparently the worst kind, but bad enough. Still it was curable and not a million-dollar wound. They would not send him home, assuring him he would be fine in two or three months.

He was sick and feverish and weakened. He turned out to have parasites as well as the fungal infection. Nonetheless, he liked being in the hospital, where he refound himself, as if he were waking and discovering he had dreamed himself to be someone entirely other. He read; he enjoyed reading; he could prefer one book to another, judging, comparing. He began to have ideas again, thoughts focused beyond the moment, beyond anxiety. He could contemplate something more than filling his belly, discharging his ragged bowels and trying to catch a safe snooze. He could think of Ruthie without reaching for his cock. He could be silent when the other men would let him be.

Unfortunately, the doctors decided all too soon he was sufficiently recovered. He did not feel well. He could scarcely remember what it had felt like to be entirely without pain, to walk easily, to run up a flight of steps without dizziness, without nausea.

In the mysterious ways of the Marines, he was not returned to his old outfit, but posted to the 2d Division, 8th Marines, who were almost all San Diego boot camp marines, not Parris Island like his old outfit. He felt mistreated, shoved among a lot of guys who knew each other. The 2d Division was based out of Wellington, New Zealand, where he’d been in the hospital, so maybe they had just decided not to bother shipping him any farther. He reported to Camp McKay and his quiet time was over. A lot of the men had been in New Zealand awhile, so it felt like home to them. They had friends, they had girlfriends, they had taken up the local slang and called each other cobby. He felt as much an outsider as he had in boot camp.

He was assigned to a tarpaper hut heated by a kerosene stove. He still became easily chilled. Some men here had been on the Canal too, and still had malaria. At least he had been spared that, thanks to the Atabrine that gave him a yellowish cast and had probably masked the hepatitis from the corpsmen—what the Marines called medics—on the Canal.

The major in command of his new outfit believed in hiking. They went on sixty mile and eighty mile hikes in the mountains. The first time, Murray couldn’t make it. His feet had softened up in the hospital and soon began to bleed. In the Marines, nobody was ever supposed to be weak, even two days out of the hospital, and he was punished like a goldbricker. Still, a lot of men dropped out, because so many had been sick.

The scuttlebutt was that they were going to retake Wake Island, where marines had been captured. Murray’s strength was seeping back.

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