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discourage me from pursuing the military service as a livelihood. I was discharged and set free to finish my college education and subsequently to make my earnest, fledgling way in the world of letters. A year or so later, through a subterfuge which played upon both my inertia and my ego, and which I was dumb enough to fall for, the Marine Corps enticed me back into its purview. Offered a promotion in rank, to first lieutenant, and a reserve status which required no duty or drill, no responsibility, no commitment other than that I be available in the event of a future emergency (and how remote such a danger seemed back there within the minatory shadow of the atomic bomb), I took the bait with what must be regarded as amazing innocence, truly a victim of the age of the soft sell. When orders (in quintuplicate) came, less than four years later, to report for duty to the Second Marine Division in North Carolina, my woe and shock became almost insupportable—partly due to the knowledge of my own complicity in the matter. But bloody wars and the might of nations, as Bismarck observed, are built upon such witless acquiescence.
    Since this account is not about myself, really, but about Paul Marriott—who at the time I am describing was a lieutenant colonel in the regular marines—I do not want to use more space than is necessary in dwelling upon the circumstances that led up to our relationship. But in all honesty I cannot skimp the whole frenzied atmosphere, the mood of despondency—“despair” would not be too strong a word—which surrounded me and my friends as we enacted oursolemn rehearsal for another war. For if I had not felt so traumatized, so out of place, so forsaken in this new yet achingly familiar environment, had I not been half-consciously searching for someone with whom I might come to a reasonably civilized understanding, Paul Marriott might have passed unnoticed and we would not have sought each other out, and I might have failed to discover this exceptional man whom the Marine Corps had nurtured and honored. So if only for my own satisfaction I must try to describe my frame of mind at the time, and recount some of the details of the predicament so many of us found ourselves trapped in that spring and the following months.
    It may be easily guessed that at this point I had undergone a fairly thorough transformation. Vanished were the ideals of duty and sacrifice. I had been to college and had cultivated the humane studies and had come to develop a strong aversion to warfare, along with many of my contemporaries; after the thrill of an illusory and romantic “victory” in World War II had palled, we began to be chilled by a premonition that the terminal act of that drama—the defeat and surrender of Japan—was not an ending but a prelude to a succession of wars as senseless and as bestial as any ever seen. Moreover, I had a particularly selfish reason to want to remain a civilian: to be recalled to duty at this moment in my life seemed an especially outrageous swindle. It was not only that I had fallen comfortably into a bohemian way of life, living in Greenwich Village, where I let my hair grow long and accustomed myself to rising as late as two in the afternoon. I had also written a novel, which was about to be published and which showed the unusual signs of becoming—for a first novel—brilliantly successful. I had suffered long andhard on this work, pouring into it all the passion and vitality that the gods squander on youth, and while I was satisfied (as much as one ever can be) with my achievement in terms of its art, I was deep down no tiresome eccentric and hankered also after the side benefits that accrue to single young men whose first novels are brilliantly successful: toast of the world, flattered, fussed over, with a thick wallet and suavely tailored flannels, dining at the Colony and Chambord and plowing my way through galaxies of movie starlets and seraglios of wenchy Park Avenue matrons