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train, where I slept stupefied all the way to Fredericksburg, Virginia.
    The camp to which I had been ordered was originally known as New River. Then it later acquired the name Lejeune—after an illustrious marine commandant of a bygone era. Set amid the pinelands of the Carolina coast, the camp was still young as military establishments go; the next day when I arrived it was bustling and businesslike, as I always remembered it. I had spent a few tough months there during the previous war, and on the morning that I reported for duty I was stung by an awful sense of recollection at the sight of the broad asphalt avenues filled with marching men—along with that intimidating tramp of regimented feet that I thought I had put out of my ears for good—and by the vista of brick barracks and headquarters buildings with theirphony Federalist cupolas so reminiscent of some callow newly built college campus almost anywhere in the nation. My emotions must have been very close to those of an ex-convict who has savored the sweet taste of liberty only to find himself once more a transgressor at the prison gates, gazing up at the long-familiar walls. It was unseasonably warm. The base had already changed over to khaki uniform and I felt in my green woolens not only awkward and conspicuous but near suffocation. I was also hungover, jittery with exhaustion, and gripped with such foreboding about the future that my mind retreated from all notion of what the next year or years might bring, and in my thoughts I fiddled with the past.
    From the top-floor window of the administration building, where I stood smoking a cigarette, waiting for the division adjutant to receive me, I could see across miles of swampland—fiercely green now in the full tide of springtime—almost to the ocean. Cypress, scrub oak, palmetto, tupelo, and countless groves of longleaf pine—all watered by the estuarial marsh in which they spread their roots, and by evil, slow-running brown streams that had nearly drowned more than one wretched recruit: this was the wilderness which only ten years before the generals had surveyed from the air and, observing its proximity to the sea, had pronounced ideal for training young men in the new amphibious-warfare theory, or “doctrine,” as it was known. Rugged and isolated, far removed from any metropolitan fleshpots, it was the perfect place to harden up troops for what turned out to be the cruelest combat ever known in the annals of war: it was lonely, inhospitable, frigid in winter, a steaming cauldron in summer, and largely uninhabited savefor mosquitoes, ticks, and chiggers in stupendous numbers, possums, poisonous water moccasins, a few bobcats and bears, and, on the relatively dry periphery of the fastness, a tiny, scattered community of Negroes who scratched out a poor living on plots of tobacco and peanuts. These people—they had lived on the land for generations—had not been taken into much account by the generals during their aerial survey. As I stood there, I once again recalled hearing how half a dozen of the Negroes had killed themselves rather than face eviction—an outbreak of suicides that caused widespread talk in the region, especially since self-destruction, by the light of southern mythology, is rare among a race of people born to patiently endure their suffering.
    But some had killed themselves, and those who survived them had been “equitably” paid and resettled, transported to another county. Behind them they left scattered along dusty tracks through the pinewoods a dilapidated hodgepodge of tobacco barns, sheds, privies, cabins, and a handful of crossroads stores plastered with signs advertising RC Cola and Dr. Pepper and Copenhagen snuff. Windowless and abandoned, with porches rotting and tar-paper roofs in tatters, they sagged amid overgrown plots of sunflowers and weeds, or became carapaced in sweet jungles of honeysuckle where the drowsy hum of bees only made more pronounced the sense of a