Djelloul Marbrook

There was a moment in boot camp when I almost laughed myself out of the Navy. It might have been a first. One of the guys in our company at Bainbridge, Maryland, was there because his father thought it would make a man out of him. Some of us were macho jerks and some of us were pretty decent. This kid had me figured for one of the latter and he sort of attached himself to me, hoping maybe I could help him get through that summer alive. Most of us had our doubts about whether he’d make it.

“How come this doesn’t seem to bother you?” he asked me one night after taps. I was thinking about how to answer him when I fell into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. I couldn’t stop laughing. I was coming apart and they were going to cart me out of there in a wheelbarrow. My best efforts to get a grip failed. Now what was unusual about that was that I hardly ever laughed. I didn’t think anyone was funny. Well, maybe Frank Gorshin mimicking John Wayne. Or that vaudeville guy who couldn’t get his wonder dog to do a damned thing.

My friend, the one the good guys were worried about, started slapping me on the back. I finally calmed down because a curious notion seized me. “It doesn’t bother me because it’s a goddam piece of cake,” I said. It had reached 110 on the grinder that day, so you can understand why the kid looked at me incredulously. “I thought you went to private schools,” he said. I saw my reflection in a moonlit windowpane at that moment. I looked like a rabid wolf. My teeth were bared. “Oh yeah, I had a great time,” I said.

But it took me almost thirty more years to continue that thought, to say I’d been sexually abused in boarding school, to say some bigger kids tried to hang me from a hay loft, to say a lot of other like things.

My survival instincts were so well honed by then that the military never fazed me. The first big crisis we had that summer was when some of the guys tacked up the Confederate battle flag in our barracks. It was sort of like firing on Fort Sumter. Maybe about fifty-five or sixty percent of the guys were from the South. The rest of us were from New York and New Jersey. Things were heading for a showdown when Seaman Recruit Survivor Marbrook doped out that the Southerners were divided between flatlanders and mountaineers, and the mountain kids didn’t share all that second-hand chauvinism. They just wanted something better than where they came from, and they weren’t about to screw it up fighting “the war” all over again. For that little insight I got voted Company Honor Man when we graduated.

The next little problem came from the North. Some truculent guys from Joisey decided to shape up the unfit, like the fellow I mentioned earlier, by making their lives even more miserable than they already were. Having grown up in New York, I was used to clods like that. They were the kind of creepy bullies who idolized Adolph Hitler. So I mobilized the most decent Yanks and mountaineers among us and we “tuned up” the bullies one night. It was great fun. I knew I was going to like the Navy after that.

But the real reason I liked it so much was that I always knew what the name of the game was, and for a guy who’d never known the name of the game, that was sort of like dying and going to heaven first class.

Boot camp was full of revelations. I mean, I took the bus out of Manhattan with Nat King Cole and Ole Blue Eyes in my head, and within hours I was hearing that High Lonesome for the first time in my life, and I was a goner. You could call it country, but I called it pure damned exciting. Where had Hank Williams been all my pathetic little life?

We were always asking each other to repeat things so we could savor our foreignness. We all talked funny, and I was endlessly curious about Southern speech. For starters, I discovered Southerners spoke as many dialects as we Yankees did, and none of them sounded like Gone With the Wind. They were always telling me, You don’t sound like a New Yorker, by which they meant I didn’t sound like a kid from Greenpernt, nor could I convince them that Manhattan kids didn’t say Toid Avenoo ‘n Toidy-Toid Street, Brooklyn kids did.

I think maybe the strangest thing that happened to me in boot camp, the most memorable thing, was some of the mountain kids asking me to write letters home for them, to their girlfriends, their mothers. Didn’t they know it wouldn’t sound like them? Yeah, they did, but they wanted me to do it anyway, and so I left boot camp knowing a lot more about them than I should have. And it’s stuck with me all my life. I keep wondering about those letters, those relationships. How did they turn out? Sometimes when I can’t sleep I make up lives for these guys and the people they left behind. Some of them became frog men, a few even career officers. I never knew a better bunch.

About the kid who wasn’t making it. He didn’t. He slept above me, and one night when I thought maybe another of his problems was bed-wetting I found he’d cut his wrists. We rushed him to the infirmary.

In a day or two his mother came from Richmond—not his father—and she embraced some of us for taking care of him as much as we could, and I think his pluckiness in trying to make it made better sailors out of all of us. I think most of us would have been happy to punch out his dad.

—DM