Just before lunch the breakfast pots and pans were finished and one of the cooks signaled for us to grab some chow—bolt it down in the upright position, actually, since in the few moments we were away a new mountain of stainless-steel, brass, and aluminum cookware filled the pot shack. By midafternoon I was moving back and forth on the pot shack’s slippery duckboard at all times very much aware of where my partner was standing and as I began to match his output, he began to hate me just a little less whereas my loathing for this lowlife hillbilly had no bounds.

We took the early supper and then worked until midnight finishing up the dinner pots and pans and the green marmite hot food containers that the mess crew brought in from the field where they had been serving the grunts on night maneuvers.

I staggered back to the barracks and put in a piss call with the night watch, fell asleep in my clothes, and when a Marine with a flashlight tapped me on the shoulder at two A.M., I jumped out of bed and made my way through the dark back to Mess Hall Number Three. A new guy, fresh from San Diego, was standing guard and called out, “Halt, who goes there!”

I was no seasoned Marine but neither was I in the mood for this kind of Mickey Mouse, so I said, “Bugs Bunny, motherfucker!” I heard the private chamber a round and thought a bullet in the back of the head wouldn’t be so bad the way things had been going ever since I joined the fucking Crotch. The question “Why did you join? Why did you join? Etc. Why did you fucking join?” came up a lot in my interior monologues. It was my impenetrable Zen koan. I had not been coerced to join by the court; I was not a psychopath and I did not join because I became temporarily insane after a girl two-timed me. The pay was something like eleven cents an hour, so it wasn’t for the money. I was not drafted but actually joined—of my own free will, sober and in full possession of all my mental faculties—the United States Marine Corps. I was convinced that such a fool as myself had never lived.