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Authors: Roy Blount
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would be exciting but not salutary.
Associations were gathering quickly now. The salutes by which I had just been bracketed were the first I had seen in some time. They took me back to the mid-sixties, when nudity and antimilitarism were growing rampant among the young, and I was a callow, married army lieutenant. Other twenty-three-year-old Americans were daubing “Peace” and “Love” on their foreheads and filling the picture magazines with Human Be-Ins. I had grown up imprinted with sentiments like “Do your bit” and “If you must talk to a nude woman, start a family.”
What adults did, I had gathered, was marry, for life; Paul had told the Corinthians that it was better to marry than to burn. I had been burning since the seventh grade. So I married. And suddenly the conscience of America was single, anti-grown-up, and running around naked at Make Love Not War rallies.
These youths must have come along a few years too late to be affected, as I had been in 1949 at the age of eight, by The Sands of Iwo Jima, in which John Wayne plays a sergeant who turns raw recruits into fighting men. Since I was palpably raw, and I loved playing gun battle, and John Wayne was John Wayne, that movie struck me with the force of an imperative.
Looking at it today, you might think that The Sands of Iwo Jima would put a decent-minded boy off warfare, since it features the broiling of what John Wayne calls “little lemon-colored characters” in pillboxes. But you don’t have the feeling that John Wayne enjoys that kind of thing. The movie’s great theme is the difficulty of getting through to people.
Wayne keeps trying to strike a rapport with John Agar, who plays a raw recruit whose father, a legendary colonel, was killed in action. Wayne’s own son (from whom he is now estranged) is named after Agar’s father, under whom Wayne once served. Agar, for his part, is bitter toward his father, who regarded Agar as “too soft.” At mail call Agar learns of the birth of his son. When Wayne tries to congratulate him, Agar tells Wayne, coldly, pointedly, “I won’t insist that he read the Marine Corps manual. Instead I’ll get him a set of Shakespeare.”
Wayne’s eyes narrow, but with feeling. “I’ve tried every approach to you that I know, and got nowhere,” he tells Agar. Eventually the two of them become close, after Agar saves Wayne’s life by dispatching an impending Asian with an entrenching tool. Agar says, “There’s something I’ve been trying to say, but I just can’t seem to find the words.”
Wayne says, “You mean you been to two universities and still can’t find the words to say you been out of line?”
Then we see Wayne get killed by a sniper, and the famous flag-raising scene. Inside Wayne’s shirt Agar finds a letter to Wayne’s son that says, “Always do what your heart tells you is right.”
I don’t say, even in retrospect, that this is bad advice. But it doesn’t clear up the obliqueness in The Sands of Iwo Jima, which I never quite got out of my system. Furthermore, the notion that becoming a fighting man was profoundly connected with adulthood stuck with me, through two universities, all the way up until I entered the army. It was ROTC camp that took the pleasure out of weapons for me. To get our attention, one Korea-vet instructor went fwooof with a flamethrower and said, “Presto! Chinese hamburger!” By then I was already sworn in.
I embarked upon two years of bureaucratic lieutenancy. The Vietnam buildup began. I was unable to see the point of burning villages in order to save them. I could see a certain appeal, for a guy my age, in friendly nude anarchy. I was living in married-junior-officer quarters and exchanging salutes.
When saluted by young men who had the good taste to be not only disaffected soldiers, like me, but also uncommissioned, I felt what is known as role strain. And they knew it. Once I fell from a bicycle in front of a leaf-raking detail — three stockade
Associations were gathering quickly now. The salutes by which I had just been bracketed were the first I had seen in some time. They took me back to the mid-sixties, when nudity and antimilitarism were growing rampant among the young, and I was a callow, married army lieutenant. Other twenty-three-year-old Americans were daubing “Peace” and “Love” on their foreheads and filling the picture magazines with Human Be-Ins. I had grown up imprinted with sentiments like “Do your bit” and “If you must talk to a nude woman, start a family.”
What adults did, I had gathered, was marry, for life; Paul had told the Corinthians that it was better to marry than to burn. I had been burning since the seventh grade. So I married. And suddenly the conscience of America was single, anti-grown-up, and running around naked at Make Love Not War rallies.
These youths must have come along a few years too late to be affected, as I had been in 1949 at the age of eight, by The Sands of Iwo Jima, in which John Wayne plays a sergeant who turns raw recruits into fighting men. Since I was palpably raw, and I loved playing gun battle, and John Wayne was John Wayne, that movie struck me with the force of an imperative.
Looking at it today, you might think that The Sands of Iwo Jima would put a decent-minded boy off warfare, since it features the broiling of what John Wayne calls “little lemon-colored characters” in pillboxes. But you don’t have the feeling that John Wayne enjoys that kind of thing. The movie’s great theme is the difficulty of getting through to people.
Wayne keeps trying to strike a rapport with John Agar, who plays a raw recruit whose father, a legendary colonel, was killed in action. Wayne’s own son (from whom he is now estranged) is named after Agar’s father, under whom Wayne once served. Agar, for his part, is bitter toward his father, who regarded Agar as “too soft.” At mail call Agar learns of the birth of his son. When Wayne tries to congratulate him, Agar tells Wayne, coldly, pointedly, “I won’t insist that he read the Marine Corps manual. Instead I’ll get him a set of Shakespeare.”
Wayne’s eyes narrow, but with feeling. “I’ve tried every approach to you that I know, and got nowhere,” he tells Agar. Eventually the two of them become close, after Agar saves Wayne’s life by dispatching an impending Asian with an entrenching tool. Agar says, “There’s something I’ve been trying to say, but I just can’t seem to find the words.”
Wayne says, “You mean you been to two universities and still can’t find the words to say you been out of line?”
Then we see Wayne get killed by a sniper, and the famous flag-raising scene. Inside Wayne’s shirt Agar finds a letter to Wayne’s son that says, “Always do what your heart tells you is right.”
I don’t say, even in retrospect, that this is bad advice. But it doesn’t clear up the obliqueness in The Sands of Iwo Jima, which I never quite got out of my system. Furthermore, the notion that becoming a fighting man was profoundly connected with adulthood stuck with me, through two universities, all the way up until I entered the army. It was ROTC camp that took the pleasure out of weapons for me. To get our attention, one Korea-vet instructor went fwooof with a flamethrower and said, “Presto! Chinese hamburger!” By then I was already sworn in.
I embarked upon two years of bureaucratic lieutenancy. The Vietnam buildup began. I was unable to see the point of burning villages in order to save them. I could see a certain appeal, for a guy my age, in friendly nude anarchy. I was living in married-junior-officer quarters and exchanging salutes.
When saluted by young men who had the good taste to be not only disaffected soldiers, like me, but also uncommissioned, I felt what is known as role strain. And they knew it. Once I fell from a bicycle in front of a leaf-raking detail — three stockade
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