"I believe I shot myself," he said.
Bushnell studied the perfect little scene. He thought Ozzie's remark sounded historical and charming, right out of a movie or TV play.
"Where did you get the gun is what I'm thinking if I'm the duty officer and just happen to come around."
"Meanwhile would you do something?"
"What do you want me to do?"
"Get a corpsman would be fine with me."
"What's it doing? Is it bleeding? Looks like a shaving cut to me."
"There's a hole in my arm."
"You shave yet, Ozzie? I hear your mother shaves but you don't. What happens when they see the gun?"
"It was an accident."
"Bullshit. You should have used your.45."
"And blow my arm off."
"It's government issue, shitbird. What are you supposed to tell them, I found the gun on a sidewalk at high noon?"
"I did find it."
"Christ, Ozzie, you make me sick. You're sitting here all alone. What if I don't come in? You just sit and wait? If there's anything I don't respect, it's bad planning."
"Meanwhile I am shot."
"Well big fucking deal."
"I am bleeding, Bushnell."
"You deserve to bleed. You deserve to go white and fucking die. This is a stunt. It is just the oldest stunt in the world. How do you expect them to walk in here and say all right you're shot, Oswald, so you stay here and the rest of them have to ship their asses out to sea."
"Because I am shot. That's how I expect them to say it."
"Completely ignoring the fact you hit only flesh, which it looks like it to me. It's a court-martial offense, I guarantee, the minute they see a weapon that's not authorized."
"I took the gun out of the footlocker to turn it in when it went off."
"Tell us how small and cute it is."
"I am bleeding."
"You'll be hit with wrongful conduct, regardless. Same as if you had a riot gun."
"It went off when I dropped it. I picked it up off the floor, which at the time I felt dizzy and thought to myself I'm in a state of shock so I closed the footlocker in an attempt to sit down, which is how you found me."
"Don't tell me. Tell them, shitbird."
"Just get me a corpsman, Bushnell. Somebody has to treat me. I'm a wounded Marine."
DIAGNOSIS: WOUND, MISSILE, UPPER LEFT ARM GUNSHOT, NO A OR N INVOLVEMENT #8255
Within command-work.
Patient dropped 45 caliber automatic, pistol discharged when it struck the floor, and missile struck patient in left arm causing the injury.
NARRATIVE SUMMARY:
This 18 year male accidentally shot himself in the left arm with a sidearm, reportedly of 22 caliber. Examination revealed the wound of entrance in the medial portion of the left upper arm, just above the elbow. There was no evidence of neurologic circulatory, or bony injury. The wound of entrance was allowed to heal and the missile was then excised through a separate incision two inches above the wound of entry. The missile appeared to be a 22 slug. The wound healed well, and the patient was discharged to duty.
SURG: 10-5-57: FOREIGN BODY, REMOVAL OF, FROM EXTREMITIES, LEFT UPPER ARM #926
Postcard #1. Aboard the USS Terrell County in the South China Sea. Ozzie sits on the afterdeck with Reitmeyer, counting the days of ghost maneuvers in the drenching heat, wondering if he'll ever see land again.
"What do you say I teach you to play chess?"
"Fuck you."
"It's for your own stupid good, Reitmeyer. Plus we have to pass the time somehow."
"Take a flying fuck at the moon."
"The best players in the world are generally Russian."
"Fuck them, in spades."
Men sit dazed in the streaming light.
Postcard #2. Corregidor, among the war ruins. John Wayne comes to visit the homesick leathernecks of MACS-1, interrupting work on a movie being shot somewhere in the Pacific. Ozzie has mess duty, he has mess duty all the time now, but he sneaks a look at the famous man eating lunch with a group of officers-roast beef and gravy that he has helped prepare. He wants to get close to John Wayne, say something authentic. He watches John Wayne talk and laugh. It's remarkable and startling to see the screen laugh repeated in life. It makes him feel good. The man is doubly real. He does not cheat or disappoint. When John Wayne laughs, Ozzie smiles, he lights up, he practically disappears in his own glow. Someone takes a photograph of John Wayne and the officers, and Ozzie wonders if he will show up in the background, in the passageway, grinning. It's time to get back to the galley but he watches John Wayne a moment longer, thinking of the cattle drive in Red River, the great expectant moment when it starts. Stillness, nervous steers, horsemen in dawn light, the rim of hills, the deep sure voice of aging John Wayne, the voice with so many shades of feeling and reassurance, John Wayne resolutely to his adopted son: "Take ' em to Missouri, Matt." Then rearing mounts, trail hands yahooing, the music and rousing song, the honest stubbled faces (men he feels he knows), all the glory and dust of the great drive north. He reads Walt Whitman in hospital ruins.
One thing about Konno. He never talked to Lee in a personal way. He seemed to be reciting, talking into a Dictaphone. There was no flexibility in his manner. He didn't see the individual.
One other thing. He was in over his head, technically speaking. He didn't know the terminology, all the phrases and labels in aviation electronics, high-altitude reconnaissance. An elevator operator. Ha ha.
Lee didn't let on that he'd wounded himself with the derringer Konno had supplied. First because the strategy had failed to keep him in Japan. Then, too, he didn't want Konno to know he'd been under his influence.
No talking.
You stand at attention until assigned.
You do not step on white paint at any time. Segments of the floor are painted white. Do not touch white. There are white lines running down passageways. Do not touch or cross these lines. Every urinal is situated behind a white line. You need permission to piss.
You take your beatings in the area between the chest and groin, so bruises won't show. This is tradition. Or a guard will put a bucket on your head and whack it with a truncheon.
If you are assigned a cell, your guard will hose out the cell while you are inside it.
There are special punishment facilities called the hole, the box, the cage-names with a vivid history familiar from the movies.
You never walk where there is room to run. You run to and from your storage box. You stop at every white line and wait for permission to cross. You run in the compound, your grub hoe held at port arms.
You are processed naked, holding your seabag above your head at arm's length, shouting aye aye sir and no sir at the slightest sound. You are permitted to lower the seabag to the back of your neck only when you bend over to allow them to check your anal cavity for printed matter, narcotics, alcoholic beverages, digging tools, TV sets, implements of self-destruction.
This was the brig in Atsugi, a large frame building with cement floors, a number of storerooms, offices and compartments, a turnkey's area and a large chicken-wire enclosure that contained twenty-one bunks. The enclosure was filled to capacity. New prisoners were lodged in six concrete cells located along a passageway marked with white lines. The cells were designed for single occupancy but summer was the season of misfits, runaways, violent drinkers, born losers, petty thieves, desperadoes, men of every manner of delicate temperament, and Oswald had a cellmate named Bobby Dupard, a slim sad-eyed Negro with a copper cast to his hair and skin.
Oswald, first in, got the stationary bunk. Dupard got a swayback cot and a mattress that was aglimmer with flat-bodied biting things- things you could crack between your fingernails and they'd break into two and become four and then eight, swarming back into their cottony nests to breed some more, so what was the point of even trying, according to Dupard.