May 30, 2005
TAPS
Flower Arrangement and Photography by Catherine King
Memory by Jerome du Bois
This song is Reality. Remember? Surely you remember?
--James Jones, From Here To Eternity
I was born in Lanikai, Oahu, Hawaii in 1949. My father, Alan van Fleet du Bois, fought relentlessly and with valor in the Pacific in World War II. He mustered out as a corporal in the United States Marines with five Purple Hearts --that's right, I've seen the scars --a Bronze Star, and two Silver Stars. If he hadn't lived, if he hadn't been brave beyond words or believing, I would not be here now, and I wouldn't be writing these words. Thanks again, Dad. I'm so proud of you. I wish I'd said that more when you were alive.
Before the War he was a sporting-goods manager, enjoying some early-morning golfing with some friends at the Oahu Country Club on Pearl Harbor Sunday when the Zero squadrons flew over their heads, rattling the golf clubs in the bags. What the hell was that? Heads tilted back, gloved hands shading eyes, seeking answers from the glorious, fateful blue sky.
He was really too old, in his early thirties, but like Queequeg who hit the spot of tar floating in the bay, he impressed the recruiters with his marksmanship. They let him in and trained him as a sniper. Just take a moment to consider the psychological implications of getting the drop on someone, over and over, and staying stable. My old man did. (After the war, he got a degree in psychology.)
He was a dead shot every time he lifted a pistol or a rifle or a shotgun, until he put them all down sixty years later due to macular degeneration. Fifteen years after the war ended, when I began asking about what went on, he didn't talk about it much --he told me a little, some really horrific things, but he also told me to read books about it, as he did. (By the end of his life, my father's WWII library reached nearly 2,000 volumes.)
He earned those medals by performing actions --sniping with uncanny accuracy, deep recon, clearing caves of the enemy with a flame-thrower, saving nearly a whole platoon, dragging wounded comrades to safety-- which even today chill my bones, and yet make me proud.
James Jones wrote From Here To Eternity in 1951, and Hollywood made a famous movie about it two years later, with Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, and Deborah Kerr. It was about soldiers in Hawaii, at Scofield Barracks on Oahu, before, during, and just after December 7, 1941. I never saw the original movie in the theater, but I read the book for the first time when I was twelve, and I reread it many times; and whenever the movie came on TV my brother and I would devour it, partly because there were hardly any movies about Hawaii. People who didn't grow up there then don't realize how provincial we felt, even after statehood. An exotic backwater. Let's go surfin now everybody's learnin how. Yeah Yeah Yeah.
We liked the movie all right --even as a kid I too easily felt Clift's pain as Robert E. Lee Prewitt, the bugler-boxer-- but there were two highlights we preferred, both about music. My brother, a year and a month older than me, who had not yet bothered to learn to read music but could pick up a song for his guitar after one or two listens, would pay close attention to "The Re-Enlistment Blues" scene. We had the words of the song from the frontispiece of the book, see, and the blues has a classic structure, so he could sing the song --but what about the mood? Well, after we saw the movie the first time, we sang it over and over, around our beach campfires, skinny little tanned sixth-grade ka'amainas, Caucasian, Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, and poi-dog combinations, singing heartfelt as hardened soldiers. My friends. What did we know of war and pain? but we sang that twangy blues the way it spozed to be sung, ramshackle and funky. After forty years I say: my father fought for this, on Iwo Jima and Okinawa and other, forgotten hells, and saw many die before his eyes, for my friends and I to harmonize on that beach those nights, to try to feel what adults feel.
The fire crackled, warming the sand, the low tide lapped the beach, and as we sang about the fear and pain of those who stood for and laid it down for our lives, the moon itself laid down a golden band from the horizon to our feet, underlining the rightness of it all.
There's always been a zigzag of November melancholy in my soul, even as a kid --I don't know why, but the name of this blog is no accident-- so in the movie of From Here To Eternity I always waited for the "Taps" scene. I will let James Jones himself describe it.
He [Robert E. Lee Prewitt] looked at his watch and as the second hand touched the top stepped up and raised the bugle to the megaphone, and the nervousness dropped from him like a discarded blouse, and he was suddenly alone, gone away from the rest of them.
The first note was clear and absolutely certain. There was no question or stumbling in this bugle. It swept across the quadrangle positively, held just a fraction longer than most buglers hold it. Held long like the length of time, stretching away from weary day to weary day. Held long like thirty years. The second note was short, almost too short, abrupt. Cut short and too soon gone, like the minutes with a whore. Short like a ten minute break is short. And then the last note of the first phrase rose triumphantly high on an untouchable level of pride above rhythm, triumphantly high on an untouchable level of pride above the humiliations, the degradations.
He played it all that way, with a paused then hurried rhythm that no metronome could follow. There was no placid regimented tempo to this Taps. The notes rose high in the air and hung above the quadrangle. They vibrated there, caressingly, filled with an infinte sadness, an endless patience, a pointless pride, the requiem and epitaph of the common soldier, who smelled like a common soldier, as a women once had told him. They hovered like halos over the heads of the sleeping men in the darkened barracks, turning all grossness to the beauty that is the beauty of sympathy and understanding. Here we are , they said, you made us, dont close your eyes and shudder at it; this beauty, and this sorrow, of things as they are. This is the true song, the song of the ruck, not of battle heros; the song of the Stockade prisoners itchily sinking sweating under coats of grey rock dust; the song of the muckily KPs, of the men without women who collect the bloody menstrual rags of the officers' wives, who come to scour the Officers' Club-- after the parties are over. This is the song of the scum, the Aqua-Velva drinkers, the shameless ones who greedily drain the half filled glasses, some of them lipsticksmeared, that the party-ers can afford to leave unfinished.
This is the song of the men who have no place, played by a man who has never had a place, and can therefore play it. Listen to it. You know this song, remember? This is the song you close your ears to at night, so you can sleep. This is the song you drink five martinis every evening not to hear. This is the song of the Great Loneliness, that creeps in like the desert wind and dehydrates the soul. This is the song you'll listen to on the day you die. When you lay there in the bed and sweat it out, and know that all the doctors and nurses and weeping friends dont mean a thing and cant help you any, cant save you one small bitter taste of it, because you are the one thats dying and not them; when you wait for it to come and know that sleep will not evade it and martinis will not put it off and conversation will not evade it and hobbies will not help you to escape it; then you will hear this song and, remembering, recognize it. This song is Reality. Remember? Surely you remember?
"Day is done...
Gone the sun...
From-the-lake
From-the-hill
From-the-sky
Rest in peace
Sol jer brave
God is nigh..."
And as the last note quivered to prideful silence, and the bugler swung the megaphone for the traditional repeat, figures appeared in the lighted sallyport from inside of Choy's. "I told you it was Prewitt," a voice carried faintly across the quadrangle in the tone of a man who has won a bet. And then the repeat rose to join her quivering tearful sister. The clear proud notes reverberating back and forth across the silent quad. Men had come from the dayrooms to the porches to listen in the darkness, feeling in the darkness, feeling the sudden choking kinship bred of fear that supersedes all personal tastes. They stood in the darkness of the porches, listening, feeling suddenly very near the man beside them, who also was a soldier, who also must die. Then as silent as they had come, they filed back inside with lowered eyes, suddenly ashamed of their own emotion, and of seeing a man's naked soul.
These days some people whine if you call them a name, or question their blind certainty, or cast your shadow on something they got a special jones for. They ought to, but never will be, ashamed of themselves. They're lost.
My father came home from several hells without complaint. (He once had to set a friend's decapitated head, still in its helmet, aside, and pick up his carbine and resume the fighting.) He swallowed his pain, and for years afterward he suffered from migraines and bouts of malaria. He not only raised a family of three, he expanded Honolulu Sporting Goods from one store to five, and then, after we moved to Phoenix, he created the E. Blois du Bois Educational Foundation and ran it for thirty years, helping to educate thousands of Arizonans.
Today I remember and honor him, and the friends and comrades he left behind.
And today, Catherine and I stand for all the dead who stood for us, again.
Reader, before you leave, consider again my beloved wife's epigraphic photograph. Look closely: rising from black death, red blood, and purple pain, glorious ivory life climbs the green fuse ladder, bloom after bloom, to bask in the rays of the life-giving Sun.
The world only moves forward.
[James Jones excerpt courtesy of this website.]
Posted by Jerome at May 30, 2005 01:00 AM | TrackBack