Lunar Follies

LONGOMONTANUS

Corporal Wing is chopping celery in the company mess and in the meantime Chinese mortars are laying down elegant patterns of death with lazy, terrible precision, the gooks, as they are called on this wall placard (hereon “Gooks”), can put a fucking round right up your ass if you’re unfortunate enough to bend over. It’s an inspiring collage, now you see him, now you see him as little chunks of seared flesh and splintered bone whizzing through the air. In full color. One magazine, ball ammunition, lock and load. And setting off the stirring photos of soldiers going about their everyday business is a wonderfully honest shot of Second Lieutenant Arthur M. Codgille crisply saluting the First Sergeant, Robert Swanson, with his left hand, it’s adorable, the picture nicely set off with a border of OCS patches. A comic-strip balloon, in, as someone once mysteriously said, “lonely majesty,” contains a message, to wit: THEY TOLD US WE WAS EE-FECTING A STRATEGIC WITHDRAWL, BUT ACKSHULLY WE WAS FLEEING IN WILD DISORDER. And here’s an authentic mess hall sign: Salusbury steak au juice, mash potatos, string beans, apple sause, mix salad, bread and butter, milk, coffee, ice cream. Ready on the right. Take all you want, you pussies. Ready on the left. Eat all you take, you cunts. And here is what seems to be a deposition by one Corporal John Roy Whitfield, Infantry, an astigmatic and slow-witted machine-gunner. Ready on the firing line. Corporal Whitfield’s complaint stipulates that various (and numerous) members of his platoon pissed on him throughout a long night during which he slept drunkenly in the urinal trough of the second platoon’s barracks latrine. The flag is up. No fucking way. The flag is waving. To treat a fucking noncommissioned officer. The flag is down. In the fucking United States Army. Commence firing. And a swell line drawing, delicate as all get out, left as a farewell note by a man whom the hogs ate soon after he went to shit, a diagram, actually, of how to string empty beer cans, each containing a few pebbles, on concertina wire. The whimsical caption reads: “When the clinkety-clink of the pebbles against the interiors of the cans is heard by the alert gunners, they can fire with the reasonable assurance that they are going to blow apart any fucking gook unlucky enough to be part of an initial assault, oh yes.” Stand at ease, soldier! How long have you been in the Army? The walls are brilliantly yet soberly painted in shades of khaki and olive drab.

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