J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [56]
“The Magic Foxhole” opens days after D-Day on a slow-moving convoy presumably heading to Cherbourg. It casts the reader as an anonymous hitchhiking GI picked up by the narrator, a soldier named Garrity. Addressing the reader only as “Mac,” Garrity eagerly recounts the events of a battle fought by his battalion directly after D-Day. His tale focuses on the company point man, Lewis Gardner, and the experiences that caused him battle fatigue.
Garrity and Gardner’s battalion had emerged from storming the beach on D-Day only to encounter a German stronghold. The Germans, who outnumbered them two to one, had entrenched themselves into woods upon a hill. Between the enemy and Gardner’s battalion lay a deadly marsh dubbed “The Widow Maker’s Swamp.” Here, the Germans pinned the men down for two days and nights, while Garrity and Gardner’s battalion attempted to take the enemy position. Repeatedly they crawled through the marshland, seeking to reach the Germans, who barraged them with gunfire and mortars. Whenever heavy arms began to explode around them, they scrambled for one of a handful of foxholes, holes that were too far apart to protect all the men. Because Gardner was the company point man, he maintained a position 50 feet in front of the rest and always got a hole to himself. Every foxhole that Gardner occupied held him alone and was therefore seemingly magic.
The situation is futile, and Salinger conveys its hopelessness with the authenticity of a participant. Readers experience the stench of the swamp and have a clear image of the sheer waste of battle. Admiration is inspired and increased with every pointless yet unquestioned assault upon the German defenses. There is no glory in this fight, only the steel determination of its men and the mad scramble to survive.
As the battle progresses and Gardner seeks refuge within successive foxholes, he begins to see a strange ghostlike soldier wearing glasses and a futuristic helmet. He confides these encounters to Garrity, who at first thinks Gardner insane. After several meetings with the phantom soldier, Gardner learns to his shock that the apparition is his own son, Earl, who is yet to be born. At this point, Gardner begins to unravel. Believing Earl to be participating in some future war, he resolves to kill his son in the hope of preventing the conflict. Upon learning of Gardner’s plan, Garrity is alarmed. He decides to jump into a foxhole along with Gardner and knock him out with the butt of his rifle in order to spare his ghost-son. But Garrity is struck in the back by shrapnel and never makes it into the hole with Gardner.
Garrity awakes from his shrapnel wound at a hospital set up on the beach. There he locates Gardner, who has been mentally destroyed. Unwilling to stay on his stretcher, Gardner pitifully clings to a pole stuck in the sand. Salinger’s description of his condition contains a quality for which his later New Yorker stories will be famous: an ability to transfer multiple messages and emotions through a handful of simple words. Gardner, with death in his eyes, now stands on the beach in his hospital nightshirt, clinging to the pole, “holding on tight, like as if he’s at Coney Island on one of those rides where if you don’t hold on tight you’ll go flying off and get your head cracked open.”21
A closer, perhaps retrospective examination of Garrity’s tale reveals that he is also suffering from battle fatigue, to a lesser degree than his friend. His speech is erratic and hurried, his thought patterns scattered. He has also developed a morbid fascination with suffering, traveling daily to the beach to gaze upon the mangled and limbless soldiers being evacuated. He is not yet as sick as Gardner, but that day is swiftly approaching.
Salinger’s criticism of the army is strong in this piece. Apart from condemning the army’s crushing