The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [218]
He looked at Croft, who had put on a clean fatigue uniform. He was squatting on his cot, sharpening his trench knife against a little whetstone he had withdrawn from his pocket. Hearn knew Croft perhaps best of all, or more exactly he had spent the most time with him that morning discussing the patrol, but actually he did not know him at all. Croft had listened to him, had nodded, spat occasionally to the side, and answered him when necessary with a few bare words, uttered in a low toneless murmur. Croft obviously handled the platoon well, he was tough and capable, and Hearn was reasonably certain that Croft resented him. It would be a difficult relationship to handle, for Croft knew more than he did yet, and unless he was careful the platoon would soon realize it. Almost with fascination, Hearn watched Croft working on his trench knife. He brooded over it, his cold gaunt face examining his hands as he drew the blade back and forth against the stone. There was something frozen about him, something congealed in the set of his tight mouth, the concentration of his eyes. Croft was tough, all right, Hearn told himself.
The boat was turning now, angling against the swells. Hearn grasped a strut more firmly as it jarred against a wave.
There was Sergeant Brown, whom he knew slightly; he was the one who looked like a boy with his snubbed nose and freckles and light-brown hair. The Typical American Soldier -- the agreeable composite hatched out of the tobacco smoke and hangovers of the advertising conferences. Brown looked like all the smiling soldiers in the advertisements, a trifle smaller, perhaps, plumper, more bitter than was permissible. Brown had an odd face actually, Hearn decided. Up close there were jungle sores on Brown's skin, and his eyes had become dull and remote, his skin had begun to wrinkle. He looked surprisingly old.
But, then, all the veterans did. It was simple to pick them out. There was Gallagher, who probably had always looked that way, but still he had been in the platoon for some time. And there was Martinez, who seemed more fragile, more sensitive than the others. His fine features had been nervous, his eyes had blinked as he talked to Hearn that morning. He was the one you would pick instantly to crack up, and yet he was probably a good man. A Mexican had to be to become a good noncom.
There was Wilson, and the one they called Red. Hearn watched Valsen. That one had a craggy face with a rough boiled look about it which emphasized the blueness of his eyes. His laugh had a hoarse sarcastic edge as if everything disgusted him exactly the way he had known it would disgust him. Valsen was the one who was probably worth talking to, and yet he would be unapproachable.
Collectively, they lent something to each other, seemed harder and meaner than they would if isolated. As they lay on their cots, their faces seemed the only things alive in the troop well. Their fatigues were old, faded to a pale green, and the boat walls had rusted brown. There was no color, no movement in anything but the flesh of their faces. Hearn threw his cigarette away.
On his left was the island, not more than half a mile across the water. The beach was narrow at this point and the coconut trees grew almost to the water's edge; behind them grew the brush, a dense tangle of roots and vines and plants, of trees and foliage. Inland there were hills, set heavily on the earth, their ridge-lines lost in the forests that covered them. Their lines were ugly, broken and scraggly, with bald patches of rock like the hide of a bison when it is shedding in summer. Hearn felt the weight and resistance of that land.