The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [272]
Only it could not last. It was as if Brown had awakened in the middle of the night, helpless in the energies his mind had released in sleep. In the transit to awareness, to wakefulness, he would be helpless for a time, tumbling in the wake of his dream, separated from all the experience, all the trivia that made his life recognizable and bearably blunted to himself. He would be uncovered, lost in the plain of darkness, containing within himself not only all of his history and all of the present in the ebbs and pulses of his body, but he would be the common denominator of all men and the animals behind them, waking blindly in the primordial forests. He was at that moment the man he might have been for good or for bad.
But inevitably he climbs out of the sea, grasps in his vision the familiar bedposts, the paler rectangle of the window, smells the flat commonplace odors of his body, and the pit of anxiety and aliveness shrinks to its normal place, is almost forgotten. He begins to brood about his concerns for the coming day.
So Brown thought about his wife, remembered her at first with longing and a flood of long-compressed love, and saw her face over his, her breasts nuzzling richly against his neck. But the unfamiliarity, the nakedness of his feeling was leaving him. He heard Goldstein and Ridges talking, felt the moistness of Wilson's forehead, and he was cast again into the worries and problems of the two days ahead. Seeing the bedpost, his heart clamped on the memory of his wife like a dog crunching a bone, and he pushed her away, immersed again in bitterness. Fooling around with anything that wears pants.
He began to brood about the difficulties of carrying Wilson back. There was a strong residual fatigue in his body from the first two days of the patrol, and the hills ahead would be demanding, exhausting, now that their relief had returned to the platoon. He had a sharp preview of the next day's march. With only four of them to bear the litter, they would be working all the time without relief, and after fifteen minutes in the morning they would be cruelly tired, dragging on painfully, having to halt for rest every few minutes. Wilson weighed two hundred pounds, and when their packs were lashed to the stretcher, it would be easily three hundred pounds. Seventy-five pounds to a man. He shook his head. Through experience he knew how exhaustion broke him down, dissolved his will, and muddied his mind. He was the leader of this detail, and it was his duty to get them through, but he felt unsure of himself.
The aftermath of all this -- his sympathy for Wilson, the purge he had felt, and then the return of his bitterness -- left him very honest with himself for a few minutes. He knew that he had wanted this detail because he was afraid of going on with the platoon, and he had to succeed here. A noncom ain't worth a goddam when he loses his nerve if he lets himself show it, Brown told himself. But it was more than that. Somehow he could slide through the months, perhaps the years ahead. They were in combat only a small part of the time really, and even then nothing might happen; his fear might not be noticed, nobody might be hurt because of it. If he did the rest of his work well enough it would be all right. After the Motome campaign was over, I was a hell of a lot better than Martinez for drilling and training, he thought.
What he realized partially was that he was afraid of breaking up completely, of being inefficient even in garrison. I gotta get ahold of myself or I'll be losing my stripes.