The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [34]
Across the table from Webber were the "twins," Major Binner, the Adjutant General, and Colonel Newton, the Regimental Commander of the 460th. They were both tall thin mournful-looking men, with prematurely gray hair, long faces, and silver-rimmed eyeglasses. They looked like preachers, and they also rarely spoke. Major Binner had given evidence one night at supper of a religious disposition; for ten minutes he had conducted a monologue with appropriate references to chapter and verse in the Bible, but this was the only thing which distinguished him to Hearn. Colonel Newton was a painfully shy man with excellent manners, a West Pointer. Rumor claimed he had never had a woman in his life -- since this was in the jungle of the South Pacific, Hearn had never had an opportunity to observe the Colonel's defection at first hand. But the Colonel was beneath his manners an extremely fussy man who nagged his officers in a mild voice, and was reputed never to have had a thought which was not granted him first by the General.
These three should have been harmless; Hearn had never spoken to them, and they had done him no harm but he loathed them by now with the particular venom that a familiar and ugly piece of furniture assumes in time. They annoyed him because they were part of the same table which held Lieutenant Colonel Conn, Major Dalleson and Major Hobart.
"By God," Conn was saying now, "it's a damn shame that Congress hasn't slapped them down long ago. When it comes to them they pussyfoot around as if they were the Good Lord himself, but try and get an extra tank, try and get it." Conn was small, quite old, with a wrinkled face, and little eyes set a trifle vacantly under his forehead as though they did not function together. He was almost bald with a patina of gray hair above his neck and over his ears, and his nose was large, inflamed, and veined with blue filaments. He drank a great deal and held it well; the only sign was the hoarse thick authority of his voice.
Hearn sighed and poured some lukewarm water from a gray enamel pitcher into his cup. The sweat was lolling doubtfully under his chin, uncertain whether to run down his neck or drip off the edge of his jaw. Caustically, Hearn's chin smarted as he rubbed the perspiration onto the forearm of his sleeve. About him, through the tent, conversation flickered at the various tables.
"That girl had what it takes. Oh, brother, Ed'll tell you."
"But why can't we lay that net through Paragon Red Easy?"
Would the meal never end? Hearn looked up again, saw the General staring at him for an instant.
"Goddam shame," Dalleson was muttering.
"I tell you we ought to string them up, every last mother's son of them." That would be Hobart.
Hobart, Dalleson and Conn. Three variations on the same theme. Regular Army first sergeants, now field officers; they were all the same, Hearn told himself. He derived a mild amusement from picturing what would happen if he were to tell them to shut up. Hobart was easy. Hobart would gasp and then pull his rank. Dalleson would probably invite him outside. But what would Conn do? Conn was the problem. Conn was the b.s. artist from way back. If there was anything you had done, he had done it too. When he wasn't mouthing politics, he was your friend, the fatherly friend.
Hearn left him for a moment, and reconsidered Dalleson. There was only one possibility for Dalleson, and that was for him to get enraged and want to fight. He was too big to do anything else, even bigger than Hearn, and his red face, his bull neck, his broken nose, could express either mirth or rage or bewilderment, the bewilderment always a transitory thing until he realized what was demanded of him. He looked like a professional football player. Dalleson was no problem;