The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [85]
The lesson beneath the lesson appeared a little later. The soldier who had been assigned to the operation of the generator in the daytime had been given the officers' recreation tent as an additional chore. He was supposed to furl the side flaps in the morning and let them down at night and fasten the sides. He was also, since the noise of the generator was considered too loud to be used at night, supposed to fill all the Coleman lanterns with kerosene, and light them.
Hearn went into the recreation tent one evening several days after it had been completed, and found it still dark. A few officers were groping around and swearing to each other. "Hey, Hearn," one of them called to him, "how about getting on the ball and giving us some light?"
He stalked over to the pup tent of the recreation tent orderly, and bawled him out. "What's the matter, Rafferty, do you have too many jobs to handle?"
"Jesus, Lieutenant, I'm sorry. I just forgot about it."
"Well, all right, hop to it, don't stand there looking at me." Hearn had found himself about to yell, "Get on the ball, man, will you," and after Rafferty got out of his tent and went jogging over to the motor pool to get some kerosene, Hearn had looked at him with disgust. Stupid ass, he thought, and immediately afterward, with a shock, he realized the trace of contempt he was beginning to feel for an enlisted man. It was slight, barely apparent, and yet it was there. They had tried to balk him when they were building the tent, they had indulged every tiny advantage they could. They had done it before they even worked with him, before they knew him; they had accepted him with an instinctive and immediate distrust, and he resented it.
Suddenly he knew the General's lesson. A new element had been added. In the past when he worked with enlisted men he had been tough because he considered his sympathies had no place in a particular job. When men worked they generally resented their leader. That was unimportant. He had not resented them.
And now there were the beginnings of resentment. The General's point was clear enough. He was an officer, and in functioning as an officer for a long enough time he would assume, whether he wanted to or not, the emotional prejudices of his class. The General was reminding him that he belonged to that class. He remembered Cummings's pale baleful eyes staring at him blankly, and then the inexplicable wink. "Have to keep you happy, Robert." It was a little clearer now. Hearn had known ever since he had been with the General that if he wanted to he could easily rise to a field officer's rank by the end of the war. And there was an ambition in him which responded to that, an ambition he distrusted. Cummings recognized it, Cummings had effectively told him then that if he wanted to, if he was strong enough to overcome the distastes and prejudices he felt toward officers, he could satisfy that ambition.
Understand your class and work within its limits. Marxist lesson with a reverse twist.
It disturbed Hearn deeply. He had been born in the aristocracy of the wealthy midwestern family, and although he had broken with them, had assumed ideas and concepts repugnant to them, he had never really discarded the emotional luggage of his first eighteen years. The guilts he made himself feel, the injustices that angered him were never genuine. He kept the sore alive by continually rubbing it, and he knew it. He knew also at this moment that out of all the reasons why he had begun to quarrel with Conn in officers' mess, one of the vital ones had been that he was afraid of not really caring enough about what Conn was saying. It was true of too many of his reactions. And since his direct self-interest could only move him back toward the ideas of his father, there was no other direction for him to turn, unless there was some other emotional basis for continuing in his particular isolated position on the Left. For a long time he had thought there was one, for even a longer period he had sustained his