The Drifters (69 page)

When the girder was almost cut away, a savage arm of the typhoon roared inland from the ocean and carried away not only the flapping top but also the girders below, including the one to which Holt had lashed himself. The weatherman told me, ‘We watched in terror as the top part plunged to the earth, wiping out wires and wooden buildings. We thought Holt was on this portion, but his girder must have been very tough, for again it refused to break, although all the others did. So for at least ten minutes this new length of steel flapped back and forth in the gale … with Holt lashed to part of it. We were sure he would be either crushed or thrown loose.’

‘I hung on,’ Holt said later.

When the invading gale retreated, having done its damage, Holt gingerly unfastened the lashings which had saved him, reached out and climbed from the flapping steel onto the lower reaches of the tower, from which he calmly proceeded to cut away the girder. When I asked him how, through all that tossing, he had managed to hold onto the acetylene torch, he said, ‘If your job is to cut steel, you sure as hell don’t drop your torch.’

The highlight of Holt’s life had been his service with the marines, and the apex of this service had been not Iwo Jima or Okinawa or Korea, at each of which he had won decorations, but rather his boot training at Parris Island, where he fell into the hands of a drill sergeant named Schumpeter. ‘He took me a boy and sent me out a man,’ Holt said. Obviously he worshiped Schumpeter the way he did Humphrey Bogart and Spencer Tracy, but he rarely said much about him except that he owed Schumpeter both his life and his scale of values.

During the early years when I was becoming acquainted
with Holt, I supposed that in the training at Parris Island, Schumpeter had interceded in some accident to save him, but that was not what Holt meant. The salvation had been spiritual and had come through the iron drilling Schumpeter had given in the fundamentals of man-to-man warfare. ‘A lot of fellows older than I was thought they knew it all,’ Holt said cryptically. ‘A fat belly like Schumpeter couldn’t tell them anything. They’re dead.’

‘What was it he told you?’

‘Lots of things … useful things … like special ways to care for a gun … or use a bayonet.’ Holt refused to talk of his war experiences, but he did add this: ‘Any good drill sergeant could teach you that, of course. What Schumpeter added was a philosophy of war. To him it was two things. Something you damned well better win. And something you damned well better live through.’

Several times I tried to press Holt on these points, but he refused to say anything except that Schumpeter may have been a fat belly, as the others said, but when the marines shipped him out to Okinawa for having slugged an officer, he performed on the battlefield even better than he had in the drill hall. ‘A lot of man with a lot of belly,’ Holt said grimly. ‘He was no loudmouth.’

It was by chance one night in Baghdad that I learned about Holt at war. A marine colonel on detached duty with the Iraqi army happened to sit next to me at the bar of our hotel and we got to talking about one thing and another, and when he heard that I did a lot of work with tech reps, he said, ‘You ever run into a fabulous guy named Harvey Holt?’

Turned out he had been Holt’s platoon lieutenant on Okinawa. ‘Just turned eighteen, with stars in his eyes. He was sort of beautiful, so straightforward and gung ho, but he damned near drove me nuts. Every time I gave an order, he’d say, “Sergeant Schumpeter told us to do it this way,” until I demanded that he be ticketed to some other outfit. The captain called us in and said he was sure we could get this straightened out, but I said I was sick to my gut of hearing about Sergeant Schumpeter, so the captain asked Holt, “What about this, son?” and Holt said, “All I know is that on Iwo Jima, I did things the way he said and I’m alive. The smart alecks are dead.” The captain repeated that he felt sure I would be able to bring Holt into line, so I said, “Isn’t Schumpeter that
loudmouth who was broken last month because he slugged the officer at Parris Island?” and when we looked into it, we found that he had been sent to Okinawa as punishment.

‘Well, Holt went all apeshit running around the island till he found Schumpeter, and that afternoon the Japs struck, as you probably read. It was one hell of a go, and right at the point where they hit us hardest were Holt and Schumpeter, a two-man army. It was really something to see … sort of beautiful. I was about a hundred yards behind them, totally pinned down. It was murder that afternoon … murder. And these two characters stayed there inside the three walls of a shattered hut and you would have thought they were Napoleon and Ulysses S. Grant. They made not one false move. Christ, they even sortied at one point, right into a machine gun that couldn’t be swung around in time to hit them. I’m convinced the Japs thought there were at least fifty men in that hut. It was really sort of poetic, like the way Homer might have described a couple of Greeks, say, Achilles and Ajax—a young boy and a busted sergeant with a huge gut.’

The colonel began laughing, and I said it was funny to think of Harvey Holt as a Greek, but he said, ‘I wasn’t laughing about that. It was Schumpeter. That night after he and Holt rejoined us and everybody was telling them what a hell of a show they had put on and they ought to get a Silver Star or something, some Japs took a position from which they could bang-bang right into us, and I asked for volunteers to gun them from the rear—not too difficult a job—and I happened to see Schumpeter making himself real small in a corner, and after the team had gone out I said half-jokingly, “Schumpeter, you look scared,” and Holt barked at me, “Of course he is. You would be too.” I turned to this bright-faced kid and started to ask him who …

‘He broke in very fast and said, “In boot camp Schumpeter taught us that a man has only so many chances each day, and when they’re used up, lie low. He also taught us that a man is a horse’s ass ever to get mixed up with the troubles of another outfit. He’ll have enough pain with his own. This isn’t his outfit and he’s afraid to try to get back. Because today he’s used up his chances.”

‘I suppose these days the smart boys would construct
some fantastic theory about Holt and Schumpeter to prove their relationship was latent homosexuality. Anyway, Holt appealed over the captain’s head and got transferred to Schumpeter’s outfit, where—as he probably told you—he won all sorts of medals.’

‘He told me nothing.’

‘Back there I said a two-man army. It was really a one-man army, with Schumpeter doing the coaching. Holt was one of the real heroes of Okinawa. They gave him a battlefield commission. He was scheduled to lead one of the units ashore when we invaded Japan. He asked for Schumpeter as his sergeant, but the fat guy said that his luck was used up and he went home. He’s a drill sergeant again at Parris Island. When the marines get a good man, they keep him.’

In my opinion, the most surprising fact about Harvey Holt was his ability to quote poetry, for he was not a literary man, nor even one who bothered with the arts, yet in his freshman year at Colorado Aggies a Professor Carrington had asked during one of the first meetings of English 101 how many students could quote an entire poem, regardless of length. When only two hands went up, he cried, ‘Disgraceful. Poems are the world’s repository of significant experience and you ought to know some of them.’ He then said something which impressed Holt as being profound, as if no man prior to Carrington could have entertained such a thought: ‘Memorize a poem and you own it for life.’ Carrington had then made this proposition to his students: ‘For every fourteen lines of poetry you memorize before mid-terms, I will give you five extra points on your examination. Why do I nominate fourteen lines as the measure?’

A smart girl who had gone to high school in Massachusetts said, ‘Because that’s a sonnet.’

Holt had not heard the word before.

‘So there it is! You memorize twenty sonnets—and not only will your grade be one hundred, but you will be immeasurably richer.’

Holt, captivated by this bold proposal, went to Carrington’s office that afternoon to ask his advice on what to memorize, and Carrington asked, ‘Long or short?’ and to
his own astonishment Holt replied, ‘Maybe something long,’ and Carrington said, ‘For a young man in an agricultural college, there are only three to consider’ and he laid them out: Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Scholar-Gypsy,’ Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘The Deserted Village’ and Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.’

The first was quite beyond Holt’s comprehension and the second was too long. He said, ‘I’ll try this one,’ and he could still remember those autumn days—when early snow appeared on the Rockies to the west and aspen turned gold along the Cache la Poudre—when he had memorized the simple, exquisite lines.

A curious thing happened. When he came to the last three stanzas, which constituted the epitaph, he found them printed in italic, and these he memorized in funereal tones, as if they were part of a church service. When it came time to recite the poem to Professor Carrington he botched up some of the more difficult central stanzas, but when he reached the italicized stanzas he could see them line by line engraved in heaven, and with profound gravity he delivered the epitaph for this young man who had lived and died unknown in a forgotten village:

Professor Carrington coughed and told the Okinawa veteran, ‘You pass.’

In his lonely work at the outposts, Holt had perfected his memorization of this poem and could now recite it practically without error. He had also memorized large chunks of ‘Horatius at the Bridge,’ and since this was done after his service on Okinawa, he recognized that certain lines of this poem epitomized Sergeant Schumpeter, and now when he recited them in the jungle or along the edge of the desert, he thought of his drill master:

But the two poems which Holt had grown to love best were two that I had not known before I heard him recite them. The first was a rollicking ballad he had picked up from some Australians who worked with him at one of his stations, ‘The Man from Snowy River.’ It dealt with a wild chase downhill during a stampede of horses, and it was a man’s poem, filled with manly images and robust rhymes. When Holt recited its larruping lines he threw his head back, and you could see him upon a horse, galloping down the side of some sunset mountain, disregarding the rocks and crevices. He always made you feel that the poem was better than it was, and I wondered why I had not heard of it. He told me it was a great favorite throughout Australia, and he made a deep impression on tough Aussies in various parts of Asia by standing in the shadows of some bar and slowly beginning the lines which made their pulses quicken:

The other poem was something quite special. I’ve asked a good many knowledgeable people about this epic of the American west, and so far no one has heard of it. Apparently it has always had wide circulation in states like Wyoming and Colorado, where almost any campfire will produce at least one man who has memorized it. The rhythm is peculiar in a wild, undisciplined prairie sort of way. I remember asking Holt several times if he was quoting the opening lines correctly, so he wrote off to Denver for a copy—and there it was:

The poem told of an outlaw cowboy who had only one friend in the world, a tough Mexican girl named Lasca,
who shared his luck through many adventures in the west, until the day when … Well, the ending is rather sticky, sort of a cowboy epic, but the power which these lines had to make ranch hands stare into space was extraordinary, or so Holt said.

I gathered that Harvey loved the poem because it assured him that occasionally in life lucky men sometimes do find women who will share the frontier, who will ride side by side. When the Ford Motor Company brought out a new car and called it the Mustang, Holt bought one of the first and had it shipped to Sumatra, but after a while he sold it.

Once as we drove across the semi-desert in Afghanistan he told me, ‘What I’d really like would be to have a couple of horses in one of the villages along the desert. And some girl who would be willing to ride … you know, she’d have her mustang, I’d have mine.’

If any base at which he worked had married couples, he went out of his way to be courtly and proper to the wives. He said that marriage was by and large a good thing and one should do what he could to make women feel needed. It was obvious that his own divorce rankled deeply, a mark of defeat for which he was principally to blame, and whenever he contemplated his failure to find a faithful woman like Lasca, you could see the disappointment in his face.

I never heard him speak poorly of his wife, but a man who had known them both in Turkey said of her, ‘A real tramp. Slept with three different men in Istanbul and shacked up with the steward on the boat home. Harvey was lucky to get rid of her.’

Harvey did not think so. Frequently, he spoke of the excellent care she gave their son, and once when he showed me a photograph of the boy, I saw beside him a very attractive woman in her thirties with blond hair and a movie-star kind of face. I said, ‘She’s prettier than the girls who used to sing with the bands,’ and he agreed.

I never learned all of ‘Lasca.’ Its broken rhythms were not in my style, but I knew enough lines to throw them at Holt when we were driving from one base to another, and he would pick them up, and soon our car would become a pair of horses and we were riding through the west with a fiery Mexican girl at our side: