He wanted only to have a choice; Karras feared naval duty over anything, especially feared the prospect of facing death within the confines and close quarters of a ship. And the idea of being a dogfaced grunt, regular infantry in the U.S. Army, did not appeal to him in the least. After all, he had been told throughout his life that he was a Spartan, believed the warrior implications that went with the tag, and simply felt that the Army was not in any way the equal of the Corps. There was also the element of living up to a certain image in his father’s eye. Karras’s mother had tried to keep him from the service with a phony Greek birth certificate that she had used for other purposes on several occasions, but Karras would not be one of the men who walked the streets of Washington without a uniform, men who were frankly considered less than men by most of the women around town. So he did not wait. He enlisted in the Marine Corps, and tuned out his mother’s anguished cries, and endured the unreadable, watery-eyed stare of his father. He was twenty-two years of age, and off to war.
After twelve weeks of basic training at Parris Island, Karras returned to D.C. on a ten-day furlough, fifteen pounds heavier, all of it muscle, with a new, handsome hardness to his tanned face. On the first night home, he had dinner with his parents — his mother had prepared a lamb — and then met some friends at a pool hall and beer garden at 5th and G. The next day he rang up a girl named Eleni Triandokidis, the younger sister of a friend from Central High whom he had had an eye on for some time. On those rare occasions when Karras had found the privacy to masturbate while at boot camp, it had been Eleni to whose image he had returned most.
She was a shapely brunette with thick ankles and rather large calves for a girl her age — Eleni was seventeen when Karras first courted her — and a nose that crinkled when she smiled. Eleni’s people were from the Peleponese, not Sparta, so Karras’s parents would not have approved. Peter Karras would not have taken their advice in any case, as after their first date, dining under the stars on the patio at the Roma on Connecticut Avenue, he convinced himself that he had fallen for her, that he maybe even loved her in some detached, dispassionate way. What he loved, of course, was the image of being with her, to taste the salt of sweat on her breasts and lie between her muscled thighs. Karras had his way with her the night before he shipped back out, in the basement of her parents’ house off Kansas Avenue in Northwest, his hand over her mouth at the end to keep her from waking the old man. There was the mumbled promise of an unofficial engagement before he went out her door for the long walk home.
Back on Parris Island, he was recommended for and accepted the position of DI, a favorable situation on the surface in that it kept him in the States. But he soon found that he was working seven days a week and pulling extra shifts for a sergeant who was often out drinking beer. After thirty days of that, and with the vague desire to test himself in some unforeseen way, he requested and was granted overseas duty. He shipped out to Norfolk, then to Hawaii, where on the island of Kauai he found himself training in an artillery outfit that specialized in 55-millimeter guns.
After zigzagging across the Pacific for almost two months, he landed in Guam and was told that his outfit would continue to train. Somehow Karras managed to get on the wrong side of a Sergeant Skinner, a real SOB from the old school, so Karras pulled a three-month duty repairing belly stoves. But the tedium was relieved by rugby games on a stone-filled field, and the assemblage of a crack baseball team, on which he played catcher. Eventually, he and his unbeaten teammates were flown to Saipan, where they played opposite Cecil Travis, the Senators’ shortstop who was on an island-hopping tour designed to boost troop morale. Beating Travis and his boys was the highlight of Karras’s tour of duty; it made him wish he could see his friend Billy Nicodemus, who loved baseball as much as life. He had not heard from Billy in more than a year.
On returning to Guam, the outfit threw what had become their weekly party, in which the six members of each tent pooled and drank their beer rations in one night. As the night progressed, the humor grew crueler and there was at least one fight. A private from Kentucky named Valin, who went on incessantly about his Louisville fiancée, was encouraged to drink more than the rest, the idea being that a passed-out man could not talk. The atmosphere was meaner than usual that night, as there was a feeling among the men, a feeling fueled by strong and repeated rumor, that they were to be shipped out for combat very soon. Valin did not pass out, kept on bragging about his girl, and late in the party a couple of guys in the outfit held him down while another poured Listerine down his throat. He vomited immediately and fell flat on his stomach into a deep sleep. Then someone pulled Valin’s pants down around his ankles, and another fellow crouched behind him, and a third brought out a camera, and from just the right angle took phony bugger pictures to the laughter of the remaining men. The photographs were sent to Valin’s fiancée the next morning. Karras did not participate, but did not move to stop them. This episode was not mentioned again, not even that afternoon when they had sobered up. And it was not mentioned three weeks to that day, when a Japanese shell cut Grayson Valin clean in half.
The night after the beer party, Karras, who felt the need to get away from the men in his outfit, hopped a ride on the back of a supply truck to a division two miles down the road, where a movie was set to be shown in the main tent. The schedule called for a Rita Hayworth picture, but it turned out to be an Abbott and Costello, which drew boos initially and then uninterrupted laughter once the projector rolled.
After the show, Karras stood outside the tent and lighted a cigarette. He heard a voice that sounded familiar in tone and accent.
“Hey, Marine,” said the voice.
Karras turned. The voice belonged to a fellow named Tommy Rados, a Washingtonian with an easy style, a great dancer and storyteller who was well liked in the Greek community by both men and women.
“Tommy,” said Karras. “How you doin’, chum?”
“Real good,” said Rados, who shifted his shoulders and smiled.
“Seen any action yet?”
“Uh-uh. You?”
“We’re fixin’ to, I think,” said Karras.
Rados hummed a few bars of a popular tune, kicked some dirt at his feet. “Say, I’ve got an army buddy in the infantry, made it off Guadalcanal. He wrote a letter to me, mentioned a local boy in his outfit, guy named Recevo. Didn’t you used to pal around with a fellow named Recevo?”
“Joe Recevo, yeah. Why, he’s all right, isn’t he?”
“Far as I know. ’Course, the letter’s kinda old now.”
“Uh-huh,” said Karras, who pitched his cigarette out into the night.
“Yeah,” said Rados, with a reassuring smile. “Well, I gotta get back. Stay safe, Pete.”
“You too. Tommy. See you in D.C., hear?”
Karras liked Rados, thought he was a good Joe. Five years later, when he saw Tommy Rados cutting it on the dance floor at the Casino Royal back in town, he felt glad to know that Rados had made it through.
Karras walked back down the road through the thick starless night. The next morning, he shipped out for Leyte, one of the Visayan Islands in the Philippines, somewhere between Samar and Mindanao. It was late October 1944.
Though the landing met little resistance, the fear level was as high as it would get for the men and boys, who for the most part were facing combat for the first time. Going in, there was talk and some derisive laughter over MacArthur’s wade in the surf at Red Beach near Tacloban, the true story having gotten around of the famous image being staged. But any laughter during the landing was short and forced, as each man sweated tightly through his own thoughts. Next to Karras on the boat a fellow named Begonia tried to expel gas but instead shit his pants; Karras breathed sparingly, wanting only to get away from the cramped quarters of the LCI.