“I don’t know from nothing, O’Leary. I just read the papers.” Another truck came by, loaded with corpsmen, followed by a jeep in which sat the helmeted Major Lawrence, a look of sulky arrogance on his face, his arms folded at his chest like a legionnaire riding through a conquered city. “But from what I understand,” Culver went on, turning back, “quite a few guys got hurt.” “That’s tough,” O’Leary said. “I’ll bet you they were using that old stuff they’ve had stored on Guam ever since ’45. Jesus, you’d think they’d have better sense. Why, I seen those shells stacked up high as a man out there just last year, getting rained on every day and getting the jungle rot and Jesus, they put tarps over ’em but five years is one hell of a long time to let 81-shells lay around. I remember once....” Culver let him talk, without hearing the words, and drowsed. O’Leary was an old-timer (though only a few years older than Culver), a regular who had just signed over for four more years, and it was impossible to dislike him. On Guadalcanal he had been only a youngster, but in the intervening years the Marine Corps had molded him--perhaps by his own unconscious choice--in its image, and he had become as inextricably grafted to the system as any piece of flesh surgically laid on to arm or thigh. There was great heartiness and warmth in him but at the same time he performed all infantry jobs with a devoted, methodical competence. He could say sarcastically, “The Colonel’s really got a wild hair, ain’t he?” but shrug his shoulders and grin, and by that ambivalent gesture sum up an attitude which only a professional soldier could logically retain: I doubt the Colonel’s judgment a little, but I will willingly do what he says. He also shared with Hobbs, the radioman, some sort of immunity. And thus it had been last night, Culver recalled, that upon the Colonel’s announcement about this evening’s forced march--which was to take thirteen hours and extend the nearly thirty-six miles back to the main base--O’Leary had been able to give a long, audible, incredulous whistle, right in the Colonel’s face, and elicit from the Colonel an indulgent smile; whereas in the same blackout tent and at virtually the same instant Mannix had murmured, “Thirty-six miles, Jesus Christ,” in a tone, however, laden with no more disbelief or no more pain than O’Leary’s whistle, and Culver had seen the Colonel’s smile vanish, replaced on the fragile little face by a subtle, delicate shadow of irritation.