Was he sitting at the bar?
Or maybe in the car?
When he told that old, old story
Of bravery and glory,
Of perilous feats from lands afar?
The most pleasant times I spent with Michael was those times when he told a story. Most often he told his tale over a martini in the lounge of a conference hotel, but I happen to have a copy of a story he told at the 2007 Linguistic Circle of Manitoba and North Dakota. It was part of his keynote address.
Michael tells a story
In a 1958 snapshot, seven 19-year olds stand sweating and weary-looking in front of a Quonset hut, dressed in ill-fitting Marine fatigues. The short, skinny one at the right holds a sodden boot in one hand and stares into it. That’s me. A few days earlier we had been instructed in several methods of killing a man with one’s bare hands. Some of us had taken a try at negotiating the obstacle course, with varying degrees of success. Evenings we spent at the base officers’ club, drinking gin and tonics and singing bawdy songs. We were the ROTC midshipmen of Holy Cross College, assigned to Little Creek, Virginia, for three sweltering weeks of Marine Corps indoctrination and training. On the day when that photograph was taken we had conducted a mock amphibious landing, charging down the ramp of a landing craft, struggling through deep surf and across a sandy beach into thickets of coarse grass and stunted pines, where we wandered aimlessly for a few hours under a baking July sun that would have dried our sopping uniforms, were it not for the humidity and our profuse outpourings of sweat. The boot I stare into in the photo was gritty inside and out with quantities of wet sand I had picked up while struggling across the beach, sand that had rubbed my poor foot raw.
The photo was taken by a classmate who, several years later, became my brother-in-law. Over the intervening half century we have reminisced now and again about our adventure in amphibious warfare, usually over a glass of something or other that invariably prompts what the old-time rhetoricians called copia verborum—artful variation and embroidery on whatever facts we can dredge up. The story has become for us a sort of comic Iliad, and though both of us were first-hand participants, we have embellished the story so often and enthusiastically that neither of us can say for sure where fact leaves off and imagination begins. I’m fairly certain that I was indeed one of the first to step off the ramp of the landing craft when it dropped into the surf, but who can say for sure how far out from the beach we actually were and how deep the water I stepped into really was? In my mind’s eye, the surf stretches for two hundred yards, five hundred yards, sometimes more, and the water into which I stepped was over my helmet-laden head. As I recall myself struggling desperately to breathe, a sadistic (and possibly imaginary) sergeant yells at me from the security of the landing craft to “keep that weapon dry, mister!” The “weapon” was a World War I vintage rifle, lacking firing pin and ammunition lest we injure ourselves or one of our instructors.
Michael’s keynote address is available in the conference proceedings:
Me too!
I’d like to see this photo!