The Marines Have Landed

by CAPTAIN ROBERT P. PARSONS

1

HERE is the formula: Take equal parts of two nice peoples, white and brown; mix suddenly and intimately; close your eyes and hold your hands over your ears while awaiting the explosion. If no explosion occurs, open your eyes and see what, if anything, has happened.

That experiment was made in Elysia in 1042. It wasn’t exactly an experiment—it was a necessity, Elysia, for obvious reasons, is not the name of the place, but it would be a good name if the Elysians wanted to use an English designation for their group of islands.

A word about the white and brown ingredients. The whites are American boys who in 1941 were in American homes, on American farms, in American factories, filling stations, offices, grocery stores, drugstores, soda fountains, high schools, colleges. In 1942 they were transformed, transported, and transplanted, all in the course of a few months — transformed into American Marines, transported far into the Southwest Pacific to Elysia, and transplanted onto Elysian soil.

The browns, the Elysians, arc only a few generations removed from cannibals, but they have changed their dietary habits and now subsist on taro roots, bananas, breadfruit, chicken, pork, papayas, and an infinite variety of dishes prepared from the ubiquitous coconut of the Southwest Pacific. They are a gentle, kindly, and friendly people of great simplicity as to manner of life, and are, I should judge, the happiest people in the world.

Until about forty years ago they had practically no contact with the white man, and from that time until 1942 they saw only a few traders and a handful of missionaries. The white man, having been present in such small numbers, did not affect them very much, except in two ways: he brought them his diseases, notably tuberculosis (but in fairness to the missionaries as well as, I suppose, the Elysians, be it said that he brought them no venereal diseases, and to this day venereal disease is virtually unknown in the Elysian group), and he brought them Christianity.

The missionary business has always been good in Elysia. Christianity came pretty high as it brought a plethora of fine church buildings that had to he built and have to be supported. But on the whole, the Elysians got their money’s worth. Or rather, their mat’s worth. Until very recently, woven mats were the only medium of exchange. They got their mat’s worth because they love religion, they love preaching, they love rituals and ceremonies and prayers and dignity and austerity, and meetings and gatherings under any pretext; and above all they love singing, the choral music of our hymns being as much up their alley as spiritual choruses are to the American Negro.

The Church brought a certain amount of social order and discipline, which did no harm. The Church should not be credited with the Elysian’s abstemiousness as regards the white man’s alcohol. He just has no taste for it and probably could not even be “driven to drink.’ The Church taught the women to cover their bodies with dresses when in public, and although there are those who view this custom as an unfortunate introduction of prudishness, I am inclined to stand with a different school, which contends that partial concealment, like distance, lends enchantment.

That was the milieu in which the Marines were set down. They found themselves in the midst of Elysians, and the Elysians found themselves in the midst of Marines. There was a fairly even mixture — white and brown. There wasn’t a white woman in the islands. The few that were present were evacuated after Pearl Harbor — before the Marines arrived.

2

The Marines were not segregated in one section of the islands, as they were before the war when Marine Corps posts were established outside the United States. They moved into every village. They pitched their tents between the ‘Tittle grass shacks” and all around them. They even expropriated some of the larger and better native huts and moved in. Sometimes they didn’t wait for the natives to move out. Shelter is something you have to have in Elysia, the way it rains there.

There are many social distinctions and castes among the Elysians, but they all dress alike and live in the same kind of huts, so the Marines were not aware, at first, of the pattern of the social order, and they did not know that any arrangement or negotiation of any importance with the natives could be effected only by prior consultation with the high chief of the village. Also, the natives did not know much, at first, about the pattern of the Marine Corps, and they didn’t appreciate the necessity of seeing the colonel first about matters involving interracial transactions.

But both sides caught on quickly, and both saw and accepted the need for extensive compromises. To the credit of both sides, the compromises were accomplished with the utmost ease. Both broke with tradition and both gave a good deal of ground. So no explosion occurred, and if you should ask what happened, the answer would be: so far as trouble goes — not a darn thing.

The compromises were interesting enough, and often surprising. The Marines were obliged to learn and to endure a much simpler way of life; the Elysians had to conform to many complexities that must have seemed strange and needless to them. It is debatable which side found the larger difficulties, the greater amusement, or the greater mystification through all the changes. I wouldn’t venture so much as a guess about it, but I attended the meeting of a native debating society one evening and was given a running translation of some arguments relating to the advantages and disadvantages of wisdom. One elderly Eiysian woman debater doubted the high value of the white man’s kind of wisdom. She said, “What is the use of it when it teaches them so many new and terrible ways of destroying each other in such large numbers?”

One of the more serious problems at first was that of camp sanitation. Pigs were everywhere in the villages and did not respect the white man’s living quarters. In terms of sanitation they were a serious nuisance. The Marine captain told the village high chief to fence the pigs in a designated area well removed from the village. There was no fencing material, but the high chief said, “Okay, Cap, we do.” The natives brought rocks, carried them one by one, and built a wall that enclosed a two-acre pigpen, all in the course of a couple of days. But an occasional pig got out or an occasional one wandered in from a neighboring village. The captain said, “Chief, tell your people that any pig I see in the village I am going to shoot.” The chief said, “Okay, Cap, you shoot, we eat.” The chief was privately pleased over an arrangement whereby the Marines would perform some of his slaughtering for him.

Every village was soon a model of cleanliness and orderliness. The captain would say, “Chief, I notice there is some trash around the village; get it cleaned up.” “Okay, Cap, wn do,” the chief would say, and quicker than it takes to say “remove trash” in Eiysian there would be fifty brown kids scurrying about the village and carrying every article of refuse to an incinerator outside the village.

Plumbing, modern or otherwise, was something entirely foreign to the Eiysian. Even a latrine was a nonentity as well as a nonessential so far as his past experience went. The whole jungle was his latrine and the jungle came close, too close, to the village and marine encampments. The sanitary oilicers recommended that the natives be provided with privies and be forced to use them. The captain had a conference with the village chief, explaining that the Marines would construct the necessary buildings, et cetera, at strategic points about the village. The whole problem was rather perplexing to the chief and he had to ask a few questions about technical details and ponder the matter some minutes. But he soon announced his decision: “Okay, Cap, you build, we use.”

3

Considerations of recreation and entertainment, in the service, come under the general heading of “morale.” The military use of the word is a very broad one. It was easy enough to provide such standard American forms as athletic sports, music, movies, and reading matter, but when it came to holding dances, well, the only girls were brown ones; they had no shoes and had had no experience at all in American forms of dancing. Moreover, they were outnumbered by the Marines about five to one, and then there was the question of what the Elysian boys and parents and high chiefs might think about it. The whole thing had to be entered into cautiously, and at first as a sort of small experiment.

The success of the experiment was incredible. There were a few sticklers for tradition among the Marines, but fully 90 per cent believed in “taking their fun where they found it.” The bare feet of the girls seemed to matter not at all. It detracted nothing from their grace or their ability in ballroom dancing, and the bare feet were so tough that when they were stepped on their owners just giggled and said “Okay, so sorry.” The girls learned all the steps in one easy lesson of about ten minutes. Arthur Murray would never make a cent in Elysia. Dancing lessons in Elysia start at the age of two, shortly after the baby is able to stand on its feet, and I have often seen mothers, at the break of day, sitting cross-legged on a coconut mat and beating a rhythm with their hands while naked babes were learning the first foot and body movements of the native dances.

The awkward ratio of sexes was met at first by stag lines and tag dances, but further measures had to be taken. Some of the villages are close together and at first the Marines of different units from several neighboring villages would all collect at the one village where the dance of the evening was being held. This practice was soon stopped by an innovation that might be called the reverse invitation. Colonel Smith, of village X, would send out invitations to the commands of the neighboring villages, announcing that a dance was to be held in his village on a certain evening, but because of the small size of the hall and the shortage of girls, all troops from all other villages were cordially invited to stay away. These invitations were accepted, respected, and fully reciprocated. On the other hand, all the girls attended from all the near-by villages and sometimes were imported from distant villages by the truckload.

As for the Elysian boys, they rose to the situation handsomely. They came in their bare feet and did their share of tagging and got tagged. Both sides were very sporting about it all and tried to outdo each other in courtesy. The girls never left the floor except for a moment to go to the powder room, or rather the powder jungle. Perhaps that was why parents didn’t worry about the dances in Elysia. Incidcntly they don’t use powder in Elysia, or rouge or lipstick. It would be terrible to gild those satin complexions. If Patrick Henry were here he might say, “If this be treason, let’s make the most of it, but the truth is the American boys kinda like that absence of cosmetics and find it rather refreshing.”

The dance business soon became too much of a success and would have become too much of a racket if certain restrictions had not been applied. The Elysians had begun to get acquainted with American money and its potentialities early in 1942 when the American contractors arrived to construct certain military installations and hired Elysian labor. This enabled most families to stop planting taro and to import it from other islands and to buy canned salmon and other American luxuries.

The dance business supplied more fuel for the gravy train, and this new economy was not salubrious. The village chiefs and other important families soon realized the financial possibilities of dances and began the practice of removing the furniture from their houses once a week and turning them into dance halls. They charged fifty cents admission and put on native dance exhibitions during which the customers were invited to throw money on the floor. The dancing girls did not share in the floor money, the house taking all. The take for one exhibition would be sometimes as much as forty dollars. Exhibitions usually alternated with partner dances. The overhead was negligible. The dances were becoming so numerous and so raucous that the military people put on the brakes. Now the only dances are those sponsored by the Marine units, admission free, Marine music, selected exhibitions only, paid for by straight fees to the exhibition girls, and no floor money.

During the heyday of the exhibition dance racket we saw some unusual advertising placards around our village. The following is a verbatim copy of one of them except for name place deletions and the English substitution for the native name of the dance club.

DANCE

Give by
“TAKE IT EASY CLUB”
Admission 50₡
Dancing Hall at 6.30 P.M.
June 13, 1942 — Saturday evening
Jazz Music Orchestra

The fancy show will be held on Saturday Night, in the same time competition of different dances will perform. Those who will give the best show and the best performance will be deserved to get the first prize. Come, don’t miss the best dancers wonderful time Hawaiian hula and Polynesian dances and performances, will be taken place and also a knife dance. I believe you eager and grave to have good time so come to see its will be helpful remedy for your sadness and to give a chance to your long happiness.

(NOTICE)

Intoxicating liquor, fights and arguments with all indecent actions are not allowed to be seen, if we do get rid of these things its does mean we are showing our Gentlemenlike. (Dress Up Well.)

4

At village X we went in for benefit dances at first, but now they are definitely out. The Elysian Teachers Society approached me about a dance for their benefit because of their trouble in eating, with the high price of taro and their continued low salaries. After confirming their story I agreed to their request and we planned to hold the dance a week later to inaugurate our newly constructed recreation hut. The day following the agreement with the teachers, I received at my tent a delegation of very irate brown ladies, members of the Ladies Relief Society of village X. They said that I should have consulted them first and they demanded that a benefit dance for their Relief Society be held before the one for such a non-local organization as the island Teachers Society. They said that their plan would be more in keeping with Elysian custom, which follows a policy of Charity Begins at Home.

I explained that it was an old American custom to keep one’s promise; that I had already promised the teachers the opening night benefit; but that I should be glad to fix a later date with them for their benefit. They were adamant and gave me notice that unless I acceded to their demands they would boycott the teachers’ dance and would not allow the village maidens to attend. I countered with the information that we had already arranged for two truckloads of girls from village Z, three miles distant, and that doubtless other neighboring villages would send girls, so that while the high quality of the village X maidens might be missed, their numerical absence would scarcely be noticed. The delegation left in a huff and I thought at the time that they were my enemies for life.

A serious dispute was brewing at that time between the natives of village X and the natives of the adjoining village Y, I set to work to arbitrate it and on the day of the dance I was able to gather all the chiefs together from both villages and was fortunate enough to negotiate a settlement that was entirely amicable and satisfactory to both sides. The resulting joy was so great throughout village X that the matrons called off their boycott and they and their daughters attended the dance in force. The box office was so successful that we presented the teachers with the price of a three months’ supply of taro.

Late in the evening the Relief Society president came to me with the request that her ladies be allowed to put on an exhibition dance. I explained that, by previous agreement with the teachers, the exhibitions were limited to a selected few, that our boys had expressed themselves as being surfeited with exhibitions, and that it would profit her nothing anyhow, since all floor money was being turned over to the teachers, in addition to all the box office money. Whereupon she offered me a personal bribe of five dollars if I would allow the exhibition; a bribe, not for the teachers, but for my personal pocket. The teachers’ committee was then consulted and they decided to accept the five dollars (plus the floor money) for this infringement on their program, but two of them said they doubted if it was worth the money. The transaction gave me some insight into the ramifications of the dance racket. Apparently, except for feature numbers, the performers pay higher than the audience for the exhibitions.

Two weeks later we put on a benefit for the Ladies Relief Society and doubled the take of the teachers’ dance. At this writing the ladies of the Relief Society are my warm friends. I don’t think they know yet that we have banned benefit dances for all future time.

5

The laundry situation has been a difficult one ever since the Murines landed. In the pre-Marine era there was a small machine laundry in the largest village, capable of giving service to about one hundred people. Except for soap, the Marines brought no laundry equipment with them. The Marine officers, especially the colonels, had been accustomed for years to rigid standards of personal attire, and now there was no way of keeping them in the fine style to which they had become accustomed. Some of the early arrivals were able to secure a private laundress for each house full of Marine officers; and these women, having had some previous experience with laundry methods and standards of the white man, were able to produce results which at best could be classed as fair. With the officers billeted in tents in or near the smaller villages it was different. They had to send their laundry out to any of the village women who would handle it.

The Elysians have many fine arts in which they have attained a laudable degree of skill, but laundering is not one of them. The Elysian method, in common with that of most tropical regions, is somewhat as follows:

Entire laundry collection of one individual is wrapped into a tight bundle and taken to the nearest river or the village pool, which is a combination bathing and clothes-washing center. The bundle will include socks or other articles from which the dye will run, and these streak plentifully the khaki and white articles. The next step is to take a club, a little longer and heavier than a policeman’s, and beat the bundle mercilessly for twenty minutes, immersing it momentarily alter each fourth or fifth whacking. The bundle is then opened and the articles are spread out over bushes or rocks or grass. The drying period varies from minutes to days, according to the rainfall of the season. In the final step the clothes are spread over a cloth on the floor of the woman’s hut, and by a few deft strokes with her charcoal-fueled iron she removes some of the wrinkles, rewraps the bundle, calls it a day, and reaches for her guitar. The customer’s problem, after the bundle has been returned to his tent, is to guess which of his clothes bundles are to be sent to the laundress and which have just returned from her.

The Elysian laundresses do not concern themselves with check lists. That is the customer’s worry, and it does worry him to find frequent discrepancies between outgoing and incoming bundles, the discrepancy always being on the wrong side of the ledger, so far as he is concerned. The Elysian woman’s vocabulary of English words is totally lacking in terminology of the laundry business, except for matters of price, so that the question of discrepancies is absolutely closed to discussion. Many Elysian men and boys, whose chests and necks once proudly bore fine necklaces and artistic tattoos, are now much less colorfully attired in drab khaki shirts or white cotton undershirts.

The Marine undershirt is practically a universal garment in Elysia. It clothes the entire body of a child up to the age of six at least as much of the body as requires covering in Elysia. The Marines usually have their names stenciled along the lower border of the undershirt, so it is a little incongruous to see brown children playing about the village in undershirts of knee or ankle length bearing stenciled names like Steve Ryan, Corp. USMC, or Pete Macielewski, Pvt. 1st Class, USMC.

The natives do not acquire all these undershirts through laundry pilferings. They come by many of them honestly as just payment for native merchandise or favors granted. The undershirt seems to have replaced the woven mat as a non-monetary medium of exchange. Most natives prefer to receive payment in undershirts since they have an intrinsic value which is lacking in American currency and because there is a very limited variety of commodities that can be purchased in Elysia anyhow.

As I remarked earlier, the most acute sufferers in the present laundry situation are the later arrivals among the officers. The privates, of course, wash their own; but the sergeants and corporals have every woman for miles around every camp signed up in one way or another to her full capacity of laundry production. A newly arrived lieutenant, down to his last clean shirt, was complaining bitterly to one of the sergeants. “Sergeant,”he said, “I can’t understand it and I don’t know what I can do about it, but it seems a person can’t get a laundress around here for love or money.”The sergeant’s reply was a classic. “Well anyways, sir,” he said, “not for no money.”

The colonel in village X doesn’t have to worry. They do a pretty good laundry job for him with quick and regular service and never a missing garment; not even an undershirt. But the colonel has something to trade for the service. He has a commodity that is more highly prized than undershirts. You could never guess what it is, so I’ll tell you. It’s garbage. The Elysian’s favorite dish is roast pig, and the pig’s favorite and most fattening dish is garbage. Without garbage from the Marine Corps camps the pigs would be in a bad way, and without fat pigs the Elysians would be in a bad way. The colonel sends the camp garbage to the village high chief’s pigpen, thus solving with no trouble at all the sanitary problem of garbage disposal. The high chief’s wife is the laundry dictator, as well as the social dictator, of the village — and there you have it: contented pigs, happy high chief, high chief’s well-fed wife, and satisfied laundry customer, the colonel.

6

It must not be concluded from what we have said about the Elysian laundry service, or anything else we have said to place the Elysians in an unfavorable light, that the Marines do not have an admiring and friendly regard for them. The more the Marines see of them and learn about them the higher they esteem them and the more they value the Elysians’ friendship. It is only the small fraction of the Marine population that fails to appreciate the finer qualities of this remote people living in a world that is a complete contrast to the world we have know n. Tout comprendre, c’ est tout pardonner. It is just the few who, laboring under some ridiculous sort of race superiority complex, are not able to see that variations from our own social-economic formulae should not necessarily condemn a people.

These few say that the Elysians are dirty. Actually, they bathe oftener and longer than the white man, and put on clean (though poorly ironed and unstarched) clothes oftener. They say the Elysians are lazy. Actually they work harder and longer than the white man, with their own hands and not with machines. They go into the mountains daily — all those not needed in the home or in village activities, from young children to wrinkled old men and tottering old women — to plant and to harvest taro and to gather heavy loads of food and materials of many kinds that enter into their scheme of home economics. The few say the Elysians lack ambition. But the mountains have fertile soil and plentiful rains and the sea is full of fish. It is hard work to gather the fruits and the fish and the materials for clothing and home building, so it would be foolish to gather more than you need. You can only sleep in one bed (or on one mat) at a time, so why have a house larger than is needed for one mat per occupant?

“Why don’t they make chairs?” the white man inquires. But the answer is that they are more comfortable sitting cross-legged on a mat; and those who, out of curiosity or deference to our custom, try sitting on a white man’s chair get just as cramped and tired as we should sitting cross-legged on the floor. Why don’t they follow our clothing fashions? Because theirs are twice as comfortable and therefore twice as sensible. Why don’t they build houses like ours? Because theirs are cooler and airier and easier to build. Why don’t they eat our types of food? Eor one good reason, because they like theirs better; and for another, because, judging from the Elysian physique, theirs must be much more healthful.

The Marines have learned a great deal by coming to Elysia and living among the Elysians. Many of them have come far enough away from the large cities of America to unlearn a few things. The smarter and more philosophical ones have been able to unlearn some very old American fallacies. Those who had been accustomed to money and to the idea that money is a measure of success and happiness found themselves very unhappy when they first arrived in Elysia. There was nothing to buy with their money. They had to learn that great happiness comes from working with one’s hands, producing one’s comforts, one’s food and clothing and shelter, with one’s own hands; that you get your happiness with manual skill and industry and mental alertness, and from the natural joy and loving friendship that nature has stored in the more fortunate of human hearts. Nature has stored her best gifts plentifully in the hearts of the Elysians.

We have done many things around village X that have brought serious hardships and inconvenience to the villagers; but far from complaining, they have smiled and shown their beautifully perfect white teeth and have thanked us, and God, that it was no worse. We have built barracks in their taro patches, moved their homes when it suited our plans, injured or destroyed their houses by tractor accidents, plowed up their yards, their flowers and grass, with our trucks and tractors. But they have always laughed and said it was their contribution to the war. They have laughed and have sung soft music in the moonlight for us and have planted their taro higher in the steep mountains where our tractors cannot go. They have shown us happiness and deep friendship at times when the white man would be inspired to murder.

Most any Elysian kid can win the heart of most any Marine. My first acquaintance in village X was with Willie, aged twelve. He stood in front of me for a moment and, flashing his white teeth in a bewitching smile, lost no time in engaging me in conversation. Willie had just come down the mountain with a heavy load of taro and was quite dirty; in fact, his only garment, his loin cloth, was filthy. Willie could be a perfect stand-in for Baku, the elephant boy, of the movies. He is a smart kid and speaks better English than anyone in the village except his father. He looked me over and noted the insignia on my collar.

“Captin,” he said, “I very very happy, very happy to meet you.” I had not introduced myself or made any gesture that would indicate a desire for his acquaintance. “If you like walk in village,” he continued, “I can go wid you, show you every tings. I did not know I would walk wid you dis day. If I know I would make my body clean. If dere is words you do not know I will announce de meaning of dem to you.”

Willie’s father has one eye, wears a khakicolored cloth and a string of shark’s teeth beads, and speaks polished English. He teaches school all day — all the usual subjects of the grade school, plus English. In the evening he conducts a class in which he tries to teach the Elysian language to a group of Marine and Navy officers, but with indifferent success, which is no reflection on his teaching. The language has no points of comparability with English in what we understand as grammar or sentence construction; but that is an intricate subject, and don’t get me started.

One evening Willie entered the classroom in the middle of the session and whispered something to his father. Quite unruffled, the teacher stopped his lecture to announce: “If you will excuse me, gentlemen, I think we shall terminate our lesson for this evening. My son, Willie, has just come to inform me that my wife is removing the furniture from my house and is leaving.” Trying to outdo him in savoir-faire I stood up and said, “We are dismayed to learn of this unhappy turn of events. If we can be of any possible assistance in this dark hour that has fallen upon your house you have only to call on us.”

Still unruffled as he made his unhurried exit, he smiled graciously and said, “Thank you so much. No, I can attend to this myself quite well.” I don’t know what sort of technique he employed in that crisis but it must have been effective. I passed his house the next morning and his stout wife, Katie, and all the children were going about the morning routine in their usual happy and placid way.

We and the Elysians have learned a good deal about each other in 1942, and the more we have learned the more friendly and appreciative of each other we have become. Each has recognized that the other is smarter in some things; that the other excels in some directions. We both understand that our backgrounds have made us differ from each other a little but that basically we are pretty much the same thing.

But the Elysian children still think we are rather odd.

Little Lucie, aged six, wandered into my tent one day and looked the place over carefully. She turned to me and said, “Where woman? ”

Lapsing into Lucie’s dialect, I said, “Don’t got woman this house.”

Lucie was frankly puzzled. “Don’t got woman this house? All house got woman,” she said.

“Well, this house don’t got woman,” I said.

“White man funny” Lucie said, and walked out of the tent.