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Snafu gets a letter one month after he gets back to New Orleans.
He’s settling about as well as he ever did before the war; a beat-up apartment, a job that pays for chow and cigarettes and works the nightmares out of him.
So Snafu’s back, and he ain’t ever been seriously injured. The second he takes off his uniform it’s like he never was gone. He introduces himself as Merriell to girls and Snafu to men, and if they ask what the hell kind of name it is, he tells them.
No one working at the mechanic’s is surprised that he’s calling himself by military terms. He guesses that it’s not exactly unexpected to learn he served. Everyone served, anyway, seems like. Least Snafu wasn’t no fucking draftee.
He goes out sometimes to talk to girls till they slap him, which he doesn’t care about either way. If he was stuck back on that shithole Pavuvu with no girls, he’d be talking shit to the guys till someone swung a punch, and it’d accomplish the same thing. But Snafu’s getting his kicks by pissing off girls whose nails leave marks across his cheekbone sometimes.
He doesn’t wear his dogtags anymore, but he did drill a hole through one of those Jap teeth to string it up as a trophy he can pull out for free drinks in exchange for a story or two.
And then he gets that letter.
It’s addressed to Snafu Shelton, in handwriting he thinks he remembers. The return address on the envelope doesn’t have a name, but it’s from Alabama, so he knows anyway.
Shelton,
You have some kind of nerve, walking off the train like that.
I’m back home and Deacon’s still dead. My dog, I mean. My best friend’s getting married and my brother’s full of stories about Europe, and I can’t tell my mother anything. The first time your name came up I’d have to explain it to her and then she’d probably wash my mouth out with soap.
I don’t know if you remember Sidney Phillips, from H/1/1. I hung around with him before Peleliu, but you and I didn’t talk much then. Well, he’s marrying the prettiest girl in town, even though she doesn’t deserve the grief he’s going to give her. It’s next month, the end of April. I’m the best man.
I thought maybe you could come.
Snafu only reads the letter once. Then he turns the paper over, scrawls out, how the fuck did you get my address, and puts the letter back in its envelope. He takes it to work with him, because they have tape there for the torn-open edge.
He goes to the post office instead of eating lunch. The man at the counter is in a uniform, with sharp creases and hat and everything, and it seems stupid to dress up like that and not even have medals or rank insignia. Who gives a shit if you have shiny buttons and a fucking hat.
“Send this back,” he tells the man at the counter.
He takes it curiously. It’s obviously been open and sealed again. He frowns and asks, “Did it go to the wrong address?”
“Sure did,” Snafu says.
The man chuckles good-naturedly and gets out a stamp. “I’ll mark it ‘Return to Sender’, then, and they can try again.”
Snafu wishes he were allowed to carry his KA-BAR around even though he’s not in the Marines anymore. He can’t stand people who are in that good a mood to do their jobs. But he just shakes he head and goes back to work.
Five days later, there’s another letter. Snafu ignores it a full day before he gets drunk and reads it before bed.
Shelton,
Are you actually too lazy to buy a stamp?
I called up the Marine office in New Orleans. They have records on veterans and they were only too happy to give me your address once I told them why I wanted it.
I’m serious. The wedding is the 28th, a week after Easter Sunday. You can stay with me, we have plenty of guest rooms.
Snafu just goes to sleep, refuses to think on it any further.
He takes it to work again in the morning, borrows the woman who runs the desk’s pen to write on the back of the letter: why did you want it. Then he tapes it closed and goes back to the post office.
“Again?” the postman says. He’s still got those shiny buttons and no real purpose.
“They’ve got the wrong guy,” Snafu says. His lips stretch in a smile and he stares at the man’s eyes until he’s discouraged from asking anything else.
The envelope gets the rubber stamp and heads back for Alabama. Another comes in its place by the end of the week.
It’s a bad day for Snafu. He’s not tired enough to sleep without dreaming, and all day at the garage he had to work on a car whose muffler kept making a soft whump that echoed wrong in his head. He kept expecting orders on how to aim his mortar, kept freezing and waiting for Sledge to call that he was ready to fire. Kept tensing his body, ready to grab forty pounds of weapon and hump it up some fucking miserable hill. He’s ready to go Asiatic.
Now he’s smoking too many cigarettes and staring at the newest envelope.
He tears it open, finally, with a dirty glass and a bottle waiting to be poured out sitting on his counter.
Shelton,
You are, indeed, exactly that lazy. I don’t know why I’m surprised.
I told them I needed your address to put you in my will. During the war it was just my parents on there.
I told them you’re coming. If you don’t buy the train tickets, I’ll come down there and drag you here myself. Two weeks from Sunday. Come on Friday, stay the weekend.
Snafu throws the letter down and decides he’s got too much energy to stay in. He goes out to a low-down bar, where the kind of girl who’d take offense to him wouldn’t dare come. Snafu picks out an Army man who dressed up in his ODs to come to this kind of place and hates him immediately.
He’s in the kind of mood where if anyone in the place had slanty eyes, he’d be picking a fight with them. Instead, he sidles up to the Army man and starts talking, the slow cruel way Snafu perfected for creeping the new meat outta their skins. The Army man fought in Europe, and he gets pissed when Snafu starts shit talking about how Nazis are pussies who at least fucking surrendered.
Snafu goes home with a new shiner all over his face. No way they’d want him at any wedding.
In the morning, he brings the letter to work. The woman at the desk is all concerned over him and his bruises and his split lip, and he tells her off for it. He’s had much worse and he has the scars to prove it. He uses her pen to write, ain’t got no suit, in a place where the words haven’t bled through to the back of the letter’s paper.
“Persistent, aren’t they?” the postman asks, taking the taped-up envelope. He’s not so cheerful anymore, not staring at Snafu’s face the way he is.
Snafu bites his lip open again, makes sure there’s blood in the creases of his teeth when he smiles this time. “They’ll learn their lesson.”
Another envelope comes, thin and flat. Nothing inside it. Just Snafu Shelton’s address, the nameless return in the corner, and on the backside: Wear your dress blues, you have a week to get them pressed. And buy your own paper.
Snafu has the day off work, anyway. He goes to the train station and then the post office. He buys an envelope and a stamp and stands at the counter with the empty, unopened one from Alabama, copying over the return address. He puts the ticket receipt inside, writes Eugene Sledge above the address, and hands it to the postman, who’s learned his lesson about asking questions by now.
He’ll need to keep the other envelope, or he won’t know where to go when he gets there.