Chapter 32
WHEN WE LAST LEFT Prell in Chapter 29, he was on his bond-selling tour in Kansas City, Lincoln, and Denver. Strange had telephoned him from Luxor in the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City to tell him of Marion Landers’ death. Prell was feeling guilty about his own lack of reaction, during his talk with Strange, to Landers’ apparent suicide. As with the others, he was being beset with nightmares involving the squad again, the patrol on New Georgia, and in his dreams Landers was now one of the dead. He was guilty also about his own position, the Medal of Honor hero, which he did not believe he deserved. He felt he was making speeches for a living—that he had become an entertainer, part of a vaudeville team.
His reaction when he returned briefly to Luxor from this first bond-selling tour was to avoid getting in touch with either Strange or Winch. He did not want to see them; he did not want to expose himself to the ridicule he imagined he would provoke in them because of what he considered his false role as a public relations man.
All he had left now, Prell felt, was his son-and-father relationship with former colonel, now Brigadier General Stevens, the commander of the hospital, a kindly relationship which began with Stevens’ first visit to Prell in the hospital when the doctors were threatening to amputate his leg, and deepened as the months passed.
But in a scene with Brigadier Stevens in his office in the hospital in Luxor, Prell found to his sorrow that Stevens did not truly understand his feelings of guilt and inadequacy, and that in fact Stevens never had understood him. Prell did not feel up to explaining to Stevens what he believed to be his hypocritical role as a salesman and a fake hero.
Prell left his session with Stevens more desolate than ever, realizing that perhaps Strange and Winch were the only two people who genuinely did sympathize with what was happening to him. But he was still unwilling to call either one of them.
Warrant Officer Jack Alexander informed Winch that Prell had returned to the Luxor hospital for a few days. As far as Alexander could see, in his uncomprehending attitude, Prell was all right. Winch had hoped that Prell would come and see him and Strange, but his talk with Alexander nonetheless reassured him.
Prell was then ordered more or less permanently to Los Angeles with Major Kurntz and the same public relations crew with which he had made his first bond-selling trip. Since he had had a highly unsatisfactory reunion with his pregnant wife, Delia Mae, and his ambitious mother-in-law in Luxor, he took an apartment in Los Angeles and did not give them his telephone number or address.
In Los Angeles Prell made a couple of appearances with several movie stars and starlets. But after his first speech there, which was a huge success, he got drunk and went out that night in the limousine which had been put at his disposal with its Army driver, a sergeant. He ran around down in the low-bar areas of Los Angeles and ended up in a seedy bar filled with drunk servicemen. The driver waited for him outside.
With all the accumulated rage burning in him, he tried to pick a fight. But with his bad legs he was practically incapable of self-defense. Just as the irate soldiers whom he had insulted and challenged were about to beat him up, perhaps even kill him, one of them suddenly recognized the Medal of Honor ribbon he was wearing on his blouse, and then remembered him from his pictures in the Los Angeles papers. The soldier said: “Good God, we’re about to beat up on a Medal of Honor winner!” and stopped the fight.
The soldiers found out that there was a sergeant waiting for Prell in the limousine outside the bar. They went and got him. The soldier who had recognized Prell warned the sergeant, “He shouldn’t be in a place like this.” The sergeant took Prell home. He did not inform Major Kurntz of what had happened, thinking that he was protecting Prell, and doing so with his natural soldier’s instinct not ever to tell the authorities anything they did not already know.
The next speech was in Bakersfield. The entire bond-selling group drove out in limousines for the evening “performance.” After his speech, Prell repeated the same pattern with a different driver. He got very drunk and asked the driver to let him off at another tough bar.
He got out of the limousine and hobbled into the bar on his ruined legs. There was an expression on his face of hard desperate determination. He walked into the bar. It was a green place, smoke-filled, with the rattling of pool balls, and mean drunken soldiers at the tables and on the bar stools, and a couple of poker games in the corner. After two or three drinks he began to bait some of the servicemen around him, and picked another fight. This time he was not recognized by the soldiers. The result was a bloody brawl, with Prell at the center, in which he seriously hurt someone. In the smoky haze one of the soldiers picked up a pool cue. He hit Prell over the head with it and killed him.
The sergeant driver, having heard the noise, rushed into the bar and saw Prell bleeding on the floor. He felt his pulse. He told the men what they had done, told them whom they had killed. The soldiers were horrified, but left the impression that Prell had brought it all on himself, as in fact he had done, deliberately picking the fight with them.