United States Marine Corps

The United States Marine Corps enters the story chiefly through Ernie Block’s life and self-understanding: twenty-eight years of service, combat experience in Vietnam, and a conviction that duty and courage remain binding even after retirement. The Corps is not presented through an institutional overview; its significance is personal, visible in the habits Ernie carries into civilian life and in the crisis that makes those habits insufficient.

Career and Service

Ernie served in the Marine Corps for twenty-eight years and had been retired for six when his fear of darkness began to dominate his days. His military history includes two tours in Vietnam. During his second tour, he was wounded by bullets in the butt and back, an injury that had once been the only reason he had spent time in a hospital.

A memory from his work with Marine Intelligence gives combat fear a precise measure. Driving a Jeep through territory expected to be friendly, Ernie came under enemy fire. Shells threw dirt and broken pavement near the vehicle; he endured more than twenty near-misses, was struck by three jagged mortar fragments, temporarily lost his hearing in the blasts, and struggled to control the Jeep after all four tires went flat. He survived the episode believing he had experienced fear as profound as fear could be. Years later, the memory becomes a contrast against an anxiety that has no visible enemy and no battlefield to escape.

Military Identity in Civilian Life

Ernie’s physical presence and military past make his new vulnerability difficult for him to accept. Six feet tall and powerfully built, he had been called Bull as a high-school football player. During his Marine career, people called him sir, sometimes even those of equal rank. That public authority sits uneasily beside the private evidence of his condition: sweaty palms as sunset approaches, trembling hands, a churning stomach, and dread of the dark itself.

He treats endurance as a duty that continues beyond his service. Although retired, he still thinks of himself as a Marine and regards duty and courage as sacred. When darkness makes it impossible for him to keep the motel desk open, he experiences the retreat not simply as fear but as a failure of the standards he has always met. His memories of Vietnam intensify the humiliation: he had performed under bullets and explosions, yet cannot manage an ordinary evening shift behind the motel counter.

Faye and the Life Built Around Service

The Corps also shapes the shared history of Ernie and Faye Block. Faye followed him from Quantico to Singapore, to Camp Pendleton in California, and to Alaska, making a home wherever military life allowed dependents to accompany him. She did not follow him to Vietnam or, later, Beirut. Ernie recognizes that he had underestimated her toughness and the steadiness with which she had weathered difficult years without complaining or failing him.

That history informs his effort to conceal his growing fear. He worries that she will discover how severely darkness affects him, and he imagines that an illness such as Alzheimer’s could make him a burden on her. His belief that the men in the Block family must never let their womenfolk down connects his private shame to a family code as well as to the discipline he associates with military service. When he finally agrees to tell Faye everything, sharing the burden becomes a change in how he faces the problem: he no longer has to protect her by keeping his condition secret.

Duty, Fear, and the Limits of Discipline

Through Ernie, the novel distinguishes courage from invulnerability. His Marine record does not prevent his fear; it makes the fear harder for him to admit. He first dismisses the possibility that his condition is serious, partly because mental illness has never appeared in his family and partly because he cannot imagine himself seeking psychiatric help. He expects to tough it out, as though the discipline that carried him through combat must also overcome an unexplained terror of darkness.

The crisis tests that expectation in concrete ways. On a return drive from Elko, a flat tire and a delayed repair leave him racing toward the Tranquility Motel as the sun sinks over the Great Basin. He fears that if full darkness catches him on the road, he will be unable to finish the journey. The motel’s neon sign, visible ahead in the twilight, becomes a welcome refuge. Yet the episode also shows the limits of an identity built on self-reliance: military endurance can explain why Ernie keeps trying, but it cannot by itself make the fear disappear. The Corps’ influence is therefore both sustaining and constraining—giving him a language of duty while making vulnerability feel like a breach of duty.