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"Cpl. Lee "Killer" Clark, a Kentuckian and Marine for eight years, was tall and lean with an enormous head and grossly insufficiently sized ears that painted a picture of cork stoppers in the side of a small keg. He most recently served on the USS Washington and had also been a member of one of the Marine expeditionary companies that had landed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti to restore order in 1915. Clark was most noted for his vulgarity. While most Marines were bilingual in the languages of English and profanity, Clark was the consummate scholar of cursing. When he opened his sewer of a mouth to reprimand Marines, a stream of billingsgate poured forth like fire from the dragon’s mouth.” 

“Pfc. Charles Archibald "Chaz" Ashburton, IV’s father was a prominent rich-as-Croesus Philadelphia lawyer.  Their family home was a sprawling country estate in the affluent community of Villanova on Philadelphia’s Main Line. Cradled in the lap of luxury, he was in his final year at Harvard Law when he and two dozen of his thirty or so classmates dropped out to enlist. Kenneth had great admiration for Ashburton who, with the world as his oyster, chose to forego polo fields, golf courses, tennis courts, and a yacht, for baked-in-the-sun outdoor gyms, muddy hill trails, steaming parade decks, and a steamship crowded with nearly two thousand snoring, barfing, burping, and farting Marines bound for war. For all his money, he never put on airs. He’d give anyone the shirt off his back, but one shouldn’t try to take it from him as he was quick-tempered and could throw a mean punch. All in all, Kenneth concluded that this compatriot who chose to open his oyster with a sword was one fine fellow from Philly.”

“Pvt. J.D. “Goober” Coyle was from a small town in the Mississippi Delta where, shortly after the Civil War, his family had turned to sharecropping after losing their land to plummeting cotton prices. His father had been lynched by neighbors for helping Negro croppers and for his anti-lynching views. From what Kenneth was able to piece together, the family had suffered a perpetually poor existence for four decades after the elder Coyle’s death, moving to Richmond where they lived an equally threadbare life. How Coyle had made it through the recruiting process boggled the mind. Wrong-footed, clumsy, and bungling while on the move, when standing in-place he exemplified Mark Twain’s observation about someone looking like an envelope without any address on it. When attempting a response to anything but the simplest of questions, it was clear that Coyle was lowering his pail into an empty well. If ignorance is truly bliss, then Coyle, having cornered the market, must have more warehouses full of happiness than Mississippi has barns of cotton.”

“Pvt. Walter “Reverend” Titus had been a divinity student at the Bonebrake Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, when a patriotic calling had, at least temporarily, displaced his religious calling. He had shared with Kenneth a letter he had received from a real reverend on the school’s Board of Trustees, calling soldiers an “abomination unto the Lord,” and scalding him for leaving the service of God to become a patriotic murderer. Titus’s father had also been a man of faith — a travelling preacher who had taken his son on the road and regularly broke more than a few commandments, especially the seventh, until he drank himself to death. Despite his father’s transgressions, or perhaps because of them, Titus had turned to the religious life. Raised on prunes and proverbs and scarred by his patriarchal experiences, Titus, a teetotaler, abstainer, and all-around innocent, had extreme views on drink, fornication, and sin in general, and must, on joining the Marines, have had feelings similar to Abraham when he first gazed on Sodom and Gomorrah. Titus employed an army of sententious proverbs, forever sending them into battle, regardless of their relevance, but, in general, he got along well with the other men who, like Kenneth, seemed to find something comforting about having such a zealously devout type in their midst as they headed off to war. Kenneth thought how he would have liked to have been at Titus’s enlistment physical when the Navy doctor asked him, as they did all recruits, whether he had ever had the clap. No doubt he had employed the solitary curse he allowed himself — mahocket! — a made-up swear that kept him from the realm of blasphemy . . .”