that, harassment never visited Private McQueen.
Another marine walked into the barrack hut one day and found McQueen alone on his bunk, writing a letter to Julian. What struck the other man, whom Steve called over to help with his grammar, was the opening statement, scrawled in an ink that looked uncommonly like blood – ‘IM MY OWN MAN NOW, fuggit!’ – and which went on from there to get angry. There would never be a more accurate or succinct description of McQueen’s three-year hitch in uniform. Those first four words, in particular, expressed the whole throughline of his career. His own man. Fuggit. While most of the grunts tore about the camp in quick-moving, impetuous gangs, seeing almost nothing, Steve was watchful, curious, even as the rawest recruit, about the way people behaved. The military, as a rule, humiliates the individual, but never so McQueen. His rebellion turned on the familiar devices of sarcasm, cunning and obliging charm – Why didn’t he wash everyone’s jeeps? ‘I’ll make ’em glow!’ – again and again.
A note of satire, needless to say, lurked just below the smile. ‘Steve was always on the side of Steve,’ is one ex-marine’s fond memory. Yet another contemporary account of Camp Lejeune has McQueen ‘marching up and down, mumbling obscenities and doing hilarious impersonations of the officers under his breath’. He was a gifted mimic, and now military ritual was feeding his inborn talent as fast as he could hone it. Not surprisingly, Steve got involved in his unit’s biannual revue, and in later years he always felt that his time in the service had made it natural for him to ‘hang with show types’, and even to join them.
Gambling, whether for high stakes or laughs, played a large part in 2nd Recruit Battalion life. McQueen played too, but only when there was cash on hand instead of chips. Poker was a key factor in Steve’s judgement of his friends; he was said to form an opinion of a new recruit’s ‘mud’ – his basic code – only after he’d played cards with him. McQueen was one of these games’ fiercest competitors and one of their most engaging personalities. He was highly disciplined at the table, as well as a natural bluff – cool-headed, daring and independent. His only interest was in winning, but his best friend at Camp Lejeune insists that ‘Steve would frequently, and on the QT, slip back what he’d taken off you…The key factor was always whether or not you’d had the balls to “see” him instead of folding. That kind of style counted for a lot with McQueen.’
Besides the fighting and gambling, Steve’s only other long-term legacy from the military was his cancer. The exact illness that led him to Dr Kelley was mesothelioma, an acute form of asbestos poisoning. In those days the stuff was everywhere, including in the tanks he drove at Camp Lejeune. It was also used for such insulation as there was in his barracks. In one sorry incident (part of a punishment for his exploding a can of baked beans) McQueen was ordered to strip and refit a troop ship’s boiler room. Most of the pipes there were lagged with asbestos. The air was so heavy with it, Steve would say, ‘You could actually see the shit as you breathed it.’
Ample evidence, including his own, documents that McQueen’s visceral mistrust of ‘suits’ continued to harden in the Marines. Free, fast-living, for him all discipline offended. Specifically, Steve wanted no such austere figure as his CO interfering in the schedule he meant to set himself. Long experience had taught that with any brass restraint, even ‘shit’, was inevitable. As McQueen encountered more authority, the bones of a deeply individualistic, anarchic view of life emerged more clearly. He was no ideologue. Rather, Steve was romantically attached to certain personal principles which weren’t necessarily owned by the left or right. One army buddy recalls him ‘reading his rights’, as he put it: the right to drink, to get laid, to race bikes and to tool around in his souped-up jeep. With that agenda a clash with authority was ordained, and duly came. From then on, Steve’s insubordination became proverbial. The one moral or intellectual datum it brought with it was a programmed response – one of his crisp variants of ‘Fuck you’ – to being cooped up. McQueen hated fences.
Leave soon came around.
‘I’ll be hootin’ and hollerin’,’ Steve said with glee. ‘I’ll be boozing! Fucking and fighting! Do you hear me?’
‘Just watch it,’ they told him.
But after extending a two-day pass into a two-week holiday with a girlfriend, Steve spent forty-one days in the Camp Lejeune brig. (This stint in the stockade, suitably dramatised, would provide much of the source material for The Great Escape.) Following a second AWOL episode – this one involving a punch-up with the Shore Patrol – he was busted down to private, the first of seven straight demotions. Not long after that, Steve was posted to the military arsenal in Quantico, Virginia, before graduating to the Gun Factory in Washington, DC. His best marine friend – who asked to follow him there – recalls the scene in the barracks when McQueen burst in after yet another report: ‘I remember he flung his cap into a corner and shouted, “Well, pal! Busted!” And I said, “What are your plans now, Steve? Somehow I can’t see you as officer material.” And with that he gave me that cool, drop-dead squint of his. “As far as I can see,” Steve said, “I got two choices. I could go on stage, or I could go to jail.” Most people’s money would have been on the latter.’
McQueen may have been a full-time morale problem for the uniformed class. His beefs about military life in general, and the lack of women and good food in particular, became lore. When his unit pulled a midwinter tour of Lake Melville (then 30 degrees below zero), it seemed to his friend that ‘all the ingredients were there for Steve to go ape. A lot of guys, better adjusted than he was, snap in those conditions.’ The first few days in Canada, spent in various cold-water amphibious exercises, were bad enough. McQueen complained ever more bitterly about his rations. Frozen bully-beef – ‘Shit,’ he growled as he crunched his. One early morning, when a transport carrying tanks and jeeps set off for Goose Bay, the divisional brass sensed there might be further trouble with McQueen. He was standing on the bank, hunched double against the snow, while waiting for the boat to pick him up. The few other men around him could hear him curse, over and over, moving from his cold and hunger to his lieutenant, to whom he offered certain medical advice as blunt as it was impractical: ‘rich stuff’, according to one witness, even for the Marines. In short, everything looked set fair for a confrontation.
And then, before anyone quite realised what was happening – before the officers could shout warnings – the transport floundered on a spit. Several vehicles and their drivers slid off the deck into the arctic water. Because of its speed, the ship itself capsized and began going down within seconds.
People watched.
McQueen sprang from his crouch and began snapping out orders, grabbing two or three soldiers (striking one of them as being ‘almost inhumanly calm’) and launching a small flatboat towards the sandbar. Inside a minute he was at the scene of the wreck, ducking down into the ice to rescue survivors – he personally pulled five men to safety – while keeping up a flow of commands, echoing crisply over the water, so as to avoid a second sinking. (Another boat that set out to help did keel over, with the loss of three lives.) Back on shore, he then saw to it that warm clothes and blankets were broken out before accepting any help for himself. Even his commanding officer seemed disarmed. After the shock had worn off, and before his own court-martial, there was a seizure of gushing thanks – a notable reversal for a hip-hup type who had long promised to ‘break’ his company misfit. ‘Steve, you amazed me,’ he admitted. According to the handwritten citation, ‘Pfc McQueen’s initiative in immediately setting a rescue in motion was the key to what followed afterwards…Had Pfc McQueen not acted promptly in that direction, more loss of life would have ensued.’
Once again, the bloody-minded loner had been redeemed by his instinctively gutsy, dogged alter ego: this was McQueen’s track record in the forces. His mutinous streak, his overall volatility and neon changes of mood would provide most of the copy for biographers mining his early years. But the artful, organised side deserves attention, too; no one personified grace under pressure
