Three of Styron's major works of fiction are focused centrally on the military: The Long March, In the Clap Shack, and The Way of the Warrior (in progress). In the first two of these, published twenty years apart, war is emblematic of human existence: its bureaucracy and impersonality represent all institutions; the isolation and fear of its combatants are the primary conditions of modern life.

Lieutenant Culver of The Long March, like many of Styron's protagonists, looks nostalgically from a chaotic present into an Edenic past. He has left behind a law practice, his family, and the strains of Haydn, Bach, and Mozart reverberating through peaceful Sunday afternoons in New York City. Now his companions are his fellow marine reservists in the Headquarters and Service Company in rural North Carolina, his comfortable existence exchanged for endless maneuvers during frigid nights and torrid days in training for possible combat in Korea. The surrealistic pursuit of an imaginary enemy, the relentless exhaustion, and the isolation from all ordinary endeavors fill Culver with confusion, apprehension, and dismay. This sense of disorder and chaos is replicated in Styron's narrative technique, which substitutes flashback within flashback for a chronological sequence of events. The first two chapters of the novella proceed by means of flashbacks to present the central event of the novel: not the long march of the title, as one might suspect, but the event that causes the march to take on its utmost meaning—that is, the accidental short firing of rounds that kills eight soldiers in the next battalion. . . .

The novella, then, focuses on a tragedy: the slaughter of eight young marines through what would come to be known in the Vietnam War as "friendly fire." Because of this accident, and because of the stateside setting in a noncombat situation, the characters wonder about the identity of their real enemy. Who is the invisible aggressor whom the reservists relentlessly stalk, against whom the commanding officers ceaselessly warn? The state of exhaustion in which the reservists perpetually exist, for they are woefully out of shape, softened by the good life back home, makes the answer to that question unclear to Culver, who plays the role of Everyman in this story. Through Culver's eyes the reader views the man who plays the role of tragic hero, the platoon leader Al Mannix. A man of mythological proportions, compared implicitly to Atlas and to Christ, Mannix identifies the enemy as the military system itself and proceeds to knock his head against the nature of things in an effort to beat the system. Through this effort, which is ridiculous and even aberrant by standards of sanity and propriety, Mannix wrests control over his life from the powers-that-be and asserts the humanity of the boys who died as well as of the reservists he leads.

The story of Mannix's perverse rebellion cannot be understood unless the nature of military service as Styron views it is first delineated. Styron does not regard the military as an inherently evil profession, but, ever suspicious of institutions, he considers it to be a bureaucracy that stifles individuality. The reservists in H & S Company must all be treated alike, as marines; all-important is the esprit de corps that bonds the many into the one. In this sense the men are nonentities rather than fully realized human beings. Sergeant O'Leary, a marine regular, is said to be grafted onto the military system like a piece of skin, and therefore molded into the image of marine. The reader is reminded that the outcome may be similarly dehumanizing: the eight dead marines look as if they've been sprayed from a hose, turned into mere shreds of skin and bone that seem never to have been alive at all. Because the reservists have known freedom, they are especially resistant to the authority wielded by Colonel Templeton and his officers.

This authority manifests itself most forcefully in Colonel Templeton's order for a thirty-six-mile march that will toughen the reservists, prepare them for actual combat, and make them more like the regulars. The order and the subsequent march fill Culver and Mannix with revulsion and fear, not merely because they doubt their ability to withstand the heat and the pain, but, more importantly, because they are loath to relinquish their free will: "How stupid to think they had ever made their own philosophy; it was as puny as a house of straw, and at this moment—by the noise in their brains of those words, you will—it was being blasted to the winds like dust. They were as helpless as children." The military reduces the fighting men to the state of children, belittled as it were, with the commanding officers as powerful parental figures determining the course of their charges' lives—fathers, maybe, or even priests, invested with a quasidivine authority. Culver, calling "Bundle Able" on the radio at Colonel Templeton's request, feels "juvenile and absurd, as if he were reciting Mother Goose." Mannix has only contempt for this code language of military communication that replaces ordinary conversation with boy-scout passwords. Major Lawrence, subservient to the colonel, looks to Culver like a five-year-old child, and speaks to the colonel in the third person as if Templeton were an imperial ruler and the major his subject.

Other figures of speech, more emotionally charged than the references to children, hint at the odious status of the soldiers. Captain Mannix is compared at one point to a shackled slave, and at another to a chain-gang convict. By these means Styron conveys the idea that the military imprisons the individual and subordinates him to the system. Quite simply, the marines are not free men. Mannix despises Templeton for the authority that Templeton wields, not only because authority is anathema to this rebellious individual, but also because Mannix is all too aware of the fallibility of those who wield the power. The accidental misfiring of the missiles and the resultant death of the eight young marines may well have been caused by the decision to use old shells stored on Guam since 1945. Such disregard for the consequences of decisions bespeaks a lack of connection between those who give the orders and those who do the fighting. This lack of communication between commander and commanded—indeed, between men in general—is symbolized by the incident that Mannix relates to Culver from his buck-sergeant days during World War II. Pinned down in his shell hole under heavy fire from the Japanese, Mannix screams desperately into the telephone for assistance. Each time he hollers for aid he gets hit by another piece of shrapnel. Just before losing consciousness he notices that the telephone wires have all along been severed. There has been no lifeline between him and others. Instead, he is on his own, to succeed or fail on his own powers along with the luck of the draw. Even the radio over which Lieutenant Culver tries to make contact with Able Company emits only a banshee wail of signals, "like the cries of souls in the anguish of hell." No call to that company gets through, so isolated and uprooted are these men. To Styron, this situation of being cut off is the human condition. Alienated from his God, estranged from his fellows, the individual cannot count for aid and comfort on the ministrations of anyone else; he had best rely on himself.

And so, because the dead soldiers could not take control over their lives, Captain Al Mannix takes control over his. He does not opt out of the marines, for he has made his commitment. (This is, after all, the Korean War in the conformist 1950s; the next war, in the next decade, would tell a different tale.) Rather, he chooses to exert the full force of his individuality within the strict parameters of the military system. If Colonel Templeton, nicknamed Old Rocky because of his obdurate nature, can order thirty-year-old, out-of-shape reservists to march for thirteen hours, then Captain Mannix can find his own way of being an immovable object. He finds it in a rebellion in reverse—that is, in seeing the march through to its end and exhorting his company to do the same. Mannix accomplishes this task under especially grievous conditions; added to the fatigue and heat suffered by all the marchers is the discomfort of a nail sticking up from his boot into his foot, resisting his best efforts at removal. Marching for Mannix becomes a true torture, and thus a true test of his human capacity to endure. The nail and the injury it causes provide Mannix with an escape from the forced march if he wants it: Templeton commands him to ride in on the truck. But Mannix chooses to obey the first command, to march, rather than the second one, and thereby enacts his perverse rebellion. This "one personal insurrection" cannot hope to accomplish much good. Indeed, it turns Mannix into a taskmaster, bullying his men into completing the march with him. It injures his foot and makes every step a crucifixion. It gets him confined to quarters, and perhaps even court-martialed, after cursing the colonel. But if this insurrection is absurd it is not therefore without value. In fact, it does get Mannix from point A to point B on his own terms. And he does indeed carry some of his company on his back, Atlas-like, completing his superhuman task almost like a god rather than a man, elevating his men in spite of themselves. By refusing to drop out or to let them drop out (though two-thirds of them eventually do), he asserts the dignity and worth of human life and thereby wrests control for the individual from dominating outside forces. Though comical, caricatural, and even bizarre, Mannix's gesture attests to the durability of the human spirit.

If Mannix is not necessarily to be considered a fool, is he therefore to be considered a hero? Styron thinks so. In the midst of senseless slaughter and a senseless, seemingly endless march, in a war presaging the "forceless, soulless, pushbutton wars of the future," one indefatigable man with an indomitable will imprints his features on the action. By so doing he fights the battle of the luckless marine whose "face had been blasted out of sight" while he waited for his lunch. Templeton's own face is likened to a mannequin's, betokening his lack of humanity, and the loaded pearl-handled revolver he wears on his hip is a sign of the military's potential to turn humans into inert matter in one moment, as the short rounds did to the men on the chow line; the forks and spoons of the dead soldiers were turned into "pathetic metal flowers," completing the inhuman and unnatural picture. Mannix is ennobled by his suffering, which personalizes the impersonal order to march and humanizes the dehumanizing task of carrying out this order. His rebellion therefore sets the world in order, if only temporarily. The reader recalls the episode related by Mannix to Culver about his most harrowing experience during World War II. On a spree out of boot camp, on the tenth floor of a hotel in San Francisco, Mannix had been suspended for several long minutes naked and upside down from the window by a couple of drunken marines. The utter helplessness and disorientation of the situation were too horrible for bearing. Human existence, Styron implies, is often an upside-down view into the abyss. Any attempt to set the world rightside up and to provide something to hold onto is a laudable, even heroic task.

Throughout the novella Styron draws attention to Mannix's body. Whereas the other characters are clothed and protected, Mannix is often pictured naked and vulnerable. One is aware of his fleshiness, his mortality; he is massive and hairy, larger than life. Mannix points out to Culver the many scars covering his entire body. He seems almost a mass of wounds, and he shows them off not proudly but matter-of-factly, as if to say, this is what it means to be alive. He is wounded and suffers because he dares. His emotions are not controlled, his responses are not programmed. Mannix is a man, not a machine.

The final scene of the novella drives home this point. Mannix has showered after his long march and proceeds down the hall draped only in a towel, clutching the wall for support and dragging his maimed leg behind him. His suffering is described as gigantic, befitting this man's physical and spiritual proportions. He meets the black maid, whose sympathy for his condition is immediate and genuine as she asks him if he is in pain. He communicates a complex set of emotions to the maid without jargon, without lies, almost even without words. As he struggles to remain upright the towel falls away, and for one last moment he stands naked and exposed, his body a mass of scars. Tomorrow Mannix may be court-martialed, his world turned topsy turvy again. But for today he has made it through, vulnerable and suffering as ever, but still standing. And that, at least for now, is triumph enough.