that he wanted to write a combat novel specifically set in the Philippines where "the American hunger for power was palpable." Mailer told his sister that he wrote to his wife, Bea, about his plans for a novella with "'a ridge or a peak as a symbol' of 'the higher aspirations of man, the craving for the secret, the core of life,'" and the Faustian need for power. In another letter to his wife, Mailer recounted an encounter with the top mess sergeant, who called him "'a chickenshit son of a bitch.'" This real life incident inspired Mailer to construct the pivotal confrontation between General Cummings and Lieutenant Hearn which leads indirectly to Hearn's death. Initially, Cummings burdens Hearn with small, chickenshit tasks, and later Hearn retaliates within restricted power dynamics by dropping a match on the General's floor and grounds it into the floor with his heel. According to General Cummings, "what Hearn had done was equivalent to a soldier's laying hands on his person." Thus, Cummings transfers Hearn to the platoon with Croft. During World War II, General Patton was considered one of the most fastidious perpetuators of chickenshit, constantly enforcing the Army's dress code on his soldiers. Similarly, in The Naked and the Dead, Dalleson harps on pride in the outfit of the Army. J. Michael Lennon, Mailer's definitive biographer, claims that "Mailer's landscape descriptions crackle and pulse with energy and must be ranked among the best of postwar American writers.". Diana Trilling Diana Trilling observed, "'The most dramatic moments in The Naked and the Dead are precipitated by intensities in nature.'" While writing his combat novel, Mailer stated that "[t]here are going to be troubling terrifying glimpses of order in disorder, of a horror which may or may not lurk beneath the surface of things.'" Hennessey's death as well as Croft, Reed, and Martinez's "primitive glimpses of a structure behind things" is Mailer's depiction of '"the old business of man constructing little tag-ends of a Gd for himself in his moral wilderness.'" Mailer argued that everything is more direct in war and this dramatically impacts the senses and one's perception of realism. Mailer depicts this theme of power in nature and man's subjection to that in Cummings and Croft's reflection on Mount Anaka. Homosexuality: The theme of homosexuality is most evident through Cummings. In his "Time Machine", Mailer illustrates Cummings growing up experiencing gender-role confusion. Although