Battle Fatigue Page 8

  “What did you do?”

  He doesn’t answer. He is suddenly fascinated by lima beans.

  My father has just told me a war story. It is the only one he has ever told me. There will probably never be another. But I have to say something to stop him from staring at the beans like that.

  “How come we only have tuna and lima beans?”

  He examines my face quizzically for a second while he struggles back. “Your cousin Bennie.”

  “What about Bennie?”

  “He’s a wholesale distributor for lima beans and tuna fish. Big deal.”

  And he goes back upstairs.

  Maybe it is a question of personality. Some people can see wars clearly and other people are confused by them. Or maybe it is just that some people are clear and others are confused in general. Maybe I am just a confused person. Other people don’t seem to be having this problem.

  I talk to Donnie LePine about Vietnam because he is the least confused kid I know. He is getting annoyed with me for not being like him. “Listen,” he says, “it’s pretty clear.”

  “It is, Donnie?” I say, genuinely struck by this. It is what I have been afraid of—it’s clear to everyone but me.

  “Yes. You don’t need all these questions. Your country goes to war, you have to be there to help. That’s all.”

  This doesn’t clear things up for me. “What about the war being a lie?”

  “The attack may have been a lie,” Donnie explains. “But the war is real. And we can’t let the Communists win.”

  Clarity isn’t working. Who are the Communists anyway? Maybe I need a more complex view.

  I ask Mr. Walter what he thinks. “Those are the questions, man,” he says, bowing his head to punctuate that thought with falling hair, which gives him the opportunity to throw it back on the next statement. “You cats better start asking those questions. I’m not going to give you the answer. You have to come up with your own answers. Dig on that, man.”

  Things are clearer over at the Panicellis’. Dickey is signing up. “Because my country needs me. That’s it,” he says. “We aren’t going to get pushed around by the Communists.”

  “Damn straight,” says Popeye.

  “Dear!” Mrs. Panicelli cautions him about his language.

  “Well, straight. However the hell you say it. If we hadn’t been so slow to slap back at the Germans, there wouldn’t have been a Pearl Harbor.”

  Now, I don’t understand that at all. Wasn’t it the Japanese who attacked Pearl Harbor? As Dickey and I get the big Hemi engine back together with its parts clean and new gaskets placed on the edges and everything clamped in, he explains about the importance of standing up and fighting. I start to feel a lot better. Still, it is hard to believe that Dickey Panicelli is actually going to war. He is the first of us. We will all go, just like our fathers.

  Seeing his son enlist in the military is affecting Popeye’s walk. The difference is subtle, but I am sure I’m not imagining it. His elbows and knees stiffen and his back straightens and he walks as though marching on a parade ground, turning at an abrupt right angle to leave the garage and go into the house.

  Dickey has joined the marines and is training at boot camp. It is baseball season again so I wouldn’t have been working on cars with him anyway. But still, I keep thinking how the first of us is already off training for war.

  Then he is back, but only for a visit. In his uniform. A marines uniform with that great red stripe. I cannot help imagining how I would look in a uniform like this. I don’t want to be a marine, but they do have that uniform. I have always thought of myself going into the navy because I like their uniforms, but I have to admit a marine could look pretty good. We have all discussed the different branches of service. Rocco wants army, which I think is a mistake because my father and uncle didn’t seem to like it. Donnie and Stanley and I have been talking about the service since our Three Musketeers days. But we can never agree on where we are going to war together. Donnie likes the air force. Stanley likes the marines. A lot of these choices have to do with the uniforms.

  I have to look closely to see that it really is Dickey because they have shaved his hair off, making his ears and eyes seem very large and giving a kind of intense, almost angry look to his face.

  They really are sending him to Vietnam. I’m still not sure where that is. I ask him and he just says, “Somewhere in Asia, I guess.” I look on a map and it isn’t close to anything I know; it is a part of the map I have never looked at. When my brother and I were little we had a globe and we would spin it and stick a finger on it, and where the finger stopped was where we were going to go. Our fingers never landed anywhere near Vietnam.

  The next day Dickey leaves. He doesn’t seem worried, though his parents do. Popeye looks fierce and Mrs. Panicelli looks sad. But Dickey seems unfazed. I’ve seen kids look more nervous about going off to college. “It’s the training,” he explains. “I’m ready. You know, Joel”—he leans in closer because he wants to tell me something especially important—“you know, now when I hear ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ it means something.”

  I look at him and whisper back, “What does it mean, Dickey?”

  He just glares at me. It is a stupid question, I guess. Why am I always asking stupid questions? But I really wanted to know.

  Part Two

  My Time

  Chapter Seventeen

  The F-Word

  This year I will turn seventeen and it is a great year because the Yankees aren’t even in the World Series. It is between the Dodgers and the Twins and the Dodgers started off in trouble because Sandy Koufax took the first game off for Yom Kippur. I didn’t see that game anyway because my parents would not let me watch a game on Yom Kippur, one of the few Jewish holidays that we always observe. The other kids watched because they aren’t Jewish but they all said it was a terrible game.

  The first thing everyone was talking about was whether Koufax should pitch in the first game. Stanley came to me to ask if Yom Kippur was that big a deal given the importance of getting the best pitcher into game one. I wished he would pitch but he wouldn’t, and they lost that first game. But now that the holiday is over, Koufax is pitching complete games almost every other day and the series is tied for the final game seven, and the winner takes the series. Should Don Drysdale pitch or Koufax? Koufax is better. Drysdale was awful in the first game. But Koufax just pitched nine innings two days ago. Donnie LePine is insisting that it’s too hard on Koufax and that starting Drysdale is “the only responsible way to play it.”

  “Don’t give me that,” says Rocco, who, after all, is a pitcher. “If he couldn’t do it, he would say so.”

  I am about to point out that you could start Koufax, with Drysdale warmed up and ready to go if needed. But something out of the corner of my eye stops me. It is Dickey Panicelli. He is back. His hair is long and hangs down straight like something limp and damp. He has a mustache. He is wearing green marine fatigues. It strikes me how different his green clothes are from the army field jacket from the Battle of the Bulge that I am still wearing. It fits me now. But Dickey wears marine green and I realize that my generation is going to be wearing a completely different type of old used fatigues. But his eyes have that same dead look that my uncle’s have when he watches television, that I see in Mr. Shaker, and sometimes in my father. Dickey was one of us—but now he is more one of them.

  Dickey uses the F-word a lot now. He uses it in places you can’t, like in front of my parents and especially in front of his mother.

  “Fuck this,” he says.

  “Dickey!” she shouts in horror.

  “Sorry, Mom. What the fuck.”

  “Knock it off,” says Popeye. “I thought the marines would teach respect.”

  “Is that what you thought the fuckin’ marines teach? That’s not it, Dad. They fuckin’ teach you, though.”

  I can hear this from my window. There is something wrong with Dickey. But it takes time. My uncle and Mr. Shake
r and the vegetable guy, all of them took my entire childhood to get just a little better, my whole childhood, and they are still struggling.

  Night seems to be worse. I go to sleep and about midnight I wake up. I hear this sound, a strange long note. Then I realize it is screaming. It is Dickey next door, screaming. Why is he screaming? What has happened to him? I hear his parents go into his room. But soon a fight breaks out about his language or respect or something.

  Poor Dickey. The next night I hear him screaming and I decide to go over there and talk to him. I quietly slip out the back door of my house. I don’t know why I am trying to be quiet. He is shouting so loud it almost echoes in the night. No one is going to hear my footsteps. As I get closer I realize that he is screaming the F-word. Poor Mrs. Panicelli. For a while he screams it, then he starts crying it, sobbing it, then mumbling something, then suddenly screaming into the night again.

  Between our backyard and theirs is a small chain-link fence, which I hop over. But now the screaming has stopped. Their house is quiet and I don’t know what to do. I can’t just knock on their door in the middle of the night. I walk up to the window of what I know is Dickey’s bedroom and stand on my toes. I can see into the room. There is a light on and the room seems an awful mess, with sheets and clothes tossed across the floor.

  Suddenly I feel pain in my right shoulder and hear a shout. The next thing I know I am lying faceup in the mud, staring at the shiny heavy rubber treads of Dickey’s combat boot. He is standing over me with his boot on my face.

  “Dickey,” I say, as though trying to wake him up.

  “Fuck, man. One short kick and I drive your nasal septum clear into your brain. You’re fucking dead, man.”

  “Dickey, it’s me.”

  “I know,” he says with a smile, and helps me up. He is wearing a marine-green T-shirt that is completely soaked. He is sweating so much that he looks like he just stepped out of a shower. He tries to say something, but his teeth are chattering and he can’t speak. He is shaking.

  “You have malaria,” I say.

  “Ye-e-ah,” he says, shaking so badly that the word comes out in about eight syllables. We walk over to the swing set in my yard where I used to play when I was little and we sit on the swings. I let him stay quiet for a long time. I know how to do this. Then finally I say, “Are you all right?”

  “Fuck.”

  “Fuck yes or fuck no?”

  He smiles and even laughs a bit. Then we stay silent for a little longer. I know he will start talking soon. He does. “It was the last mission. The last fucking mission. I was so short I wasn’t even supposed to go. But I wanted to be with my buddies. How stupid is that?” He talks for an hour about his last mission. But I have no idea what he is talking about. I never find out the details of the mission. Only that he keeps reliving it in dreams. But I don’t know what happened—I don’t know about Dickey’s war any more than I know about my father’s war or my uncle’s.

  Chapter Eighteen

  My War, Deferred

  It seems like we have all run off in different directions. More kids from my class are going to college than ever before in the history of the school. The reason is that the only other alternative is to go to Vietnam and end up like Dickey. Lyndon Johnson is sending more and more troops to Vietnam and it seems almost certain that we will all be drafted and sent. If you are in college, they won’t take you until you graduate. This is called a “college deferment.” But a lot of the kids in Haley don’t have the money for college and they will be going to Vietnam. There are state schools and there are scholarships. Donnie LePine easily gets scholarship offers from three different schools that everyone wanted to get into. Stanley is struggling to get money but thinks he will at least be able to go to a state school. I get into the school I wanted, Whiting College in New Hampshire, and my parents say they can pay the tuition. I am luckier than most kids. But the crisis is just being deferred for four years. Once we get our degrees we will be sent off. Of course there is the possibility that in four years the war will be over, but at the moment it looks like it is getting worse. Besides, that is not my destiny. This is my war and it is going to take more than a college deferment to get rid of it.

  My parents send me off to college with more tears than the Panicellis shed when they sent Dickey off to war. My father takes me down to the shelter to touch tuna cans while telling me things like “study hard.” He is more sentimental than I ever realized. My mother has done research and assures me that there are Jewish girls at Whiting. I am looking forward to seeing what kind of girls they have at Whiting but this is not something I want to talk to my mother about. Donnie LePine, while considering Whiting, told me that it was known for its beautiful women. I am excited about my new life and about leaving Haley, even if I am a little sad about leaving. I’m even sad about not having Sam to pick on anymore. In the tenth grade, he is slightly taller and larger than me and so serious that I am sure most people would think he was the older brother. He tells me, “Listen, Joel, be careful. What you do in college is going to shape the rest of your life.” By the time he gets to college he probably will be older than me.

  As a freshman at Whiting College, I consider joining an officer-training program known as ROTC. There would be a few special courses and training and a uniform to wear once a week. At least this way when my time comes I could go as an officer. Only something Dickey Panicelli told me is making me rethink this idea of being an officer. He says that the regular soldiers are killing the officers. At first I think he is telling a story like my father’s about the Japanese sniper shooting at him, but then I realize this is something different. American soldiers are shooting their own officers. They call it “fragging.” Dickey said, “They fragged two fucking lieutenants in my outfit. First one came. He was stupid. They fragged him before he got everyone killed. The second fuckhead was just as bad. Gone. Gone.” He repeated the word “gone” several times and then did the stare like my uncle.

  This story was a revelation to me because I had always thought that an officer was a good thing to be. The officer training at my college is Air Force ROTC. That’s not even a good uniform. I remember how we all jumped on Donnie LePine when he said he wanted to join the air force. One thing about Donnie, he always wanted to look good, and an air force uniform—blue gray and boring—was not going to do it.

  But that was a million years ago, before I had heard of Vietnam. Now the only thing appealing about Air Force ROTC is that you can train to be a pilot. I thought being a pilot would be wonderful. It would be exciting to fly airplanes. But more and more, news was coming in about what airplanes did in Vietnam. They were dropping bombs everywhere and unleashing napalm, a chemical that causes fire to cling to people’s bodies. That was not the kind of pilot I wanted to be.

  In fact, I was having the same problem with being a chemist. What did chemists do now? They made things like napalm. Napalm was invented during World War II by a chemist at Harvard. It was the old story: take two things that in themselves are harmless—naphthalene and a carbon-saturated fatty acid—combine them in just the right amount, and you get this sticky stuff that burns like gasoline, sucks the oxygen out of the air, and kills everyone in a ball of fire. The wonders of chemistry! I went to a demonstration in upstate New York on a bridge to Canada—it’s funny, but it’s called the Peace Bridge—and we demonstrated against, DuPont, whose slogan is “Better Living Through Chemistry,” for making napalm.

  So being a chemist was like being a pilot. I couldn’t do it. You had to be careful. Look at Albert Einstein. A pacifist who opposed war, he was one of the all-time greatest creative minds, completely rethinking how the universe works. He figured out that the speed of light never changes and can be used in a mathematical formula to derive the energy released from any mass. So what did the scientists do with this knowledge? They took a tiny amount of uranium and produced enough energy to level the city of Hiroshima and kill more than 100,000 people. That’s what they used physics for—so bei
ng a physicist is even worse than a chemist or a pilot. The way the world is, you have to choose your career carefully.

  I seal my doom. It is December, and to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor—a major event for television and newspapers but also my eighteenth birthday—I register for the draft. I do it by mail, filling out a form in which I state, as clearly as possible, that I am a full-time college student. I receive a card in the mail with my student deferment. Life goes on, as it will for the next four years.

  There are a lot of kids from Massachusetts at Whiting College but not from Haley. This isn’t a Haley kind of place, and most of the kids here come from fancier towns in suburban Boston or New York. The truth is that before Vietnam and the draft, college had not been a Haley kind of place.

  The only other kid from Haley who is going here is Donnie LePine. When he first made his choice he said he was excited about our going to school together. Once we got here, though, I did not see much of Donnie. I didn’t know where he was. I checked to see if he had joined Air Force ROTC, but he hadn’t. Then one night there is a knock on my door. Opening it, I see someone who at first appears to be Jesus Christ but who, on closer inspection, turns out to be Donnie.