WHEN I was eighteen I worked on a ship, a Coast and Geodetic Survey ship out of Norfolk. As I sat on my bunk one night, reading a book, I became aware that one of my shipmates was staring at me. My face burned, the words started swimming on the page, the tranquillity in which I had been imagining the scenes of the novel was broken. For a time I blindly regarded the book and listened to the voices of the other men, the long shuddering surge of the engine. Finally I had no choice but to look back at him.
He was one of the ship’s mechanics. He had rabbity eyes and red hair cropped so close his scalp showed through. His skin was white. Not fair. White, the pallor of a life spent belowdecks. He hardly ever spoke. I had felt the weight of his scrutiny before, but never like this. I saw that he hated me.
Why did he hate me? He may have felt—I might have made him feel—that I was a tourist here, that my life would not be defined, as his had been, by years of hard labor at sea relieved now and then by a few days of stone drunkenness in the bars of Norfolk and Newport News. I’d been down to the engine room on errands and maybe he’d seen me there and seen the fastidiousness that overcame me in this dim, clanking, fetid basement where half-naked men with greasy faces loomed from the shadows, shouting and brandishing wrenches. He might have noted my distaste and taken it as an affront. Maybe my looks rubbed him wrong, or my manner of speech, or my habitual clowning and wising off, as if we were all out here on a lark. I was cheerful to a fault, no denying that; glib, breezy, heedless of the fact that for most of the men this cramped inglorious raft was the end of the line. It could have been that. Or it could have been the book I was reading, the escape the book represented at that moment and in time to come. Then again there might have been no particular reason for what he felt about me. Hatred sustains itself very well without benefit of cause.
Not knowing what to think of him, I thought nothing at all. I lived in a dream anyway, in which I featured then as a young Melville, my bleary alcoholic shipmates as bold, vivid characters with interesting histories they would one day lay bare to me. Most of what I looked at I didn’t really see, and this mechanic was part of what I didn’t see.
I worked on cleanup details in the morning, scraped and painted in the afternoon. One day I was scraping down the hull of a white runabout that was kept on davits for the captain’s pleasure and as a partial, insincere fulfillment of our lifeboat requirement. It was sultry. The sun beat down through a white haze that dazzled the eyes. I ducked under the boat and pretended to take an interest in the condition of the keel. It was cool there in the shadows. I leaned back, my head resting against one of the propeller blades, and closed my eyes.
I slept for a while. When I woke I felt heavy and dull, but I couldn’t go back to sleep. In this muzzy state I heard someone stop beside me, then walk to the stern. I opened my eyes and saw a pair of bell-bottom pant legs ascending the ladder. Boards creaked overhead. My nap was done.
I sat up and shook my head, waited for clarity, was still sitting there when a great roar went up behind me. I looked back and saw the propeller I’d just had my head on spinning in a silver blur. I scuttled out from under the boat, got to my feet, and looked up at the mechanic, who was watching me from the gunwale of the runabout. Neither of us said a word. I knew I should go after him, even if it meant taking a beating. But he was ready to kill me. This was a new consideration, and one that gave me pause, excessive pause. I stood there and let him face me down until he decided to turn away.
I didn’t know what to do. He’d given me no evidence for a complaint to the captain. If I accused him, the mechanic would say it was an accident, and then the captain would ask me what the hell I was doing down there anyway, lying against a propeller. It waspretty stupid. That’s what my shipmates told me, the two of them I trusted enough to talk things over with. But they believed me, they said, and promised to keep an eye on him. This sounded good, at first. Then I understood that it meant nothing. He would choose the time and place, not them. I was on my own.
The ship put in a few days later to take on supplies for a trip to the Azores. The weekend before our departure, I went to Virginia Beach with another man and ended up on the first dark hours of Monday morning propped against the seawall, trying to make myself get up and walk the half mile to the motel where my shipmate was waiting for me. In an hour or so he’d have to begin the drive back to Norfolk or risk having the ship weigh anchor without him. I sat there in the chilly blow, trembling with cold and sunburn, and hugged my knees and waited for the sun to rise. Everything was cloaked in uncongenial grayness, not only the sky but also the water and the beach, where gulls walked to and fro with their heads pulled down between their wings. A band of red light appeared on the horizon.
This was not the unfolding of any plan. I’d never intended to miss my ship, not once, not for a moment. It was the first cruise to foreign waters since I’d been on board, and I wanted to go. In the Azores, according to a book I’d read, they still harpooned whales from open boats. I had already made up my mind to get in on one of these hunts, no matter what. All my shipmates had the bug, even the old tars who should’ve known better. When they said “Azores” their voices cradled the word. They were still subject to magic, still able at the sound of a name—Recife, Dakar, Marseilles—to see themselves not as galley slaves but as adventurers to whom the world was longing to offer itself up.
I didn’t want to miss my ship. Forget about far-off places, the open sea; the ship was my job, and I had no prospects for another. I didn’t even have a high school diploma. The prep school I’d finagled my way into had tolerated my lousy grades and fatuous contempt for its rules until, in my senior year, having pissed away my second and third and fourth chances, I was stripped of my scholarship and launched upon the tide of affairs, to sink or swim. I appeared to be sinking.
Where to turn? My mother lived in one small room in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a secretary by day, by night as a restaurant hostess. She had just begun to accord me, with touching eagerness, the signs of respect due a man who pulled his own weight in the world. Unteachable optimist that she was, she drew hope from every glint of gravity in my nature, every possibility of dealing with me as an equal. I didn’t want to think about the look on her face when I turned up at her door with some tomfool story about the ship sailing without me. Where else, then? My brother Geoffrey and I were good friends. He might have been open to a visit except that he was in England, doing graduate work at Cambridge on a Fulbright fellowship. His good luck; my bad luck. My father was also unable to play host at just this moment, being in jail in California, this time for passing bad checks under the name Sam Colt.
I had to join my ship. But I stayed where I was. People with dogs began to appear on the beach. Old folks collecting driftwood. When there was no longer any chance of meeting my shipmate I got up stiffly and walked into town, where I ate a jumbo breakfast and pondered the army recruiting office across the street.
THIS WASN’T a new idea, the army. I’d always known I would wear the uniform. It was essential to my idea of legitimacy. The men I’d respected when I was growing up had all served, and most of the writers I looked up to—Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Erich Maria Remarque, and of course Hemingway, to whom I turned for guidance in all things. Military service was not an incidental part of their histories; they were unimaginable apart from it. I wanted to be a writer myself, had described myself as one to anybody who would listen since I was sixteen. It was laughable for a boy my age to call himself a writer on the evidence of two stories in a school lit mag, but improbable as this self-conception was, it nevertheless changed my way of looking at the world. The life around me began at last to take on form, to signify. No longer a powerless confusion of desires, I was now a protagonist, the hero of a novel to which I endlessly added from the stories I dreamed and saw everywhere. The problem was, I began to see stories even where I shouldn’t, where what was required of me was simple fellow feeling. I turned into a predator, and one of the things I became predatory about was experience. I fetishized it, collected it, kept strict inventory. It seemed to me the radical source of authority in the writers whose company I wanted to join, in spite of their own coy deference to the ugly stepsisters honesty, knowledge, human sympathy, historical consciousness, and, ugliest of all, hard work. They were just being polite. Experience was the clapper in the bell, the money in the bank, and of all experiences the most bankable was military service.
I had another reason for considering this move. I wanted to be respectable, to take my place one day among respectable men. Partly this was out of appetite for the things respectable men enjoyed, things even the dimmest of my prep school classmates could look forward to as a matter of course. But that wasn’t all of it, or even most of it. My father’s career, such as it was—his unflinching devolution from ace airplane designer to welsher, grifter, convict—appalled me. I had no sense of humor about it. Nor, for all my bohemian posturing, did it occur to me to see him as some kind of hero or saint of defiance against bourgeois proprieties. He had ruined his good name, which happened to be my name as well. When people asked me about my father I sometimes told them he was dead. In saying this I did not feel altogether a liar. To be dishonored and at the end of your possibilities—was that life? He appalled me and frightened me, because I saw in myself the same tendencies that had brought him to grief.
The last time I’d lived with my father was the summer of my fifteenth year, before I went back east to school. We were taking a walk one night and stopped to admire a sports car in a used car lot. As if it were his sovereign right, my father reached inside and popped the hood open and began to explain the workings of the engine, which was similar to that of the Abarth-Allemagne he was then driving (unpaid for, never to be paid for). As he spoke he took a knife from his pocket and cut the gas line on either side of the filter, which he shook out and wrapped in a handkerchief, talking all the while. It was exactly the kind of thing I would have done, but I hated seeing him do it, as I hated seeing him lie about his past and bilk storekeepers and take advantage of his friends. He had crooked ways, the same kind I had, but after that summer I tried to change. I didn’t want to be like him. I wanted to be a man of honor.
Honor. The very word had a martial ring. My father had never served, though he sometimes claimed he had, and this incompleteness in his history somehow made his fate intelligible and offered a means to escape it myself. This was the way, the indisputable certificate of citizenship and probity.
But I didn’t join up that morning. Instead I went to Washington to bid my mother farewell, and let her persuade me to have another try at school, with results so dismal that in the end she personally escorted me to the recruiter.
I never made it to the Azores, and even now the word raises a faint sensation of longing and regret. But I was right not to go back to my ship that morning. So many things can happen at sea. You can go overboard at night. Something heavy can fall on you, or something sharp. You can have your hat size reduced by a propeller. A ship is a dangerous place at any time; but when one of your shipmates wishes you harm, then harm is certain to befall you. In that way a ship is like a trapeze act, or a family, or a company of soldiers.
I WENT through basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, during a heat wave, “the worst on record,” we kept telling one another, on no authority but our opinion that it was pretty damned hot. And it was. The asphalt streets liquefied, sucking at our boots, burning our eyes and throats with acrid fumes. Sweat gleamed on every face. When they packed us into Quonset huts for lectures on “homoseshality” and “drug addition,” the smell got serious enough to put a man down, and many went down. Passing out came to be so common among us that we awarded points for the drama of the fall. The big winner was a boy from Puerto Rico who keeled over while marching, in full field equipment, along a ledge on a steep hillside. We heard him clanking all the way down.
The drill sergeants affected not to be aware of the rate at which we dropped. They let us understand that taking notice of the temperature was unsoldierly. When a recruit in another company died of heatstroke, our company commander called a formation and told us to be sure and take our salt pills every day. After he’d given his speech and gone back to the orderly room, our drill sergeant said, “Shitbirds, why did that troop croak?”
We had the answer ready. “Because he was a pussy, Sergeant.”
We were mostly volunteers. A lot of men regretted the impulse that had brought them to Fort Jackson, and all of us whined unceasingly, but I never heard of anyone writing to his congressman about the treatment we got, which was pretty much what a boy brought up on war movies would expect, and maybe a little better. The drill sergeants rode us hard, but they didn’t show up drunk at midnight and lead us into swamps to drown. The training seemed more or less purposeful, most of the time. The food was decent. And there were pleasures to be had.
One of my pleasures was to learn that I was hardy and capable. I’d played team sports in school, and played them doggedly, but never very well. Military training agreed with me. My body was right for it—trim and stringy. Guys who would have pulverized me on the football field were still on their third push-up when I’d finished my tenth. The same bruisers had trouble on our runs and suffered operatically on the horizontal bar, where we had to do pull-ups before every meal. Their beefy bodies, all bulked up for bumping and bashing, swayed like carcasses under their white-knuckled hands. Their necks turned red, their arms quivered, they grunted piteously as they tried to raise their chins to the bar. They managed to pull themselves up once or twice and then just hung there, sweating and swearing. Now and then they kicked feebly. Their pants slipped down, exposing pimply white butts. Those of us who’d already done our pull-ups gathered around to watch them, under the pretense of boosting their morale (“Come on, Moose! You can do it! One more, Moose! One more for the platoon!”) but really to enjoy their misery, and perhaps to reflect, as I did, on the sometimes perfect justice turned out by fortune’s wheel.
Instead of growing weaker through the long days I felt myself taking on strength. Part of this strength came from contempt for weakness. Before now I’d always felt sorry for people who had trouble making the grade. But here a soft heart was an insupportable luxury, and I learned that lesson in smart time.
We had a boy named Sands in our squad, one of several recruits from rural Georgia. He had a keen, determined look about him that he used to good advantage for a couple of weeks, but it wasn’t enough to get him by. He was always lagging behind somewhere. Last to get up. Last to formation. Last to finish eating. Our drill sergeant was from Brooklyn, and he came down hard on this cracker who didn’t take his army seriously.
Sands seemed not to care. He was genial and sunny even in the face of hostility, which I took to be a sign of grit. I liked him and tried to help. When he fell out on runs I hung back with him a few times to carry his rifle and urge him on. But I began to realize that he wasn’t really trying to keep up. When a man is on his last legs you can hear it in the tearing hoarseness of every breath. It’s there in his rolling eyes, in his spastically jerking hands, in the way he keeps himself going by falling forward and making his feet hurry to stay under him. But Sands grinned at me and wagged his head comically: Jeez Louise, where’s the fire? He wasn’t in pain. He was coasting. It came as a surprise to me that Sands would let someone else pull his weight before he was all used up.
There were others like him. I learned to spot them, and to stay clear of them, and finally to mark my progress by their humiliations. It was a satisfaction that took some getting used to, because I was soft and because it contradicted my values, or what I’d thought my values to be. Every man my brother: that was the idea, if you could call it an idea. It was more a kind of attitude that I’d picked up, without struggle or decision, from the movies I saw, the books I read. I’d paid nothing for it and didn’t know what it cost.
It cost too much. If every man was my brother we’d have to hold our lovefest some other time. I let go of that notion, and the harshness that took its place gave me a certain power. I was recognized as having “command presence”—arrogance, an erect posture, a loud, barky voice. They gave me an armband with sergeant’s stripes and put me in charge of the other recruits in my platoon. It was like being a trusty.
I began to think I could do anything. At the end of boot camp I volunteered for the airborne. They trained me as a radio operator, then sent me on to jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia. When I arrived, my company was marched onto the parade ground in a cold rain and drilled and dropped for push-ups over the course of the evening until we were covered with mud and hardly able to stand, at which time they sent us back inside and ordered us to be ready for inspection in thirty minutes. We thought we were, but they didn’t agree. They dumped our footlockers onto the floor, knocked our wall lockers down, tore up our bunks, and ordered us outside again for another motivational seminar. This went on all night. Toward morning, wet, filthy, weaving on my feet as two drill sergeants took turns yelling in my face, I looked across the platoon bay at the morose rank of men waiting their ration of abuse, and saw in one mud-caked face a sudden lunatic flash of teeth. The guy was grinning. At me. In complicity, as if he knew me, had always known me, and knew exactly how to throw the switch that turned the most miserable luck, the worst degradations and prospects, into my choicest amusements. Like this endless night, this insane, ghastly scene. Wonderful! A scream! I grinned back at him. We were friends before we ever knew each other’s names.
His name was Hugh Pierce. He was from Philadelphia. It turned out that we’d gone to rival prep schools. To come across anyone from that life here was Strange enough, but I didn’t give the coincidence much thought. We hardly ever talked about our histories. What had happened to us up to then seemed beside the point. Histories were what we’d joined the army to have.
For three weeks the drill sergeants harried us like wolves, alert to any sign of weakness. Men started dropping out. Hugh loved it. The more fantastic the oppressions, the greater his delight. He couldn’t stop himself from grinning his wiggy grin, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he waited for the next absurdity. Whenever the drill sergeants caught him smiling they swarmed all over him, shouted dire threats directly into his ears, made him do push-ups while they sat on his back. Nothing got to him. His pleasure in the ridiculous amounted almost to a pathology. And they couldn’t wear him down, he was too strong for that—immensely strong, and restless in his strength. Unlike me, Hugh made a habit of helping men who dropped back on our runs, mostly out of generosity, but also because to him exertion was joy. He liked making it harder for himself, pushing the limits however he could. At night, when the last drill instructor had exacted the last push-up and pronounced the last insult, we fell into our bunks and made wisecracks until sleep got us. But for me the joke was wearing a little thin. By now I was mainly trying to keep up.
In the last week we jumped. We jumped every day. For hours each morning we waited on the tarmac, running in place, doing push-ups and equipment checks while the drill sergeants went through all the possibilities of getting lunched. They dwelt in loving detail on the consequence to our tender persons of even the slightest accident or mistake. Did anyone want to reconsider? Just step to the side. Always, some did. Then we boarded the planes, facing one another across the aisle until the green light came on and the jumpmaster gave the order to stand and hook up our static lines. To psych ourselves for the plunge we sang “My Girl” in falsetto and danced the Stroll, swinging our shoulders and hips, flapping our wrists feyly as we made our way down the cargo bay to the open door of the plane. The planes were C-130 turboprops. The prop blast was tremendous, and you jumped right into it. It caught you and shot you back feetfirst spinning like a bullet. You could see the earth and sky whirling around your boots like painted sections on a top. Then the chute snapped open and stopped you cold, driving your nuts into your belly if you didn’t have the harness set right, snatching you hard even if you did. The pain was welcome, considering the alternative. It was life itself grabbing hold of you. You couldn’t help but laugh—some of us howled. The harness creaked as you swung back and forth under the luminous white dome of the silk. Other chutes bloomed in the distance. The air was full of men, most quiet, some yelling and working their risers to keep from banging into each other. The world was laid out at your feet: checkered fields, shining streams and ponds, cute little houses. For a time you belonged to the air, weightless and free; then the earth took you back. You could feel it happen. One moment you were floating, the next you were falling—not a pleasant change. The ground, abstractly picturesque from on high, got hard-looking and particular. There were trees, boulders, power lines. It seemed personal, even vengeful, the way these things rushed up at you. If you were lucky you landed in the drop zone and made a good rolling fall, then quick-released your parachute before it could drag you and break your neck. As you gathered in the silk you looked up and watched the next stick of troopers make the leap, and the sight was so mysterious and beautiful it was impossible not to feel love for this life. It seemed, at such a moment, the only possible life, and these men the only possible friends.
In our last week of jump school Hugh and I signed up for the Special Forces and were sent on to Fort Bragg.
The Special Forces came out of the OSS teams of World War II. They’d worked in German-occupied territory, leading partisan brigades, blowing bridges and roads, killing enemy officers. The membership was international. When I came to Fort Bragg some of the old hands were still around: Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Brits, Hungarians. We also had a number of Germans who had signed on after the war, more attached to the uniformed life than to any homeland.
This accented remnant gave a legionary feeling to the unit, but most of the troops were young and American. They were also tough and smart, and savvy in a way that I began to understand I was not. I could keep up with them physically, but I didn’t get the hang of things as easily as they did—as if they’d been born knowing how to lay a mortar, blow a bridge, bushwhack through blind undergrowth without ever losing their sense of where they were. Though I could do a fair impersonation of a man who knew his stuff, the act wouldn’t hold up forever. One problem was that I didn’t quite believe in it myself.
There was no single thing I had trouble with, no skill I couldn’t eventually learn. I simply ceased to inhabit my pose. I was at a distance, watching this outrageous fraud play the invisible bushman, the adept with knives, the black-faced assassin willing at the drop of a hat to squeeze the life out of some total stranger with piano wire. And in that widening distance between the performance and the observation of the performance, there grew, subtly at first, then intrusively, disbelief and corrosive irony. It was a crisis, but I hardly recognized its seriousness until one achingly pure spring day at the sawdust pit where we practiced hand-to-hand combat.
We were on a smoke break. I lay on my back, staring up at the sky. Our two instructors were sitting behind me on the wall of sandbags that surrounded the pit. One of them had just received orders for Vietnam and was saying he wouldn’t go back, not this time. He’d already done two six-month tours, and that, he said, was enough. The other sergeant murmured commiseration and said he could protest the orders but it probably wouldn’t do any good. He didn’t seem at all surprised by this show of reluctance, or even falsely sympathetic. He sounded troubled. I’m not going, the sergeant with the orders kept saying. I’m not going.
Both of them were dull the rest of the session. They just went through the motions.
This set me thinking. Here you had a man who knew all the tricks and knew them well enough to teach them to others. He’d been there twice and been competent enough to get home. Yet he was afraid. He was afraid and didn’t bother to hide it from another man who’d been there, certain it wouldn’t be held against him. What sort of knowledge did they share, to have reached this understanding?
And if this sergeant, who was the real thing, had reason to be afraid, what about me? What would happen when my accounts came due and I had to be in truth the wily, nerveless killer I pretended to be? It was not my habit to meditate on this question. It came to me unbidden, breaking through the bluff imitation of adequacy I tried so hard to believe in.
I never unloaded my worries on Hugh. I didn’t hide them, but when we were out on a tear they ceased to trouble me. We patrolled Fayetteville on our nights off and spent the weekends cruising farther afield in Hugh’s Pontiac, to Myrtle Beach and Chapel Hill and down to Fort Gordon, Georgia, where his brother was stationed. Yak, yak, yak, all the way. Girls. The peculiarities of our brothers-in-arms. Books—at least I talked about books. And of course the future. We had big plans. After we got out of the army we were going to get all our friends together and throw the party of the century. We were going to buy motorcycles and bazooka through Europe. We were going to live. It’s been almost thirty years now and the words are mostly gone, but I remember the ecstatic rush of them, and the laughter. I could make Hugh laugh pretty much at will. It was a sight: crimson circles appeared on his high cheeks, his eyes brightened with tears, he wheezed for breath. He could do the same thing to me. We were agreed that the world was a comical place, and that we’d been put here for the sacred purpose of being entertained by it.
And we sang; how we sang. Hugh had uncanny rhythm. He could do scat. He could imitate a bass, a muted trumpet. He had a good voice but preferred to sing harmony and backup while I took the lead. We did old Mills Brothers songs, the Ink Spots, Sinatra. A couple of the girls we went out with were always after us for “The Best Is Yet to Come.” That was our big gun. I laid down the melody while Hugh did crazy riffs around it, shoulders jumping, eyes agleam, head weaving like a cobra’s. We might have been pretty good. Then again, maybe we weren’t.
This was 1965. The air force had started bombing North Vietnam in February. The marines were in Danang, and the army had forty-four combat battalions on the way. Plenty of guys we knew were packing up for the trip. Hugh and I were going too, no question about that, but we never talked about the war. I can guess now that the reckless hilarity of our time together owed something to our forebodings, but I didn’t suspect that at the time. Neither of us acknowledged being afraid, not to each other. What good would that do? We had chosen this life. My reasons were personal rather than patriotic, but I had consented to be made use of, and in spite of my fears it never occurred to me, nor I’m sure to Hugh, that we would be used stupidly or carelessly or for unworthy ends. Our trust was simple, immaculate, heartbreaking.
That fall Hugh got sent for medic’s training to Fort Sam Houston in Texas. I was at loose ends and bored. My company commander had been working on me to apply for Officer Candidate School, and I finally agreed. I took some tests and went before a panel of generals and colonels who took note of my command presence and pronounced me officer material. They told me I’d be on my way in a month or so.
While I was awaiting my orders I got a letter from one of the girls Hugh had gone out with. Her name was Yancy. She said she was pregnant and that Hugh was the father. She knew he’d left Fort Bragg but didn’t know where to find him, and asked me to send her his address and let him know the situation. I got this letter on a Saturday afternoon. The building was empty. I sat on my bunk and tried to think what to do. Yancy was the friend of a girl named Trace I’d gone out with. The two of them roomed together, tending bar and living it up on terms as hedonistic as ours, or so it seemed to me. I hadn’t seen either of them since Hugh left, and I didn’t know what to make of this. Was I honestly supposed to believe that Hugh was the only man Yancy had been close to during the time in question? I supposed it was just possible. But what would Hugh think if I gave her his address, or if I sent him the message she wanted me to send? Would he think I was meddling, taking her side? Judging him? I understood that the strongest friendship can be spoiled by a word, a tone, even an imagined tone.
Why had she written me, anyway? It didn’t matter where he was, if she’d addressed the letter to Hugh it would have been forwarded. Maybe she didn’t know his last name. Did he not want her to know?
I put the letter away. I would consider it, then come to a decision. But I never could decide. The standard by which Hugh and I tried to live was loyalty, and I’d always thought it was a good one. In the face of the Other we closed ranks. That worked fine when the Other was a bullying sergeant or a bunch of mouthy drunks, but it didn’t shed much light here, where she was a girl in trouble. I could sense the insufficiency of the code but had no stomach for breaking it, at the risk of betraying Hugh. In the end I did nothing. I let other matters claim my attention.
MY ORDERS came. Instead of sending me to the infantry school at Fort Benning, they assigned me to artillery Officer Candidate School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I felt both guilty and relieved. Since the Special Forces had no howitzers they could not reasonably send me back there. My logic was impeccable, but six months later, with twenty years of life under my belt and new gold bars on my shoulders, I opened my orders and saw that I was going right back where I started, to Fort Bragg and the Special Forces.
My position was absurd. While laboring to become an artilleryman I had acquired a body of skills now utterly useless to me—trigonometry! calculus!—and lost or grown clumsy in those I needed. It was going to be hard for the troops at Fort Bragg to take me seriously as an officer when some of them had known me not long before as an enlisted man, and as something of a fuck-up. I couldn’t even take myself seriously. In my OCS class I’d finished forty-ninth out of forty-nine, the class goat—like Custer, as no one lost a chance to tell me.
It wasn’t as disgraceful as it looked. There’d been one hundred twenty of us to start with. But it was still pretty bad. I barely passed the gunnery course, and then only by pulling all-nighters in the latrine. I was chronically late and unkempt. My jocose manner amused only a few of my classmates and none of my training officers, who in their reports labeled me “extraneous” and “magic”—not a compliment in those circles—and never failed to include me in the weekly Jark, an hours-long punishment run in full field equipment, which was so effective in producing misery that people used to line the streets to watch us stumble past, as they would have gathered to watch a hanging. Some bystanders were actually moved to pity by the sight of us, and slipped us candy bars and words of encouragement. The true Christians among them threw water on our heads.
In the end I finished OCS only because, mainly to amuse myself, I had written a number of satirical songs and sketches for our battery to perform on graduation night. These revues, in the style of Hasty Pudding or the Princeton Triangle, were a tradition at Fort Sill and a big headache to our training officers, whose talents did not lie in this direction. Along with hundreds of other visitors, the post commandant and his staff would be in attendance. There’d be hell to pay if the show was a flop. When the time came for the final cuts to be made in our class it was discovered that I was the only one who could put the whole thing together.
They kept me on to produce a farce. That was how I became an officer in the United States Army.
ONE BY ONE Hugh and my other buddies disappeared into the war. I kept waiting for my own orders. At last I did get orders, but instead of Vietnam they sent me to the Defense Language Institute in Washington, D.C., to study Vietnamese for a year. Most of the students were young Foreign Service officers. So I wouldn’t stick out too much, I was detached from the army and put on civilian status. I could live where I wanted to live. I reported to no one, and no one checked up on me. My only duty was to learn Vietnamese. On top of my regular salary I got per diem for food, housing, and civilian clothes. Before leaving Fort Bragg I was issued a pamphlet showing in detail the kind of mufti an officer should wear on different occasions, from clambakes to weddings. Each “Correct” picture was paired with an “Incorrect” picture—goateed beatniks in shades and sandals, hipsters in zoot suits, doughy proles in bermudas and black socks. The correct guys always wore dark blue suits except when they were doing their morning run.
It wasn’t a hardship post. My mother still lived in Washington and so did my brother, Geoffrey, and his wife, Priscilla. I had some good friends in town as well, guys I’d known from school days and kept in touch with during my leaves home. Laudie Greenway, in town for a last fling before joining the army himself. George Crile, studying at Georgetown and working as a stringer for Drew Pearson. Bill Treanor, about to open the first home in Washington for runaway kids. We threw in together and rented a house not far from Dupont Circle. Our landlady was Jeane Dixon, the newspaper sibyl who’d become famous by predicting the deaths of President Kennedy and Dag Hammarskjöld. She collected the rent in person, but not from me. As soon as her car pulled up I went running out the back door before she had a chance to see me and start prophesying. In all the time I lived there I never once let her lay eyes on me.
I bought a Volkswagen and took girls to Wolf Trap and the Cellar Door. I smoked dope. I began a novel, which, somewhat to my surprise, I managed to work on in a fairly disciplined way. I fell in love.
Her name was Vera. She was related by marriage to a Russian prince, and had grown up among expatriate Russians and come to think of herself as one of them. She had their wounded gaiety, their air of romantic, genteel displacement, their manners and terms of address. Her grandfather she called Opa; her brother Gregory, Grisha. She hated to cook, but when she had no choice she made great borscht. She favored high boots and bright skirts and scarves such as a Russian princess might wear while at leisure among her beloved serfs, picking mushrooms or hunting bears or dancing to the balalaika. She drank like a man and ate like a wolf. I fell in love with her the first night I saw her and pursued her for weeks afterward. I loved her name, her odd swinging stride, her dark wit and mad laugh, her clothes, her pale skin and antique, heart-shaped face. She had a steady boyfriend but I kept after her anyway until finally she surprised us both by falling in love with me. Her best friend, the girl who’d introduced us, took me aside and told me I was in way over my head. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I began to learn.
She could be very funny, my Vera, but her humor was desperate and biting. She was obsessed by a single terrible truth, that everything and everyone you love will someday be taken from you. For Vera all other truths were frivolous; this was the one that mattered. Her father had been her closest friend. He had told her his secrets. They had conducted ESP experiments together—successfully, according to Vera. She had lost him suddenly, without any warning, when she was in her first year of boarding school, and the pain that came upon her then had never left her. She saw everything through it.
And as if it weren’t enough by itself, this unhealing wound was endlessly abraded by anger, anger at the world for being a place where such a thing could happen. She wouldn’t have said so herself, but her father’s death left her feeling deserted. And because she was convinced that everyone else would desert her in the end, she was always looking for the first signs. Just about everything was a sign. A quizzical look, failure to agree, reference to experience not shared with her, private sorrow, old loyalties. Anything could qualify. And her rage at such betrayals was uncontainable.
We were driving across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge late one night. It was hot in the car, and I asked Vera to crack the window. She looked at me curiously. I asked her again. What? she said. Crack the window? Please, I said. She screamed Here! and struck the windshield with the heel of her hand. She did it again, and again, as hard as she could. Here! Here! I grabbed her wrist so she wouldn’t hurt herself and asked what I’d done wrong. You know, she said. She stared ahead, hugging herself. Finally she declared she’d never in her life heard the expression “crack the window,” and said further that I knew she’d never heard it. Why, she asked, did I like to mock her? Exactly what pleasure did it give me?
I thought it best not to answer, but my silence goaded her to fury, and the injured sound of her own voice served as proof that I had wronged her, that I was vicious, disloyal, unworthy, hateful. Vera was still going strong when we got to my place. She hadn’t moved in with me yet; that opera had yet to open. My friends and I lived in a black neighborhood where people didn’t observe the white protocol of seeming not to hear what was going on around them. I tried to hush Vera but she was in full cry, and before long our neighbors joined in, yelling at us from up and down the street. They were inspirational to Vera but not to me. I told her she had to go home, and when she refused I simply got out of my car and went inside.
It was well after midnight. My friends were in their rooms, gallantly pretending to be asleep. I opened a beer and carried it to the living room.
The first crash wasn’t that loud. It sounded like someone had kicked over a garbage can. The second was louder. I went to the window and parted the blinds. Vera was backing down the street in her mother’s old Mercedes. This was a blocky gray diesel made, no doubt, from melted-down panzers. Vera went about fifty feet, stopped, ground the gears, started up the street again and rammed my car head-on, caving in the hood. Her undercarriage got caught on my bumper as she pulled away. She couldn’t move but kept trying anyhow, racing the engine, rending metal. Then she popped the clutch and the engine died.
“I’m going to kill you,” I told her when I reached the street.
I must have looked like I meant it, because she locked her door and sat there without saying a word. I walked back and forth around my car, a yellow Volkswegen bug, the first car I’d ever owned. It was cherry when I bought it. An unusual word to use about a VW, but that’s what the ad said: “Cherry, needs tires, runs good.” Gospel, every word. It was a good car but a soft car, no match for the armor-plated Überauto now parked on its hood. Before landing there Vera had nailed the bug twice on the driver’s side, caving in the door and breaking the window.
I kept circling it. As I walked I began to tote up the damage, translating it into words that offered some hope of amendment. Crumpled fender. Dents on door panel. A phrase came to mind that I tried to dismiss and forget, because the instant I thought of it I knew it would undo me. Cracked window. I sat down on the curb. Vera got out of her car. She walked over, sat beside me, leaned against my shoulder.
“You cracked the window,” I said. “I’ll think twice before I ask you to do that again.” And we sat there laughing at my ruined car.
This sort of thing became routine, all in a day’s work. At first I was able to see Vera’s fits as aristocratic peculiarity, and even managed to believe that I could somehow deliver her from them and help her become as squared away as I was. After all, she looked as solid as a rock compared to her brother Grisha.
I never actually met Grisha. Just before I started going out with Vera he had quarreled with their mother over something so trivial she couldn’t remember it afterward, except that she had said something about not liking the look on his face, whereupon Grisha declared that he wouldn’t inflict his face on her or anyone else ever again, and locked himself in his room upstairs. He refused to come out except when there was no one to see him. Vera’s mother left Grisha’s meals on a tray outside his door and carried the dirty dishes away when he was done. The same with his laundry. That was the situation when I first visited the house. Vera’s mother was a fond and patient woman who had long ago surrendered her authority in the family. She accepted this business with Grisha as she accepted everything her children did. Anyway, it couldn’t go on much longer. Summer was almost over. Grisha had another year of school left, and he would have to leave the room once classes began.
That’s what she thought, but Grisha thought otherwise. Just before Labor Day he left a note with his dirty dishes announcing that he planned to stay right where he was and get his diploma by correspondence. He trusted his mother to arrange the details.
She called a family council to discuss the question, and asked me to sit in. I was glad to do it. It was a sign of favor and I did my best to be worthy of it. When she asked for my view I gave sound military advice, which was to lay siege to Grisha. Starve the brat out, I told her. She had to show him he wasn’t the center of the universe.
When I finished I looked at Vera’s mother and saw that I’d been wrong: Grisha was the center of the universe. She seemed embarrassed and a little amazed that I didn’t know this. She thanked me and turned to Vera, then the talk turned serious. They reasoned together and after sober consideration reached their decision. Grisha could do anything he wanted to do.
Vera’s mother signed him up for correspondence school and continued to minister to him. But one night Grisha opened his door just as she was picking up his dinner tray. For a breathless moment they were face-to-face. Then Grisha slammed the door and immediately took measures to ensure that no such accident ever happened again. He wrapped his head completely in gauze, leaving little holes for his mouth, eyes, ears, and nostrils. Once he was all covered up he became less reclusive. I could sometimes catch glimpses of him at the end of a hallway, or retreating up the stairs as I came in the front door. And once, after dropping Vera off in the early morning, I came across Grisha out for a walk. He flared up suddenly in my headlights, his bandage a white ball on his narrow shoulders. It wasn’t at all funny. It was as if I were seeing not Grisha but some terrible future, the future of my fears.
I made up my mind to live with Vera’s moods, as I wanted to think of them, even while they grew more outrageous. I tried to see them as evidence of a rich, passionate nature. What other girl had ever cared enough about me to destroy my car? She’d even threatened to shoot herself once, pulling a pistol out of a desk drawer as I was about to leave her house in the middle of a quarrel. It was pure theater, I understood that, but a small doubt remained, and a small doubt was too much for me, so I gave in and stayed. I nearly always gave in. This became part of the trouble between us. Once she got her way she despised me for letting her have it, and immediately started pushing again. She had to find that line I wouldn’t cross, where my cussedness was equal to hers. On this ground we fought like sworn enemies. We held nothing back, and once we were exhausted, after we’d given and taken every hurt, we came together with a tenderness that lasted for days, until the next round began. It was a hard way to be in love, and not the way I’d hoped for, but it was our way.
To be out of the barracks and the uniform. To be young and in love, surrounded by friends, free in a great city. To have my own time, to read, to loaf, to see plays, to hit jazz bars with Geoffrey and stay up until dawn talking about books and writing—all this was to forget for hours, even days at a time, that I had a bill coming due. But I found reasons to remember.
This was late ’66, early ’67. The news kept getting worse. More troops going over, more getting killed, some of them boys I’d known. I was afraid of the war, but I had never questioned its necessity. Among the soldiers I’d served with that question didn’t even get raised. We took the official explanations on faith and did not ask for details. Faith carried no weight in Washington. My brother and most of my friends believed that the war was an atrocious mistake and ridiculed the government’s attempts to justify it. I argued with them, furiously at times, but I didn’t have command of the subject and my ignorance got me in trouble, never more than when I locked horns with I. F. Stone one night at Geoffrey’s house. With exquisite gentleness, Stone peeled my bluster like an onion until there was nothing left but silence.
I began to attend Professor Carroll Quigley’s Vietnam lectures at Georgetown. I went to a teach-in, but left after the first couple of speakers. They were operating out of their own faith system; faith in the sanctity of Ho Chi Minh and his cause, faith in the perfidy of those who were unconvinced. Mostly I read: Bernard Fall, Jules Roy, Lucien Bodard, Graham Greene.
The Quiet American affected me disagreeably. I liked to think that good intentions had value. In this book good intentions accomplished nothing but harm. Cynicism and accommodation appeared, by comparison, almost virtuous. I didn’t like that idea. It seemed decadent, like the opium-addicted narrator and the weary atmosphere of the novel. What really bothered me was Greene’s portrayal of Pyle, the earnest, blundering American. I did not fail to hear certain tones of my own voice in his, and this was irritating, even insulting. Yet I read the book again, and again.
In time I lost whatever certitudes I’d had, but I didn’t replace them with new ones. The war was something I had to get through. Where was the profit in developing convictions that would make it even harder? I dabbled in unauthorized ideas, and at the point where they began to demand a response from me I drew back, closed my mind as if it were a floodgate, as if I could control the influx of doubt. But I was already up to my neck in it.
My mother lived within walking distance. We had dinner together at least once a week. She liked making a fuss over me, and I liked letting her do it. One night I was sitting in her living room while she cooked up some spaghetti. Her husband, Frank, was out somewhere. She moved around the kitchen, humming along to the radio—101 Strings, Mantovani. Easy listening. The apartment was warm and smelled good. She had filled it with mementos of her travels: Spanish dolls and Brazilian puppets, posters, goat-hair rugs, a camel saddle from Morocco, where she’d spent two weeks driving through the Atlas Mountains with a friend. I sat on the sofa with my legs crossed, drinking a beer and reading the newspaper. While I was in this state of contentment I saw Hugh Pierce’s name among those of the dead.
It was no mistake. His name, rank, and unit were all there. I kept reading the words, and each time they floated farther away from my comprehension. I understood only one thing: This shouldn’t have happened. It was wrong. I knew it at that moment as well as I know it now.
I called out to my mother. She came to the kitchen doorway and stood there looking at me. She was on guard, she knew something was up. I told her Hugh had been killed. I said it reproachfully, and my mother frowned and pushed her lips together like a girl who’d been scolded. Then she crossed the room and sat beside me and touched my wrist doubtfully. “Oh, Toby,” she said.
I knew there was something I should do, but I didn’t know what. I began to walk back and forth while my mother watched me. She told me to go on home if I wanted to be alone, we could have our dinner another time. But I discovered that I was hungry. Famished. I sat down and cleaned my plate and let my mother fill it again. I didn’t talk and neither did she. Afterward I sat there and tried to form an intention. I couldn’t think at all. I felt weightless. My hands were on the table as if I were about to push myself up decisively, but I stayed where I was. My mother looked on, stricken and afraid. For her sake I knew I had to get out of there. I said maybe I’d better go home after all.
I didn’t remember Yancy’s letter until late that night. I got out of bed and opened the top drawer of the dresser, where I kept my correspondence and receipts. I riffled through the pile. She had loopy, girlish handwriting, and she’d used a pencil. I could recognize the envelope at a glance and often did, with a pang, when I was looking for something else. I knew it was there, but I didn’t come up with it the first time through, nor the second.
I slid the drawer out and put it on the floor and knelt beside it. One by one I lifted every letter, turned it over, set it aside. When the drawer was empty I still hadn’t found it. I was close to panic. I sat back and imposed calm on myself. The letter had to be somewhere in the room.
Taking care not to hurry, I searched the other drawers. I looked under the dresser, then pulled it away from the wall and looked behind it. I emptied my duffel bag, went through the pockets of my civvies and even my uniforms. I ran my hands over the shelves in the closet. When I heard myself panting I sat on the edge of my bed and forced myself to think back to when I’d last seen the letter. I couldn’t. I got up again, took stock. Quietly, so I wouldn’t wake the house, I began to tear my room to pieces. I left no inch of it unexamined. Nothing. Yancy’s letter was gone. Had I thrown it away? Could I have done that—just thrown it away?
I couldn’t even remember her last name.
A few days later I thought of calling her friend, the girl I’d taken out, but the number had been disconnected and her name wasn’t listed in the directory. I called the bar where they’d both worked. No one knew any girls named Trace or Yancy.
I don’t know exactly what I would have done if I’d found Yancy. Given her the news, of course. Tried to find out if she’d had the baby. I wanted to ask her about the baby—lots of questions there. And I would have said I was sorry for sitting on her letter, because I was sorry, I am still sorry, God knows I am sorry.
VERA AND I fought more riotously every week. She took offense at something during a party and hewed out great clumps of her hair with pinking shears. One night she climbed the tree outside my bedroom window with a rope around her neck and threatened to hang herself. The outlandishness of our quarrels isolated us, and made reconciliation harder. We had to keep upping the ante, promising more of ourselves, to put the last one behind. Just before I finished language school we got engaged.
And then my year of grace ended. At the end of it, scared, short-winded, forgetful of all martial skills and disciplines, I was promoted to first lieutenant and posted back to Fort Bragg to await orders.
Just after I got there I was assigned to a training exercise being played out in the mountains of Pisgah National Forest. I didn’t know any of the men whose temporary commander I became; I was filling in for their regular team leader, who had other business to attend to. Our job was to parachute in and link up with another team and make a show of our expertise.
It was over a year since I’d been in the field. In that time I had done almost no exercise, nor had I worn a uniform, carried a rifle and pack, or given an order. I hadn’t read a compass or used a map except on drives into the countryside. On the day before the drop I locked myself up with plenty of coffee and every field manual I could get my hands on, like a student boning up for a chemistry final.
We gathered on the airstrip well before dawn. I tagged along with the first sergeant while he made the equipment check, looking on as if I knew what he was doing. It was still dark when we boarded the plane. I sat with the others until we entered the forest, then I hooked up my parachute and stood in the open doorway, trying to follow our position on the map. There was light breaking on the tops of the hills but the land below was still in darkness and the map kept flapping in my hand. Our pilot was supposed to flash a green warning light when he saw the smoke marking the drop zone, but I knew better than to rely on him. We were moving fast. If out of distraction or malice he was even a little slow giving us the signal we could end up in impossible terrain, miles from the drop zone and the men we were supposed to meet.
We were flying up a long valley. The slopes were awash in light, the plain was turning gray. We passed a cluster of houses. I tried to find the village on the map; it was unmarked, or I was looking in the wrong place. In fact I had no idea where we were. As the valley began to narrow, the plane descended and slowed. This was the usual prelude to the jump, but the green light still hadn’t come on. I braced myself in the doorway and looked out. Smoke was rising off the valley floor a mile or so ahead of us. Our smoke was supposed to be yellow, and this was black, but it was the only smoke out there. I turned to the first sergeant. His eyes were closed. I looked back out the door and confirmed what I’d seen. Smoke. But still no green light.
A decision was required. It was my duty to make it. I gave the order to hook up, and as the first man came to the door I smacked him on the rump like a quarterback breaking the huddle and shouted “Go!” Then the next man, and the next, until everyone was out but me, and then I jumped.
Sudden silence. Mountains all around. The eerie, lovely sight of the other canopies, the men swinging below. My men. I’d gotten them out in good order, and with no help from the pilot. If I could manage this, I could manage the next thing. That was the secret—not to think ahead too much, not to rehearse every single step in advance. Just do what was needed as the need arose.
Then the man closest to the ground gave a shout and I looked down and saw him hauling like crazy on his risers, trying to change the path of his fall. The others started doing the same thing, and a moment later, when I got a good look at what lay below us, so did I.
We were not, as I had supposed, drifting down upon a field marked with signal grenades, but over the expanse of a vast garbage dump where random fires smoldered, sending greasy coils of smoke high into the air. I caught my first whiff a couple of hundred feet up and the smell got worse the closer I came. I pulled hard to the left, making for a patch of ground not yet covered with junk. I was lucky; being last out, I was fairly close to the edge. Almost everyone else landed in the soup. I watched them go down as I drifted to port, and listened to them bellow and swear, and heard the crunching sounds they made as they slammed into the dump.
We were several miles from the drop zone. To get there took us most of the day. No one spoke to me. It was as if I did not exist. We maintained this arrangement until our part in the exercise was over.
Two weeks later I was in Vietnam.