Battle Fatigue

To Talia Feiga, her generation,
and their dream of a better world

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

—
W
ALDEN
, HENRY DAVID THOREAU, 1854

Prologue

Snag in the Plan

It is a cold fall day and I am thinking of Canada—thinking of how cold Canada will be. Everything seems to be going so fast. Only three years ago I was a teenager. Now I am a refugee, a political exile—or I will be soon. After a year and a half of appeals, I'm just waiting for the final decision of my draft board. I know what that decision is going to be. And then I can either go to prison or to Canada. I think Canada would be better, but it is not without its drawbacks.

I have never been to Canada though I was close once. I demonstrated on a bridge right at the border. Maybe it would have been easier if I had just crossed over then and not come back.

I'm sitting in my bedroom in dim bluish New England light, skimming through a booklet with a yellow cover called
Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada.
I paid two dollars for it. It has a lot of information about how to go to Canada as a draft resister and get legal status. The book was put together by people who want us to refuse to fight and to come to Canada, so it tries to be reassuring. It has a chapter titled “Yes, John, There Is a Canada.” The next chapter is “It Has Politics,” and it explains which political parties oppose the war. The next chapter asserts that Canada does have a culture, followed by a chapter claiming that Canada has real cities. And then, finally, the book gets to the real point—Canada has snow.

The temperature in Canada is very much on my mind. The town that I come from in eastern Massachusetts, Haley, was named after Martin Haley, who fought and died in Canada in the mid-1700s in the French and Indian War. He was my age when he died but he got a town named after him, and I suppose he was the original reason that being a war hero was considered so important in Haley. When we were little we used to hear, and often made up, stories about how many Indians Martin Haley had killed—or was it Frenchmen he killed?—before they got him. We weren't sure, but he must have killed a lot of some kind of people to have a town named after him.

But when we got a little older we heard the story that it wasn't Indians or Frenchmen that killed him. It was Canada. He went up to Canada and it was so cold that he got sick and died. All the kids thought this was a great joke and we used to play Martin Haley Goes to War, which consisted of a bugle call, the drawing of a sword, a sneeze, and then someone falling over. We would all laugh.

This remains my image of Canada. The
Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada
states that a temperature of eighty-one degrees below zero had once been recorded in a town called Snag. I am not going to move to Snag. The booklet says the temperature in Toronto averages seventy-one in July. But it also says Toronto gets fifty-five inches of snow a year. Is the best that can be said of Toronto that it is better than Snag?

I have settled on Vancouver, which only gets twenty-four inches of snow. The manual also says that chocolate chip cookies cost forty-nine cents a pound in Vancouver, while they cost fifty-seven cents a pound in Toronto. It does not give cookie prices in Snag.

This is how I am making decisions these days. I'll take the town with the least snow and the cheapest cookies. After having made the one big decision that I have spent my whole life thinking about, all the rest are now tossed out on things like the price of cookies.

How did it come to this? How did I, Joel Bloom, become a political exile? I had always thought I was a fairly normal American kid. Maybe a little different, but I loved baseball. In fact, I am still excited about the 1971 World Series. Baltimore, with one of the best pitching staffs in history, is taking on the Pittsburgh Pirates with Roberto Clemente. This could be one of the great seven-game series.

My only problem is that I don't want to kill Vietnamese people. Like Martin Haley, I turn out not to be an Indian slayer. That has disappointed a lot of people. I have always known that I would have to face war and I have always thought about it. Even as a small child in Haley I could see it coming. But back then I mostly wondered how I would do. I didn't know that there was a choice, a decision to be made. It has taken me all these years to make it, but looking back I see how most everything in my life—even things that didn't seem very important at the time—was leading to this decision. Only when I look back at all of it do I really understand what happened.

Part One

My Childhood

Chapter One

Doing the Great Thing

I know that because I am a boy I will go to war. Boys in Haley go to war. I don't know who I am going to fight. Possibly the Germans or the Russians. It will come, probably when I turn eighteen. I am only seven now so I have a lot of time. I'm not worried. It's just what happens.

All the buildings in Haley are brick. In the summer the bricks look a reddish-chocolate color. It is easy to imagine that the whole town is made of chocolate, everyone living in little chocolate houses and going to the chocolate school. The town looks a little prettier in the summer when it becomes green. There are a lot of very big maple trees, which are the best trees for climbing because the branches start low to the ground. We sometimes split the wing-shaped sticky green seeds and put them on our noses so we look like long-nosed Martians. Maybe we will end up fighting Martians—with ray guns. I have a toy ray gun.

In the winter, with no leaves and cold light, the bricks turn blackish, the town looks hard, and there is no dreaming it away. It is a hard town of brick factories that produce small hard things like tools and metal wire and ball bearings that make engines turn. Sometimes we play with ball bearings—shoot them like silvery marbles. I am not sure how they make machines run but that is what they say.

Just before I was born there was the Big War, the biggest war ever, World War II. Everyone fought it, all over the world. I know this because all the men in town ask each other where they were during the war, and the answers are strange names from far away. But when the war was over the soldiers came to Haley because Haley had jobs. Everyone has a job in Haley, most of them in the factories.

My father went to war, my uncle went to war, the fathers of everyone I know went to war, every man in the neighborhood went. Then they came home and had all of us.

My father was in the Pacific, which, I have learned, is the world's largest ocean. He was an officer, which is a good thing to be. I think I would like to be an officer but it must be a hard thing to get because none of the other dads were officers. They were privates and corporals and sergeants. But once you become an officer, you can become a general. For some reason, though, my dad didn't like it very much. He doesn't like to talk about it. I have never seen a picture of him in his officer uniform but I'm sure he must have looked fantastic. That is one of the things about being an officer. You get much better uniforms. All the other kids have pictures of their fathers in plain uniforms set out in their living rooms. But there is no picture of my father in his officer uniform.

I went with him once to a clothing store. He was looking for a raincoat. He searched through a long line of them, shoving them over one by one like he was hitting them.

A salesman came over looking unhappy. I thought he was going to tell my father not to hit the raincoats but all he said was, “Can I help you, sir?”

“Yes, don't you have any coats without these damn epaulets?” My father slapped the coats one more time. He was going to get into trouble.

“I'll go and look,” was all the salesman said, and then he left.

“Dad?” I said.

He didn't answer. He was staring at the raincoats.

“Dad?” I repeated.

“Yes,” he said, shaking his head and changing his tone of voice as if he had just been awakened from a spell. “What is it?”

“Dad? What's an epaulet?”

“It's this,” he said, poking at a raincoat. A strip of cloth was stuck to the coat near the collar and it buttoned on the other end, at the shoulder. “When I was in the army, everything I wore had these things on it. Well, I don't have to wear them anymore,” he said angrily.

I wonder what he did in the war. I know he was in New Guinea, though I am not sure where that is. We have a painting hanging in the living room. A green and red jungle. I always thought it was a painting of where he had been in New Guinea, but I was wrong. It is a copy of a painting I found by accident in a book. It is by a famous French artist named Paul Gauguin. The book said it is a painting of Tahiti, which my mother showed me on a map. It is not even near New Guinea. The Pacific is very big.

I can feel New Guinea in our home, and so I am always looking for signs of it. There is a black stone ax with straw in the center—an odd-shaped thing—hanging on the wall. And this really is from New Guinea. It belonged to a kind of Indian in the Pacific. It was his tool—or was it a weapon?

I often stare up at the strange T-shaped object, trying to decide.

“Stay away from that thing, Joel,” my mother says. “If that thing falls down it will split your head in two.”

It seems to me that everything is more—just more—in our house. Other kids are told to be careful with things because they could “put an eye out.” But in our house you could split your head in two, which seems even harder to fix. I avoid the wall with the ax.

Another thing my father brought back from New Guinea is even scarier. It is called malaria, and it causes sweat to pour out of him—like juices are being squeezed out by something crushing him. He shakes so hard that it seems he might come apart. You can talk to him while he sits there shaking. I like to because it proves to me that he will be all right. There are fewer attacks than before and they are not as bad. The war seems to be wearing off.

My uncle is very different. He was not an officer and he didn't fight in the Pacific. He fought the Germans in Europe and he does talk about it. He seems to have been everywhere in Europe inside a tank. I don't think you can see much from inside a tank because he cannot describe anything, only an endless list of places he has been—Normandy, Paris, Bastogne, the Rhine, the Elbe … The French have a drink called Calvados, which he said was very nice and very strong and got him very drunk, and the Belgians had cherry-flavored beer, and the Russians had tea that was so strong it was black and tasted like coffee.

But there is something missing from his war stories. There is never any mention of fighting—only the places and the drinks. Sometimes, when my uncle is babysitting at night, I go into the living room to watch television and I turn on the lamp. My uncle is right there, sitting in a chair, silent, his light-gray eyes wide open. Without turning or moving he says in a very low soft voice, “Hello.”

He spends a lot of time on that one chair with its white cover printed with designs of roses and lots of leaves, just sitting there in the dark.

I go to the television and turn the dial. There are five stations. At least one of them will have something about the war—old news films or a television program or even a movie. Movies about World War II are everywhere. They are about the men. There is always a farm boy who knew nothing and there is always a kid from Brooklyn who knows too much and is not completely honest. And there is usually an Italian and a Jew and a Pole, which is pretty much what our neighborhood is like too. These men would become friends from fighting together, killing the enemy, and sometimes getting killed—but in the end becoming
men
, doing what men have to do. War is how you grow and become a man.

My uncle always asks me to stop on the war movie and usually it is about his war. When the film gives the name of a place, he says, in a low voice with no emotion that I can hear, “I was there.” Sometimes when they mention a place—“We're going to Bastogne”—he will repeat the name. “Bastogne,” he will say, making a sound with his mouth like he needs to let some air out.

When the movie is over he stops talking. I turn off the television and he does not move—doesn't even turn his head. I don't think his eyes are moving.

“Well, I guess I'll go to bed,” I say, and I don't wait for him to answer.

As I walk out of the room, he asks me to turn the light off, and I leave him staring into the dark as if he has his own television to watch when the real one is off. He is back in his war.

I do know a little about my uncle's war from my mother. My mother has not been to war and so is more willing to talk about it. My uncle was in something called the Battle of the Bulge and then he fought across Germany. His group met the Russians, who were fighting across Germany from the other side, at a river. According to my mother, he also helped capture a concentration camp called Dachau.

I know what a concentration camp is because my grandfather's family disappeared in one and my grandfather has been writing a lot of letters to the Red Cross trying to find them. These camps were places where Germans held Jews and every day sent some away to be killed. I don't know why they would do this and my uncle never says anything about these places. Neither does my grandfather.

Every Friday morning I go with my mother to the bakery to get a challah and an onion rye bread, hot out of the oven. Onion rye bread hot out of the oven is one of the best things about my childhood. I would like to eat an entire loaf, steamy and bitter and sour and even sweet, with its hard crust and soft silvery middle—just breaking it apart with my hands. No butter or slicing or anything. But this is something I never get to do.

My mother orders the bread and a woman with her dark hair in a scarf, wearing a white coat, takes this soft and heavy loaf and slides it into a white paper bag and hands it over the counter to me. She always hands it to me, not my mother and, as she reaches down, the white sleeve of her coat slides up her wrist and I can see the blue numbers, a long row of them, on her arm. I can never look into her eyes because I know those eyes have seen terrible things and it scares me.

I will admit that I am afraid of concentration camps. My parents said that millions, including my grandfather's brothers and sisters and parents, were murdered in them by poison. My parents and other grown-ups argue about how much I should be told about this and that makes me listen carefully. So now I have found out everything. The Nazis poisoned people in showers and made lamp shades and bars of soap from Jewish people. This was how I learned that grown-ups do things that are stranger than anything kids can think up. We once played a game where if you were captured you were turned into spaghetti and then you couldn't stand up. But this was even stranger. This was the worst thing. My uncle had done a great thing by capturing the concentration camp and killing the Germans or putting them in jail or whatever he did. That is the part no one will tell me about.

All of my grandparents were born in Europe somewhere. They never explain where. Sometimes I hear my mother's father speaking Polish with the Polish people in town.

“So Grandpa,” I say. “You speak Polish?”

“Echhh,” he says, rotating his hands palm up and then palm down to indicate “maybe, maybe not.”

“So you're from Poland?”

“Echhh.”

He never explains.

“They all had terrible lives in Europe,” my mother says.

“Why was it terrible?” I ask.

“The Poles hated the Jews. They rode through the towns on horseback beating people and killing them and setting houses on fire.”

I tried to imagine this. The only thing I had ever seen that sounded anything like this was something I once saw on television about people covered with sheets who rode through a town setting things on fire. They were called the Ku Klux Klan.

“Was it like the Ku Klux Klan?” I ask.

“Something like that,” she says. “And we would have all lived like that if my parents hadn't gotten us out. Then it got even worse.”

“The concentration camp.”

“Yes,” she says. “You know about that, Joel?” Why wouldn't I know about that? The grown-ups talk about it every day. “But they got out, walking all the way to Hamburg.”

“And that's why we were not in the concentration camp?”

“Yes,” she says.

So I understand that fighting for America is a very good thing. My father did a good thing fighting the Japanese because they attacked America in Pearl Harbor and so America made them pay, dropping atomic bombs on them. It was a good thing. My uncle killed the Germans who wanted to poison people in the shower. That was a good thing too. All the men in my neighborhood had done great things and someday I would be called on to do a great thing.