Battle Fatigue (12 page)

I decide to hobble on. Donnie was right about his outfit. I cannot see him and I keep calling to him to find out where he is. Sometimes his voice is in front of me, sometimes behind me.

After about an hour, maybe longer, I start to think that these woods are a lot bigger than I had thought. Strange, because New Hampshire's not that big. Now I hear an odd sound from Donnie. He has tripped over a rock and can't find his bomb. We grope around but can't feel it. We consider lighting a match but then remember that matches are not a good way to hunt for gasoline bombs. We decide to leave it. One will be enough. We hope.

I think it has been another hour now and I smell a lot of gasoline and think maybe some of it has spilled on my jeans. I would like to see, because if there is no more gas in the bottle there is no point in going on. The sign has fallen in the mud a few times and I am not sure it is readable. Maybe we should check on that. Actually I can almost read the sign because the lettering is against a white background. Maybe Donnie could stand away from me and the gasoline, and light a match. He takes the sign and walks ahead about six feet through the trees. I can see him clearly now. My eyes must be adjusting.

Then I realize that I am seeing better because it is dawn.

“If we wait a little longer it will be daylight and we can find our way back to the road.”

“Or we can just go into town. Even if we do look strange, we didn't do anything. Nothing has happened. So we can just walk through town,” Donnie points out.

We leave the second bottle in the woods and fold up the sign. There is nothing to hide. Donnie is right. And I feel a little relieved about that. My days as a revolutionary guerrilla fighter are over. Soon there is enough light for us to find our way into town. It is not far away although in a completely different direction from where we had been heading. On the way back to the apartment, Rachel, who has been circling town all night, pulls up next to us. Nobody noticed the red Volkswagen driving around. But why should they, since nothing has happened? We give her the disappointing news. For some reason, she just laughs. Then we all laugh. Not knowing what to do, Trotsky laughs too.

Ex-guerrillas, we are studying for our final exams. I take a break and turn on the television but I doze. I can hear they are running some old film of the Kennedy assassination. Suddenly I realize it is
this
Kennedy, the brother. They have killed Bobby too. Donnie walks into the room and I start to tell him but realize I can't tell him about another Kennedy assassination. So I say nothing and he sees it on television.

Rachel is right, I understand that now. You can't change things if every time someone tries, he is killed. Maybe my thinking is completely wrong and I am not recognizing the way the world really is. Maybe, like Martin Luther King, I am too soft. And isn't that just another way of not standing up, of being the German?

I call Sam, thinking how upset he will be too. He is upset, but he is not thinking the way I am. He is talking politics. He is worried about the Kennedy delegates. Do they give them to McCarthy or to a new antiwar candidate? How do they stop Humphrey …

I let him talk but I am not listening. It doesn't matter to me because no one who will stop the war is going to get the nomination. And if someone could, he would just be shot.

The war is still on.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Induction

To me, Bobby Kennedy's death was the final death of wounded hope. I finished my last two years of college without believing there was anything much anyone could do. I studied biology and tried to understand why the world is arranged the way it is. Professor Moreland urged us to study Darwin and promised that if we understood the natural order we could understand ourselves. Like Moreland and most everyone else I know, I go to demonstrations but I realize they won't stop the war. Nixon, whom I thought I had left behind in my childhood, is now president. Was this what Darwin meant by the survival of the fittest? At this rate we will be back to Eisenhower soon.

But, bad as the world is, I don't want to make it any worse. My college education, my draft deferment, has slipped by. Still, I know that no matter what happens, I will not be killing Vietnamese people for Richard Nixon or anyone else. In my mind I keep reviewing the alternatives as presented by Myron in Dorchester.

But now there is another possibility. Now there is a lottery in which a number will be assigned to every day of the year. If your birthday has a high number you are probably free. If you have a low number you will almost certainly be going into the military. Donnie LePine, for whom everything always turns out well, draws number 347 and he is out of the draft. The only surprise is that he didn't get number 365. Donnie has decided to drop out of school for a while and “work for the movement.”

December 7, my birthday, pulls number twelve. My low number isn't surprising to me. It is becoming clearer every day that this war is my destiny. I will have to face it—fight it or refuse to fight it. But I will not just get out of it by something as easy as a lottery number.

I am officially no longer a student. I am twenty-one years old and I have just finished my last final exam. What this means to me is that my draft deferment has ended and I am eligible.

Detroit has faded since it won the 1968 World Series. They didn't do well last year. This year their star pitcher, Denny McLain, was suspended for carrying a gun when traveling with the team. The world is so mad that you don't even ask why he wanted to carry a gun. It was not allowed and he was suspended for half the season. I only care because they are now short a pitcher and so maybe they are going to bring up a rookie left-hander named Pizzutti. The last I heard from Rocco, he had made Double A. Donnie and Stanley and I always said we would go see him play again but we never have. Now Donnie is off with his high lottery number working for the movement. I think he is in hiding, or as he and Rachel would say, “gone underground.” Stanley and I, with low lottery numbers, are coming out of college about to face induction into the military. Isn't this the reverse of what should happen? Shouldn't Stanley and I be the ones to go into hiding? At least Rocco has beaten the draft.

After finishing the exam, I return to my apartment where I plan to call my parents to explain that there is nothing to celebrate and that I do not want to attend my graduation. But as soon as I get there, the telephone starts ringing. The way I am feeling, I half expect it to be the army telling me to report for duty.

Close. It is my father telling me my draft notice has arrived. It is as if the military had been watching. I am almost surprised that they mailed the notice to my parents' home rather than have someone outside the test room waiting for me.

I think I should just refuse to go. That would be better than going and then refusing to fight. My father has a friend who can get me into the Army Reserve and then I wouldn't have to go to Vietnam. But that would still be supporting the war, not resisting it. If you participate in the military in any way, you are participating in the war. The fact that I might manage to get an easier job for myself would not be opposing the war.

Rachel says I should go in and “work for the movement” from within the army. According to her, I should try to get soldiers to rebel. Isn't that how revolutions begin? Someone else tells me I should just tell the army that this is my plan, and then they won't take me. Stanley insists that he has spoken to medical students and knows how to get medically rejected. But I don't have anything wrong with me.

My parents are angry that I won't go into the reserves. “You're just being stubborn,” my mother says. I argue that it is more complicated than that.

My father insists, “There's a right way and a wrong way to do these things. You can go into the reserves and stay away from the war and it will at least be
legal
. Once you do things that are not legal, you don't stand for anything. You're just a criminal. You could go to jail.”

“I know that.”

But finally he gives me his blessing down in the shelter, tuna in hand. He says, “I think it's good to try for this exemption on moral grounds, as long as you accept that after you lose you will go in.”

This did not make any sense but he was happy with it so I didn't argue.

My uncle cannot believe that anyone would just refuse to serve. He cannot even talk about it. I think he does not like the idea that he had a choice. The idea that war is “doing what you have to do” is very important to him.

I am sitting on the swing in the backyard, the old battlefield where Donnie and Stanley and I formed our brotherhood. I wonder what happened to the Nazi hats and canteens and Stanley's flag of surrender. Sam comes out with his slow bearlike walk. I can see he has something on his mind. He always does. All he says is, “Hi, Joel.”

“Hi, Sam.”

There is a long silence while Sam prepares what he wants to say and I wait for it.

“Joel? The Army Reserve is a good spot. This is an outfit that will never be called up.”

“I thought you were against the war?”

“I am but … this will ruin your whole future.”

“It will just shape it in a different way. I have no idea what my future is. But it is not killing Vietnamese people.”

There is another long silence except that the crickets in the yard are very loud. Warm summer nights, the chirp of crickets—I keep remembering those summers with nothing to do but play war and baseball.

“Joel, if you do this it will ruin
my
career. Joel, I want to go into politics.”

He says this as though it is supposed to be surprising, but he has been in politics since he was in high school, and he is majoring in political science. Of course, so did Rachel and Donnie, but Sam is different.

“I'm going to work for Senator McGovern. He's going to run for president in 1972 and he'll stop the war. His staff has promised me a full-time job when I graduate but they are not going to want the brother of a draft dodger.”

“Why? He opposes the war.”

“That's why he can't afford to be surrounded by draft dodgers. He was a combat veteran.”

So even George McGovern disapproves?

“It's just his staff looking out for him. It's not just that you'd be a draft dodger. You would be a felon. That would plague me my whole career.”

I can't help but think the whole reason Sam is planning out his career is that he got such a high lottery number he doesn't even have to think about the draft. I think about Lester. Sam has put me in Lester's shoes. If I don't go it will ruin a career, although in my case it's not even
my
career. I don't like the idea of Sam being plagued his whole life by a decision I made. But to ignore what is right because it will be hard for your family—isn't that being the German? Wasn't that one of the standard excuses? Can I kill Vietnamese people because it would look best for my brother's career?

The only one who approves of my decision to outright refuse is Dickey Panicelli. He walks up to the fence between our yards and stares over at me, or into the night darkness, in silence, and after a few minutes says, “I wish to hell I had taken five fucking minutes to sit on a swing and think before I signed up. I bet I wouldn't have done it.”

I am to report to South Station in Boston and go by train to the induction center. What a funny word “induction” is. It sounds like being sucked into some kind of duct. We are all here to be inducted.

Stanley is here too. He is sick because he has eaten ninety-two eggs in an attempt to raise his albumen count. No one knows exactly what albumen is, but it is in eggs and everyone says they won't take you if you have too much of it. Looking at Stanley you would think too much albumen turns you green, but maybe that's just the effect of too many eggs.

Brian Sorenstag is talking with a ridiculous lisp that makes him sound like Elmer Fudd. He is hoping to convince the army that he is gay, though the gay people I know don't sound anything like Elmer Fudd. Was that cartoon supposed to be about a gay guy?

Everyone has something they are trying to do to get out. Everyone but Tony Scaratini. Tony stopped growing, so that he doesn't look any bigger than the rest of us now. He is even a little on the small side. For a moment I think maybe he stopped growing when I hit him back in high school. He is already losing his hair and has a humble, stoop-shouldered posture. He's very quiet and doesn't try to speak to any of us; none of us were ever interested in speaking to him. But we are fairly quiet anyway, thinking about the possibility of going to war or reviewing a strategy for not going or, in Stanley's case, feeling too sick to speak. But Brian Sorenstag is doing a lot of talking, practicing his Elmer Fudd accent.

Rocco and Donnie are the only ones missing. They have found their ways out.

It is a long and strange day of physical and psychological testing in a very large open space with rooms off to the side. Hundreds of men my age in various states of undress are being herded around by crisp humorless men in uniform. Being sheep is our introduction to military life. I try to fail everything but of course it doesn't work because that too is not my destiny. They show two squares and a circle and ask which one doesn't belong. Trying to sound earnest, I quickly respond, “Second square sir!”

A psychiatrist asks me if I have violent dreams. I say, “I think I am having one right now.” But that just comes off as a joke. I guess it does not sound at all deranged. If you want to sound crazy you would have to say you love war. Dickey sounded a lot crazier to me when he went off to war than when he came back.

Anyone with a reasonable number of limbs, and, I suppose, the right albumen count, can pass this physical.

By the end of the day I am a big step closer to Vietnam. I have been found mentally, intellectually, and physically suitable for killing Vietnamese people. Shows what they know.

There are not many moments in life like this. This is the moment that everything in my life has led me to, the moment when I will finally face my war. And I know, without a twitch of hesitation, what to do. All day long a huge man in a khaki uniform, a sergeant, I think, has been shouting at us, sending us from station to station. He is a head taller than me, broad shouldered, and very fit-looking—probably a dangerous man to argue with. He has a red face and hair too short to guess at the color. Veins wander over his temples and you can see them pulsating when he shouts. He is exactly whom you would want for the crystallizing confrontation of your life.

I march up to him—as close to marching as I'm ever going to come—and I say, “Sir, I think this war is completely immoral and I refuse to participate in the military in any way.”

He stares down at me. The whites of his eyes are crisscrossed with red veins, making his blue eyes look even bluer. Suddenly he looks to me like a man near the end of a long workday. He rolls those eyes and in a bored singsong recites, “Conscientious objector, line three.”