Battle Fatigue (8 page)

Chapter Sixteen

The First to Go

But it isn't over. It is hard to say what exactly happened. Some say there were two attacks, some say one. Some say none at all. But why would somebody make something like that up? And why don't we know the truth? How can you be on a ship and not know if you've been attacked or not? There are a lot of arguments about this, especially in Congress, but they are going ahead with the war anyway.

I ask my father why this war is so much more confusing than other wars.

“Because you might have to fight it,” he answers, somewhat glumly, it seems to me. “War is very clear when someone else is going to fight it. It just becomes confusing when it's you.”

“But the War was clear to you, wasn't it?” When you say “the War” it always means World War II. “I mean, you had to stop the Nazis.”

He looks at me disapprovingly and says, “I was in the Pacific.”

It is true—in the Pacific they were fighting the Japanese, not the Nazis. “Sure, I know, but the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.”

He smiles a bitter smile. “Fighting the Germans would have made sense to me, but I didn't have to fight them. It probably made less sense to your uncle. Because he had to fight them.”

“But wasn't Pearl Harbor clear? You had Pearl Harbor.”

“Oh, it was clear. I remember before Pearl Harbor there were all these Jewish groups saying we had to fight the Germans. But no one agreed with that. Then after Pearl Harbor everybody agreed that we had to fight the Germans because the Japanese had attacked us. And that was supposed to make sense.”

I have never heard anybody talk like this before. “I'll tell you something, Joel,” he says, examining the label on a can of lima beans. “In 1945 I was in the Philippines. I was a major by then and I was being driven by an enlisted man in a jeep going through a mountain pass. Somewhere in the mountains was a Japanese sniper. You know, an expert shot with a rifle hiding far away and picking people off. Maybe he wasn't a very good sniper, because he kept missing. But you could hear the bullets hit the rocks.
Ping. Ping.
And it occurred to me that he was shooting at me because I was a major, and maybe I should take off my maple leaves. Or somehow cover them up. Or hide them. ‘But maybe that would be an act of cowardice,' I thought.
Ping. Ping.
And maybe if I appeared to be the same as the guy who was driving he would shoot at him instead of at me. But then if he hit him, it would be my fault.
Ping. Ping.
Then again, he was already in danger because of me.”

“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. Shaker 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.