Battle Fatigue (9 page)

Chapter Eighteen

My War, Deferred

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

College has changed Donnie as much as war changed Dickey—but maybe in the opposite direction. I'm not sure. Donnie's straight brown hair flows and swirls toward his shoulders and the thick black beard that covers the lower half of his face is neatly trimmed. He looks like an Italian Renaissance version of Jesus Christ. Donnie invites me to a meeting of a student group that is against the war in Vietnam. It is hard to believe that a kid from Haley would be in such a group. But on the other hand, I have been thinking about this for years now and I cannot come up with a reason to fight in Vietnam. The Vietnamese don't seem to be plotting to take over the world. Aren't they just plotting to take over Vietnam? And now I realize that I am not the only one, not even the only one from Haley, having these thoughts.

At the meetings I see that these kids are a lot different from the kids in Haley. No one mentions baseball or the Red Sox, even though the Sox have finally integrated and started putting together a real team for next season. These kids have all read books I have never heard of, and they like to argue about them. There is a German writer named Herbert Marcuse. He has come out with a new book called
One-Dimensional Man.
I am the only person there who hasn't read it. I know I should but at the moment, to be honest, what has drawn my interest is not so much the ideas of Herbert Marcuse as the ideas of Rachel Apfelbaum.

Rachel is also a freshman. Her head is covered with endless, indecipherable dark curls. She is wearing a flowing flower-print dress that she says she made herself. She says she makes all her own clothes. She looks great in them. But not only is she beautiful and not only does she make her own clothes and keep up with the latest German philosophers, but she has—what I used to call when I was back in Haley—clarity. She knows the Vietnam War is wrong. She has no doubts. It is wrong and racist and has to be stopped. She does not have to take a breath or swallow. She is sure of it. She is explaining this to me at two thousand words a minute and I am nodding my head like it is a language I don't speak and I can't let her know I'm a foreigner. Then she says, “You know, Marcuse says that there have always been subversives throughout the whole history of thought.”

“Well, yes … Does he really … I think this—”

She interrupts me. “Have you read
One-Dimensional Man
yet?”

Now, if some girl in Haley said that to me I would say “Come on.” But it is the way Rachel says it. First of all, she gives me a smile that is like a gift, like a reward. What wouldn't you do to get one of those smiles? But also it is the way she says the word “yet.” That word means that of course I would be reading Marcuse's new book. It is just a question of have I done it
yet
. There is no judgment. But because of this, I cannot bring myself to disappoint her. So I say, “I'm reading it now.”

And she says, “How is it going?” Which surprises me because it acknowledges that reading Marcuse may not necessarily go well.

So I say, “Okay … I've got some issues with it.”

Incredible. “Some issues with it.” Where did I get that?

And then she says, “I do too. We should talk about this.”

“Yes,” I say, getting nervous about how well this is going. “Yes … we should.”

“Tonight at seven o'clock?”

Rachel Apfelbaum has just asked me out on a date.

Chapter Nineteen

Crazy People

Formal logic foreshadows the reduction of secondary to primary qualities in which the former become the measurable and controllable properties of physics.” Yes, that is what Marcuse has written in his new book. In anticipation of my date with Rachel Apfelbaum, I run to the campus bookstore and buy it. Do I have “some issues” with this book? Only this: I have no idea what he is talking about.

Reading Marcuse reminds me of the novels I struggled through in high school French. Whenever I started to understand a passage it would then slip into the incomprehensible. I would underline the passages I understood because those would be the parts I could talk about. There are moments in Marcuse when I recognize some phrases and start to understand him and then he says something like “In advanced capitalism, technical rationality is embodied, in spite of its irrational use, in the productive apparatus.” I can't argue with that because I cannot figure out what he is saying.

But it doesn't matter. It turns out that Rachel Apfelbaum doesn't really want to talk about Marcuse after all. She wants to talk about absolutely everything, and we don't stop talking for the rest of the year.

We go to antiwar demonstrations in Boston, in New York, and in Washington. The police seem to have trouble with our ideas. They slowly encircle us as we march, then they fire off canisters of tear gas, which burn your eyes and make you feel ridiculous because you are supposed to be standing up for your beliefs but you end up doubled over and crying. We try bringing sliced limes, which everyone says counteract the effects of tear gas. But they don't seem to help. We also wear helmets. Rachel and I have football helmets—she rolled her eyes contemptuously when I pointed out that they sold Red Sox batting helmets at the store in Fenway Park. But there are all kinds of helmets. Some demonstrators even have army helmets and it is starting to remind me of how we played war as kids. The reason we wear them is that after the tear gas the police move in with clubs and start beating us. Only there are so many of us that somehow the police never get to Rachel and me. But we can see demonstrators who don't have helmets getting serious head injuries.

Why do the police do this? A lot of people seem to feel really threatened by anyone who opposes war, as though there is some basic right that we are trying to take away from them. They live in a world where war is accepted and soldiers are heroes. But if Dickey Panicelli doesn't feel like a hero, no one wants to hear from him. And certainly no one wants to hear that I don't want to fight for my country. It goes against all their beliefs and they just want to beat us until we see things their way.

Rachel, with her clarity, sees it differently. She says the police beat us because they are pigs. I've noticed that she loves the word “pig.” She never says “policeman” or “cop.” It is always “the pigs.” Is Popeye Panicelli a pig? Rachel, who calls for total revolution, has never known a policeman personally. We argue a great deal.

“Don't call them pigs.”

“Why not?”

“They're just people,” I say. “You call them pigs and it makes them mad.”

“Tough.”

“People don't act well when they get mad.”

“Are you afraid?”

I can't believe it. Is this like Kathy Pedrosky all over again?

Rachel believes in violence. She says that eventually we will have to “take on the pigs.” I know this kind of talk from Haley. How you have to fight. I suppose when we take on the pigs, our school friends will wish us good luck and tell us to “show them what you can do.”

This isn't making much sense. If we are opposing war, opposing violence, why use violence to oppose it? Everybody seems to be going a little crazy.

This is true in Haley too. I go back to Haley for spring break and I bring Rachel to meet my parents. What will they think of her flowing homemade dresses, of her arguments from German philosophy, of her talk of total revolution? Is she going to call our next-door neighbor a pig?

But this is getting very weird. My mother and father are looking intently into her eyes, smiling, and nodding their heads. They love her. She is the first girl I have ever dated that they like. Now I realize why they didn't like Haley girls. The only thing they notice about Rachel is that she is Jewish, and this pleases them. She talks about “ten million people, armed and on the streets,” and they nod and smile!

To me, Rachel sounds completely crazy. But everyone else has gone crazy too. Popeye Panicelli has taken to walking around the neighborhood with his nightstick in hand, twirling it and swinging it and talking about how he is ready to “bust some heads.” Dickey smiles maliciously and stares off at some distant hill that only he can see. My uncle has started target practice, or so he claims, with the old bolt-action German rifle, getting ready for “when the hippies come.” I realize, though he doesn't, that he is talking about my girlfriend. He has heard her kind of talk somewhere and he takes it seriously. Will the next war be between my uncle and Rachel Apfelbaum?

I run into Rocco Pizzutti walking by the mills along the river, lost in thought. He does not know what to do because the Detroit Tigers, looking for a young left-handed pitcher to develop, have offered to sign him. It is a different era. Baseball is not about the Dodgers and the Yankees anymore. Koufax is retiring. The Red Sox are hot with Carl Yastrzemski. The dominant teams are the Cardinals and the Detroit Tigers. And the Tigers want Rocco Pizzutti.

“Rocco, that's fantastic.”

He doesn't look like he agrees. “Should I sign with them?”

“You mean drop out of school?”

“Exactly.”

He doesn't need to explain. He is eighteen years old. If he drops out of school and goes into the minor leagues and does well, he can be a major-league pitcher at twenty-two or twenty-three, which is the age they like to get them. But if he leaves the University of Massachusetts, he loses his deferment and he will be drafted. For an instant it occurs to me—here's Rachel's influence—that if the war continues, baseball is not going to be able to recruit young players and then Major League Baseball, a powerful ally, will also oppose the war.

But meanwhile, what is Rocco going to do? If he leaves school he will be drafted and will go to Vietnam. If he stays in school it will delay his career three more years and then he still might get drafted into military service when he graduates. So it could be five more years before he can play and the Tigers wouldn't be interested in him by then. Finally he decides that if he has to go into the military, he is volunteering for Vietnam because that will make his army time a few months shorter, which, if he times it right, could mean a whole extra baseball season.

“If I sign up right now, I can be playing ball in a year and a half.”

“I don't know, Rocco.”

At least Rocco was one person who had not gone crazy.