Dog Tags (21 page)

“Future supermen of America!” the cowboy declaimed. “And you want 'em gung ho. The doc's right. You're crazy.”

“You tell 'em, cowboy,” Benny said.

“Cowboy?”

“What'd you used to do?”

“Soda fountain fixtures in Florida.”

“My mistake,” Benny smiled.

“Look here.” Cornelius was trying to be emphatic. “The whole purpose of military training is to make every man responsible for every other man in his unit. Ultimately, in his company and battalion and regiment and division and country.”

“Well then
do
it!” the black lieutenant wailed. “Man, I'm a regular. This is my army. And
nobody
got trained like that,
believe
me. You made an army out of boy scouts with a complaint department and a suggestion box and god damn
merit
badges. I mean it, I mean it—we had a
suggestion
box. Christ, when I was a sergeant I had to watch my
language
around them, or they'd report me. But you just let me train 'em right and I'll
flog
'em. I'll tell 'em: you kill who I say or I'll kill
you
. And these gooks are
not
human, just do your job, and if you get captured you remember that what they do to you is
nothing
compared to what I do to you if you fuck up.”

“You're preposterous,” Cornelius said.

“That's the
facts
of things,” the lieutenant said, “so why not make it the theory of things too?”

“We weren't trying to destroy an inferior people,” Fontaine said. “That's nonsense. I don't like to hear a Negro officer say that.”

“Oh shit,” the lieutenant said.

“We don't mean there was anything
personal
,” Benny said. “But we'd wipe out Asia tomorrow. Or Africa. For business reasons. To bring them the benefits of used-car lots and luncheon clubs, or to save their immortal souls. God almighty, man, where you been for a hundred years? But we can't do it with boy scouts toting candy bars for the orphans they make.”

“Then you favor a tougher army,” Cornelius said, “like the Turks.”

“I need a drink,” Benny said. “I am beginning to think the only way to talk to you people is drunk.”

“We favor no army,” the black lieutenant said softly. “Sooner or later this army,
my
army, is going to wipe me out too.”

“You're crazy,” Cornelius said.

“You wait,” the lieutenant said.

“I sure favor no army,” the cowboy said. “I favor setting every general and politician in the world to work. Let 'em dig ditches and build houses and carry bedpans. Bounce 'em off the free ride and make 'em pay their own bills and leave decent people alone.”

Benny said, “I favor letting no general or politician make a war until he has personally bayoneted a pregnant woman in the belly.”

“That's disgusting,” Cornelius said.

15

Two years.

Two years
.

In first hope we lounged and chaffed, awaited word, a suit of civvies, twenty dollars and a train ticket. Kinsella demonstrated leadership by allowing us some days of unrestricted joy and speculation before announcing that truce negotiations took time, and these in particular would prove troublesome, and we should resign ourselves to a delay, perhaps as much as six weeks. Cheerfully we resigned ourselves. We swam. The progs cut class and also swam; they were still segregated but would look across at us sheepishly, like vaguely remorseful Auschwitzer peasants just learning (surprise!) what the souvenir factory was. No one bore them ill will, as Kinsella explained. Contempt yes, but we were all Americans here, or Allies, and any rebukes or punishments would be administered by the proper authorities at the proper time. So we waved back, or ignored them, and sat in the sun, needing only a cracker barrel, and swapped tall stories. The summer suits were blue cotton, comfortable, even racy. We sprawled like lizards and blinked heavily.

I remembered Ou-yang's fervid glare, his warning, and did not kneel to hope; but the food was richer and the sun was sweet and juices circulated, life beckoned. At night I lay tense, beating back optimism, quelling reverie. Carol. Others. Her. I opened my heart to memory and loss, punished myself with a thousand unforgettables; cheered up and grinned hysterically, subsided and bit the flesh of my own arms.

I made my rounds. I suppose they—“they”—allowed cautiously for an end to the madness; they let me rove the camp, issued alcohol and dressings. Humanitarians now, all of us. Much of my work was useless, or simple therapy; nothing could be done here about badly set bones or flagrant scars or obscure internal pains. Or even athlete's foot: fungicides were scarcer than homicides. I prescribed exercises for limpers, kept close watch on stumps (limbs, digits), treated conjunctivitis and prickly heat. Once I saw Ewald, across lanes of wire: he waved, sketched a smile. I too waved; he looked friendly and apologetic, an air of weakness about him, the last downhill run; he was less round, pale, his eyes pouched. I was disturbed, and shivered. Omens and auguries again, clouds no bigger than a man's heart.

What we needed was an epidemic to restore our hard-won despair. So—presto!—we got one. Far beyond the poor powers of your umble physicker: bleeding at the orifices, chills, fever, headache, vomiting, muscle pains. “God damn,” Kinsella cried. “They're pissing blood. They got swollen eyes and blood in the nose and mouth.”

“There must be fifty,” I said. “I don't know what it is.”

“You don't know!”

“No. I never heard of anything like it. Bewley says it's a punishment.”

“My God, my God,” he moaned. A real moan, a wail, a keen. Kinsella too had his limits.

“Pray,” I said. “Keep clean.”

“You've got to do something. Pretend.”

“Tell me what. I need blood counts and textbooks.”

A very few died. The fever went down in five or six days but a few died anyway. Some suffered urinary retention near the end, and died hurting. Some just dozed off. Most just got better. Mysteries. I dreamed of a lab, tests, kidney function, urinalysis, spinal taps, white cell counts. By the middle of a hot August the scourge had passed. The Chinese too had suffered, acupuncture or no acupuncture. Doctor Li fretted.

In late August they delivered mail. We buzzed, a swarm of hope and joy. Near as I could tell, everybody got a letter. Variously dated. No newspapers. No magazines. No books. Not one, ever, the whole time. Only these scraps of paper months apart, decades. Stunned, we retreated to corners to be alone with the news, the words of love, the peppy assurances and exhortations. Someone guessed that the war might be over, why else this generosity, and in an hour we all believed it, but as the days passed we fell silent, then sad, then bitter.

“There's birds, anyway,” Kinsella said. It was true. They had settled on us in spring, blackbirds and sparrows and little red and yellow ones, chirping and stunting, sifting their limy blessings on master and slave alike; there were geese, ducks and cormorants on the river. “Those are eider,” Kinsella said. “Listen when they go over, whoosh-whoosh-whoosh.” Spring had been green and brown, a vasty blue sky, and in summer flowers blossomed, specks of red and white pricking out a lush hillside.

Then the petals fell. I saw Ewald again, and Bewley, in an outdoor class, sprawled on the grass like college kids, the instructor lecturing, spectacles, minatory finger. One evening I came home—home!—for chow and found a book on my bag of bandages. Kinsella wanted to know where I'd got it. I didn't know. No one knew. It was
Les Misérables
. In French. So at last I read
Les Misérables
. Long stretches of it bored me. There were words I did not know.

Ou-yang told us that the peace talks had been suspended.

Kinsella fell into a depression.

Cuttis was walking. He was tanned.

I wondered how my General Motors was doing, and my Standard Oil.

Later I wondered this: if we had known that it was to be two years, would any have killed themselves, defected, or tried to break out? Or would they have felt relief that it was not to be ten?

The days grew short and the birds fled. V's of eiders whoosh-whoosh-whooshed overhead, darted south, wheeled, streaked north, free. North? More madness. Geese honked at dawn and arrowed south. Smaller birds stuck around and scrounged, but soon they too deserted us. The guards came for Kinsella, and he was away for two days and came back to us untouched but exhausted. Other officers also. Not me. The progs debated, and more of us joined them. A gang of guards tramped up one day, so we fell silent, and then we saw that they were carrying a burden, and then we saw that it was Trez. They shoved him our way and he staggered and strained and kept his feet and swayed. We moved in. “Trez.” The guards about-faced and trotted off. Kinsella took him under the arms and held him up like a lover, face to face, close, and said almost tenderly, “Did they torture you?”

Trez blinked several times and hoisted a small smile. “No sir,” he whispered. “Never laid a glove on me. And I didn't have a lot to say to them. But,” and he drew in an endless, epically weary breath, “they sure made me tired.” The smile broadened, like a small boy's, and he held out a hand to me, closed his eyes and collapsed. We lugged him to his pallet and laid him out comfortably. “Good man,” Kinsella said, feisty. I wanted to knock him down. “Good man. God damn. Give me a hundred like him.”

One of our corporals suffered a heart attack and died. In November, a time of dust and frost and sudden yellow winds from the northwest, the issue of winter clothing was a sad event, and we all quit hoping then and cursed the government, ours and theirs, all governments everywhere and at all times. “I quit,” Kinsella said.

“Quit when you're dead.”

“I'm dead,” he said. “Look at that.”

It was Ewald again, distant but recognizable with his yellow hair. He walked as if entranced—repeating lessons? arguing with himself? penetrating the dialectic? He suggested some early Swedish saint meditating among the stalks, sauntering under God's eye, murmuring verses and blessing crickets. Bringing word of Bewley the black Christ.

“Poor guy,” I said.

“Hell with him,” Kinsella said. “No more ducks. I used to shoot ducks. And geese.”

“City boy, myself.”

“Used to fish too. You ever tramp across a field of corn stubble in November?”

“No.”

“Kick up a pheasant,” he said. “Wham, like an explosion. In that nippy air, and your breath white. Jesus. I had a double once, it was so sweet, so perfect, left and right. I took them in and had a glass of whiskey I can still taste. Second one was a hen, illegal but what the hell. Benny,” he said, “tell me the truth. Is this war going to end?”

“Yes,” I said. “How would I know?”

“Doctors know everything,” he said.

“Jesus,” I said.

“I better get a grip on myself,” he said. “It looks like a long hard winter.”

That it was. The imminence of death had driven us to the wall; a hint of life had raised us up; now death-in-life palsied us. We moved like shadows, spoke like ghosts. I did my work mechanically and returned to the hut to sit in mourning. To sit through endless hours of space, endless leagues of time. Waves of bitterness, of hate. And then irrepressible waves of grief; sitting there like a dummy and suddenly tears in the eyes. You can't know. If you've done time, maybe, or been gut-shrinking poor. Prison. An indeterminate sentence. Endless. Consider. You who are without sin.

Christmas.

I remembered the story of the old Chinese philosopher who dreamed that he was a butterfly, and when he woke up he wasn't sure if he was a philosopher who had dreamed that he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that he was a philosopher. Was I a free man dreaming that he was a prisoner, or a prisoner who had dreamed that he was a free man?

Ou-yang invited me to sit and said, “They are talking
again
, at any rate.” He was sullen and pasty: he too. What I felt was more than sympathy; it was kinship. Sorry. Mark that down. When he said “they.” We all had our they. Somehow the same they.

“About what?”

He shrugged. He blinked then, and made a sad neighing sound, and tossed a file folder to me. I opened it. Photographs. Photographs of children with their eyes burned shut and their noses and ears burned off. Children without arms. A mother and child welded together. A boy whose face was a mask, a horror, two tiny eyeholes, no lips. My stomach bucked; dimly I remembered Rospos retching, and before that, years before, other photographs.

“Always,” I said.

“Not in your country,” he said.

More photos. After a dozen they numbed.

“I want you to broadcast as a doctor,” he said.

“I can't.”

“A request for peace only,” he said, “to hurry the negotiations.”

“No.” My answer was a reflex; I had chosen my way and was beyond reasons. And I was angry, sick: so blatant, these photos. Do something, as a doctor.

“What's holding them up?”

He shrugged. “Many things. Mainly that the Americans want time to
convert
their prisoners.”

“Unlike you.”

“They have many thousands. They will not return them but insist on letting them choose. So they indoctrinate.”

Wearily I said, “I hear we have a choice too.”

“You could speak as a doctor. As a doctor only.”

“If I really spoke as a doctor both sides would shoot me. No. I'm sorry.”

“It could do no harm.”

“We never know that. Not the simplest consequence of the simplest choice.”

“Ah yes,” he said. “An ancient Chinese fable. The farmer who found a horse.”

I waited.

“And his neighbors came to
congratulate
him, and he said, Wait, wait. And his son was riding the horse and fell off and
broke
a leg, and the neighbors came to
condole
, and he said, Wait, wait. And the duke's captains came to take all younger men for the army, and the son was
exempt
because of his leg. And so on and so forth.”