Honor and Duty (47 page)

He nodded, his mouth compressed in a massive effort of will to stop his emotions. He was thin and older, pale under sunburned skin. “Thanks, Kai,” he said. Tears ran down his face. “Marco’s honored that you came.” His strong voice trem-ored. “So am I.” He handed me an envelope with my name on it. We shook hands. Later, I would learn, Mario would never sing again.

I started to approach the parents and Marco’s widow, and Mario gently, almost imperceptibly, shook his head. My Asian face was unwelcome at this moment, at this American funeral for a son who had been killed by Asians. By gooks. I nodded. “Good luck, Mario,” I said, and immediately left the cemetery in long strides, panting, thankful for the heavier pelts of falling snow. I began to run, fleeing the loss, the hatred, the confusion. Clint called and I ran faster. Pee Wee could outsprint me, but he gave up the chase.

I ran all the way to the Thayer. Jean was on duty, and she gave me a table on the lower patio, where no one sat in winter.

God love you, Marco Fideli. Thank you for your warm heart, for your cheering of me in a hard year, for teaching me how to laugh in the face of Beast, for teaching me the geography of my soul. Even if we kill them all, I’ll still miss you.

Inside the envelope was a gold lieutenant’s bar. It was corroded with the humidity of the Far East, scratched by unknown causes, so unlike the impeccable appearance of its owner. I would be honored to wear it. I leaned forward, holding it to my forehead.

I would never attend another funeral for a Vietnam fatality. I hated funerals with a deep and undefined passion and was not strong enough to do this again. Pain filled me, and I expected blood to run from my ears. Don’t mean nothin’. After
a while, it was true. By evening, I could no longer remember the theme of the chaplain’s eulogy.

I did remember my expected failure of the Juice whufer. I opened the textbook. My mathematical mind, absent since youth, was facing its grandest opportunity to realize what Buddhists seek—nothingness. Beset by an endless siege of invidious calculus problems, battered by three years of bad engineering grades, and finally victimized by my wretched study habits, the architecture of my thinking, such as it was, now approached rubble.

The small, fine edges of linear thought, the clear geometric cutting devices and bright boundary lines that allowed analysis in any subject, were becoming
tseuh
, porridge. My synapses were clogging, the neurons in retreat, and my thinking apparatus assumed a negative personality that sounded like a roll call of the Seven Stupid Dwarfs: Surly, Cranky, Dumb, Dopey, Grouchy, Foolish, and Unprepared. When it came to engineering, I concluded, there was only so much one could do with wishful thinking. Now, it seemed, wishful thinking was no longer in season. If I had a wish, I’d bring Marco back. Thinking about academic failure was more comforting than acknowledging his loss. I slammed the book shut.

I thought of Pearl. “Chinese honor,” Pearl had said. “Honor at all costs. It’s a sacrifice. The highest value.”

Marco’s life was the price. He had told us, near the end of Beast, that we were entering a ground war in Asia, against all good military advice. When it was time to go, he had said cheerfully, “We’re off to win a war.”

I could live to be a hundred and I would not have his great human spark, his strength and mirth, his sense of Honor. He was dead. He had wanted me to forget my fears. Byron Maher wanted me to do my duty by zapping classmates who were cheating. Cathy Pearl Yee wanted me to help Maher, and to be a man not only with emotions, but one who admitted them. She had brought me love. Townsend Fan Yee wanted me to compete for his daughter and to protect his wealth.

My father and Edna wanted me to be an American West Pointer. Schwarzhedd wanted me to be conscious. Tony had wanted me to be a college man with a hat and a briefcase. Uncle Shim wished me to be a Chinese man of letters, opposed to violence and committed to the past. But Tony was gone and Marco was dead, and I didn’t know what to do with all these
feelings which were rushing to the surface like so many boiling gases.

Sonny was drilling me for the whufer, and my roommates had evacuated to the library to give us workout space. Sonny started with the basics. “It’ll hurt more to face your dad if you flunk than to squeeze Juice data into your iron head. Right?”

Sonny presented what he considered to be the standard problems and walked me through them. I understood what he was doing. He then gave me a new problem. With much struggle and a great deal of rote memory work I solved it. He pulled out his red pen and drew a large five-pointed star and circled it. A star from the starman. He grinned, and so did I, with less enthusiasm.

He created a variant problem. But however minor the variation, I had no idea how to proceed. He made hissing noises and ran his hand through his thick black hair, his heavy eyebrows dark with concentration and frustration, tinted with a look of fear.

Clint returned early. I expected him to look as defeated as I felt, but he undressed and racked out quickly. I turned out the ceiling lights and we went to the subdued desk lamps.

“Ready for tomorrow?” I asked.

“Hmm,” Clint said.

Sonny Rappa sighed. “Okay. Try it like this,” he said, but he lost me. He tried again. By now my mind was in full retreat.

“Back to basics,” he said. “Do these differential and integral equations,” and he drew out a series of them. I worked them.

“Kai, got two problems. One, your calculus sucks. Two, there’s somethin’ in your brain that doesn’t let the stuff in. You got a series of heavy-duty resistors in line with your reasoning circuits. I can’t find connections on your main circuit board. I end around, and I’m in the jungles of Brazil or something. Let’s get some of Chad’s high-octane java. I need a jolt.” Chad “the Man” Enders made the strongest coffee this side of the ordnance lab.

“Works for me,” I said. “I need a break.”

When we returned, Deke was in the rack. Neither the java nor the break changed matters, as we hacked our way through the uncharted areas of my math-disabled brain. The ten-minute bell before taps sounded.

I shook my head. “Sonny, thanks a lot, really,” I said. “I feel
like I wasted all your time. You could be working on pulling a cold max.”

“Naw” he said. “I know the poop—better I’m here. I
like
buttin’ my head up against a brick wall.” He hit me on the arm. “Good luck tomorrow. Just grab down some rack. Don’t stay up late. This stuff’ll come to you—trust me. I know what I’m talkin’ about. Just pull seventy-one percent. Your mind’ll be clear tomorrow.”

“That’s my problem,” I said. “My mind’s always clear; it’s ’cause there’s nothing
in
it.”

“Hiya, buddy!” said Bob Lorbus to Sonny as he came in the door. He smiled and shook his head as he piled his books on his desk. “This stuff is awful.”

Sonny grimaced; no one liked his favorite subject. He gathered his books and his slide rule, put on his gray company jacket, and I walked him out. At the stairs, he gave me a thumbs-up, and headed out to return to his barracks on the far side of the Cadet Hilton.

Bob racked out. I stayed up for an hour, shuffling meaninglessly through my notes and Sonny’s materials. I stood by the radiator and looked out the window at the Area, avoiding Venus’s jaws and letting Para-Rat-Trooper grab my pinkie with his little claws as I shelled a peanut for him. There were only a few other lights on. I knew who they were: goats like me, struggling with tired brains against the challenge of tomorrow’s final writ, hoping stupidly that sacrificing sleep and rest would produce results.

At midnight I collapsed on top of my brown boy, wondering what strange twist of fate had led me, a ham-fisted slide-rule klutz, to survive this long in a school that so dearly loved math. Above me, in the upper bunk, snored Deke in his steady, reliable, hypnotic buzz-saw rhythm that meant no Nam nightmares tonight. My eyes followed the sound. Taped to the underside of the bedsprings were some papers. On the top sheet were five electrical engineering problems, surrounded by a great deal of explanatory script.

I stared at them. I thought overconsumption of saltpeter from the mess hall, or too much of Chad’s atomic coffee, had induced hallucinatory misperception. I scrunched my eyes closed and rubbed them, but when I opened them, the papers were still there.

I pulled the masking tape from the springs. Ten sheets, each with five problems. They were typed. Homework sets were run
off on blue ditto machines, with space to enter your work. In the spaces appeared to be the answers, in neat, approved solution form.

Why were they taped to the bottom of Deke’s bunk? Were they for him, or me, or neither? They had been in direct line of sight above my pillow. I went to my desk and examined them.

“Sinusoidal Input to RL and RC Circuits … Impulse Response … Sinusoidal Steady-state Solutions of Parallel Circuits … Automatic Control Systems … Linear Approximations to Machine Analysis … Electronic Analog Computers.…” This was a roll call of the key topics of second semester—the exam topics of the WFR.

1. For the circuit shown above, find the natural response, i(t), for t ≥ 0. Hint: Use KVL to write an integro-differential equation in i(t); differentiate to form a 2d order linear homogeneous differential equation.

Solution:

Note: Minus sign because i(t) is
UP
through the capacitor!

Apply to KVL

Differentiate

Characteristic equation