I Pledge Allegiance (3 page)

T
here was never any doubt where Ivan was going. He didn’t even sleep that night, waiting up ’til the recruiting office opened. When he said Army, he meant Army.

Beck had the hardest time. See, Beck is meant for better things. He’s a brilliant guy, from a family of smarts. His house is a strange place, always filled with music, with paintings all over the walls, and all of that stuff is created by the people who actually live there. His dad works with computers. Who works with computers? Who works with computers, paints, and makes music? I mean, I am mostly not a dummy, but to me those things come down from
elsewhere,
you know? They are not produced by people, much less by people you ask to pass the gravy.

But these are Beck’s people, and Beck’s people are not happy. The boy has a scholarship to study physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and that’s what his people want to see him doing. The draft won’t even bother him for at least four more years, not even
counting graduate school. And graduate school to his family is like primary school for most of us: You bring shame on the whole clan by failing to complete it.

Beck has nothing to gain by signing up. He is, by far, making the greatest sacrifice with this pledge.

“You don’t have to go,” I tell him.

“Yes, I do.”

We are back at Peters Hill, walking up through the few pre–Revolutionary War headstones that slant along the street side, with their skulls and crossbones and childlike death carvings. Beck stops, staring at them, and we don’t bother going to the top. It’s a perfect June day, sunny, cool in the shade, just-hot in the sun. We sit, back-to-back, with the thin slab of a former somebody named Weld between us, propping us up after just sitting there doing nothing for two hundred years.

“I wouldn’t go if I were you,” I say.

“You’re lying,” he says. “And if you weren’t lying, Ivan would shoot you if you tried not to go.”

I think about it, staring directly into the sun even though I know how bad that is for me. Trying to blind myself before induction, maybe. I am that scared.

“Too true,” I say. “He wouldn’t shoot you, though. You know it. Nobody would shoot you, and nobody would think anything bad about you if you just went to Madison. You’re worth more than this, Beck, man.”

I can feel, just slightly, Mr. Weld’s stone moving my way, pressing on me.

“Is this guy trying to get up,” I ask, “or are you actually pushing his grave marker over?”

I look over my shoulder when he doesn’t respond. I don’t even think he’s aware of pushing.

“We all have to go, Morris,” he says. “I’ve already had to go to war with my parents and my sisters and my uncles — if I have to fight you over it, too, I’m going to have nothing left for the Vietcong.”

Vietcong. Even their name has come to scare me.

“Still …”

“Still, we made a pledge, and it was a great pledge. I’m going. I just about managed to convince my dad that being in the Air Force counts as continuing my aeronautical education, and with Wisconsin deferring my admission until I get back, everything’s fine.”

Everything’s fine. Everything’s fine. He watches TV just like I do, and he knows how fine everything is not.

“Fine,” I say.

“Fine,” he says.

Rudi passes his physical. Nobody doubted that he would, since Rudi’s shortcomings tend not to be below the neck. In a way, you could say he failed by passing his physical, which is all very Rudi.

“What are they going to expect me to do, Morris? Are they going to give me, you know, a job or something?”

“I would expect that’s what they will do. But whatever job they give you, remember your real job is just to be careful and come home safe.”

“I hear ya. I just don’t know if I’ll know how to do that. I’m gonna get killed, Morris. I don’t have a chance, and you know it, and everybody else knows it.”

If you were going purely on things like common sense and reason, then he would be right. Rudi is going to die in Vietnam just as sure as the Red Sox are going to fail to win the World Series. That’s just the way the universe is set up.

“No, I don’t know that,” I say to him. We have just left the Navy recruiting office, which we had agreed to visit as soon as he got his physical results and his notice to report. I signed up without even listening to the guy’s pitch about the joys of life on the high and low seas.

“I’m gonna die, Morris. I mess up most things, and even the things I do the best at, I don’t do very well. Even I know that when you don’t do the Marines very well while you are in Vietnam, you don’t just get kept back. You get bloody and dead.”

“Why are we here, Rudi?” Here, at the moment, is a booth in the front window of Brigham’s Ice Cream on Boylston Street downtown.

“We’re here because I was crying — again — and because I am such a baby, you had to promise me an ice cream.”

“We are here because I joined the Navy. And why did I join the Navy?”

“Because the Navy watches over the Marines, and you wanted to be able to watch over me.”

He’s learned his lines well. That’s the story I told him.

That’s the story I told myself.

“Correct, my friend. I am gonna be there with you. And so is Ivan. And Beck. As long as we’re all there, then we’re together, like always. And as long as we’re together, nothing’s going to happen to you, or to any of us. Okay?”

The sundaes arrive. His is chocolate with marsh-mallow, nuts, and multicolored jimmies. Mine is butterscotch with whipped cream and chocolate jimmies. The sun is shining through the window, and the street outside is happy busy. What could be wrong?

“Okay, Morris, man, if you say so.”

“I do say so. Now eat your sundae.”

“Fine,” he says, digging in and almost smiling. “But tell me again now, who are we fighting, and how come? “

I really wish he would stop asking me this.

“We are fighting alongside the South Vietnamese against the North Vietnamese. The North has gotten aggressive against the South.”

“Like the Civil War here.”

“Well …”

“But we were on the North side then, and the South side now.”

“That part is kind of irrelevant.”

“Why are we mixed up in it if those two are fighting? I mean, it’s sad, but it’s also far away, so why should we care?”

“Your ice cream is melting, Rudi.”

“I like it a little melty.”

“It’s about Communism versus Democracy. Remember all that stuff from school? And from the four times I already tried to explain it to you?”

“I remember it, Morris. It’s just that, sorry, but you’ve never explained it in a way that makes sense.”

There is a good reason for that. I wish I understood it better myself.

“Ours is not to question why,
pal.”

“Now
that
quote I remember. It ends with
die,
right?”

“You’re right — I
am
doing a lousy job of making this make sense. Maybe you should stop expecting me to make sense of things, Rudi.”

“I’ll never expect you to stop making sense.”

He has finished his ice cream and reaches over to take mine. It’s okay. This is the way it always winds up.

“How in the world did they ever pick me, Morris? If they didn’t draft me …”

“That’s why they call it the Selective Service, man. You meet some qualifications, then after that, they’re just plucking your name out of a barrel.”

“Well, the service can’t be very selective if they want me, that’s all I’ll say.”

I stand up, even though he has several spoonfuls left. It’s his signal to shovel. He gets to it, and I take a scan all around me, looking at bright and shiny Brigham’s, here just the way it always has been, the way I figure it always will be. The checkerboard tiles, the ceiling fans, the long counter with the spinning seats.

It will be here when I get back. Of course it will. Everything will.

“Arrrr,”
Rudi says, getting up, wincing, grabbing his forehead. Like always.

“Froze your brain, right?”

He nods, his hand nodding right along with his head.

“Stay just like that, my man, and you will be fine.” I grab him in a headlock and haul him out into the bright sunshine and business of Boylston Street. “Don’t let anybody thaw out that brain of yours.”

“Who would want to?” he asks.

“I’m guessing the Marine Corps might want to take a shot at it.”

“A shot?” He seems slightly alarmed.

“I don’t think they will go quite as far as shooting you. But they will put a lot of work into making your mind into something different.”

“Good for them,” he says. “And good luck to them.”

I’m about to release the headlock, but he actually holds on to my arm. It’s less of a headlock now, more of an extremely friendly grip. We can walk this way.

“Can we take a walk around the Common before we get the trolley home?” he asks, like I’m his guardian or something instead of his pal.

His comrade in arms.

“I don’t see why not,” I say, and we cross the street into the busy, sunny, lively Common. “Rudi,” I say, “you wouldn’t really want them to change you all over like that, would you?”

He thinks for a bit. “Yeah, I would. I wouldn’t mind at all, if they made me into somebody who was good at stuff. That would be okay. But most of all, I hope they can change me into somebody who isn’t so scared. Because Morris, man, I am
scared.”

“We’re all scared.”

“Not Ivan.”

“Okay, Ivan doesn’t count.”

We spend a solid hour doing nothing much as we walk around the Common like a married couple. In all our lives we have never used the Common as anything much more than a place to walk through on the way to someplace else, except when the Christmas lights were up.

“I love this place,” Rudi says.

“Me, too,” I say.

And any day now, we’ll be leaving it all behind for a place, and a life, that couldn’t be much farther away.

I
n my head, in my mind and my dreams, I sit and watch. From my perch along the coast, this strange green salad of a place is manageable. I can see where the ocean I know meets this land that I never will know. It is a vision I can live with.

I am watching over all the guys. My guys, and whatever other guys, but mostly my guys. I can watch and keep everybody safe. Somehow.

The USS
Boston
is my home now. How much more perfect could it get? It’s almost like I never left, right? The ship — a heavy cruiser — has practically got its own skyline, which could look like the regular Boston’s skyline if only you squinted. Really, really hard.

That is, if you squinted and you were looking at it from a distance. Which I cannot do.

“Thinking about home already?”

I’m surprised but not startled by the voice up close to my ear. You get used to having people right behind
you, beside you, on top of you in the Navy. The voice belongs to one of my new best friends, whose nickname is Huff. His full last name is Huffnagel, but unlike me, he seems like a guy who’s been comfortable with the nickname thing for some time. He probably gave it to himself.

“We
are
home, remember?” I say.

“My home has grass and trees. I don’t see any grass and trees here.”

“Sailor,” I say, “you lack imagination. Look at those mighty oaks directly above us.” I point up at the big brute 8-inch guns stretching out just overhead from the turret. There are two forward turrets, each with three 55-foot guns protruding, and if they ever wanted to go at each other, they could swing around and be staring so close, the guys inside could exchange winks and wave greetings before blowing everybody to bits. I hope they never get that bored.

“Okay, they are mighty. But I think we’ll be missing the greenery soon enough, if you want to be pretending those are trees.”

I sigh. The wind whipping over you when you are out at sea is always strong enough to take a sigh right out of you like it never happened. Which is good, because I sense a lot of sighing over the next four years of my enlistment.

Four years. Four. I look at that same distance behind me, and I see a boy just leaving eighth grade. I look forward that same distance and I see … what?

Should I even try and look that far, considering everything?

“Yeah,” I say. Then I sigh again. “I’ll miss home.”

Huff slaps me hard on the shoulder, harder than I used to get slapped, probably lighter than I will be getting slapped.

“But listen, Mo …”

I am Mo on this ship. I have never been Mo before. I am not the type to be called Mo. Nicknames come with the territory here. I sleep in a bunk — a rack — with one guy hovering about two feet above me and another two feet below. Getting along is probably better than fighting a nickname that is meant with all the best intentions no matter how stupid it might sound.

So I’m Mo now. A whole different somebody leading a whole different operation. This will just be the Mo part of my existence, in between the Morris part I came from and the Morris part I will return to.

“My man Mo,” Huff says, “we need to get used to this. To learn to love it. Right? It’s not the same as regular home life, so it does no good to compare it. This life is different, as different as we could get. Learn to love it, is what I think.”

“So, what’s to love?” I ask.

“Glad you asked.”

Next thing I know, we are surrounded by boom.

“Boom,” he says, as we walk around the cramped and dense munitions storage area deep within the ship. It’s not a new place to me. We’ve all been introduced to every inch of this vessel. The space is chock-full of shells for the big guns up topside, smells of steel and oil and gunpowder, and as we walk up and down, Huff is touching, smelling, tasting every shell as if we have stumbled across some combination of God’s own pastry kitchen and the arsenal of true love.

“Boom,” I repeat back at him.

“Boom,” he repeats back at my repeat.

“What’s so special about all this, Huff? “

I have been walking along behind him, acting as if the two of us are on some kind of inspection tour. Only now he turns around and faces me. And it becomes unlike the usual inspection tours that happen in the Navy about every fifteen minutes of every day.

He goes right up to one of those impressive, deadly, not-that-pretty shells and nuzzles it.

“Why are you nuzzling that shell, Huff? It’s pretty weird, and I’m not sure, but I’d be willing to bet it is against regulations.”

He smells it really close, and it’s pretty convincing. I
thought he was testing me, seeing if he could freak me, but now, no. He’s in love.

“You ever felt like you had power before, Mo?”

I shrug. “I suppose,” I say.

He’s shaking his head at me.

“No?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “Not like this. Look at you. Skinny. Young. Polite. You never had an ounce of real power in your life, and it shows from a mile away.”

“Thanks. Now that you put it that way, I guess I’ll just go lie down somewhere out of the way while the rest of you guys do the warring.”

“Hey, it’s not your fault. And don’t get me wrong, I never had any, either, even though I’m sure that surprises you.”

It doesn’t. But like I said, best to get along.

“But brother, whatever was true up to now, it’s all different. We got power, me and you.”

“Except that people boss us around all day, every day, tell us where to be and when to be there and how to do every little thing and what is going to happen to us if we don’t do every little thing just exactly the way we are told to do it.”

Huff is staring at me now, all deadpan. Then, very dramatically, he kisses the nose of one of the shells. So dramatically, I’m actually a little uncomfortable.

“That stuff doesn’t matter,” he says. “This,” he pats the shell, “matters a whole lot, Mo, because our country is in need, and we have answered the call, we have been handed some awesome power, and make no mistake, we are going to use it. Before this big adventure is over, we are going to unleash this stuff and we are going to change lives, and who would have said that about us, a couple of teenage nobodies, a year ago, huh?”

Huff’s words continue zinging around the steel and brass that make up the interiors all round the ship. Words tend to do that in here. When they stop, I start.

“And end some.”

“What?”

“Lives. If we use this stuff, we wind up ending some lives, right?”

“That’s one view,” he says.

There is something in Huff I have not encountered before. You might think from what he is saying that he is nothing but some bloodthirsty cowboy, but that would be incorrect.

“I don’t want to kill anybody,” Huff informs me. “And I don’t plan to kill anybody.”

“What are you gonna do with the big guns, then?”

“Blast ’em, of course. Smash things, destroy things, blow things up. Honest, Mo, I hope I don’t kill anybody this whole war. ‘Cause I feel the same way Muhammad
Ali feels. Like what he said,
I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.
And that’s true, I feel that way. I wouldn’t know a Vietcong if he bit me —”

“He might yet.”

“Well,
then
he gets killed. Until then, how I see my job is, I am here to end this war. And to do that I am gonna blast away, smash things, destroy things, just until we show ’em who’s boss. That’s how you win a fight, by showin’ ’em who’s boss.”

He is back to over-loving the shell as he speaks.

“And this makes me boss, Mo. Me and you. We’re bosses, like never before. I gotta admit, I cannot wait to fire them guns for real.”

“Yeah,” I say, “I kinda gather that.”

“But I’m not here to kill anybody. That’s for the Marines. We’re just here to pound the daylights out of ’em, nice and simple.”

“Simple. And nice.”

“Exactly.”

“If you say so, Huff.”

“I say so.”

And that is that, for now. Eventually, Huff and I and loads and loads of other guys here in the city of
Boston,
not to be confused with the city of Boston, have to hit the rack. We are supposed to sleep when we can, to be ready for the times when we can’t.

Except that, during lots of the time when I’m supposed to sleep, I can’t.

I hear Huff snoring in the rack across from me, and Rivera talking quietly in the rack below me. That’s how you know when Rivera is sleeping, because he’s talking. Awake, he’s about the shut-uppest guy I have ever met, so I suppose that’s why it all has to come out when he’s asleep. I have a thought that maybe he stopped talking when he got on this ship and found himself stuck with the nickname Vera. But I wouldn’t know for sure, because he won’t say. Maybe he’ll tell me in his sleep one night.

Which I would probably miss anyway, because I don’t like to stay in my rack for very long. For starters, the nightmares are back. They’re basically the nightmares I had before, where Rudi, Beck, Ivan, and I are all slaughtered in Vietnam. Only now they’re higher-quality nightmares, after basic training and the war stories you get from every single person you meet in the military whether you want to hear them or not. My nightmares are now more graphic and better informed.

And it seems I have discovered a kind of claustrophobia I never knew I had. It’s a strange relationship you have out here on a naval vessel in the middle of the ocean. It becomes an odd and unexpected outside/in thing. The topside of the ship is truly as outside as you could ever be in this world. The constant fierce wind
and the spray, the insane distance of nothingness on the horizon and the sky being bigger than any universe I ever thought existed. That is the Navy I thought about, when I thought about the Navy.

But then you go inside. Belowdecks, downstairs, whatever you want to call it, and it all closes in on you. It’s too hot. The air sits still and always carries a whiff of the one guy out of twelve hundred who needs a shower. The racks are close. The iron walls are close. It is a gigantic mother of a ship carrying a whole lot of little smallnesses within. It gets to me. It gets to me, and I get to
out.

It’s why I don’t normally spend more than two consecutive hours sleeping before I go wandering. I don’t know, honestly, if the new vastness of the ocean outside has made me more critical and uneasy, or if it is just the configuration of the ship, or the Navy itself that’s done it. But I’m uneasy.

And then, of course, there’s this: I can hardly keep a decent watch over my boys from inside, can I? What good am I asleep, or canned like Spam in the depths of the ship?

What if it happened, to any one of them, while I was sleeping?

So I walk around and around, sucking in the night air, watching for whatever’s out there in the sweet black
air. It takes an eternity for our ship to get over to the other side of the world in order to blow parts of that world to pieces. Weeks of quiet routine before we get to the real thing, which we know will be anything but quiet. Or routine.

I wish this part would last a little bit longer. But it can’t. We’ve got a mission. I’ve got a mission.

And before long, after a lap and another lap of the ship, I wind up where I always wind up, staring up, aft of the ship. I am staring straight up, like a little boy, at the awesomeness of our two Terrier guided missiles sitting ready in their launchers.

And I know just exactly what Huff is talking about. He likes the big guns in their tanklike turrets, and I like our guided missiles, pointed and ready to do the business. Like nobody’s business.

I feel the rush every time I see them. I feel something I never knew was in me before. I’m not about to nuzzle the Terriers, but I’m a lot closer to it than I ever would have expected.