A Tragic Honesty (13 page)

It was downhill from there. In the weeks that followed, whatever self-confidence Yates had gained from his Avon success was decimated. First there was the IQ test that recruits took at the induction center. Yates alluded to this experience twice in his fiction—in
Disturbing the Peace
and the more explicitly autobiographical “Regards at Home”—and both times he gave the same IQ score: 109. Like many a great writer before him (Salinger and Cheever come to mind), Yates was a poor test taker—a slow, careful reader whose aversion to math bordered on the phobic.
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This being the case, John Wilder's ordeal in
Disturbing the Peace
rings true: Wilder recounts for his psychiatrist how he scored 100 on his first attempt at the “Army General Classification test,” which he retook in hope of scoring the 110 or better needed to qualify for officers' training; when he missed by a single point, he tried to remonstrate with the examiner, who said, “‘Curious thing; you didn't get a single question wrong, but you only did about half of them.'… ‘Well, but, sir [Wilder replies], if I got them all right doesn't that indicate—'… ‘It indicates a hundred and nine. You must be a very slow reader, that's all.'” Like Wilder, too, Yates's relatively poor performances on such tests would be a lifelong source of insecurity, though in person he hardly gave the impression of one whose IQ was barely above average (except perhaps in his almost obsessive vigilance against any form of intellectual pretension).

And so Yates had to make his way among enlisted men, almost all of whom were older, stronger, and more comfortable in their own skin. Under other circumstances he might have withdrawn into the shy, courteous persona that had served him well among bullies at Avon, but with his ineptitude on constant display it was hard to maintain any sort of sangfroid, nor was the army a place for little gentlemen. After a “mild and pampered” month as an air corps recruit, Yates was transferred to Camp Pickett, Virginia, for basic training as an infantry rifleman—where (as he wrote of Bill Grove in
Uncertain Times
) “he'd been a fuckup, in the unforgiving idiom of the time.” Later the term “fuckup” would invariably come to Yates's lips whenever he discussed his army days, which he endeavored to do in a lighthearted way. “Dick was hilarious about his war experiences,” said his friend Pat Dubus. “The stories were always at his own expense, and he could really make you
see
it.” The humor, the pathos too, mostly arose from a vast discrepancy between his desperate
effort
as a soldier, his pure intentions, and the results achieved by his clownishly incompetent body. For it can hardly be emphasized enough that Yates was clumsy on a legendary scale: All his life he bumbled and tripped and knocked things down, and not only was he clumsy but absentminded too—a bad combination in the army, as illustrated by the newly recruited Prentice in
A Special Providence
:

On the very first morning, late for reveille and sleepily fumbling with his unfamiliar infantry leggings, he had put the damned things on backward, with the hood lacings on the inside rather than the outside of his calves; he had taken four running steps across the barracks floor before the lacing hooks of one legging caught the lace of the other, and down he came—all gangling, flailing six-foot-three of him—in a spectacular locklegged fall that left his audience weak with laughter the rest of the day.

And when one considers, finally, that at eighteen Yates was still a boy in almost every particular but height, it's a wonder he survived at all.

At Camp Pickett he was again a pariah, and this time there was almost nothing he could do about it. He couldn't find a niche among the surly, mostly working-class men, and there was no way to prove himself, or any fellow fuckup of quite the same magnitude with whom to commiserate. In moments of humiliating defeat he might try to vent his defiance (and perhaps bridge the social gap) by being as loud and foul-mouthed as the best of them, but this only made him seem more ridiculous; and if he tried to keep his own counsel he was mocked and left out just the same. The one thing he could do well was the one thing nobody seemed to notice: stay in step on parade, perform his manual of arms in crisp unison with his comrades—an aptitude made possible, perhaps, by the very fact that nobody was watching.

Later Yates would blend with the masses in a more essential way, as part of a personal (and artistic) ethic. “Dick cultivated an anti-intellectual manner,” his friend and student DeWitt Henry observed,

but there was nothing phony or affected about it. In places like the army and tuberculosis wards he was put in contact with unlettered people, who were just as sensitive as anybody else. Dick instinctively took it as his mission to articulate the complexity of people who didn't have the official badge of an education. It was a special quality of his writing. But in person, too, his manner was based on his army experiences—this need to bond with unlettered people. To Dick, speaking clearly and simply was good manners; pedantry was bad manners.

Pedantry was bad manners because it was a form of condescension, perhaps the form that made Yates most defensive in later years. While in the army, though, he didn't know that his own formal education was already over, and his empathy with “unlettered people” was in a latent phase at best. Still, the hardships he suffered as the nonpareil fuckup of Camp Pickett helped teach him the value of action rather than fine words, and perhaps increased his awareness of how certain people were likely to perceive his own behavior: “An all-around incompetent was bad enough,” the narrator remarks of Robert Prentice; “but when he turned out to be a little wise guy too—when he swore not only in bad temper but in what sounded like the clipped, snotty accents of a spoiled rich kid—that was too much.”

It does seem likely that Yates finally made a friend and mentor of sorts at Camp Pickett: a man represented by the well-spoken, irascible character of Quint in
A Special Providence
. The man seems to have taken pity on Yates, though his typical mood toward the forlorn fuckup was, apparently, exasperation. In any case what happened to “Quint” later, and Yates's possible part in it, would seem to lend further credibility to Vonnegut's thesis about the self-destructive tendencies of veterans.
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*   *   *

As a member of the 75th Division
†
—nicknamed the “Diaper Division” because it was the youngest to enter the war—Yates went overseas on January 8, 1945. By the time his ship arrived in England, the war in Europe was almost won: The Battle of the Ardennes, or the “Bulge,” was in its final days, and with it the last German offensive had been routed. A hopeful rumor was spread among the replacements of the 75th that they were headed for a camp near Southampton, where they'd be trained to serve as occupation troops in Germany. When they got to Southampton, however, they were told to keep marching until they boarded a foul-smelling troopship bound for France.

From Normandy a train took them through snowy countryside until they came to the First Army replacement depot near a bombed-out, mostly abandoned Belgian village, where Yates lost no time living up to his Camp Pickett legend. Among the many “hilarious” war stories he liked to tell, perhaps the most characteristic is the one about how he was almost reported AWOL within days of arriving overseas. As told in
A Special Providence,
Yates accepted a soldier's invitation to join him and others in spending the night at a nearby civilian house, rather than the grain mill where the rest of the men were sleeping. After a jolly time with a hospitable Belgian family—who shared their wine and marveled at Yates's height (
“un grand soldat”
)—he woke up, late, to the mass shuffling sound of men on the march. He raced back to the grain mill to retrieve his lone duffel bag, then ran a great distance to catch up with the last of the marching men, and a great distance more before he was staggering alongside his own company. To make matters worse, he'd missed his chance to draw rations and had to watch with famished exhaustion while the others wolfed theirs down. Nor was anyone inclined to share, least of all the mentorly “Quint”: “Half the guys in this company are sick,” he rails at Grove in
Uncertain Times
(and at Prentice—in so many words—in the other book), “but we don't fuck up all the time like you. We don't keep losing our stuff in the snow and forgetting to draw our rations and expecting somebody to take
care
of us all the time.”

Perhaps to make amends, Yates volunteered for dangerous “runner” duty during the Colmar Pocket Battle that began on January 30. The troops had been transported over the freezing Vosges Mountains, and by the time they reached the Alsace region Yates was seriously ill. Though dizzy and feverish and hoarse from coughing, he ran about the tiny shelled-out village from which his battalion planned to launch an attack on the town of Horbourg, three miles away. “He took pride in delivering his small messages, even though the effort of speaking made him twist and rise on tiptoe before any sound came out.” As it happened Yates had pneumonia complicated by pleurisy, and apparently he wasn't the only one. His friend “Quint” was sick too, and both Bill Grove and Robert Prentice would later “agonize” over the fact that they'd proudly refused to go to an aid station when Quint made the suggestion. “I mean after this Horbourg business is over maybe I'll go back,” says Prentice, “but not before.” Shamed, Quint decides to stay in the action too, and is killed a few days later—or such is the fate of that character in two of Yates's most autobiographical novels. If such a man existed, and if he died in these or similar circumstances, then certain psychological ramifications might at least be considered, and for what they're worth, the reader is left to consider them.
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That said, let it be noted that the subject of “Quint”—whoever he was or wasn't—seems rarely if ever to have been broached outside the novels.

Yates's own delay in going to an aid station would, without a doubt, have lifelong consequences. Such was his eagerness to redeem himself as a soldier that he continued running messages amid the rubble of Horbourg, as mortar shells burst around him, until he was all but dead with exhaustion. And when he finally woke up to find himself, at last, in an aid station, it was with a dawning sense of embarrassment: He wasn't even wounded. A doctor dismissively made note of that fact and poked him in the chest, whereupon Yates fell back unconscious. It later transpired that his lungs had been permanently damaged, and for the rest of his life he'd be a semi-invalid. For the time being he was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge (as was everyone who participated in ground combat), but this crumb was only the beginning of a lifetime of restitution the U.S. government would make toward Yates, in various forms, for his valor.

*   *   *

For five weeks he was far away from the front. The hospital was an old Catholic girls' school that overlooked the Alsatian hills, and Yates spent his days watching the snow melt and writing grim letters to his Avon friends. One detail he never forgot was the peculiar stench of the pneumonia ward, and sometimes he'd put down his pen and lie wondering at its source.

By the time Yates was released in March, the Seventy-fifth Division had driven deep into Germany and was positioned along the west bank of the Rhine; the men were moving from town to town, sometimes under heavy mortar attack, and by his own account Yates ended up shooting a lot of trees. As he later put it, he'd never been so “shit-scared” in all his life, but soon learned—while advancing through eighty-eight fire or flushing Germans out of ruined buildings—that he could “shut off [his] mind and keep a tight asshole and [not] even think about fear” until the danger had passed. (“Keep a tight asshole” became a favorite motto in times of adversity.)

Eventually he was made to feel rather proud of his own bravery, thanks in part to the reassurances of one Frank Knorr, who later told FBI agents that Yates had been “fine” under fire, and then persuaded his incredulous friend that he was quite sincere in saying so. Knorr had been the B.A.R. (Browning Automatic Rifle) man in their squad—the kind of solid, competent mensch that Yates would admire, wistfully, all his life; they'd met after Yates's return from the hospital in Alsace, and Yates was rather amazed that someone like Knorr was willing to be his friend. Indeed, the two would keep in touch for most of their lives, and something of hero worship is suggested by the fact that Yates, when deranged or in his cups or both, would occasionally claim that he himself had been a B.A.R. man, though the heavy Browning Automatic was generally handled by the burliest, most flatfooted, and reliable member of a twelve-man squad—the antithesis of Yates, in short, and thus a kind of ideal in his eyes.

Yates's long-standing ambivalence about his performance in combat was partly due to what happened at the Dortmund-Ems Canal, his company's last major engagement of the war. The canal was Germany's second line of defense, and in the dark early-morning hours of April 4 the Americans attempted to cross it. While engineers rushed to construct a footbridge and get ladders up on the other side, the men waiting on the bank were subject to constant artillery barrage, and the crossing itself was chaotic: Amid enemy fire and screaming casualties, one terrified column after another went shoving and scrambling over the wet ramshackle bridge and up the ladders, each man laden with heavy equipment. As he wrote in his early story “The Canal”—whose combat scenes were cannibalized almost word for word into
A Special Providence
—Yates (aka “Lew Miller” and Prentice respectively) was carrying a fifty-pound spool of communication wire as he staggered through the dark and tried to keep his eyes on the man in front of him. But like any number of men that night, Yates lost track of his squad in the melee, and when he finally caught up he was castigated by his sergeant as being, in effect, “more goddamn trouble than [he was] worth.”