Battle Fatigue (11 page)

Chapter Twenty-Two

It's not that Easy

He is beautiful, my new roommate. Donnie LePine talked me into getting an apartment with him. It is in a small building on the edge of town. Donnie is resplendent in his long locks. But it doesn't come easy, and I see hours of shampooing, brushing, setting it in a stocking cap. Rachel, who spends no time at all on her hair, is more beautiful.

There are other people living in the apartment. There is someone sleeping on our couch right now. His boots are on the couch and he is snoring but I have no idea who he is or who most of the people here are.

Influenced by one of the most famous professors at Whiting, Henry B. Moreland, I have decided to major in biology. Moreland is the author of a dozen books on Darwin and the natural order. He is also an outspoken presence at antiwar marches in Washington and around the country. He is one of the celebrity marchers—well-known writers, lawyers, and scientists who are always seen at the heads of the marches. The police seem to avoid clubbing that front row though I am sure Moreland has inhaled his share of tear gas.

My favorite Moreland moment was during a lecture when a student in an Air Force ROTC uniform challenged him.

“Professor Moreland, would you say that violence is natural?”

Moreland squinted through his thick-lensed glasses and pushed his long gray hair off his forehead. “Well, that would depend on the act. But I would say that the tendency to react with violence is common in nature. Most animals, including human beings, are built with an instinct for violence as a survival mechanism.”

“Then,” said the young recruit, certain that he had the old professor, “war is a natural thing. It is what we are built to do. What we are supposed to be doing.”

The hall was completely silent, waiting for Moreland's answer. “War may be caused by biological impulses, but impulses being biological does not make them natural and it does not make them right. We have biological impulses to be naked and eat with our fingers. That doesn't mean anyone wants to see you like that.”

The class broke into loud laughter. In some ways this was a fun time to be going to college. In other ways it was not.

The war goes on and that is what we are all talking about most of the time. Walter Cronkite, that same distinctive voice from the evening news who explained World War II to me in my childhood, is on television every night reporting on the deaths, the killings, the ever-larger numbers of troops being called up. Almost twenty thousand Americans and maybe a million Vietnamese have been killed. The generals think that if we kill enough of them the Vietnamese will give up, but that isn't happening.

We seem helpless to stop this killing. We don't want to be like the Germans we learned about as children. We want to speak out. We want to do something. We have constant demonstrations. They are all over the country. The crowds keep getting bigger. But it doesn't do anything except maybe make the police, Rachel's “pigs,” even crazier. They are becoming more violent with every march.

Donnie and I still talk about Lester. He must be a marine by now. We wonder if he is in Vietnam, if we are about to see him on television, if he will survive to be a principal. “It's the Lesters of the country that we have to organize,” says Donnie.

“I don't think you can,” I say. “Until they get back. Then they will be ready.”

“Then you have the base of a real revolution,” says Rachel. “Organize the veterans. That's how the Bolsheviks won.”

Home for a visit I find that Popeye Panicelli angrily approves of the beating of demonstrators. I wonder if he understands that I am one of them. He says, “Those kids get what they deserve.” And I guess a lot of the police feel that way. Dickey served, so why don't I? But then Dickey, who always gets attention when he speaks because he hardly ever does anymore, says, “And we're getting what we deserve in Vietnam.”

Popeye doesn't answer. I don't think they talk to each other much. At night I can still hear Dickey screaming.

There are a lot of draft counselors. They are mostly just kids like me. Sometimes they are parents of kids like me. They don't know that much about the draft but they meet with someone who gives them information and then they go to the poor parts of cities and work as counselors. I don't want to do that. But I do keep thinking about Dickey. Suppose I had tried to talk him out of going. Suppose I had convinced him. Wouldn't that have been a good thing to do? But why would I have had any more luck with him than I had with Lester?

Still, I want to start trying to talk guys out of it, so I go see Rachel's friend Myron, in Boston, the one who helped Rocco. He is in a storefront on Blue Hill Avenue in Dorchester, the widest street in a three-story neighborhood. It used to be a Jewish neighborhood but now it is black. Myron is one of the last Jews. His office is next to the Black Panthers' office. These Panthers are as beautiful as Donnie. They dress in black with black berets on their heads.

Myron, on the other hand, is in blue—blue jeans, blue work shirt, and, for contrast, a string of red beads. His office, called “The Draft Project,” is an empty room except for five folding chairs. The walls are covered with posters, mostly against the war but also supporting the United Farm Workers, a California-Mexican group calling for the boycott of grapes. I am not sure why we should be boycotting grapes but I think we should all support each other's causes, so I resolve to eat no more grapes—though I wasn't eating them very much before.

“There is always a choice,” says Myron. “You can refuse the draft on moral grounds. They will give you a hearing. If you lose, your choices are to go to jail or to Canada.” Myron is very concise about this, like a professor laying out the semester's curriculum. “Those are your options,” he says.

But they are not my options. They are the options of the guys I want to talk to. I talk to kids who aren't going to college about not going into the army. I tell them they can refuse or find a way out. But they go in anyway. Sometimes about a year later they come back looking different and they track me down just to say “You were right.” That's what Dickey would have said too. But so far I haven't talked anyone out of going.

It occurs to me that maybe there were a lot of Germans who wanted to stop the Nazis. Maybe they couldn't figure out what to do. But no one would accept that excuse from them afterward.

At our apartment my roommates are trying to figure out what to do. “We have to bring the war home so the average American is paying, so he feels it,” Donnie keeps saying.

“Doesn't he feel it now?” I ask.

“Apparently not,” says Donnie. “He needs to bleed some. We need more blood on the streets.”

The odd thing is that while Donnie is saying these things he is always shampooing or brushing or setting his shining hair. There is this one small kid who's been staying in the apartment, with wire-rimmed glasses, the kind Benjamin Franklin wore. There are always kids staying here that I don't know. For a while there was Tubs, who played a clarinet and was very funny. You have to like a fat man who calls himself Tubs. I never learned his real name. Then there was Wet Wendy. I suppose her name really was Wendy. We called her Wet Wendy because she was constantly taking showers and her hair was always wet. We were all glad when she left because it freed up the bathroom. Now there is this guy. I don't know his name or if he is a Whiting student or anything about him, but he is always here and he never says a word. No matter what anyone proposes, no matter how wild or violent or dangerous, he nods his head eagerly in agreement.

I think he must be an informer. He probably works for the FBI. If I am right, this is bad news for Rachel because she is always making comments about the “pigs” and what we ought to do to get back at them. If this is getting reported to the FBI, they will find a way to get her. I have told her this and she laughs and says, “Not if we get them first.”

I find it hard to talk to Rachel these days. I don't think we see things in the same way. Meanwhile, every time I call home my mother always asks, “How is that nice girl Rachel?”

Donnie and Rachel and some others have come up with this crazy idea about a bomb that would make a lot of noise but not hurt anyone. But I wonder, “If we get into this business of bombing, how are we better than the generals?”

“Because,” Donnie says, lifting off a knit cap like an unveiling, his newly conditioned hair flowing down into view, “our bomb won't hurt anyone.”

“Maybe we
should
hurt someone,” says Rachel.

After a moment of silence punctuated by the mute kid in the glasses excitedly nodding his head, Donnie says, “How does it look? I used this new herbal rinse. It's a recipe from a Pueblo Indian group. The recipe is from before Columbus.”

The kid in the wire-rimmed glasses continues his eager nodding.

I have other ideas. John Kennedy's brother Robert is running for president. It's funny—when John Kennedy was president, I was the least enthusiastic Kennedy kid in Massachusetts. But I have a lot of hopes for the brother. Sam is already working for him. He is only a high school junior but he has gone to the Kennedy headquarters in New York as part of a youth movement and has even met Kennedy. They say Robert is the most serious of the Kennedys, so that is perfect for Sam. I think Kennedy will stop the war and I think he knows how to get elected, and I resolve that I will work for his campaign. And then the war will end at last. Donnie doesn't say anything because we always have this sadness between us about the name “Kennedy.” But Rachel wants no part of this Kennedy campaign. “I want revolution, not another President Kennedy.”

The kid in the wire-rimmed glasses nods in agreement.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The Bomb

Throughout my sophomore year the bad times keep getting worse. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed yesterday. How could something be so shocking without being at all surprising? Everyone always thought he might be killed. He did too. He talked about dying young all the time. He spoke about it just the day before he was shot. Even when we were kids in Haley this had been a topic. Some said he deserved to die. Well, only Tony Scaratini. But we grew up with Martin Luther King Jr. He was always there, never tiring, fighting towns, states, the government—demanding change. At our college he had grown out of fashion. Both black and white kids are listening to more radical black leaders who laugh at the peaceful ways of the civil rights movement. They preach revolution and call for violence. They don't believe that big shows like demonstrations accomplish anything. And I have to wonder about it myself. Young blacks are calling for “direct action,” the same kind of thing Rachel and Donnie talk about for stopping the war. Now King is gone and in our apartment everyone is crying—except the kid with the wire-rimmed glasses, who just sits there looking like he is waiting for us to stop. But even Rachel, who always said King was too soft and just not the stuff of revolution, has so many tears running down her face that the top of her white shirt is getting wet.

Immediately after King's death it seems that everyone gets a little harder, a little meaner. We organize a demonstration on campus. It is not a large university so we do not expect too large a crowd. But about twenty thousand people show up. It is going well, peacefully, and the police are staying on the sidelines. They have shields, those clear plastic ones that look like motorcycle windshields, and they all wear blue helmets, though I don't know why. What are they worried about? We are unarmed and peaceful. Maybe it is an example of judging others by yourself.

Suddenly black vans are arriving—three … no, four … no, five. Out of them come helmeted men wearing strange padding and tugging on the leashes of large snarling black-backed German shepherds.

The dogs are now running through the crowd lunging at demonstrators. It looks like they are going for their throats but I am not sure. When they jump on demonstrators they knock them down and somehow hold them. Two policemen with dogs still on leashes are heading straight for Rachel. I run toward her though I have no idea what I am going to do. The first dog is released—a burly athletic animal that leaps up and knocks her over.

I would not believe this if I didn't see it. One of the policemen rears back, almost in a batter's stance, swings his club, and hits Rachel so hard on the head that even though I am still ten feet away I hear the melon-like thud of the club hitting her head. Her head snaps to the side in an unnatural movement. The police take their dogs and go off to the next victim. They've killed Rachel!

When I reach her, her face is white and there is blood streaming from her forehead, but she is still breathing. She opens her eyes, faintly smiles, and says something I can't hear. But I know what she's saying—“Pigs.”

“Let's get her to the hospital, man,” says a voice over my shoulder. It's Donnie, and as I look past him I see that we are the only ones left on the campus mall. There are no demonstrators, no other injured people, no police, and no dogs.

“Everyone's gone,” I say.

Donnie shrugs.

“You would think there would be some reporters or something.”

Donnie looks around and shrugs again.

“So they are just going to get away with it,” says Rachel, holding her head. “No one will know what they did.”

“Let's get her to the hospital.”

“Wait,” says Rachel. “Suppose two hundred kids turn up wounded at the hospital. That will get some attention.”

“Yes, but there's only you,” says Donnie.

“But we could get a lot more,” I hear myself say.

So we have hatched a plot. I will run ahead with Rachel to the hospital and Donnie will get as many students as he can find and have them come to the hospital complaining of being beaten up, and then some newspeople will come.

At the hospital the nurse asks Rachel what happened and she tells her that the police beat her up at a demonstration and everyone seems satisfied with that explanation. There are no more questions. They run some tests. She is fine. No concussion, no need for stitches. We try to stall longer, but no one comes, so we leave.

Now I am ready to strike back. It is a beautiful spring, with warm sunny days and evenings of soft rain that make things bloom and grow. But I am angry. We all are. What have these demonstrations accomplished? The killing goes on and on. We are having a meeting in the apartment. My only condition is that we don't physically hurt anyone. When I think about the reality that in a year or two I could be in Vietnam, I find it hard to believe that I would actually kill people. I can imagine being in the military, being in a war. I have imagined it all my life. But I can't imagine killing Vietnamese people. More to the point, I can't imagine how I will live with myself after I do. So I am not about to kill anyone here to try to stop the killing there. I don't even want to hit the man who beat Rachel. I don't want to be like him. But I also don't want the incident to go unnoticed. So we come up with another plan.

Close to town there is a statue of Thomas Pickering, who captured a nearby fort from the British in the Revolutionary War. No one guards this statue or even looks at it. Probably the one exception to that is a trustee of the college, C. Bradford Harrington, whom no one has ever seen but who claims to be a direct descendant of Thomas Pickering. Why would anyone lie about that? His family had the statue built. There are two extraordinary things about this statue that were pointed out to us by Donnie LePine. (The one consistent thing about Donnie in all the years I have known him is that he always does his homework.)

The first extraordinary thing is that, although it is a bronze statue, it stands on a wooden base. The second is that the statue is on the edge of town next to a thick pine woods. Why are these two things significant? Because none of us knows how to make a bomb. I try to remember all the explosive elements from Mr. Shaker's chemistry class and how to make something with nitrogen. In a world of volatile elements and unstable compounds it should be easy, but I don't know how to do it. Donnie, who was not interested in chemistry, claims to know how to make a Molotov cocktail. He learned this from a movie about anti-Nazi partisans in the mountains somewhere. By coincidence the movie, which I watched with my uncle, is set in a pine forest that looks a lot like the area behind the Pickering statue. A Molotov cocktail won't blow up the statue but it could burn down the wooden base.

The importance of the woods is that we could cut through the trees, throw the bomb, and disappear back into the woods—and no one would see us. We have a cardboard sign that we will leave near the statue:
THIS FIRE WAS SET TO PROTEST THE CAMPUS MASSACRE OF MAY 29
. Then the press will scramble to find out what the campus massacre on May 29 was. We make the sign by cutting random letters from magazines so there is no handwriting clue left. We learned how to do that from a movie about a kidnapping, starring Glenn Ford.

A Molotov cocktail, according to Donnie, is just a bottle filled with rocks and gasoline and stopped up with some rolled cloth as a wick. We have made two because we had two large bottles, both from wine. We considered making a third with a ketchup bottle but decided it was too small. Two will be fine. There are five of us in the apartment and we draw straws for who will go. The short straws win.

Naturally, Donnie draws one of the short straws because he always wins. Back in Haley he never even lost a coin toss. I have the other short straw. Donnie disappears into his bedroom and comes out a few minutes later and says, “All set.”

I look up in wonder. Donnie is wearing a revolutionary guerrilla fighter outfit. He has on black boots, tight black jeans, a black turtleneck sweater, and a black knit hat.

I guess I am staring because he explains, “Harder to see you in the dark.”

That's probably true. Has he done this before?

He looks great! I am wearing these stupid brown loafers that I haven't worn since Haley. I have boots, but they chose today for a heel to come off. I am wearing jeans, a blue shirt, and my Battle of the Bulge fatigues jacket, which now comes down barely below my waist because I have grown taller than my uncle.

Rachel is driving us, with another kid named Trotsky—probably not his real name (it wasn't even the real Trotsky's real name) but it's what everyone calls him. He claims to have a radical edge on all of us because he dropped out of Brandeis. Brandeis is a university near Boston but I do not know if his superior credentials as a radical are supposed to come from his having gone there or from having dropped out. Not many kids drop out of school these days because of the draft. But Trotsky isn't being drafted, maybe because he is too fat. If you can be too fat for the military, Trotsky would qualify.

It is a dark moonless night and Rachel and Trotsky are dropping us off at the far edge of the woods. The woods will be our cover and no one will see us go in or out. Rachel is driving us in her Mao-mobile. We did realize that a bright red Volkswagen might be conspicuous but Donnie had painted flowers all over his van, which seemed even easier to notice. We get out of the car. I have one bottle. Donnie has the other. I have the sign. Rachel and Trotsky have promised to periodically check back on us so that they can pick us up and the police won't spot us suspiciously walking around. Suddenly it occurs to me that Donnie's outfit may not be a good idea. Why advertise? If you were robbing a bank, would you wear a bank robber outfit?

The car is about to leave when I remember something.

“Wait!”

The car jerks to a stop. Everyone is looking at me. Sheepishly I grin. “Anybody have matches?”

Trotsky and Rachel fumble around and Donnie finds some in the glove compartment. He puts them in a pocket and we are off to attack Pickering.

Donnie stops just as we are entering the woods. Even in the dark I can see his wide smile. “Off to war together at last, Aramis.”

“Athos,” I say, and we embrace.

“Hey, Joel,” says Donnie, his hands still on my shoulders, “remember the green stones?”

“Jade.”

“Montana jade.” We both laugh and then he asks, “Do you still have yours?”

“I don't know. Maybe at my parents' house somewhere. You?”

“Same. Maybe at my parents'. What do you want to bet Stanley still has his right in his pocket.” We laugh again and turn in to the woods.

It is very dark in the woods. I take about three careful steps and then there is a sucking noise. I pull up my right foot and there is no brown loafer on it. I cannot see anything. Now I am wondering why we didn't think to bring a flashlight. I could light a match, but the matches are critical and I shouldn't waste them. I cannot find the shoe.