Battle Fatigue (14 page)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Cavalry to the Rescue

Stanley calls me. He is visiting Toronto with three friends. They kept testing his albumen and he kept eating eggs. He says, “Eventually, I would do anything rather than eat one more egg. Even Vietnam sounded better than eating an egg.

“I was in Vietnam for two months, out on patrol, when there was an attack from the side.” He points over to his left. We are sitting on stools in the Pub, a peaceful enough place, and it sounds like Stanley talking about our childhood war games. I am thinking he is about to take out the Japanese flag and tell me how he surrendered but instead he pulls on the shoulder of his baggy T-shirt and shows me a shiny round silvery scar the size of a quarter, near the top of his chest.

“Sergeant Boomer, we called him. Swung his piece around to where they were attacking and blew a hole in me instead. Took one for America.” He empties the shot glass of whiskey he has in his hand and orders another.

One of his friends who was playing darts comes over. Stanley and his friends are all in civilian clothes except for army T-shirts and they have long hair and don't look at all like soldiers. The friend says, “Stanley was stupid enough to get shot by us. But he's not the stupidest asshole here. Look.” He pulls up his shirt and turns his back to me. “Look at that,” he says, pointing out a large scar the size of a misshapen saucer on the lower left part of his back. “And then this—through the lung, baby.” He turns around and holds up his first two fingers. “Twice, man. Shot both times by friendly Americans. Genuine American friendly fire. But I'm still not the stupidest. See that one over there?” He points at one of the darts players, who throws and then smiles. “He actually got shot by the damned enemy!”

They all laugh. They are drunk and getting drunker. “I mean, it's one thing to get shot by us. Can't help that. But to expose yourself to enemy fire? Man, that's dumb,” he shouts.

I am too curious. I have to ask. “Stanley?”

“Yeah, man?”

“You still have the stone?”

He stares at me. Then he smiles. Then he laughs. He is shaking with laughter and his fist is pounding the bar. He struggles to gain control and then says in a hoarse whisper, “I carried that fucking thing everywhere. I even took it to Nam with me. Carried it into fucking battle, man.” He is staring at me. “Had it on me when I was wounded. Woke up in the hospital …” His voice breaks and he wheezes into laughter. “I woke up and the thing was fucking gone!” Now he is looking angry. “Can you believe it? Someone stole my green stone!”

“Well,” I say with a smile, “it
was
jade, you know.”

Stanley laughs. “Montana jade, baby!”

One of the darts players starts half singing and half shouting at the music, “And it's one, two, three.”

And we all screech back, “What're we fighting for!” It's a great song, but these guys are starting to remind me of how if you smack a lightbulb it will burn brighter. The trouble is, it will burn out that much faster.

“Wait a minute, man!” Stanley bellows. “Hold the game.” He starts fumbling through the pockets of his green jacket. “Where the hell is the damn thing?” Then he pulls out a medal dangling from a purple ribbon. I have never seen one before but I know what it is. It is a Purple Heart. He staggers up to the dartboard and, putting a dart through the purple ribbon, hangs the medal so that the gold-trimmed purple heart with George Washington on it is directly over the bull's-eye.

All four veterans begin furiously throwing darts. One hits the medal but the dart bounces off. “Shit!” Stanley shouts, and he charges the board with a dart in his fist and begins stabbing at the medal. There are tears running down his cheeks. The others grab him and take away the dart. They take down the medal and put it in his pocket and start leading him to the door.

“Hey!” he hollers. “Hey, man!” He is shouting at me. “You know who bought it?”

“Bought it?” I ask, hoping I don't understand, but I do.

“Greased. Wiped out. Dead.”

“Who?” I say, dreading the answer.

“Your old buddy.” He sways a little as though losing his balance. I am still waiting. “Big Tony Scaratini! Big Tony thought he was tough until he ran up against Charlie.”

Charlie. They had this first name for the enemy because the enemy was their friend, someone who could understand them far better than I ever can.

“What happened?” I ask, feeling sick. “What happened to Tony?”

“Don't know. I heard about it just before I was hit. Somewhere up north. It's a joke, isn't it? That's the end of Big Tony. Remember he never wanted to get killed when we were kids.” He does a husky-voiced Tony Scaratini impression, like all us kids used to do. “I'm not dead. I'm keeping da hat.” Stanley starts laughing but he could never do a good Scaratini like Donnie LePine. “Or maybe Charlie didn't get him. Maybe we shot him. They're going to kill us all. Cavalry to the rescue. Yes sir. Air Cav will kill us all—'cause we're air mobile!”

I don't really know what he is saying but then he starts crying again and the others lead him away.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Just like that

Just like that. Tony Scaratini's life is over. I have not been in a very good frame of mind since Stanley's visit. Now I am going over to the House to see if I can find out what happened to Tony Scaratini. But Hillary stops me as I am leaving to tell me she is not going on the Ontario wolf project this summer. The U.S. government has a new project to introduce Canadian wolves to parts of Idaho and Montana where the local hunters and ranchers have killed off the population. It is an exciting and controversial project because, of course, the people who killed all the American wolves will want to kill the Canadian ones too, saying that they are killing sheep and threatening children and could destroy the ranching industry—just like the Vietnamese are spreading Communism and endangering our way of life. But this time the federal government is going to protect the wolves. I envy Hillary working on this but we both know I won't be able to go because it involves traveling in the U.S. She says she will be back in six months but for some reason I don't think she will.

So now, on my way to find out about Tony Scaratini, I have more than one reason to be in a dark mood. The House has information on everything about the war. You can even find out how many Purple Hearts they have given in Vietnam. So far it's almost two hundred thousand. Almost fifty thousand American troops have been killed. They warn you that the number changes every day. There may be a few more since I read the number a few minutes ago.

The House doesn't tell you how many Vietnamese have been killed. The U.S. military does. They call it the “body count.” The body count is a tricky thing. They like to give the body count because it shows that a lot more of them are dying than us. It makes it look like we're winning. But we're not. On the other hand, they don't want too high a body count. They don't like to count the civilians and they like to keep the Vietnamese casualty number down—far ahead of ours but not so high that people can see what a slaughter the whole thing is.

The House has a book, really a stack of papers two inches thick, bound with rings, listing everyone killed in Vietnam. It gives last name first and then “KIA,” killed in action. I turn to “S” to look for “Scaratini, Anthony.” There is Sabatini … Scaller, Scanlon, Scranton …” I stop and think a second. Scranton. “Scr” is after “Scar.” Scaratini isn't there. I go back and check again. Could they have misspelled his name? I check every name under “S,” all six pages, and Tony is not there. It's not true. He wasn't killed. But there is something hypnotic about leafing through these names of the dead, as though by looking at their names I am acknowledging their deaths and in that way giving them life. There are so many of them. So many names. Imagine this many bodies. I look for LePine but there isn't one. I wonder if he ever did volunteer. I haven't heard from him. What about Lester? I turn to “P” for Parkman. Parker, Parks … no Parkman. Lester made it. He probably has his high school job back in Indiana by now. And then—

It is as though something has slapped me in the face. No, not slapped. Punched, sharp and hard, and I feel sick to my stomach and a little dizzy. I look again. I have not imagined it.

Pizzutti, Rocco.

Had Myron been wrong? Or did Rocco just decide to volunteer? Oh, Rocco. What a waste. What an unbelievable waste. I think of Angela, who has now lost a father and a brother to war. There is a kind of librarian in charge of all these papers, a tall woman with long straight blond hair, a face with no trace of humor; she wears round wire-rimmed glasses like John Lennon.

I ask her if there are any records of who was a draftee and who was a volunteer. She says that there aren't, that they have no records on the dead whatsoever—unless they got a medal. They do have medal citations. “He's dead,” I say. “Do they give dead people medals?”

The humorless woman almost smiles. “They give most of the medals to dead people,” she says, and she hands me another ring-bound pile even thicker than the list of the dead. Much thicker. In fact, there are two of them. I take M–Z.

There it is. Pizzutti, Rocco (KIA).

Rocco got a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. He was a “war hero.” How he would have hated that. Suddenly I understand Stanley and why he hates his medal. I want to take that Silver Star and that Purple Heart, the two seedy little baubles that are supposed to replace Rocco. I want to stab them with darts just like Stanley did. I want to deface them. Instead, because it is all I can do, I read on.

PIZZUTTI, ROCCO (KIA), Citation: The President of the United States takes pride in presenting the Silver Star Medal (posthumously) to Rocco Pizzutti, Specialist Fourth Class, U.S. Army, for gallantry in action while engaged in military operations against an armed hostile force in the Republic of Vietnam. Specialist Four Pizzutti distinguished himself while serving as a Rifleman with Company A, 3rd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division. On 1 July 1969, Specialist Pizzutti was on one of the first helicopters to set down in a landing zone northwest of Kon Tum and immediately assumed a position to provide security for the incoming helicopters. As the third helicopter touched down, an unknown-sized enemy force subjected the landing zone with intense automatic weapons, small arms, and mortar fire. A hand grenade landed one meter from Specialist Pizzutti at the feet of an officer and three other enlisted men. Without hesitating and with remarkable athleticism, Specialist Pizzutti ran to the grenade, scooped it up, and …

I'm not reading on. I know what happened. Rocco always had complete faith in his athletic ability. He thought that with his powerful left arm he could throw the grenade in time, but it was too late. I don't want to read how badly he got it, whether it was instant, or how many men he saved. He is dead. What else is there? All fifty thousand of them have their stories. The Detroit Tigers lost a great left-handed pitcher. Who knows what else was lost with these fifty thousand men? When is this going to stop? Rocco. This was not Rocco's destiny. Of all of us, Rocco was the one who seemed destined for better things. Most people thought it was Donnie but I always thought Rocco was the one with a destiny. And this wasn't it.

Chapter Thirty

Rocco's Destiny

I want to talk to Angela but this is the only phone number I can find. “Hello, Mrs. Pizzutti.” I did not really know her. She seemed an angry woman, a little scary when we were kids, and Rocco and Angela didn't bring us around to their house. “Hello, Mrs. Pizzutti, it's Joel Bloom.”

“Joel Blo—from Canada, I suppose.”

“That's right. I just heard about Rocco.”

“Did you? So the news has finally reached the safety of Canada.”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Pizzutti. I just heard.” I don't know what to say, so I say what I am feeling. “I feel sick, Mrs. Pizzutti. I loved Rocco. I always thought that he was the best of us.”

“He was. He was.” I can tell by her voice that this has softened her a little. “You know, Joel, he got two medals.”

“Yes, I heard.”

“A Silver Star and a Purple Heart. His father also got a Purple Heart. I have them on the wall right next to each other. But Rocco got the Silver Star too.”

“Yes, he was a hero,” I hear myself say. I know this is the kind of lie that keeps wars going, but now I also understand that this way of talking was invented because there is nothing else you can say to all the Mrs. Pizzuttis. I ask for Angela but she says she doesn't live there anymore and gives me another phone number.

“Hello, Angela?”

“Joel!”

“How did you know it was me?”

“I knew you would call when you heard.”

“How'd you know?”

“Rocco always said it.”

“What?”

“Never mind. He talked about you a lot. So did I. When he got drafted I kept telling him to go to Canada and join Joel Bloom.”

“But he wouldn't do it.”

“He just said that Major League Baseball wasn't in Canada.”

“Yeah, he loved baseball.”

“Yeah, he loved it so much he was willing to kill Vietnamese people just so he could play.” Her voice was turning to that husky angry tone she used to have when she talked about the Kennedy assassination. “I think baseball and the military work hand in hand. They were the ones …”

I am not really listening. I'm thinking about Rocco, about how he could never bring himself to hurt a frog. I ask where she is living and she says, “Roxbury. I'm a social worker.”

“That's great,” I say, and start thinking about how in my generation it will be the women who do all the interesting things while the men get drafted.

“It's not that great. Hasn't worked out like I thought it would. Can I come see you?”

I was expecting her. There was a doorbell ringing. I opened the door and she was standing on the stoop holding a suitcase, her black eyes burning through the icy air, and we both knew that she was never leaving.

It is funny the way when you see adults you knew as a kid, they look different. Angela had the same fiery black eyes and thick black hair on the verge of flying wild. But though she looked the same as she always had, I now realized that she didn't really look at all like Rocco. In fact, she was stunning—thrillingly beautiful. How was it that I had never noticed this before?

She said that even after I moved to Canada, Rocco was always certain we would get together. “Rocco was like that,” she said. “He never doubted things. He knew he would make the major leagues. He was certain he wouldn't get hurt in Vietnam.”

I am pretty much a Canadian now. There are rumors that Major League Baseball is going to expand, start new teams everywhere. Some people say there might even be one here in Toronto.

I heard that Rachel Apfelbaum married Donnie LePine. I never saw that coming. Then they went to law school together. I got one letter from Donnie but it didn't say anything about Rachel. He did say that he had tried to volunteer for the army but they wouldn't take him—“saw through my plan,” he said. I never hear from them. Maybe they're embarrassed. Your best friend isn't supposed to marry your girlfriend, even your ex-girlfriend. But it doesn't matter to me. It all seems far away.

Stanley has come up here two other times for visits. He doesn't seem any better. I hear from Dickey every once in a while. But I have my own life here and Haley seems a very long time ago.

Looking at the whole thing, I have to say that I'm proud that I wasn't the German. That I took my stand and never hurt anyone. Except the time I punched Scaratini. I still feel bad about that.

But at least he was the only person I ever hurt. I have never killed any Vietnamese people. I feel good about that. I have never killed a German or a Japanese or a Korean. The day before Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, he talked about how people who didn't stand up for anything were dead though they didn't know it. I didn't understand that at the time. But now I do.

I suppose I did hurt my family and I don't feel good about that. I don't have much contact with Sam. I am not sure if he is angry or if he just does not want to be seen having a connection to me. He did get a job with the McGovern campaign, one of the most catastrophic presidential runs in American history. McGovern campaigned against the war and only Massachusetts and Washington DC voted for him. Maybe Sam helped them carry Massachusetts. McGovern lost to Nixon, a man almost nobody likes, who kept insisting that if we bombed enough villages the Vietnamese would surrender. His campaign was caught burglarizing the Democratic Party offices.

Still, everyone voted for him. And the war goes on.

My parents write to me and my mother keeps sending Hebrew National salamis. She seems to think that I am lost on frozen tundra without salamis. So I am glad that they are coming to visit and can see what a good city Toronto is.

My mother brings me a box of salamis. I show them around Toronto—the theaters, the music, the lakefront. I show my mother that there are a lot of Jewish people in Toronto and a lot of Jewish food—much more than in Haley.

They are somber, as though a great tragedy has befallen me. I try to show them that I am all right. Someday someone of my generation will become president and we will all be pardoned. But I probably will never go back. Just because America forgives me does not mean I have to forgive America. Angela says she wishes she had left right after John Kennedy was killed.

Before my parents leave my father says to me in the same voice he used to use down in the shelter with the canned tuna, “I'm sorry you've had to go through all this.”

But I'm not sorry at all. How often do you get a chance to stand for something? Refusing to go to war was actually one of the best moments of my life.

Angela and I don't stay in Toronto. We move to Alberta to work with wolves that raise families and build communities in the pine forests, prowling the blue-rock snow-capped mountains killing elk, deer, and moose for the survival of their pack. But they treat their fellow wolves with love and the greatest respect. Sometimes they are suspicious of a wolf from another pack. But wolf packs don't go to war with each other. Angela loves the wolves, loves their society, and claims she is still a social worker of a kind. We try to understand them. Sometimes we befriend them.

We are not going to forget or get over anything that happened. But for now we are tired of it all—tired of war and of trying to end it—just fatigued. And in protecting the wolves, misunderstood creatures struggling to survive in their violent but loving world, we begin to understand our world. Angela and I feel that we have been surrounded by war all our lives. Even now, far beyond the high crests of the Canadian Rockies, there is still war. But here we have found peace together. I think Rocco would have liked that.