Dog Tags (12 page)

One of them said, “That's a court-martial.”

“You remember that,” I said. “Write it down.”

They went off. Trezevant said, “He's going to die anyway.”

“We all are. But the toughest last. I didn't do that for Howard. I did it for them.”

Kinsella joined us and said, “They'll give us a kettle of hot water and that's all. No fire. There's thirty-three of us. Trezevant, the hot water's for drinking, or tea or coffee if anybody has it. Any man without food, find him some, must be a few with something in their pocket.”

“We ought to pool the food,” I said.

“Who'd carry it, Lieutenant? No. Let 'em keep their own, and share it out at each stop.”

We made a meal that night, and slept in the snow, men embracing again; in the morning two were dead, each with a live and horrified lover. “Not frozen,” I said. “Cold and exhausted.”

“They'll blame it on me,” Kinsella said.

“And me.” I relieved myself and Howard. The march resumed, without benefit of hot water. I saw men weeping. Still it snowed. At noon we were allowed to rest at the roadside, and to eat; men strung out along the ditch and sat like cadavers. They chewed slowly, with heartbreaking effort. At six we did the same, and the food was almost gone. I dragged myself up and down the line of limp soldiers; none had strength enough to complain. My canteen was empty; I stuffed it with snow, an interminable labor. Ewald was a ghost but still bore his pack; it was lighter now, and so was mine. Howard was dying. I sat beside him and was helpless. Kinsella sat with me. There was nothing to say.

When we heard the motor and the ponderous clanking we stood up. “Off the road,” Kinsella shouted, “get well off the road.” We waited in darkness until a huge, squat shape shook the earth and rumbled by. “That's a Pershing,” Kinsella said in outrage. “M-six,” I said, “captured.” “From us or from Chiang Kai-shek,” Kinsella said, “or maybe bought from some Nationalist general.” “That's treason,” I said. Talking was no longer simple. “Treason hell,” Kinsella said. “I heard there was a brisk trade. Why do we have to fight everybody's wars for them? Why can't they do anything right? They never do any god damn fighting until they're on the other side. Then they turn into soldiers. How'd you know what it was? Were you in the last one?” “Yes, Germany,” I said. “Medic?” “No. Infantry. Corporal.” “I was a lieutenant,” Kinsella said. “New Guinea and the Philippines.” “Trezevant?” “Too young,” Kinsella said. “This guy dead here?” “No,” I said, “but it won't be long.” The guards were shouting and prodding. “Up and at 'em,” Kinsella said. “We're going to lose a few.” “Maybe,” I said. I ordered two men to carry Howard and the column started off. I marched half-asleep, kept a bleary eye on stragglers. Dim, almost invisible, the column stretched before me. A guard peered, another, breathing white plumes.

I was foundering and had begun to feel vulnerable. I had begun to feel several thousand years old and was no longer an American soldier but a Scythian captive. This column was as old as these hills, had always existed, had marched with stone axes and later with spears, through ice ages. This road had been worn flat by the feet of slaves. I had been taken by a Mongol horde, banner after banner riding league upon league over the frozen plains of Central Asia, the horizon a thousand miles off; stopping to slit a vein in their mounts' necks and drink a meal, plastering the gash with mud and riding on; their shadows cantered beside me, their bloodthirsty yip-yip-yip floated through the frigid air. Mountains, the endless bare steppe, frozen rivers to cross. I shivered. I was a prisoner in a cruel land, a land of tigers and snow leopards and Mongol eyes, a prisoner perhaps for life. Slavery. Would they blind me? Castrate me? There were no police to call, no statesmen to protest to. No heralds in tabards, no ambassadors in silken knee-breeches. Nothing. In the beginning was the void. Only the iron cold and the swirling snow, the hard, indifferent guards and the marching column and the endless night. Tears started again. I ground my teeth.

I moved quickly when a man forward staggered and fell to the side. I wondered how I could have seen that in the night and the snow. Another prisoner had moved faster and was crouching over the body. I ran to help him. The crouching man looked up, spun away, disappeared into the column. The fallen man was crying out; his jacket lay open. “My ration,” he cried. “He got my ration.” I went breathless with anger but tugged at the man. I shouted. Kinsella was there. “Let's get him up,” he said. “I can't,” the man said. “You can,” Kinsella said. A guard spoke sharply. We heaved the man to his feet. “Walk!” Kinsella ordered. “Just walk!” The man was sobbing but walked. The whitened column moved again.

“Some son of a bitch stole a ration from him,” I said, “like that, like a cat.” “You'll see more of it,” Kinsella said. “Right,” I said. “We'll lose some more,” Kinsella said, “unless we stop soon.” We were moving up the line side by side. A face swiveled, bloomed, white-eyed: “We're supposed to have trucks,” the man said. “They were supposed to pull us out.”

“Shut up,” Kinsella said. “Keep moving.”

An owl hooted through the snowy night.

Half an hour later I had understood life, the secret: glazed, frozen and dopey I trudged, one straight line from birth to death, from nothing to nothing, and I knew now that the first men had done it right and nobody since: thirty, forty years, kill a few mastodons, eat when hungry, sleep when tired, fuck when lusty, worship the sun and the moon, die gratefully. I did not reminisce. I shut my eyes against the relentless snow and shuffled toward my final resting place, a lonely ditch, a heap of leaves, pine needles. The snow leopards would have me and welcome.

Dimly shouts billowed. I woke when Kinsella shook me. “Quick.” The column had halted; they stood like statues, a seamy modern sculpture, a group in dead wood and white stone, heroes, a snow machine, and the world passing on to the next exhibit. I stumbled after Kinsella to the abandoned litter. Howard was well off the line of march this time, and he was dead, I knew that. We knelt. I confirmed the diagnosis. Kinsella took the dog tags. “The shoes,” I said. “What else?” “Nothing,” Kinsella said. “He's been stripped. No watch, no food, no butts, no nothing. His buddies.” “May he rest in peace.” “Amen.”

We rejoined the column. “God damn,” he said. “They ought to be flogged.”

“They're dead men,” I said.

“No they're not,” he said fiercely, and I saw him on another day, the sun winking off gold leaves, buttons, medals, the eyes bright, white gloves, a band playing, the major at ecstatic attention, taut, flat eyes, perfect reflexes, iron cross, S.S. lightnings, steel teeth; this man like all men, born of woman, forged by the sun, tempered by the rain, polished smooth by the army and painted by legend, blue eyes, red cheeks, gold balls, and the crowd kneeling. “They're babies,” he said. “They're just not soldiers.”

“They don't want to be.”

“They will be,” he said, “god damn them.”

They fell with bleats and groans, dropped to the earth floor, pressed to the iron stove, shivered and scrabbled in the orange half-light. “Sick and wounded to the fire!” Kinsella's parade-ground tenor shamed them all. “It's a schoolhouse,” I said to Ewald. He had nothing to say but did not flee, or even glare. In a warm room, out of the cold, the snow, the wind, I was drowsy. I leaned against the wooden wall, and soon I slid to the floor. In the morning I said, “It wasn't a faint. I just fell asleep like a horse.”

“Well rub your eyes and think fast,” Kinsella said. “They want to talk to us. We have thirty-two men now and two officers. One doctor, one medic. Name, rank, serial number and date of birth. You men!” They fell silent; muzzily I contemplated them, scarecrows, our turn now, Americans, barbed wire and scrapping for scraps. “You men! The Chinese want to see your officers. We may not come back here. Trezevant's in charge. Maintain discipline, maintain the chain of command, take your orders from Trezevant and Trezevant will do the talking with the Chinese. Take care of each other. Keep clean. Name, rank, serial number and date of birth. That's all. Good luck.” We marched out, escorted, a cold clear morning, football, ice-skating, and then we were at attention before a Chinese officer, who nodded and led us away. Two guards marched behind us, port arms, bayonets fixed; when I turned to look, one of them growled.

We were in a village, and the villagers had turned out to see the freaks. I envied them their padded gowns, fur hats. Cloth shoes: warm? Canvas boots. Dark eyes, like mine; the faces were surely expressionless but I read reproach into them. Pain flickered through my shoulders, back, thighs; my calves twitched. Three nights and two days, and before that the aid station, aeons ago. We marched down the middle of the road, between rows of silent spectators, no fuss. I wanted to say hello, to nod, to raise a hand. At the town hall—brick, yellowed brick, electricity, a WPA post office, 1937—we were halted and searched roughly, and the crowd murmured, pleased. Kinsella bore himself stiffly and coldly. I tried to do the same but kept absorbing details: a hat of fox, another of otter; these civilians were Korean (or were they? where was I?) but all the soldiers seemed Chinese, or was it only the uniform, and how could you tell? Within the building I saw sacks, gunny sacks against the wall, and on the floor coal balls. Coal balls. I had never seen coal balls before. I was a big-city boy, and heat came from drunken janitors.

For a time now there would be nothing that I could do about anything. I was standing in the lobby of a town hall in North Korea, and I was a free man for the first time in my life.

We were led to an office, and met the boss. He seemed to be Chinese, surprisingly large and bearish, a bit like me but smoother and sleeker. “Good morning,” he said. “I am Ou-yang. The equivalent of your lieutenant-colonel. I am a graduate of the Whangpoa military academy and have been in America in 1944. Who are you?”

“Kinsella, John Peter, Major,” and he gave his number and age, “June twenty-eighth, nineteen fifteen.”

The dark eyes shifted to me; I sought purchase in them, found none. I spoke the essentials and added, “I'm a doctor, a die-foo.”

“You don't have to tell him that,” Kinsella said.

“Don't be an ass,” I said. It was disrespectful but I was a free man. To the Chinese I said, Have you finished eating, and quickly added, “because we haven't. We're collapsing of hunger and cold and simple exhaustion.”

Ou-yang spoke and a guard went away. “How much Chinese have you?”

“That's all,” I said.

Kinsella said, “If you start this way you'll end up in his pocket.”

“Childish,” Ou-yang said. “I have many
hundred
prisoners and no place to lodge them. And no doctors, so you will be needed.”

I told him I had sick and wounded and dying, and needed antiseptics, dressings, instruments.

He stood up, and I was shocked, almost angry: he was taller than I. Big sleek head, big round shoulders. I saw him in America, grappling with words, burly and friendless, armored, a quick empty smile, a bob of the head, no girl. He said, “Yes, yes, anesthesia and penicillin, and
afterward
beef broth and ice cream and handicrafts. Use what you have.”

“It's about gone.”

“My own men come first.”

“The Geneva—” Kinsella began, and Ou-yang pounced; he had waited for that: “You never signed it. If you had, it would mean
nothing
. You sign anything and then kill children.”

“We don't kill children,” Kinsella said angrily.

“I have sick and wounded,” I said.

The guard came back with a tray and Ou-yang said, “Have some boiled millet, and even tea. Tea is a
luxury
in parts of China, you never knew that; but after all,
officers
.”

“We're entitled to food,” Kinsella said swiftly. “It's all right, Beer.”

I said, “Right.”

For now we would command our own men. There would be millet and boiling water morning and night; a detail, under guard, might fetch and carry. Only the one iron stove could be spared, but there was a
superfluity
of firewood. The men would emerge on command in groups of six or less, from time to time, for exercise in place. The latrine was in the open air, altogether public; Ou-yang was wearily contemptuous of Kinsella's complaint. We must survive without further help until transfer to a permanent camp. When would that be? No one knows. Would it be in Korea or in Manchuria? No one knows. “But I imagine it will be Korea. China is not at war.”

Kinsella snorted. I was dizzy and sipped hard at the tea. Ou-yang went on about their borders and their airspace and their hydroelectric power. Kinsella argued and Ou-yang silenced him. He told me I would examine his men too in emergencies. I said all right. I was gliding somewhat, side to side. “You will not,” Kinsella said.

“I have no choice.”

“You are not required—”

“A prior oath,” I said dreamily, floating, swaying. “Just take my word for it. I have no choice.”

“It's working for the enemy.”

“Doctors have no enemies unless they sue,” I said, and was giddy, this vaudeville, this Irishman and this Chinese and this Jew, you see, they were walking down a street in Korea and one of them says—I am still alive. I am still alive. The room whirled, and I with it, serenely, grandly, regally, and Ou-yang caught the small teacup as Kinsella caught me. Shame. A grown man. He told me I lay there smiling.

8

This time another officer sat with Parsons. It was another day. Benny said to himself, another day, another dolor. He had slept well but had dreamed of Howard rising from the dead, walking. “You look better every day,” Parsons said. Alex.