Last Notes from Home (21 page)

Abruptly the Brigadier began to laugh derisively. When the Brigadier was solemn, I didn’t trust his laughter anymore than I trusted his reined-in but palpable stillness, and what followed made me understand that for whatever reasons he had been sitting there reviewing his life. “Did I ever tell you about seeing the movie version of
From Here to Eternity
?”
Having risen from the ranks, I expect the Brigadier’s sympathies had always been with the grunts, as I expect that this conversation was the reason my thoughts so often went to Jones four years later at the Brigadier’s Hawaiian death-watch. “It was in Berlin in ‘54 or ‘55 when I was a pinchbeck lieutenant or captain. In those days the army got first runs before the Berliners did and to see it I hence had to go to a post theater. At the time the officers sat sequestered on the right side of the theater, the noncoms in the middle and far left sides of the orchestra. Halfway through the flick, at that point that feeble-minded Polack sergeant—a helluvan actor, one of those guys whose stage names you never remember—finally provokes Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt into a fist fight in Schofield’s quadrangle and Captain Dynamite Holmes stands idly by and allows the fight to proceed—remember that?—at that point, anyway, some tight-assed brigadier down front comes up ramrod straight in his aisle seat, pivots, and marches thunderously out of the theater and every chickenshit officer on our side of the orchestra leaps up and storms out after him—all this, I might add, to the deafening applause, whistling, Bronx cheers, and foot stomping from the darkness-protected noncoms.

“Every officer but me, that is. Man, I was still limping from Korea. I figured, screw these silver- and gold-laden tin soldiers, I’d paid my quarter or thirty-five cents or whatever it was in those lovely days when we were so sure we knew who the enemy was, I was enjoying the movie and hadn’t any place else to go but the officer’s club to get drunk, which I was going to do afterward anyway. Amusingly, if my brethren had waited two more minutes the camera would have zoomed to the upper balcony of Schofield Barracks and they’d have seen two staff-level officers talking, the senior officer ordering the lesser to get Holmes’s name and bring him to the former for an ass gouging. Admittedly, it was a scene Jones never wrote. Not that I remember. I expect it was a compromise Hollywood made with the Defense Department to get its cameras into Schofield. I wonder what Jones thought about it all. He probably needed money. Writers always need money. Writers ought never to need money.”

“Let me have five grand.”

The Brigadier chose not to hear.

“Still, I can’t believe that in my lifetime in the army that ludicrous scene occurred and those officers charged out of that theater in Berlin.
Kheeerist!
We don’t even have dishonorable anymore. If some fag rhetorician fresh from the editorial pages of his college rag decides he wants to go home and have his mums continue his breast feeding, we even ease his passage to those sagging withered udders. We shake his hand and wish him lah lah
lah-dee-dah
luck! It’s a wonder Congress doesn’t pass legislation instructing us to blow these fruitcakes before they leave. That’ll be next.”

I couldn’t help laughing—the Brigadier was so frenzied, so uncharacteristically verbose, so straining to seek out the utmost horizons of man’s more preposterous antics—even though I sensed in his zany nonstop monologue a volcanically simmering rage which, by some enormous regimentation of his will, he kept obstinately repressed beneath his loftily grand and comical demeanor, even though I chuckled throughout his entire erratic spiel, I knew even as I did so that he was close to a hysteria verging on dementia. Brother or no brother, the Brigadier was cracking up. And I didn’t much know what to say but I knew I had to get him off his mutually purgative and self-destructive binge.

And wherein did the Brigadier’s madness lay? It was, I thought, all the schooling to kill the “enemy,” all the strategies, the logistics, the weaponry, the intrigues, all the battles, all the dead friends, all the dead period, all the years—twenty-five in the Brigadier’s case, twenty-five,
his life!
—all fallen before a long-haired, geetar-strumming, pot-smoking, toot-sniffing, pill-popping, terrorist-inclined, rock-oriented, please-touch, denim revolution he neither understood nor could have appreciated had he understood.

But with what little regard I convey the Brigadier’s intelligence. What I was too dense to understand that day, even though the Brigadier tipped me off in a hundred small ways, was that he had long since ceased to trouble himself with triflingly imperceptive middle-class questions as to whether we were going to have a revolution in America and if so when it would come and how violent it would be. To the Brigadier—and he was right!—the revolution had come and gone! And what was needed was a willing adoption of a whole new set of vantage points from which to view both America and the world, an adoption the Brigadier was incapable of making. And what galled him more than anything was those politicians who professed a sympathy with and comprehension of that revolution, not in the least understanding that Vietnam was lost, the revolution was complete, and the implacable, laughable, and laughing Russkis had altered their goal of world domination not a whit, a domination that would bring with it its strident and real—as opposed to the Brigadier’s rhetorical—anti-Semitism, repression of the artist, et cetera, all those things we “freaking intellectuals” so professed to abhor. As the Japanese physicists were said to have wired congratulatory messages to our counterparts on our development of the atomic bomb, the Brigadier told me he was seriously considering wiring congratulatory messages to some Soviet spooks he knew.

“It makes
1984
look as shallow as a futuristically inclined comic strip. Is it any wonder the ‘body count’ mentality seeped into the military and turned ninety percent of our ambitious field commanders into goddamn liars? They began to feel they were Pinto dealers whose franchises would be yanked if they didn’t somehow account for more dead bodies or Fords or whatever it was we were supposed to be selling in Southeast Asia. Or take Teddy Bear Kennedy—and you can have him! He comes over to Nam for a whirlwind tour to get a ‘firsthand look’ at the situation and goes back to Capitol Hill and tells his colleagues, those decrepit drunken old whores, and the American people that he was appalled at the corruption he found from top to bottom in Vietnam, from the province chiefs to the village mayors right into the South Vietnamese Army. Shit me a vanilla cupcake, will yuh, baby brother? Those gooks don’t have any translation for our concepts of corruption, bribery, extortion, and so forth. To them it’s all some time-honored and admired Oriental tradition and one that very early on the military had to learn to live with and adjust itself to.”

For the Brigadier my heart leaped suddenly out in sympathy, perhaps love. He was to be pitied. He was to be pitied in the way the archaeologist who carries with him some stamp of mourning for the passing of the dinosaur is to be pitied.

“You ought to get out of the army.”

“Get out of the army? What the hell would you imagine I’m going to do? Hang around in that limp-wristed undisciplined Cub Scout pack? I’m seeing Nam through to the end”—the Brigadier would not of course make it to the end—“and then the army and I shall quit each other, kaput, slam the door in each other’s faces. And may God have mercy on us both. Especially the army.”

“I guess you’ll never make your brigadier’s star.”

“My brigadier’s star! My star!
It was never
mine.
It was always yours, for Christ’s sake. It was some power fantasy you were living out through me. What kind of a chance did you imagine I had, a high school graduate and a two-bit reserve officer into the bargain? You got any idea what it means to make bird colonel as a reserve officer? You know how many light colonels there were, say, last year at the height of the Tet offensive—we called it the counter-offensive, for Christ’s sake? Seven thousand! And you know how many would be passed over for bird? Plenty, freaking plenty, and I’m not only talking about guys like myself or even freaking college ROTCs, I’m talking about regular skinheads from the Point, VMI, and the Citadel. I never even got to the war college at Carlisle, a must to make general. Even had I been in the right place at the right time—and you can be sure, baby brother, that I usually made damn sure I was
in the place at the time
—I still never would have made my star as a reserve officer.”

The Brigadier was laughing. It was a silly, derisive laugh, causing his tall angular body to seem to creak about at the joints.

“In the last twenty years you know how many reserve officers have been offered their stars? Guess? Don’t bother. I’ll tell you.
One!
One goddamn reserve officer! And you know what he did? He told the Pentagon to shove its star up its ass!
True.
True story. I shit you not. The guy is still a legend in the army. I can’t think of the admirable gentleman’s name. Let’s say it was Hobbs. Whomsoever, as a member of the joint chiefs might say when testifying before a congressional committee, whenever old Hobbsie’s name comes up, one of the guys at the club invariably sighs and says, ‘Yeah, old Hobbsie, ain’t he the guy who told the army to empty its bladder on its star?’ And everyone cries
‘Yeah, yeah
,’
takes a morose, pensive sip on his drink, and shakes his head in wondrously awed salute to old Hobbsie. You know the kind of thing. Everyone wishing he had the balls and the opportunity to tell the army the same thing. Hobbsie, the last pariah.
The Last Pariah,
a title for you. Gratis.”

So the Brigadier, who would never be a brigadier but forever a colonel, and the army would after Nam call it quits, kaput, slam the door in each other’s faces, and may God have mercy on them both, especially the army. For a flashing instant I facetiously wondered if, on retirement, the Brigadier would have his name listed in the telephone directory as Col. W. R. Exley but the thought no sooner entered my mind than it exited because I knew that when the Brigadier quit something he owned the obstinacy to quit it forever.

Like the members of any profession, I said, guys in the army had an annoying habit of working on the tacit and smug assumption that laymen knew precisely what they were talking about Not only didn’t I understand the regular-reserve distinction, I said (“What the fuck’s the difference if either designation of officer has been in twenty-five years?”), but I also thought he’d been to every command school the army had to offer and didn’t understand this war college at Carlisle abruptly becoming an obstacle to his making general.

It was very simple. At any point in his career the Brigadier could have applied for a regular commission, but he had no doubt that without a college degree the commission would have been denied him, despite the honors bestowed on him. He probably should have applied and made the overture anyway. “The goofy bastards always want to know if you love them, you see. They want to know whether you are serious, interested in doing thirty years and assuming responsibility at staff level or whether you are a hot-dog dilettante just pulling your pollywogger and biding your time until you get your twenty in, any time after which you might pull out, buy a motel and beer bar in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, sit in the sun, and let the regulars suck ass, jockey deviously, and cut throats to achieve rank. However, some time in the fifties they introduced some fine print into the regular’s contract, some fine print that made a lot of us very nervous. If, for example, I’d become a regular and on retirement had moved over to Langley or into the Department of Defense, my regular’s pension would be cut and adjusted to the salary I was receiving from the CIA, whereas if I made the move as a reserve officer I’d draw both full pension and full salary—double dipping, as we say, on the exalted level. It was the army’s way of assuring themselves that regulars had no incentive for leaving the army until they had thirty years in. Hence, from the day I refused to make an attempt to meet requirements for a regular commission, say, picking up a degree at night school, whatever meager—and it was very meager indeed!—chance I had of going to Carlisle—believe me, kiddo, the Harvard or Cambridge of the army!—or achieving general staff level was nonexistent. Non, non, non,
nonexistent.
The choice was easy for me, though. I was never that fond of the army in any event.”

“I don’t believe that at all. And such restrictions seem silly as hell to me. I mean, with your obviously not undistinguished military career.”

“Silly? Say what you mean. It’s freaking absurd, like everything else in the freaking army.”

Later, I told the Brigadier I was going to have a good scrubdown in the shower, after which I was taking him to a small bistro in the Village and letting him buy me dinner.

“Scrub up all you damn please but I’ve already made plans to have dinner with a friend. At a place in the Village called the Coach House. Do you know it?”

“Yeah, I know it. It’s not far from where I’m going. I’ll walk you there when we get off the subway. I just hope your pal has a lot of loot. The cheapest thing on the menu is chopped steak and that goes for eight hundred dollars. And the menu is a la carte!”

“My friend is treating.”

“What the hell does he do?”

“As it happens, he’s a captain in the New York City police. Intelligence.”

“A
captain?
How old is he? And if he’s a captain, he won’t have to go for dime one, even at the Coach House.”