If I Die in a Combat Zone

‘I need R & R. And a woman; a lay’s what I need. She can take me with or without whiskers.’

‘You haven’t got whiskers,’ Bates laughed.

Barney rubbed his face, feeling for hair. ‘Well, Jesus, why do you say I need a shave?’

‘Do you ever shave?’

‘Not often.’ Barney stirred his bubbling ham and eggs.

Slowly, the camp came alive. The heat was what woke us up, cooking through the poncho liners. Then flies. Everyone stirred slowly, lay on their backs for long minutes, talked in little groups. At that hour no one really kept guard. A look out into the brush now and then, that was all. A cursory feign. It was like waking up in a cancer ward, no one ambitious to get on with the day, no one with obligations, or dreams for the daylight.

‘That wasn’t a bad night, really,’ Barney said. ‘I was looking for the Red Army to come thunking down on us. A few measly mortar rounds.’

‘Maybe they’re out of ammo,’ Bates said.

‘Could be.’ Barney looked at him, wondering if it were a joke.

‘Sure, we just put their little town in siege and wore them down. A war of fucking attrition, what.’

Barney stared at him. ‘Well, they probably got some ammo left.’

‘Probably.’

‘Did you sleep last night?’ I asked Barney.

‘Sure, I guess so. You know, you get tired walking the whole damn day, so not even the Red Army could keep me from my Zs. You sleep? You looked like you were sleeping; I saw you on guard.’

‘What? I wasn’t sleeping on guard.’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ Barney said, feeling good about inadvertently drawing some blood. ‘I mean while I was on guard. I saw you sleeping pretty well.’

‘Until two hours ago. Something woke me up, sounded like someone trying to kill me.’

‘Must have been a dream.’ Bates turned away.

‘Ah, that wasn’t anything,’ Barney said. ‘They’ll go away soon. We better get saddled up, Johansen looks like he’s fixing to move out.’

We gathered up our gear, stuffed it inside green packs and found our places in the single-file line of march off the hill and into the first village of the day.

2 Pro Patria (#ulink_9cd5b3d4-d0ec-5730-9de3-23234e1eb9e2)

I grew out of one war and into another. My father came from leaden ships of sea, from the Pacific theatre; my mother wore the uniform of the WAVES. I was the wrinkled, swollen, bloody offspring of the great campaign against the tyrants of the 1940s, one explosion in the Baby Boom, one of millions of new human beings come to replace those who had just died. My bawling came with the first throaty note of a new army in spawning. I was bred with the haste and dispatch and careless muscle-flexing of a rejuvenated, splendidly triumphant nation giving bridle to its own good fortune and success. I was fed by the spoils of 1945 victory.

I learned to read and write on the prairies of southern Minnesota, in towns peering like corpses’ eyeballs from out of the corn.

Along the route used by settlers to people South Dakota and the flatlands of Nebraska and northern Iowa, in the cold winters, I learned to use ice skates.

My teàchers were brittle old ladies, classroom football coaches, flushed veterans of the war, pretty girls in sixth grade, memories of hot-blooded valour.

In patches of weed and clouds of imagination, I learned to play army games. Friends introduced me to the Army Surplus Store off main street. We bought dented relics of our fathers’ history, rusted canteens and olive-scented, scarred helmet liners. Then we were our fathers, taking on the Japs and Krauts along the shores of Lake Okabena, on the flat fairways of the golf course, writhing insensible under barrages of shore batteries positioned under camouflage across the lake. I rubbed my fingers across my father’s war decorations, stole a tiny battle star off one of them and carried it in my pocket.

Baseball was for the summertime, when school ended. My father loved baseball. I was holding a bleached Louisville Slugger when I was six. I played a desperate shortstop for the Rural Electric Association Little League team; my father coached us, and he is still coaching, still able to tick off the starting line-up of the great Brooklyn Dodgers teams of the 1950s.

Sparkers and the forbidden cherry bomb were for the Fourth of July: a baseball game, a picnic, a day in the city park, listening to the high school band playing ‘Anchors Aweigh’, a speech, watching a parade of American Legionnaires. At night, sometimes after nine o’clock, fireworks erupted over the lake, reflections.

It had been Indian land. Ninety miles from Sioux City, sixty miles from Sioux Falls, eighty miles from Cherokee, forty miles from Spirit Lake and the site of a celebrated massacre. To the north was Pipestone and the annual Hiawatha Pageant. To the west was Luverne and Indian burial mounds.

Norwegians and Swedes, a few Dutch and Germans – Giants in the Earth – had taken the plains from the Sioux. The settlers must have seen endless plains and eased their bones and said, ‘here as well as anywhere, it’s all the same.’

The town became a place for wage earners. It is a place for wage earners today – not very spirited people, not very philosophic people.

Among these people I learned about the Second World War, hearing it from men in front of the courthouse, from men who had fought it. The talk was tough. Nothing to do with causes or reason; the war was right, they muttered when asked, it had to be fought. The talk was about bellies filled with German lead, about the long hike from Normandy to Berlin, about close calls and about the origins of scars just visible on hairy arms. Growing up, I learned about another war, a peninsular war in Korea, a grey war fought by the town’s Lutherans and Baptists. I learned about that war when the town hero came home, riding in a convertible, sitting straight-backed and quiet, an ex-POW.

The town called itself Turkey Capital of the World. In September the governor and some congressmen came to town. People shut down their businesses and came in from their farms. Together we watched trombones and crêpe-paper floats move on a blitzkrieg down main street. The bands and floats represented Lismore, Sheldon, Tyler, Sibley, and Jackson.

Turkey Day climaxed when the farmers herded a billion strutting, stinking, beady-eyed birds down the centre of town, past the old Gobbler Café, past Wool-worth’s and the Ben Franklin store and the Standard Oil service station. Feathers and droppings and popcorn mixed together in tribute to the town and prairie. We were young. We stood on the kerb and blasted the animals with ammunition from our peashooters.

We listened to Nelson Rockefeller and Harold Stassen and the commander of the Minnesota VFW, trying to make sense out of their words, then we went for twenty-five-cent rides on the Octopus and Tilt-A-Whirl.

I couldn’t hit a baseball. Too small for football, but I stuck it out through junior high, hoping something would change. When nothing happened, I began to read. I read Plato and Erich Fromm, the Hardy boys and enough Aristotle to make me prefer Plato. The town’s library was quiet and not a very lively place – nothing like the football field on an October evening and not a very good substitute – nothing like screaming for blood, nothing like aching with filial pride, nothing like hearty masculine well-being.

I watched the athletes from the stands and cheered them at pep rallies, wishing I were with them. I went to homecoming dances, learned to drive an automobile, joined the debate team, took girls to drive-in theatres and afterwards to the A & W root-beer stand.

I took up an interest in politics. One evening I put on a suit and drove down to the League of Women Voters meeting, embarrassing myself and some candidates and most of the women voters by asking questions that had no answers.

I tried going to Democratic party meetings. I’d read it was the liberal party. But it was futile. I could not make out the difference between the people there and the people down the street boosting Nixon and Cabot Lodge. The essential thing about the prairie, I learned, was that one part of it is like any other part.

At night I sometimes walked about the town. ‘God is both transcendent and imminent. That’s Tillich’s position.’ When I walked, I chose the darkest streets, away from the street lights. ‘But is there a God? I mean, is there a God like there’s a tree or an apple? Is God a being?’ I usually ended up walking towards the lake. ‘God is Being-Itself.’ The lake, Lake Okabena, reflected the town-itself, bouncing off a black-and-white pattern identical to the whole desolate prairie: flat, tepid, small, strangled by algae, shut in by middle-class houses, lassoed by a ring of doctors, lawyers, CPAs, dentists, drugstore owners, and proprietors of department stores. ‘Being-Itself? Then is this town God? It exists, doesn’t it?’ I walked past where the pretty girls lived, stopping long enough to look at their houses, all the lights off and the curtains drawn. ‘Jesus,’ I muttered, ‘I hope not. Maybe I’m an atheist.’

One day in May the high school held graduation ceremonies. Then I went away to college, and the town did not miss me much.

3 Beginning (#ulink_7bf4e166-5bff-5945-876a-f6d8b1970d22)

The summer of 1968, the summer I turned into a soldier, was a good time for talking about war and peace. Eugene McCarthy was bringing quiet thought to the subject. He was winning votes in the primaries. College students were listening to him, and some of us tried to help out. Lyndon Johnson was almost forgotten, no longer forbidding or feared; Robert Kennedy was dead but not quite forgotten; Richard Nixon looked like a loser. With all the tragedy and change that summer, it was fine weather for discussion.

And, with all of this, there was an induction notice tucked into a corner of my billfold.

So with friends and acquaintances and townspeople, I spent the summer in Fred’s antiseptic café, drinking coffee and mapping out arguments on Fred’s napkins. Or I sat in Chic’s tavern, drinking beer with kids from the farms. I played some golf and tore up the pool table down at the bowling alley, keeping an eye open for likely-looking high school girls.

Late at night, the town deserted, two or three of us would drive a car around and around the town’s lake, talking about the war, very seriously, moving with care from one argument to the next, trying to make it a dialogue and not a debate. We covered all the big questions: justice, tyranny, self-determination, conscience and the state, God and war and love.

College friends came to visit: ‘Too bad, I hear you’re drafted. What will you do?’

I said I didn’t know, that I’d let time decide. Maybe something would change, maybe the war would end. Then we’d turn to discuss the matter, talking long, trying out the questions, sleeping late in the mornings.

The summer conversations, spiked with plenty of references to the philosophers and academicians of war, were thoughtful and long and complex and careful. But, in the end, careful and precise argumentation hurt me. It was painful to tread deliberately over all the axioms and assumptions and corollaries when the people on the town’s draft board were calling me to duty, smiling so nicely.

‘It won’t be bad at all,’ they said. ‘Stop in and see us when it’s over.’