The War Lover

by John Hersey

  There was no mention of Devonshire, or of a girl friend named Judith. With a sweet and innocent candor Daphne said that I had often spoken of her intuition, and that she felt she had it to a high degree, but sometimes she made serious mistakes in judging people’s actions and manner, and she always realized after every such mistake that she had known in advance she was going to make it, but something had got in the way of her intuition. In short, she realized now that her former boss was in love with her. Perhaps her quitting had been a mistake. All this she put to me, as I say, with such open and disarming frankness that I thought nothing of it—at the time. I said not a word about my separate peace; the mood didn’t seem to be right.

  9/

  During a four-hour Group practice mission the following morning, which was intended to give the newer crews experience in formation flying, I made my compromise with myself. I believe that what brought it into being was my feeling that the crew of The Body needed me, and this had come to me strongly as a consequence of something that happened on the hardstand before stations time.

  Prien had persuaded Doc Randall to excuse him from the flight because of his stomach, and the other sergeants were discussing our tail gunner.

  Handown suggested that Prien’s trouble was that he was afraid of being wounded.

  Bragnani went pale at that, and said he hated the idea of being injured himself. “I used to imagine, when I was a kid, like a bruise was going to be blood-poisoning, or a stomach ache was cancer or something.”

  This sign of weakness and of honesty in Bragnani triggered his friend Farr, who turned on him with a torrent of scorn. I think perhaps it was the honesty that bothered Farr more than anything else. Bragnani, Farr told his crewmates, went wild in the presence of flak. He would get so crazy with fear that he would shoot his machine gun at bursts of anti-aircraft fire, and sometimes, during a bad predicted barrage, Farr said, Brag would cringe down against the wall of the plane and sit huddled up with his arms wrapped around his knees. Farr told all this as high comedy.

  At the end of it, the would-be tough guy, Bragnani, blushed and hung his head, and when Farr had finished he said, “My pal,” and gave out an embarrassed laugh.

  The other men turned away; it was too disgusting.

  It struck me that there was something badly wanting in our two loud-mouthed roughnecks, Farr and Bragnani. They just hadn’t ever been wired for moral fiber. I made a sharp distinction in my mind between the immaturity, even the signs of apparent weakness, in some of my other crewmates, such as Prien and Junior Sailen, on the one hand, and the moral vacuum in which Farr and Bragnani seemed to live, on the other. Not only did they have no feeling at all for the crew or force or nation to which they belonged, they could not even piece together, the two of them, the slightest tattered rag of loyalty to each other. Their society had failed them, and they were failing it. American life had meant to them, somehow, nothing more than, “I’ve got mine, f— you.”

  There must have been terrible deficiencies in their education, and in their homes; the Air Force had, in its wooden, cursory way, gone through certain motions toward these two men that were known as “indoctrination,” but none of it was on the simple human level that would cause them to want, at a minimum, to make sacrifices for each other and for their shipmates.

  I had seen plenty of cases among our crews of this shortage of moral strength being bolstered, and fairly well compensated for, by firm and valorous leadership, but our Marrow was too busy being a hero to bother his head about deficiencies of character in his crew. All Marrow could do was to jump poor Prien, who, though exhausted by our trials, and perhaps weak and dependent in some ways, had more decency and responsibility in him than a dozen Farrs and Bragnanis.

  These reflections gave me an inchoate sense of importance—a sense, at any rate, that I might have a definite role to play in keeping our crew in one piece for the remainder of its tour. After all, most of the men in The Body had only three more missions to fly. My finding means to ground myself at this point might be very serious for them. I honestly believe that I arrived at this conviction without conceit or self-righteousness, for I was, after all, deeply aware of my own fears, my many sorts of selfishness, my tendency to rationalize, my own confused search for a way out. More than anything else a sense of my worth, which Daphne had wordlessly given me, provided me with the gall to think what I thought.

  And what about the killing, then? What about all the frightful and revolting hostile activities of which our life in the heavy-bombardment group was made up? How could I square my conscience with them?

  I decided, flying above the rugged coast of Cornwall, that I would make this compromise: I would go along on the missions, to do all I could to help my companions get through their common tour alive, but I would try to do nothing in the plane that contributed to the death of anyone.

  10/

  I was still most anxious to talk all this, and much more, out with Daphne, but when I thought of meeting her I was filled with a vague dread about what was happening to our relationship.

  And so even with her, at first, I evaded. I took her that evening to a Red Cross show on the base, entitled Step Lively, and to an impromptu party in the club afterward. Marrow sat with us awhile, and he was charming. It was too late to talk when I took Daphne home in a jeep from the motor pool, with a driver.

  The next evening, however, we cooked supper on a hot plate in our room in Bartleck, and I plunged into the many things that had been on my mind. Daphne was in a curious mood, and my talking seemed to drive her deeper into it. She grew increasingly blue and quiet. In such depressed spirits Daphne actually developed a kind of blueness under her eyes, where the delicate, waxy skin seemed to go translucent, showing, beneath, a pale dark color appropriate to her sadness and stillness. She did not seem to like what I was saying, but I could not get her to comment on it at all. This had the effect of throwing me back on myself. She acted very strangely, as if she were having some sort of premonition. I soon gave up trying to get from her the support I had so long wanted for my thoughts and feelings, and she sat brooding, absorbed in herself.

  At the end of the evening she announced to me that she was going to have to return to Cambridge to do another stint of work for her former boss; she’d try to be back in Bartleck with me in about a week.

  I said, with a feeling of dead weight in my hands, “You’re susceptible, aren’t you, darling?”

  “To him? Bosh! How little you understand.”

  At that, quite unexpectedly, she threw her arms around me and began, with a vehemence I can only think of as desperate, to kiss me.

  I could not guess what I had done to fail her.

  We made love, and the extraordinary thing was that the flow of feeling between us had never been more quick, strong, and deep. Daphne’s intensity and her absolute dedication to me in those minutes were overwhelming.

  11/

  Daphne left for Cambridge the next morning, while we were off on another Group practice mission in fine summer weather. Old Whole Wheat was dinning the close formations into us. The flying all around was excellent, and our crew, with Prien back, and apparently happy to be back, in his old slot, seemed to be on its toes, and I myself had a lift all day from Daphne’s incandescent passion of the night before. Only Marrow behaved oddly with me: stiff, formal, somehow watchful. In five hours we covered most of England on a briefed flight plan, and when we landed I felt a pleasant tiredness, to which fear had contributed no part.

  12/

  The ninth of August was cloudy and cold for that time of year. We had had no mission for ten days, and our crews spoke of their eagerness to go on and complete their tours. That afternoon Max Brindt and I went out for a walk along the perimeter track, and while we spoke of that ardor, which we all felt to some degree, he was, as well, deeply concerned about what we would find at home. A friend of his, a bombardier and a Happy Warrior, transferred ba
ck to training duties at Deming, New Mexico, had written Max that war heroes were a dime a dozen in the States, that people said, deeply impressed, “Oh, you were a bomber pilot,” and then switched the subject to food. Worse than that, Max’s friend had written, the Air Force didn’t want his experience. The brass at Deming said to him, “Don’t bother us, we know what we’re doing, and we’ve got a nice cushy job over here in this section where you’ll be out of the way of our actual training.” Max was sore.

  As Max rambled on I was flooded with what the end—if I made it, cross fingers—would also mean for me. Where would I be then with Daphne?

  I hardly noticed, following that train of thought, that Max was leading me into the bomb dump. He sat, legs astraddle, on a five-hundred-pounder. He had a morose expression, and spoke of the bombs as s—. I think he wanted to drop them all; he had a deep mean streak in him.

  That night I had, vividly, my dream of bombing and being bombed. It was worse then ever. It seemed, to put it mildly, that my compromise had not eased my mind.

  13/

  At three o’clock in the morning of August tenth they briefed us for Schweinfurt—a calamity Marrow and I had been expecting ever since Curly Jonas had tipped Buzz off about the preliminary plans for the raid and the viewing of the tiny city made of sand. That briefing on the tenth was when Steve Murika spoke of the “honor” we were to have of making such a deep penetration of Germany. We went, heavy-hearted, out to our planes, and shortly after eight o’clock the order to scrub came riding round in the cocky jeep with FOLLO ME printed on its tailboard, and we cheered. Yet, powerful as was my own sense of relief at the cancellation, I began, soon after the scrubbing, to wish that we had gone ahead, gotten that horror over with, because once the strike had been set up and briefed I knew we’d get it sooner or later, and we were so far along in our tour that I wanted as much as possible behind me. As the days passed I developed a superstitious fear of anything to do with Schweinfurt, and when I heard Farr say, one day, by chance, in an unimportant context, “In a pig’s satchel I do,” I thought of Curly Jonas’ translation of the word Schweinfurt, and I snapped at Farr, “Don’t say that,” and he turned to Bragnani and said, “Whatta you know? Teacher don’t like us children to use naughty words. Gonta wash us mouths out with soap and water.”

  I was all coked up, jumpy and restless, that day after the scrubbing, having been keyed up so tight, and then unstrung, after our long layoff, and I began fretting about Daphne, and I couldn’t sit still. I walked to our room in Bartleck and lay down on our brass-framed bed, but after about five minutes of that I began really to be scared, and I hurried back to Marrow’s and my room on the station, and I tried, without much success, to focus my eyes on a book, but that was bad, because I began to see words that weren’t there, such as “pig” for “big,” and “fire” for “wire,” and (how can a man’s own eyes go subversive on him?) “death” for “breath.” I tried to write my mother, but my handwriting looked like an old man’s, and I tore up what I’d started. So, like many of my colleagues, I went to the club, which was packed before lunch. In the Air Force shaking a dice cup was a respectable way of having a tremor, and I had lost six bucks to Benny Chong when a tech named Miglow from sick quarters came poking around and said Doc Randall wanted to see me. It was on the tip of my tongue to say that I wanted to see him, too, but I didn’t.

  What time did he want to see me?

  Two o’clock, Miglow said, if convenient.

  It was. It sure was. I was eager.

  Doc sat me down and said that in relationships between men in the combat situation he believed in just as much honesty as the wingloading would carry, and he was going to start out with a pretty heavy weight of it. “Your pilot,” he said, “the bluster boy, was in here yesterday. He said he was worried about your combat efficiency—afraid you might boot the whole plane one of these days.”

  I guess the worst sign about me was that I didn’t, right then and there, call Marrow a son of a bitch. I didn’t even say I was worried about his combat efficiency.

  Instead I started in giving myself a hard time. “Well, Doc,” I said, “it’s true I don’t sleep very well, and I feel awful jumpy today. I don’t know just what it is. I must admit I’m scared I’ll get the heebie-jeebies in the plane sometime and screw things up. But I know one thing, Doc. I really know this. I can’t quit now and leave our bunch when we’ve only got so few to go. I couldn’t do that. You wouldn’t ask me to do that. But I do worry, I get the shakes. I’m not the only one who has troubles, but I don’t want to endanger my crew. That’s the last thing….”

  In this way, mouthing the clichés of combat fatigue, I managed to hide from Doc all that had been on my mind: killing, selfless love, Daphne, Lynch, Marrow, this rotten world.

  And Doc, I suppose as a kind of opening wedge, came back at me with a cliché of his own. “Do you notice,” he said, “that you’re not afraid of the enemy but of yourself?”

  I was just thinking that, much as I liked old Doc, this crap wasn’t going to get us to first base, when the phone rang, and Doc, with a tic-like push to one side of his fine mustache, answered and said, “Oh, have you got that call through? Hold on a second.” And he put his hand over the mouthpiece and asked me to step outside into the outer office for a few minutes; he had a call about a case….

  So I went out and sat in a straight chair, and then Marrow’s perfidious, cowardly tattling hit me like a knee in the groin.

  14/

  Doc Randall had never got used to the telephone. He seemed to think that telephone wires were tiny tubes; the longer the distance of a phone call, the louder one had to talk. At the outer edge of my slow take on Marrow I heard him now behind his closed door, talking in a medium shout in his office; I could hear the tone but not the words. Miglow and Train, the techs in Doc’s anteroom, had the habit of taking bets on the terminal points of Doc’s calls, basing their wagers on the volume of his voice.

  “That’s not so far,” Train said.

  “He got that frog out of his voice,” Miglow said. “How far would you say?”

  “Not quite to Portneath.”

  “Heck, no, that’s no Portneath call.”

  “But it’s farther than the Hall.”

  “You name it, bud.”

  “I’ll say the evac hospital at Hocker Downs. The new one up there we sent those eight to last week.”

  “Not that far,” Miglow said.

  “I just happen to think it is that far,” Train said.

  “No, that’s Cambridge,” Miglow said.

  “ ’Arf a crown?”

  “What the heck, it’s not money, sure.”

  So they checked with Doc’s secretary, Mary Peadon, a WAC, not anything great, a blonde, brisk and saucy, much too careery for me, but a female, endowed with that thankful difference, and sufficient bait to lure in to see the old skull cleaner certain men who loudly proclaimed they didn’t have any problems. The euphemism for going to pour one’s heart out to Doc Randall was, “I’m going over to diddle Peadon.” Train asked her where the Doc was calling.

  “You two!” she said.

  “Oh come on, Sergeant Peadon,” Miglow said, mincing his words like a fag, “don’t be so mean to us chaps.”

  “Cambridge,” she said.

  “Why, that son of a bitch,” Train said, bringing the flat of his hand down on his desk. “He’s got ears like a God-damn switchboard.”

  “Who would he be calling in Cambridge?” Miglow asked. “The garbage-disposal squad?” I supposed he meant the grave-diggers at the American cemetery, and anger, like a napping animal, sighed and turned over in me and went back to sleep.

  Then I came to.

  “What number?” I asked Peadon.

  Peadon looked at me in a peculiar way, as if to say, Train and Miglow were bad enough, but these creeps with combat fatigue!

  “I’m
not authorized…,” she began.

  “You heard the Lieutenant,” Miglow said. “Give him the number.”

  “He was talking to some flier’s girl. I don’t think it would be right for me to give out the number.”

  “Number, please?” Miglow asked, a brutal note in his voice.

  I was on the edge of my chair.

  “You promise not to call her?” she said to Miglow.

  “Oh, s—, Peadon!” Miglow said.

  Peadon picked a slip of paper up from her desk. “Cambridge one four seven six.”

  It was the number of Mrs. Coffin’s rooming house. One thought flashed through my mind: Was Daphne doing the work for her boss in her room at home, and what kind of work would that be, for a boss who was in love with her?

  I spoke up right away, and sharply, to Peadon. “Did that call come in from outside, or did Doc make it?”

  Peadon looked at me and hesitated, but I guess maybe my eyes scared her, because she said like a good girl, “Major Randall placed the call.”

  I was really burned, and I’d no sooner been readmitted to Doc’s office than I said, “Doc, I think that was the dirtiest invasion of privacy I ever saw.”

  Doc didn’t even ask me how I knew with whom he’d been talking. He leveled those deep, sad brown eyes of his at me and said, “Boman, there’s one thing you’ll have to understand. We—meaning we the United States—have put something like twenty thousand bucks into you, training you to do a particular piece of work. Now, I don’t know what you expect of me, but I’m not here to be your mother”—and at that an involuntary bark of laughter, like a bursting sphere of bubble gum, erupted from my mouth—“but purely and simply to maintain you as an efficient fighting man. Your happiness matters to me as a man, but as a major all I care about is what kind of combat specimen you are. So it was my duty to check up on the information your pilot gave me, and one of the ways to do that was to call the person who knows you best.”