by Alan Coren
Except there was nothing to fly against.
It had been that way for a week now. Daily, Kowalski’s reconnaissance planes went out, daily they returned, with nothing to report. The photographs showed hills and streams, trees and cloud shadows on the grass. Nothing a man could bomb. Not even a goat. A goat would have been something, thought Kowalski; especially a moving goat. Now there was a challenge! Out of the amethyst sky, Kowalski’s spotless Skyhawks would swoop, hedge-high over the dark grass, trim as white playing-cards flicked across the green baize tables of home, and BLAT! No more goat. One dead Cong goat.
Kowalski sighed, stood up, tugged his gleaming belt into the soft movement of his breakfast, and notched it. At his right hip hung a Smith & Wesson .45 Magnum, not Army Issue, but Kowalski’s own side-arm. His mother’s Christmas present. She had gone into Duckett’s Hardware in Topeka and said did they have anything for her boy who was a Major-General in Vietnam, and the salesman had said nothing was too good for a guy like that and sold her the hand-gun for two hundred dollars. He threw in a hand-tooled cutaway holster, because that was the least he could do, he said; he would have been out there himself, he said, only he had this trick knee, had it since he was a kid, gave him hell.
On his left side, Kowalski wore a Bowie knife. It was the sort of thing the men appreciated, he knew. It gave him personality, it gave him colour, it placed him in a direct line of descent from Sam Houston and John Mosby and George Custer and Blackjack Pershing. He wanted the men to know that if the Cong ever attempted to overrun the airstrip, he, Kowalski, would be out on the perimeter, meeting them hand-to-hand. ‘Remember the Alamo!’ he would cry. ‘Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes!’
He walked out into the bright sun to where his Skyhawks were drawn up, combat-ready, gleaming-white. Bullpup AS missiles hung beneath their wings, slim, deadly, and Zuni launchers fat with 5-in. rockets, and AIM-9 Sidewinders, and plump napalm tanks like great grey footballs. Kowalski watched them through his smoked glasses, trembling with anticipation, feeling himself part of their functional mystery. Kowalski prayed for opportunity.
He was still there when the morning reconnaissance planes touched down.
‘Nothing,’ said the pilot in the de-briefing room.
‘Nothing?’
‘Looks like it, General.’
Kowalski flicked again through the blown-up photographs, still moist from the fixing-bath. He stopped suddenly, peered close, cursed the light.
‘What’s that?’
The pilot squinted.
‘Some guy cutting wheat, I guess.’
Kowalski straightened up, triumphantly, looked at his assembled staff with bright eyes.
‘Cong wheat!’ he said. ‘For Cong bread.’
A colonel shrugged.
‘It’s one peasant, General,’ he said.
‘Correction, Colonel! One Cong peasant.’
‘North Vietnamese.’
‘Cong, North Viet, what’s the difference?’ shouted Kowalski. ‘He’s cutting strategic wheat, right? To make strategic bread, right? To feed to Cong, so they got the strength to pull the triggers, right?’
Twenty minutes later, three Skyhawks roared off north. Sam Kowalski watched their black trails dissolve, willing them on, feeling in his muscles the faint recoil of cannon, seeing the shells stitch dark patterns in the earth.
Two planes came back.
‘Who knows?’ said the lead pilot. ‘Small arms fire, maybe. I looked around, Harry wasn’t there. Then I see this smoke, coming out of the trees. Maybe he just spun out. Who knows?’
Kowalski thought of the wreckage, the shattered wings, the dead engine, the wasted bomb-load. The Cong would take the tailplane and put it on a stick and take pictures of it.
‘A million-dollar peasant,’ he said savagely. ‘Did we get him?’
‘He wasn’t there.’
Kowalski screwed the flight report into a ball.
‘A trap,’ he whispered. ‘A goddam Cong trap!’ He took out his gun and spun the chamber furiously while he thought. Also, he smiled, in a private, military way.
‘Maybe the guy just went for lunch,’ murmured the pilot. But Kowalski did not hear.
That afternoon, six aircraft took off on a seek-and-destroy mission to knock out the anti-aircraft sites Kowalski had pin-pointed for them. That done, a second strike was to go in and silence the peasant.
Three bombers returned. The Vietnamese, having found themselves suddenly in a strategic position, had called up a couple of heavy machine-guns to defend their village, both of which had survived the attack that had homed in on the largest building, the school.
‘School, huh?’ said Kowalski, with a certain amount of relief, due to his having originally attributed the smallness of the bodies in the photographs to some fault in his aerial cameras. He turned to his wireless operator. ‘Send this: Major-General Kowalski to USAF HQ – In a pre-emptive strike against major supply dumps north of the DMZ, an A4F Skyhawk was downed by enemy fire. A retaliatory strike against anti-aircraft positions resulted in the loss of three further Hawks. However, a major VC training-camp was destroyed, with many – make that hundreds – dead. Ten thousand rounds of ordnance and one hundred tons of bombs were expended. Attacks continue. Message ends.’
The commander smiled triumphantly upon his staff.
‘We got ourselves some war, gentlemen,’ he said.
‘For four Hawks,’ said a captain laconically, ‘they’ll want results.’
‘They’ll get results. Tomorrow, we’ll hit the missile sites.’
They looked at him.
‘Missile sites?’
‘If I know the Cong,’ said Kowalski, ‘and I know them, I can smell them, there’ll be missile sites. They got the whole night to set ’em up.’
He was right. At dawn on the following day, twenty-four Skyhawks, heavy with HE and napalm, ran into a wave of North Vietnamese GAMs. Six were shot down, one crash-landed in the DMZ; two helicopters were lost trying to bring back the pilot, who died slowly, but was recommended for the Medal of Honour by Kowalski. It was good for morale.
‘To the folks back home,’ he told his men on the parade-ground the following morning, and his voice trembled through the loudspeakers, ‘that medal isn’t just Charlie Fitzgerald’s medal. It belongs to every man out here fighting for liberty, justice, and the flag. To your mothers and dads, and sisters and brothers, every one of you is a hero.’
The airmen shuffled their feet, and blushed. Some of them were very young. Pride welled up in them, diluting fear. Reminded of what they were there for, they climbed back into their cockpits in good heart, knowing that death could have a purpose. Pride filled Kowalski, too, as he watched them go.
‘This is a major offensive,’ he told his 2IC. ‘Vital to the war. Strategic. If we break here, we break everywhere. But,’ he patted his holster, ‘no-one’s gonna break.’
That night, he went to bed happy. True, half his strike force had failed to return, but the day’s sorties had racked up a tally of a thousand tons of bombs and rockets, which was a record for his sector of the front. Also, a large area of possibly strategic jungle had been defoliated, the district hospital had been razed, and innumerable chickens would not now find their way into the lunch-baskets of General Giap and his friends. Kowalski, wide-awake, was still calculating the size of reinforcements he would need to call up in order to maintain his escalation at the prescribed textbook level, when the first mortar shell hit the airstrip. Snatching his revolver and knife from beneath their respective pillows, Kowalski leapt out into the night.
It glowed bright as day. Burning fuel silhouetted planes for the few seconds necessary for their bomb-loads to explode, shells and flaming debris rained down, men in pyjamas ran about barefoot, shouting, firing at anything that moved. Kowalski, trapped by the twin agony and joy of war, stood rooted to the spot, gun cocked, breathing in the heady fumes: it took two lieutenant-colonels and a cook to carry him away to a makeshift dug-out
.
‘I knew it!’ cried the major-general. Beside him, a man fell dead, half his head shot away. ‘I knew they’d have to come! They walked right into it.’ His words were sucked away as an ammunition dump went up, tearing the night apart, but they came again ‘. . . what you call war, gentlemen! Tomorrow, we’ll get three divisions in here, four, we’ll get two hundred Hawks, we’ll get ground-to-grounds, and whole batteries of Lazy Dogs, we’ll get nuclear . . .’
A grenade blew out the side of the bunker, flinging what was left of his second-in-command against Kowalski. The man looked up at his commander, dying.
‘I wonder,’ he murmured, ‘I wonder – whatever happened to that – to that peasant?’
‘What peasant?’ shrieked Kowalski. He looked round wildly. ‘What’s he talking about?’
But before anyone had the chance to answer, and despite Mrs Kowalski’s expensive Christmas present, they were overrun.
6
Under the Influence of Literature
My mother was the first person to learn that I had begun to take literature seriously. The intimation came in the form of a note slid under my bedroom door on the morning of February 4 (I think), 1952. It said, quite simply:
Dear Mother,
Please do not be alarmed, but I have turned into a big black bug. In spite of this I am still your son so do not treat me any different. It must have happened in the night. On no account throw any apples in case they stick in my back which could kill me.
Your son.
I hasten to add that this turned out to be a lousy diagnosis on my part. But the night before I had gone to bed hugging my giant panda and a collected Kafka found under a piano leg, and since, when I woke up, I was flat on my back, it seemed only reasonable to suppose that I’d metamorphosed along with Gregor Samsa, and was now a fully paid-up cockroach. The fit passed by lunchtime, but for years my father used the story to stagger people who asked him why he was so young and so grey.
Thing is, I was pushing fourteen at the time, and caught in that miserable No-Man’s-Land between Meccano and Sex, wide open to suggestions that life was hell. My long trousers were a travesty of manhood, and shaving was a matter of tweezers and hope. Suddenly aware of how tall girls were, and of how poorly a box of dead butterflies and a luminous compass fit a man for a smooth initiation into the perfumed garden, I tried a desperate crash-programme of self-taught sophistication; I spent my evenings dancing alone in a darkened garage, drinking Sanatogen, smoking dog-ends, and quoting Oscar Wilde, but it never amounted to anything. Faced with the Real Thing at parties, I fell instant prey to a diabolical tic, stone feet, and a falsetto giggle, and generally ended up by locking myself in the lavatory until all the girls had gone home.
Worst of all, I had no literary mentors to guide my pubescent steps. For years I’d lived on the literary roughage of Talbot Baines Reed and Frank Richards, but the time had now come to give up identifying myself with cheery, acne-ridden schoolboys. Similarly, the dream heroes of comic-books had to be jettisoned; I could no longer afford to toy with the fantasy of becoming Zonk, Scourge of Attila, or Captain Marvel, or the Boy Who Saved The School From Martians – girls weren’t likely to be too impressed with the way I planned to relieve Constantinople, it had become increasingly clear to me that shouting ‘SHAZAM!’ was a dead loss, since it never turned me into a muscle-bound saviour who could fly at the speed of light, and as for the other thing, my school seemed to pose no immediate threat to Mars, all things considered. I needed instead, for the first time, a reality to build a dream on.
But I wasn’t yet ready for adult ego-ideals. Not that I didn’t try to find them in stories of Bulldog Drummond and the Saint (Bond being, in 1952, I suppose, some teenage constable yet to find his niche), but experience had already taught me the pointlessness of aiming my aspirations at these suave targets. Odds seemed against my appearance at a school dance, framed in the doorway, my massive bulk poised to spring, my steely eyes flashing blue fire, and my fists bunched like knotted ropes. Taking a quick inventory, I could tell I was short-stocked on the gear that makes women swoon and strong men step aside. And, uttering a visceral sigh (the first, as things turned out, of many), I sent my vast escapist, hero-infested library for pulping, and took up Literature, not for idols, but for sublimation.
The initial shock to my system resulting from this new leaf is something from which I never fully recovered. Literature turned out to be filled, yea, even to teem, with embittered, maladjusted, disorientated, ill-starred, misunderstood malcontents, forsaken souls playing brinkmanship with life, emaciated men with long herringbone overcoats and great, staring tubercular eyes, whose only answer to the challenge of existence was a cracked grin and a terrible Russian shudder. I learned, much later, that there was more to Literature than this, but the fault of over-specialisation wasn’t entirely mine; my English master, overwhelmed to find a thirteen-year-old boy whose vision extended beyond conkers and Knicker-bocker Glories, rallied to my cry for more stuff like Kafka, and led me into a world where bread fell always on the buttered side and death was the prize the good guys got. And, through all the borrowed paperbacks, one connecting thread ran – K, Raskolnikov, Mishkin, Faust, Werther, Ahab, Daedalus, Usher – these were all chaps like me; true, their acne was spiritual, their stammer rang with weltschmerz, but we were of one blood, they and I. How much closer was I, dancing sad, solitary steps in the Stygian garage, to the hunter of Moby Dick, than to Zonk, Scourge of Attila!
At first, I allowed the world which had driven me out of its charmed circles to see only the outward and visible signs of the subcutaneous rot. In the days following my acute disappointment at not being an insect, I wandered the neighbourhood dressed only in pyjamas, a shift made from brown paper, and an old overcoat of my father’s, satisfactorily threadbare, and just far enough from the ground to reveal my bare shins and sockless climbing boots. By opening my eyes very wide, I managed to add a tasteful consumptiveness to my face, backed up by bouts of bravura coughing and spitting, and I achieved near-perfection with a mirthless chuckle all my own.
Suburban authority being what it is, I ran foul of the police within a couple of days, not, as I’d intended, for smoking reefers or burying axes in pensioners’ heads to express the ultimate meaninglessness of anything but irrational action, but for being in need of care and protection. At least, this was how a Woolworth’s assistant saw me. I had been shuffling up and down the aisles, coughing and grinning by turns, when a middle-aged woman took either pity or maliciousness on me, and tried to prise an address from the mirthlessly chuckling lips.
‘What’s your name?’ she said.
‘Call me Ishmael,’ I replied, spitting fearlessly.
‘Stop that at once, you horrid little specimen! Where do you live?’
‘Live!’ I cried. ‘Ha!’ I chuckled once or twice, rolled my eyes, hawked, spat, twitched, and went on: ‘To live – what is that? What is Life? We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases . . .’
I took a well-rehearsed stance, poised to belt out an abridged version of La Dame Aux Camélias, when the lady was reinforced by a policeman, into whose ear she poured a resumé of the proceedings to date.
‘Alone, and plainly loitering,’ said the copper. He dropped a large authoritarian hand on my shoulder. I was profoundly moved. I had been given the masonic handshake of the damned. Already with thee, in the penal settlement, old K.
‘I shall go quietly,’ I said, wheezing softly. ‘I know there is no charge against me, but that is no matter. I must stand trial, be condemned, be fed into the insatiable belly of the law. That is the way it has to be.’
I gave him my address, but instead of leading me to the mouldering cellars of the local nick, he took me straight home. My parents, who hadn’t yet seen me in The Little Deathwisher Construction Kit, reeled and blenched for long enough to convince the constable that the fault was none of theirs. My father, who believed deeply in discipline through applied psychology,
gave me a workmanlike hiding, confiscated the existential wardrobe, and sent me to my room. By drawing the curtains, lighting a candle, releasing my white mice from bondage, and scattering mothballs around to give the place the camphorated flavour of a consumptive’s deathbed, I managed to turn it into an acceptable condemned cell. Every evening after school (a perfectly acceptable dual existence this; the Jekyll-and-Hyde situation of schoolboy by day, and visionary nihilist by night appealed enormously to my bitter desire to dupe society) I wrote an angstvoll diary on fragments of brown paper torn from my erstwhile undershirt, and tapped morse messages on the wall (e.g. ‘God is dead’, ‘Hell is other people’, and so on) not, as members of the Koestler fan-club will be quick to recognise, in order to communicate, but merely to express. I got profound satisfaction from the meaninglessness of the answers which came back from the other half of our semi, the loud thumps of enraged respectability, unable to comprehend or articulate.
However, the self-imposed life of a part-time recluse was growing less and less satisfactory, since it wasn’t taking me any nearer the existential nub which lay at the centre of my new idols. I was, worst of all, not experiencing any suffering, but merely the trappings. True, inability to cope with what the romantic novelists variously describe as stirring buds, tremulous awakenings, and so on, was what had initially nudged my new persona into life, but this paled beside the weltschmerz of the literary boys. Also, suburban London was not nineteenth century St. Petersburg or Prague, 1952 wasn’t much of a year for revolution, whaling, or the collapse of civilisation, I was sick of faking TB and epilepsy, and emaciation seemed too high a price to pay for one’s non-beliefs. Pain, to sum up, was in short supply.
