The Nuclear Age

by Tim O'Brien

  “The line between sainthood and infamy,” Ebenezer said quietly, “is the line between winning and losing. Winners become statues in public parks. Losers become dead.”

  There was a pause.

  “Dead,” he said.

  Then another pause, longer, after which he smiled.

  “Dead, children. Losers get embalmed. Our purpose here is to produce winners.”

  Over the course of those evening seminars, it became clear that both Nethro and Ebenezer were true professionals. They never preached or proselytized; there was no evidence of ideology. Combat veterans, of course—nothing theoretical. They were mechanics. Turners of nuts and bolts.

  “A guerrilla-type war,” Ebenezer told us. “Which means we take a page from our good brethren Uncle Charlie. No trenches, no battle lines.”

  “Tell it,” said Nethro.

  “Ghost soldiers. Invisible. Like in the Nam, we hit here, hit there, then beat sweet feet.”

  “Oooo!” Nethro said.

  “During the day we wear our civvies. We melt away, we nowhere to be found. And then at night—”

  “Ooooo!”

  “At night we do our business. Slick little operations. In an’ out, like surgery, then presto, we vanish, we gone. Nothin’ but boogiemen. Ghost soldiers.”

  It was important stuff, I suppose, but I had a hard time digesting the implications.

  Ghosts, I’d think.

  Tombstones and cemeteries, all the consequences of ghost-hood.

  I wanted out.

  A motivation problem, I told Sarah. Not enough mobility or hostility. A shortage of spirit. Turned around, I said. I’d walked in blind, I hadn’t understood the terms.

  Sarah stepped out of the shower.

  She toweled off, dusted herself with powder, examined her breasts in a mirror, and stood on the bathroom scale. One hundred and twelve pounds, but each ounce carried authority.

  “Well,” she said, “you’re crawling up on a conclusion.”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Say it.”

  I wiped off a damp spot at the small of her back.

  “Everything,” I said. “Start with treason. And this boot camp thing—those two zombies. Like a death squad. Can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, they’re all gunslingers. Completely scrambled. But it’s lethal. I know that much, it’ll kill somebody.”

  “Lethal?” Sarah said. She stood facing the mirror. Her skin was a glossy brown, freckled at the shoulder blades. I wanted to touch her but it seemed inappropriate. After a moment she turned. “Funny coincidence, William, but that’s exactly what the folks in Da Nang keep saying. When the artillery comes down. Kaboom. Lethal, they say.”

  “Granted.”

  “Lethal times. Take it or leave it.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Leave it.”

  “Walk?”

  “Maybe.”

  For a moment she looked at me without expression. Then she smiled. It was a neutral smile, not angry, just dense with indifference.

  “Sissy-ass,” she said. “A sad case, man.” She aimed a hair dryer at me. “Anyhow, you wouldn’t last ten minutes out there on your own. What about cash? Connections? And this minor legal hassle with Uncle Sam—you guys had a date, remember?”

  I nodded. “There are places I could go, maybe. Hibernate for a while. Wait for things to quiet down.”

  Sarah dropped the hair dryer.

  “Fucking hibernate! Animals hibernate, people act. That’s why we’re here—to stop the goddamn killing!” She slapped her hip. “No lie, you amaze me. William the victim. Fuck conscience, fuck everything. Vietnam, you think it was cooked up just to ruin your day. That’s how you think. All the big shots, all the world leaders, they got together at this huge summit conference, and LBJ jumps up and says, ‘Hey, there’s this sissy-ass creep I want to fuck over,’ and Ho Chi Minh says, ‘I got it! Start a war—we’ll nail the son of a bitch!’ A persecution complex. Almost funny, except it’s so contemptible.”

  “My error,” I said.

  “Terrific. That’s your only comment?”

  “Not quite. I get the feeling we’re growing apart.”

  We stood facing each other.

  The shower curtain was bright red. There was some steam in the room.

  Sarah turned away. “This conversation,” she said slowly, “has outlived its utility.”

  If you’re sane, you see madness. If you see madness, you freak. If you freak, you’re mad.

  What does one do?

  I froze. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t move my bowels. At night I’d roam the villa’s hallways, thinking this: If you’re sane, you’re not completely sane.

  By daylight, too, the bombs were real. Nethro explained the physics. He showed us how to make big bangs out of small household appliances. How to bait a booby trap and adjust the tension on a pressure-release firing device. All around us, for three days, there was the smell of cordite and gasoline.

  Down on the beach, taking turns, we pitched grenades at mock enemy bunkers. We learned how to set up a Claymore mine—the angles of aim, a geometry lesson. If you’re sane, I decided, you can calculate the effects of petrochemicals on bone and tissue. If you’re sane, but only then, you understand the profundity of firepower.

  “Blammo!” Ollie yelled.

  Nethro folded his big arms. “Shit, man,” he said softly. “You don’ know shit.”

  But Ollie did know shit.

  And Sarah, too, and Ned and Tina. They knew the whys and wherefores of deadly force.

  So I froze.

  It happened first on the weapons range, where I locked and loaded, taking aim, pressing my cheek to the rifle’s plastic stock. I closed my eyes and drew a breath and squeezed the trigger. Then I froze. Full automatic—twenty rounds.

  The rifle seemed to pick me up and shake me.

  I heard myself squeal. I heard Sarah say, “Christ.” Behind me there was laughter.

  I tried to release the rifle—drop it, throw it—but I couldn’t, because then the freeze came, and the panic, and I turned and watched the bright red tracers kick up sand all around me.

  The black rifle kept jerking in my hands, I was part of the weaponry.

  Then silence.

  A soft, watery sound. The blue Caribbean, wind and waves, Sarah looking down and saying, “Christ.”

  I was smiling. I dropped the rifle and squatted in the sand.

  “Audie fuckin’ Murphy,” Ebenezer said.

  Ollie giggled.

  Ned Rafferty put his hand on my head, just holding it there, and there was still that silence.

  Strange, but I didn’t feel shame. Emptiness and relief, but not shame. Later, when the jokes started, I thought: If you’re sane, you don’t feel shame. You feel helpless. You feel a stickiness at the seat of your pants. But not shame.

  Rafferty helped me up.

  “This development,” said Ebenezer Keezer, “gives scared shitless a whole new meaning.”

  “Ain’ roses,” said Nethro.

  “Let him be,” Ned Rafferty said.

  “Yeah, but that smell.”

  Rafferty held my arm and said, “Let him be.”

  And again that same night.

  A final exam, Ebenezer called it. He was grading on the pass-fail system.

  At midnight we formed up in the courtyard. We smeared our faces with charcoal. We wore black sweat pants and black cotton jerseys. On our backs and belts, we carried C-4 explosives, wire cutters, Claymores, blasting caps, fuses, electric firing devices, rifles, and rucksacks.

  “Tonight,” said Ebenezer Keezer, “we baptize the Christians. You people will get shot at. You will not commit messies in your shorties.”

  He looked directly at me.

  “Shitpots,” he said, smiling. “Regulation panty-poopers.”

  Nethro briefed us on the details.

  A simulated commando raid. The object, he said, was to make our way across a two-hundred-meter stretch of open beach. To move with hast
e and silence. To attack and destroy a twenty-foot wooden tower that had been erected that afternoon. Along the way, he told us, we would encounter certain obstacles. Barbed wire and booby-traps and tear gas. Then he grinned and snapped his fingers. “Oh yeah, an’ two machine guns. M-60s—live ammo.” Nethro opened his hands in a gesture of reassurance. “No sweat, we aim high. Four feet, more or less. Just don’ take no leaks standing up.”

  Then we moved out.

  We crossed the tennis courts and followed Nethro down to the dunes.

  The darkness was something solid. There was fog, too, which carried the scent of brine and seaweed, and the night seemed to slide beneath itself. Ahead, I could see the green phosphorescent glow of a wristwatch. I reached out and put a hand on Rafferty’s rucksack and moved by touch. If you’re sane, I thought. Then I laughed and thought: Ghosts.

  “Hush,” Rafferty said. “Cerebral slack, man, just spin it out.”

  The starting line was a shallow trench in the sand. Quietly, we knelt down to wait. There were spooks in the dark but I imagined I was elsewhere. Mars, maybe. A deep cave. I breathed from the bottom of my lungs. Forty minutes, a full hour, then the fog lifted and I could see moonlight on barbed wire, the outline of a rickety tower two hundred meters up the beach. No panic, I thought. Just this once, I would perform with dignity. I would not wail or freeze or befoul myself.

  There was movement in the dark.

  “On your bellies!” Nethro called. “Stay flat, kiddies!”

  At the far end of the beach there was a sharp splatting noise. A green flare exploded high over the tower.

  Rafferty tapped my arm.

  “Stick close,” he said. “I’ll run the interference.”

  Behind us, Nethro fired up a flare and yelled, “Hit it!” and we were moving. Sarah went first, then Ollie and Tina and Rafferty. Nethro kicked me and said, “Anytime, darlin’.”

  The first twenty meters were easy. Up and over, out of the trench, snaking motions, part wiggle, part crawl, rifle cradled across the elbows. I was a commando now. Anything was possible. Push-glide, no thinking. Off to my right I could make out the peaceful wash of waves where the sea touched land. Dignity, I thought, then I said it aloud, “Dignity.”

  When we hit the first wire, Rafferty used his cutters and motioned for me to slip through.

  We bellied forward.

  “Easy,” Rafferty said, but it wasn’t easy. There was confusion, and my rucksack caught, and I felt a cool slicing sensation on my forehead. Concertina wire—looped and tangled—and when I twisted sideways I was cut again at the neck and cheek.

  A white flare rocketed up over the beach.

  There was a soft whooshing sound and then the guns opened up. Red tracer rounds made edges in the night. “Move,” Rafferty said, “just move.” But the wire had me. High up, almost directly above us, another flare puffed open, and the two machine guns kept up a steady fire. A game, I reminded myself, but then I flopped over and watched the red tracers unwind through the dark. That much was real. The guns were real, and the flares and muzzle flashes. No terror, just the absence of motor control. I felt Rafferty’s big arms around me, and then came a clicking sound, and we rolled through the wire.

  I pressed my face into the sand. I found myself posing foolish questions. Why were my eyelids twitching? Foolish, but why?

  Later, when I looked up, Rafferty was gone.

  I lay flat and hugged my rifle. It was all I could do, hug and twitch. Gunfire swept the beach. This, I deduced, was how it was and had to be. If you’re sane, if you’re in command of the present tense, you dispense with scruples. You recognize the squirrel in your genes. You sprawl there and twitch and commit biology.

  The night whined with high velocities.

  Lazily, I got to my hands and knees. It occurred to me that the danger here was mortal. A tracer round ricocheted somewhere behind me—blue sparks, a burning smell—then a succession of flares lit up the sky, yellow and red and gold, and for a moment I seemed to slide back to the year 1958, a balmy night in May when I jerked up in bed and waited for the world to rebalance itself. I was a child. A Soviet SS-4 whizzed over my head. Far off, the earth’s crust buckled and there was the sizzle of a lighted fuse. The sky was full of pigeons. Millions of them, every pigeon on earth. I watched the moon float away. There was horror, of course, but it was seductive horror, even beautiful, pastels bleeding into primaries, the radioactive ions twinkling blue and purple, the pink and silver flashes, charm mixing with childhood.

  If you’re sane, I thought, you come to respect only those scruples which wire to the nervous system.

  I surprised myself by crawling forward.

  It was a crabbing kind of movement, without dignity. I heard myself saying, “Sorry,” then saying, “Stop it!” Squirrel chatter. I was thinking squirrel thoughts: There is nothing worth dying for. Nothing. Not dignity, not politics. Nothing. There is nothing worth dying for.

  I reached a miniature dune and stretched flat. The guns kept firing, raking the beach, swiveling left to right and back again.

  Nothing, I thought.

  A tracer round corkscrewed over my head. I was twitching, but the twitches were strictly amoral. I was lucid. I understood the physics: If there is nothing, there is nothing worth dying for.

  I blinked and looked up and swallowed sand. There were no ethical patterns. Ahead was another tangle of barbed wire, and beyond the wire was more wire, then flat beach, then the two droning machine guns. There was fog, too, and tear gas, and familiar voices. In the distance, Ebenezer Keezer was shouting through a bullhorn, “Life after Lenin! Revolution, people! Ollie-Ollie in free!”

  Then amplified laughter.

  Briefly, near the tower, a human form rose and took shape against a yellow flare. Sarah, I thought, and I scrambled forward. Gunfire snapped close by. “Please,” I said, and lunged into the wire. The pain surprised me. I was bleeding from the nose and lips. The tear gas was heavy now, and the tremors took hold, but I clawed through the wire and rolled along the beach and whimpered and thought: Nothing. The thought was perfectly symmetrical, because if there is nothing, there is nothing worth dying for.

  I sobbed and listened to Ebenezer Keezer’s bullhorn laughter. He was engaged in philosophy.

  “Terrorism,” he shouted, “is a state of mind! A state of mind is a state of bliss! Extremism in the pursuit of bliss is no bummer!”

  There was a harsh electronic squeal. A lavender flare exploded without sound. The guns were on automatic and the night shimmied in bright greens and reds.

  Odd, but I also heard music.

  Out on the margins, Buffalo Springfield was singing … a man with a gun over there … tellin’ me I got to beware.

  The bullhorn buzzed and Ebenezer cried, “States of mind! States of bliss! Down with the states!”

  With effort, I detached myself.

  It all seemed fanciful, the mix of guns and rhetoric, the Beatles now insisting on revolution. Belly-down, I crawled toward the sea.

  “Ain’ no mountain high,” Ebenezer sang.

  I bled from the lips and nostrils. Numerous clichés came to mind. Missing in action, I thought. Lost in space. My gyro had gone, I couldn’t locate the scheme of things, but I kept moving until chance brought me to the fringe of the sea.

  It was the maximum reach. This far, no farther.

  I composed myself in a respectable posture, faceup, heels seaward, hands folded at my belly, and I lay back and watched the lights.

  “Day-O, Day-O,” Ebenezer sang, “dee daylight come an’ I want to go home.”

  A dud flare fizzled overhead.

  Tracers skipped across the Caribbean, toward Miami, and the sound track had become sentimental. Mellow music, smooth and wistful … Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end.

  “In time of terror,” Ebenezer declared, “there is no objection by means of conscience. There is no alternative service.”

  I didn’t budge.

  I wat
ched the sky do sleight of hand. Awesome, I decided, miracles of form and color. Dangling from its parachute, a nearby flare sailed upward against gravity. The twin machine guns kept firing their steady fire, and Mary Hopkin sang persuasively in the dark, achingly, we’d fight and never lose, those were the days, oh yes …

  The bullhorn crackled.

  “Hide an’ go seek,” Ebenezer cried. “You’re it, shitpot. Peekaboo! I see you!”

  His inflection carried mockery, but it wasn’t enough to make me move. I had strong convictions. There was nothing worth dying for. Not for this, not for that. If you’re sane, you resign yourself to the tacky pleasures of not dying when there is nothing worth dying for.

  I knew my limits. I also knew my heart.

  Up the beach there were battle cries. I heard Sarah shouting out commands. She had the knack, I didn’t.

  “Too bad,” I said, but I didn’t move.

  Again there was that time-space slippage. I was back under my Ping-Pong table, under layers of charcoal and soft-lead pencils, and all around me, inside me, there were those powdery neural flashes lashing out like heat lightning. I watched it happen. The equator shifted. New species evolved and perished in split seconds. Every egg on the planet hatched. And then my father was there, holding me, saying, “Easy now, take it slow, tiger.” He rocked me and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” I could smell the heat of his armpits. “It’s okay,” he said, “just a dream,” but it wasn’t a dream, and even then, even now, there was still the glowing afterimage, the indelible imprint of things to come.

  I am not crazy, I told myself. I am sane.

  Gunfire swept the beach. The music now was martial, piccolos and snare drums. Ebenezer Keezer was doing impressions.

  He did Groucho and Martin Luther King.

  “Shane!” he cried. “Shane! Shane!”

  It was coming up on a finale. A dozen quick flares made the sky tumble, and the machine guns kept firing and firing.

  I pressed low into the sand.