Dog Tags

by Stephen Becker

  “And they’d have made peace in a day if you’d been reasonable,” the lieutenant said reasonably. “And they stalled because they were indoctrinating us, and you stalled because you were indoctrinating their guys.”

  “That had nothing to do with it,” Cornelius said.

  “What I’d like to know,” Gabol said, “is why you keep calling us ‘you.’ As if we weren’t on your side.”

  The lieutenant only gazed at him, amiable, almost sunny.

  “Oh,” Gabol said.

  “I once knew a cripple,” Benny said, and they all rose to this diversion, a humorous anecdote! a cripple! “And he got drunk one night and told me he wasn’t a Democrat or a Republican, capitalist or communist, Jew or Christian or rich or poor or black or white or even an American, and they could all go to hell; he was a cripple, and nobody who wasn’t would ever, ever understand; not just the things you couldn’t do at all, but how even reaching for a handkerchief was a job of work, and how the girls looked at you, or didn’t, and what a god damn expedition it was to be a hundred yards from a toilet when you had to go, and how everything in the world was upstairs. That was the ultimate wisdom, he said: everything in the world is upstairs.”

  Fontaine asked, “What does all that mean?”

  “We’re still crippled,” Benny said. “What you have here is a bunch of go-to-hell downstairs cripples.”

  Gabol said brightly, “Then maybe you ought to lead this discussion.”

  “Not for all the tea in China,” Benny said, and someone said, “Yay ho. Yankee go home.”

  13

  I was tempted to meditate upon Jesus. Not because of Bewley; he was merely a pest, lithe, earnest always and lugubrious on Sundays; he hectored us for the day of the week, and made marks on the wall, as if he might miss the big game, the election, whorehouse night. No, not because of Bewley, but because of minor triumphs over the cruelest month—ah, nonsense. Not cruel at all. Little sprigs of green, resurrection: weeds beat scurvy. Ordinary green weeds, two or three varieties unnamable by the asphalt gardener of Union Square, but green: I had the men out like street cleaners, scavenging tares. They shuffled, slaves in blue, and fetched home handfuls of hairy leaf; all through the camp those handfuls went into the pot, and in ten days the pains had vanished, the men’s color had risen, the sun approved. Buds fattened. Apollo; why should Jesus have the glory? Hills greened, birds chattered. Weeds beat scurvy.

  And a good thing too; with pluck came sass, and the men rejected soybeans. God almighty. They were still reckoning on the old chuck wagon. At first they gobbled the beans. Then they moaned and groaned. Ou-yang sent for me and introduced me to two subordinates, Wei something and Chang something. Wei was to be our political officer and Chang the military commandant. Ou-yang would stay on as chairman of the board. He praised me to the others. They smiled thin, polite acknowledgment. Ou-yang spoke in Chinese and Wei warmed a bit, cocked a friendlier brow. I never learned what had been said. Ou-yang went on, “Your MacArthur has been sent home in disgrace.” “Ma ka ta,” Wei said, and laughed.

  I goggled. A woman? Peculations? What disgrace? Who in the world could send him anywhere, our own Heliogabalus? “A matter of policy, I think,” Ou-yang said. “Too many planes over there,” he pointed to Manchuria, “and a couple, it seems, all the way to Vladivostok. Apparently the United States is not yet ready to liberate China and Russia.” He laughed heartily, a luncheon-club laugh, jolly good fellow.

  In an hour the whole camp knew. Mulberg rejoiced. “They’ll end the god damn war. They can shove these god damn soybeans.” Applause, cheers, boiled soybeans on the floor.

  Even Kinsella persuaded himself. “God damn,” he said. “That means they quit. They won’t come north again. God damn. Why didn’t they drop the bomb? What’s it for?” He paced, the military mind clicking along. “All right. A shift in policy. Stabilization, maybe a truce, prisoner exchange. It stands to reason. All right. Could be worse.” Pacing, muttering. “What the hell. Just as well. We’d have had to tunnel a quarter-mile. Unless they let us swim.” He peered at the river. “Long swim. Christ, maybe it’s good news.”

  “They won’t eat the soybeans.”

  “God damn babies,” he said. “Make them.”

  “Nobody can make them. Look, Major, we’ll have new generals and new generals will have new plans, win the war, and they won’t be as good as MacArthur’s. We can’t win a polite war and you know it. So they’re going to fool around for a long time with their games. Bang bang. Strategy.”

  I thought he might dress me down, but he laughed. “Corporal Beer.”

  “I’d have been a sergeant by now, and sergeants know everything.”

  “Okay,” he said, “let’s ask Trezevant.”

  So we did. Trezevant said, “Shit, how do I know what those damn fools want to do?” Kinsella laughed like hell. I diagnosed a deep release working within him; he’d yielded to the most treacherous temptation: hope. “A chap which I talked to,” Bewley said, “thinks we going home.” I began to enjoy Bewley. “Lieutenant,” he said, “I hear you a Hebrew.” “No such luck,” I said, “just a Jew.” “Now you fooling with me,” he said. “Lieutenant, you got to come to Jesus Christ. That’s how we get out of this, when all come to Jesus Christ.” The spirit of Easter lay upon him. I told him I’d think about it.

  They let us each write a letter. We were Americans and assumed that the letters would be delivered. They asked us to write out a personal history. Kinsella spread the word: bare vital statistics, nothing military. They announced that a library would be made available. They began to interview the men one at a time. They announced study and discussion groups, some compulsory. A new grain was added to the soup; I never knew what it was, but it was bulkier and mealier than the millet. Days were longer and the sun held steady. Yuscavage disappeared. He was simply no longer with us. Ou-yang said only that he was safe and well. Then he ordered me to live with the officers. I could make my rounds but must live with Kinsella’s bunch. This was a time of confusion. No one was friendly or unfriendly and we all assumed that doom had passed us by, the old angel of death was just plain wore out, but some of us sensed that the future was shifty. “You know what,” Kinsella said, “it’s like we were here for good. Have they interviewed you yet?” They had not. “Me neither. They’re up to something.”

  Bewley told us what. Dear old Bewley. “Jesus,” he announced, “was the first communist.” He had been interviewed twice and given a New Testament. He had asked about regular “services of divine worship” and had been fobbed off. “Christ almighty,” Kinsella said. “No more interviews. Pass the word.” No one listened. Ewald went to meetings from nine to twelve and two to four. “I had an uncle was a Wobbly,” he said. At night he went to the library. I asked him what books they had. He said he was reading John Steinbeck. Kinsella was collating gossip; a commander without a command, he talked to himself, cogitated fiercely, speculated, demanded silence and frowned intently.

  They sent for him and he was away for four days. They had asked him to cut a recording; as senior officer he was to confirm the good treatment, food for all, medical care. Medical care. That was me. He refused. They stuck him in a dark cell with a waste bucket and hauled him out at odd hours for further discussion. He refused. They released him in honor of May Day. May Day! Union Square! I realized with sudden excitement, a great gasp at this astrological conjunction, that New York was on the same parallel of latitude as this prison camp, give or take a couple of blocks. And I saw the speakers, heard the protests: Bring Benny Home! The fan beards, the skinny Catholic vegetarian, the famous optometrist who put on a blue denim shirt and overalls and had a season; he opened on May Day and closed on Labor Day. And Jacob! Ten thousand miles due east Jacob worried, Jacob wept, Jacob badgered the government and signed petitions. He would see the Untermeyers once a week, and play with Joseph, and Carol would sit grieving, hot, ripe, twenty-three years old and unloved.

  I closed my mind to all that and listened
to Kinsella. “They want propaganda. We say no. If they need propaganda they can’t afford to brutalize us. I figured it out. We stand fast.”

  When they sent for me he said it again: “Stand fast, Benny.”

  “Right,” I said.

  Ou-yang and Wei merely wanted me to see the classrooms—so Ou-yang called them—and the library. Prisoners sat conversing in low tones, like school kids ordered silent. In one corner a Chinese officer chatted with three of them. The first book I saw was a pamphlet—Lenin it was, Women and Society. Women and Society! I needed both. It would be well-thumbed. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. A Letter to American Workers. Stalin. Engels. Magazines, brochures. Imperialism. Union Square! Michelet. Victor Hugo: Les Misérables. I had never read it. I had seen the film. George Bernard Shaw, Erskine Caldwell—that too would be thumbed, breast and thigh among the real folk—Oliver Twist, War and Peace, The Jungle, The Merchant of Venice.

  I was abruptly dizzy. In the stacks, as a young man, I had always experienced a primitive visceral urge, an odd loosening of the bowels, humility in the presence of the unknown, eternity, so much still to read, so much that I would never read. Or perhaps I was slack, greedy, perhaps it was a symptom of intellectual lust; perhaps its opposite, an inadmissible desire to be thence. Now I was merely dizzy, shuttled at the speed of light to another planet, words, letters, the smell of paper and bindings. I turned away. “You are impressed,” Ou-yang said.

  “Yes,” I said, but I was much more impressed and almost fainted when we stepped outside again and I bumped into a woman.

  She wore a tan uniform, lightly padded, and she had black hair, shoulder-length, and the reddest cheeks I have ever seen, and her black eyes sparkled and she smelled like a woman. I gulped and ogled and grew hot. Ou-yang introduced us. He called me Pee-joe Die-foo and her name was Ho Wenchen. I think. I saw her every day and soon we were making love behind the library and it was all so marvelous. No. I never saw her again. She was the first woman I had seen in five months. I have no serious idea now what she looked like, but she was unutterably beautiful and for several seconds I suffered agonies to shame the damned, the mind suddenly ignited so wanting a woman that the body rebelled, exploded; the heart pressed out between the ribs, bones ruptured the hot flesh. She moved on. I watched her walk, watched the silky black hair float. “She assists our political instructors,” Ou-yang said. “She keeps records.”

  They interrogated me once, and I said no, no, no, and they accepted the decision. Others had been tempted: mail privileges, better food. Most stalled and bluffed, and it became a contest, chess or go, get without giving. But Bewley was serious; “Give up all thou hast,” he said. Ewald too; he withdrew even further and we scarcely saw him. I asked Kinsella if Cuttis might play along; he was recovering, but slowly, and the food, the quarters, the company would help. “Absolutely not,” Kinsella said. “If you give them anything they have you.”

  “So what?” I was not sure why I had said no, no, no.

  “So what?” Kinsella despaired of me, groaned. “They’re soldiers,” he said. “They’re still soldiers.”

  “Yessir,” I said. “Any news of the war?”

  “No news of the war.” He glared. “Where the hell would I hear news? You’re the collaborator.”

  “Easy,” I said, but neither of us was angry.

  So it went for some weeks, and we divided, and the words “progressive” and “reactionary” became common nouns. I wondered: was it for the rewards? did they believe? were they poor farmhands struck for the first time by the lightning of learning? was it simple intellectual ecstasy, the mechanic from Provo who finds that he can speak, read and write Sanskrit? And the others, the reactionaries, what were they defending? flag, home, mother? our shores? their own core? a good service record? Collins was defending Collins: “Fuck ’em all. I been to these lectures. In the states. Civics.” Mulberg hawhawhawed. I almost joined him, because there was a little of that rat in me too: fuck ’em all. None of this shit about equality and mankind, not while you got me chained to this here wall. It was not the matter; what they were teaching was irrelevant. (Collins was right. Civics!) For the moment I did not care to be like everybody else. I did not care to be like anybody else. Who held out, who said no? (Ah, that monosyllable! Easiest little word in the world, and the hardest one to say, and keep saying, whether they cosset you or clip you.) Those who said no were the guttersnipes and the snobs. I was both. Nothing else mattered—race, religion or lack of it, money, none of that pushed a man one way or the other. I knew men who were progressive, one of them might have been a genuine communist, and they said no, maybe because they’d been saying no all their lives; and I knew a ritzy officer from Boston, wealth, banking, Episcopal for Christ’s sake, and he said yes, maybe because he’d been saying yes all his life. I still don’t know what it is that makes a man inviolable, but I still hope to find out.

  I went back to the old hut one day to examine Cuttis and found four strangers at the door. One I recognized, a scarred street Negro named Fennimer, from Philadelphia I think. The other three were white but all four were angry, and they all shared an aspect, an attitude: tough city kids. You could tell right away. Trezevant was holding them off, trying to soothe them. Fennimer rounded on me. “You give us that Ewald.”

  “What’s he done?”

  “Stole food. Stole two mon-toes.”

  Trezevant said, “What’s mon-toes?”

  “Steamed dough,” I told him. “Back home you’d spit it out. How do you know Ewald took them?”

  “We know,” Fennimer said. “He was there, talking sweet shit about those slants, and then he was gone and they were gone.”

  “If he’s so sweet with the Chinese how come he has to steal food? And where’d you get the mon-toes?”

  “Up yours, officer. You give us Ewald. Now.”

  Ah, a touch of home and youth! “Yeah, well just hold it,” I said. “How would that look, we just give you our guy like that. Ewald! You in there?”

  “He’s in there,” one of the white guys said.

  “Who’re you?”

  “What do you care, officer?”

  “Just curious. Where you from, then?”

  “Scranton.”

  “You guys?”

  “Atlanta.”

  “Seattle.”

  “New York,” I said, between tears and laughter, and they heard, the big town, pops, don’t mess with Benny the blade; and it sickened me, disgusted and nauseated me, this brutish street scene, quiet talk, don’t draw cops, treaties broken, tribal laws, jagged broken milk bottles. Blood must answer blood. God help us.

  “We ought to hang together against these people,” I said. “Got plenty of fights without making more.”

  “Never mind these people,” Fennimer said. “We’re in here for good. For a good long time. Got to figure that way. Got no more fight with them. Got a fight with Ewald.”

  “Sergeant,” I said, “tell Ewald I want the mon-toes.”

  Trezevant stepped inside, and left me alone.

  “Sergeant,” Scranton repeated. “Lieutenants and corporals and all. Got any eagle scouts?”

  “Ordinarily I’d let you solve your own problem,” I said. “But we’ve got plenty of sick and dying, and we’re trying to save all we can.”

  “Nobody dying no more,” Fennimer said.

  That was true. I was astonished. No one had died for a couple of weeks.

  “Can’t save Ewald anyway,” Fennimer went on. “Unless you get him a transfer. I mean, Lieutenant, after all, sooner or later, you know.”

  I nodded. Truth was truth. Sooner or later, you know. “Buy him off, maybe,” I said. “He’s a medic. We need him. What would you want?”

  They conferred in silence. Note well: four grown men, two lumps of steamed dough. The other three left it to Fennimer. He hesitated, so I made the move. “Double the mon-toes, and I’ll punish him myself.”

  “Where you going to get mon-toes?”

&n
bsp; “Up yours. I can get you aspirin too.”

  “Aspirin? What the fuck we going to do with aspirin? That’s right, though: you solid with these cats.”

  “Shut up about that,” I said.

  “Cigarettes, maybe,” Fennimer said.

  “Maybe.”

  Trezevant lazed out and leaned against the jamb, as if he would say, “Gentlemen.” Instead he held forth a round white lump and said, “I got one. He ate the other one. Don’t seem like much to fight about.”

  “Two more,” Fennimer said, “and the other stuff.”

  “A deal,” I said.

  “Solid,” he said. “How you going to fix Ewald?”

  “There’s ways,” I said. “It won’t happen again. But you lay off, all right? I can make trouble too.”

  “Last thing we want is trouble,” Fennimer said, and they all grinned.

  “All right then. You’re in eighteen.”

  “That’s right,” Fennimer said.

  “Where Sumner was.”

  “That’s right,” Fennimer said.

  “By tomorrow noon,” I said. “And you lay off.”

  “That’s right, we lay off,” Fennimer said. “I guess we better make it four cigarettes and four aspirins. I mean there’s four of us. And you with your connections.”

  When they were gone Trezevant said, “Sumner?”

  “Dysentery,” I said. “He smelled bad. So they put him out overnight and he froze to death and they brought him back in before dawn.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Doctors know everything.”

  Life was not all crime reporting; there was also the society page, and shortly I was caught up in the mad, bubbling whirl of the international set: I was invited to dinner. Blue suit. Among the notables were Ou-yang, Wei, Chang, a few interrogators and Doctor Li. Li Die-foo. The invitation arrived in the form of a guard who jabbed a stubby finger at me and pointed the way with a mean thumb, like a homicidal hitchhiker; Kinsella shouted after me, “Stand fast, Beer.”

  I was ushered into a large room where seven or eight people stood sipping tea and snapping pumpkin seeds; Ou-yang greeted me with a roar of hospitality and a clap on the shoulder, and I stood blinking and ducking like a barbarian at the court in Peking. Introductions. Li Die-foo. I shook hands, stunned. Where had he been when I needed him. Then the interrogators: colloquial English, my confusion compounded. Gossip. News of the war; my new commanding general was someone called Ridgway. Never heard of him. The Chinese were driving south, below the thirty-eighth parallel. My mind raced, slowed, dug in like harassed infantry: they were dissembling, deceiving me. I said little, nibbled pumpkin seeds, slurped tea.