God's Smuggler

by Brother Andrew

  “Cigar, Andrew?” said Thile’s father.

  “Thank you, sir.” I chose one carefully and rolled it in my fingers as I had seen the men in Witte do. Frankly, I didn’t like the taste of cigars, but the association with manhood was so strong that I could have smoked rope and enjoyed it. Throughout the coffee-and-cigars, Thile sat with her back to the window, the strong midday sun making her hair more blue than ever. She said hardly a word, but already I knew that this young girl was going to be one of my correspondents and, perhaps, a lot more too.

  November 22, 1946: my last day at home. I had already said good-bye to Thile and to the other families in Gorkum. Now it was time to take leave of my own family.

  If only I had known it was the last time I would see Mama. I would have been far less of the dashing soldier-going-off-to-war. But I didn’t know, and I took Mama’s embrace as my due. I thought I looked rather well. At last I had a uniform that fit, I was in excellent physical shape, my hair was cut close army-style.

  Just as I was ready to leave, Mama reached under her apron and pulled out a little book. I knew right away what it would be: her Bible.

  “Andrew, will you take this with you?”

  Of course I said, “Yes.”

  “Will you read it, Andrew?”

  Can you ever say no to your mother? You can do no—but you can’t say no. I put the Bible in my dufflebag, as far down as it would go, and forgot it.

  ———

  Our transport ship, the Sibajak, landed in Indonesia just before Christmas, 1946. My heart raced with excitement at the heavy tropical smells, the sight of naked porters moving up and down the gangplanks, the sounds of the hawkers on the dock trying to get our attention. I shouldered my dufflebag and struggled down the gangplank into the fierce sun of the dockside. I did not guess that within a few weeks I would be killing children and unarmed adults just like the people who crowded around me now.

  A few of the hawkers were selling monkeys. Each was held by a little chain, and many had been trained to do tricks. I was fascinated by these little creatures with their serious, ancient faces and stooped to look at one of them more closely.

  “Don’t touch him.”

  I straightened up to find myself facing one of my officers.

  “They bite, soldier.” The officer was smiling, but he was serious. “Half of them have rabies, you know.”

  The officer moved on, and I withdrew my hand. The little boy who was holding the monkey chased after the officer shrieking at him for ruining the sale. I moved back into the line of debarking soldiers, but right then I knew I had to have a monkey of my own.

  Those of us who qualified were separated from the rest of the troops and sent to a nearby island for training as commandos. I liked running the tough obstacle courses: scaling walls, swinging across creeks on vines, crawling into culverts, wriggling under machinegun fire. Even more I liked the hand combat training, where we worked with bayonets, knives, and bare hands. “Hi-hii! Ho!” It was lunge and parry, thrust with fingers stiff, come at the enemy with drawn knife. For some reason the thought never penetrated that I was training to kill human beings.

  Part of the education of a commando was the development of self-confidence. But here I needed no schooling. From childhood I had had a completely unfounded confidence in my ability to do anything I set out to do.

  Like drive a Bren carrier, for instance. These were heavy armored vehicles mounted on caterpillar treads, and handling them was difficult even for someone who could drive an automobile—which I could not. But each day as we went out on maneuvers I watched the driver of the carrier on which I rode, until it seemed to me that I had the hang of it.

  Unexpectedly, one day I had a chance to find out. Coming out of company headquarters, I ran into an officer.

  “Can you drive a Bren carrier, soldier?”

  A quick salute and an even quicker, “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, that one there has to go to the garage. Let’s go.”

  In front of us at the curb was the carrier. Three hundred yards away was the garage. Seven other carriers were parked there, nose to tail, waiting to be serviced. I hopped snappily into the driver’s seat while the officer climbed in beside me. I looked at the dashboard. There in front of me was a key, and I remembered that the driver always turned that first of all. Sure enough the engine coughed once and then caught. Now which of those pedals was the clutch? I pressed one of them and it went to the floor, and I knew I had been lucky twice in a row. I put the carrier into gear, let go of the clutch pedal, and with a great kangaroo leap we launched into space.

  The officer looked at me quickly but said nothing; no Bren carrier ever starts smoothly. But as I raced full throttle down the company street, I noticed that he was holding on with both hands and bracing his feet. We covered the three hundred yards with only one near-accident—a sergeant who discovered on the spot how great were his powers of flight—and then we came to the line of carriers.

  And I knew that I was in trouble.

  I didn’t know where the brake was.

  Arms flailing and feet flying, I tried every button and lever I could find. Among the things I pushed was the accelerator, and with one last surge of power we plowed into the row of Bren carriers parked at the curb. All seven of them bucked forward, each slamming against the other, until we came to rest, hissing and smoking, our engine at last dead.

  I looked at the officer. He stared straight ahead of him, his eyes large, sweat pouring down the sides of his face. He got out of the car, crossed himself, and walked away without once turning to look at me. The sergeant ran up to me and pulled me out of the driver’s seat.

  “What on earth got into you, soldier?”

  “He asked me if I knew how to drive it, sergeant. He didn’t ask if I knew how to stop!”

  It was probably fortunate for me that we were leaving the next morning for our first combat mission. We were going, rumor said, to relieve a company of commandos that had lost three out of every four of its men.

  At dawn we were flown to the front.

  And instantly I knew that I had been wrong about this adventure. It wasn’t the danger—I liked that—it was the killing. Suddenly targets were no longer pieces of paper stuck up on an earth background, they were fathers and brothers like my own. Often our targets weren’t even in uniform.

  What was I doing? How had I gotten here? I was more disgusted with myself than I had ever imagined possible.

  And then one day the incident occurred that has haunted me all my life. We were marching through a village that was still partially inhabited. This made us bold, for we did not think the Communists would mine a village in which people were still living. Anti-personnel mines were the thing we feared most in the world. They kept us in a state of perpetual fear, lest these jumping, emasculating instruments should explode and leave us groveling and crippled for life. We had been in combat daily for more than three weeks, and the nerves of everyone in our unit were on edge, when about halfway through this peaceful-looking village we stepped into a nest of mines. The company went berserk. Without orders, without reasoning, we simply started shooting. We shot everything in sight. When we came to ourselves, there was not a living thing in the village. We skirted the mined area and walked gingerly through the desolation we had created. At the edge of the village I saw the sight that was to send me nearly mad. A young Indonesian mother lay on the ground in a pool of her own blood, a baby boy at her breast. Both had been killed by the same bullet.

  I think I wanted to kill myself after that. I know that in the next two years I became famous throughout the Dutch troops in Indonesia for my crazy bravado on the battlefield. I bought a bright yellow straw hat and wore it into combat with me. It was a dare and an invitation. “Here I am!” it said. “Shoot me!” Gradually I gathered around me a group of boys who were reacting as I did, and together we invented a motto that we posted on the camp bulletin board: “Get smart—lose your mind.”

  Everything we did, thos
e two years, whether on the battlefield or back at the rest camp, was in extremes. When we fought, we fought as madmen. When we drank, we drank until our reason left us. Together, we would weave from bar to bar, hurling our empty gin bottles through the display windows of the local stores.

  When I woke up from these orgies, I would wonder why I was doing these things, but the question never got an answer. It occurred to me once that perhaps the chaplain might be able to help. They told me I could find him at the officers’ bar, and when I did, he was as tipsy and garrulous as anyone there. He stepped outside to see me, but when I told why I’d come, he laughed and told me I’d get over it. “But if you want, come to services before you fight next time,” the chaplain said. “That way you can kill men in a state of grace.” He thought the joke was very funny. He went back inside to repeat it to the others.

  So I turned to my pen pals. I had kept up with all of the people I had promised to write, and now I ventured to share my confusion with a few of them. In essence they all wrote back the same thing: “You’re fighting for your country, Andrew. So the rest doesn’t count.”

  One person alone said more than this. Thile. Thile wrote to me about guilt. That part of her letters spoke straight to my own wretchedness. But then she went on to talk about forgiveness. And there she lost me. My sense of guilt was wrapped around me like a chain, and nothing I did—drinking, fighting, writing letters or reading them—nothing seemed to ease its stranglehold upon me.

  And then one day when I was on leave in Jakarta, walking through the bazaar, I spotted a little gibbon tied to a tall pole. He was sitting on top of the pole eating some fruit, and as I went by he jumped onto my shoulder and handed me a section of orange. I laughed, and that was all it took for the excellent Indonesian salesman to come running.

  “Sir, the monkey likes you!”

  I laughed again. The gibbon blinked twice very deliberately and then showed me his teeth in what could have been a grin.

  “How much?”

  And that is how I came to acquire a monkey. I took him back to the barracks with me. At first the other boys were fascinated.

  “Does he bite?”

  “Only crooks,” I said.

  It was a senseless remark, meaning nothing. But no sooner had I said it than the monkey jumped out of my arms, swung along the rafters, and landed—of all the places in the room he could have chosen—on the head of a heavyset guy who had been winning more at poker than averages allowed. He crabbed sideways, flailing his arms, trying to knock the monkey off his head. The whole barracks was laughing.

  “Get him off me!” Jan Zwart shouted. “Get him off!”

  I reached out my hand, and the monkey ran to me.

  Jan smoothed his hair and tucked in his shirt, but his eyes were murderous. “I’ll kill him,” he said quietly.

  So on the same day I gained one friend and lost another. I hadn’t had the monkey many weeks before I noticed that his stomach seemed to be hurting him. One day while carrying him I felt what seemed like a welt around his waist. I put him down on the bed and told him to lie still. Carefully I pulled back the hair until I saw what it was. Evidently when the gibbon had been a baby, someone had tied him with a piece of wire and never taken it off. As the monkey grew, the wire became embedded in his flesh. It must have caused him terrible pain.

  That evening I began the operation. I took my razor and shaved off the monkey’s hair in a three-inch-wide swathe around his middle. The uncovered welt was red and angry-looking. While the other boys in the barracks looked on, I cut ever so gently into this tender flesh until I exposed the wire. The gibbon lay with the most amazing patience. Even when I hurt him, he looked at me with eyes that seemed to say “I understand,” until at long last I was able to pull the wire away. Instantly he jumped up, did a little cartwheel, danced around my shoulder, and pulled my hair, to the delight of all the boys in the barracks—except Jan.

  After that, my gibbon and I were inseparable. I think I identified with him as strongly as he with me. I think I saw in the wire that had bound him a kind of parallel to the chain of guilt still so tight around myself—and in his release the thing I too longed for. Whenever I was not on duty in the daytime, I would take him with me on long runs into the forest. He loped along behind me until he grew tired. Then with a sprint he would dash forward, jump up, and hang on to my shorts, where he would cling until finally I picked him up and put him on my shoulder. Together, we would run for ten, fifteen miles until I would fling myself down on the ground to sleep. Almost always there were monkeys in the trees overhead. My little gibbon would race into the treetops to swing and chatter with the others. The first time this happened, I thought I had lost him. But the minute I stood up to start back, there was a shriek in the branches overhead, a rustling of leaves, and with a thud the gibbon was back on my shoulder.

  One day when, laughing and tired, I bore him back into camp, I found a letter waiting for me from my brother Ben. He went on and on about a funeral. It was only slowly that I realized it was Mama’s.

  Apparently a telegram had been sent—but it had never come. I knew that I was going to cry. I gave the monkey some water and while he was drinking, slipped away from camp. I didn’t want even the gibbon with me. I ran and ran until my side throbbed in pain, knowing suddenly how very alone I must always be without her.

  And it was that week that Jan Zwart took his revenge on the monkey. One evening I came in from guard duty to be met with the news, “Andy, the little monkey’s dead.”

  “Dead?” I looked up dully. “What happened?”

  “One of the boys picked him up by his tail and kept slamming him against the wall.”

  “Was it Zwart?”

  The guy wouldn’t answer.

  “Where’s the monkey now?”

  “He’s outside. In the bushes.”

  I found him draped over a branch. The worst of it was, he wasn’t quite dead. I picked him up and brought him back to the barracks. His jaw was broken. A great hole gaped in his throat. When I tried to give him water, it ran right out the hole. Jan Zwart watched me warily, prepared for a fight. But I didn’t fight. Too many blows in a row had left me stupefied.

  Over the next ten days I nursed that monkey day and night. I sewed its throat closed and fed it sugar water. I rubbed its little muscles. I stroked its fur. I kept it warm and talked to it constantly. It was a creature I had released from bondage, and I wasn’t going to let it go without a struggle.

  Slowly, very slowly, my gibbon began to eat, and then to crawl about on the bed, and at last to sit up and chatter at me crossly if I was slow with the hourly feedings. At the end of two months he was running with me again in the forest.

  But he never recovered his confidence in people. That barracks was a place of terror for him. The only time he would stop trembling when people were close was when all four legs and his tail were wrapped around my arm and his head was hidden in my shirt front.

  When news came of a major new drive against the enemy, I asked if someone who could drive would borrow a jeep and take me and my gibbon into the jungle. “I want to let him go and then drive away fast.” I said, “Will anyone take me?”

  “I’ll go.”

  I turned around. It was Jan Zwart. I held his eye for a long time, but he did not blink.

  “All right.”

  As we drove into the jungle I explained to the monkey why I could no longer keep him. At last we stopped. As I put the little gibbon on the ground his wise little eyes stared into mine with what looked like comprehension. He did not try to jump back into the jeep. As we pulled away he sat there on the ground staring after us until we were out of sight.

  The next morning, February 12, 1949, our unit moved out at dawn.

  It was a good thing I let the monkey go when I did, for I never got back to camp.

  ———

  I tried to pretend the same bravado on this mission that I had felt on earlier ones. I wore my yellow straw hat as I had before. I shouted as l
oud, I cursed, I moved forward with my company day after day, but even my defiance seemed to have deserted me.

  And then one morning a bullet smashed through my ankle, and I was out of the war.

  It happened so suddenly and—at first—so painlessly that I did not know what had happened. We had walked into an ambush. The enemy was on three sides of us, and many times our strength. Why I was shot in the ankle and not in my straw hat I don’t know, but as I was running I suddenly fell. I knew I had not stumbled. But I could not get up. And then I saw that my right combat boot had two holes in it. Blood was coming out of both of them.

  “I’m hit,” I called, not excited. It was simply a fact, and I stated it as such.

  A buddy rolled me into a ditch out of sight. At last medics came with a stretcher. They put me on it and began moving me out, crouching low in the ditch. I still had on my yellow hat and refused to take it off even when it drew fire. A bullet once went through the crown. I just didn’t care.

  Hours later, still wearing my yellow straw hat, I was stretched out on an operating table in the evacuation hospital. It took two and a half hours to sew up the foot. I heard the doctors discussing whether or not to amputate. The nurse asked me to take the hat off, but I refused.

  “Don’t you know what that is?” the doctor asked the nurse. “That’s the unit’s symbol. These are the boys who got smart and lost their minds.”

  But I hadn’t. That was the final irony, the final failure. I hadn’t even managed to get my brains blown out. Just a foot. Somehow in all my furious self-destructiveness I had never considered this possibility. I had always seen myself going out in a blaze of contempt for the whole human farce. But to live—and crippled!—that was the meanest fate of all. My great adventure had failed. Worse, I was twenty years old, and I had discovered that there was no real adventure anywhere in the world.