Battle Fatigue

by Mark Kurlansky

  That is what I wanted but now I am beginning to wonder if it is worth the price. No one wants to talk to me. Stanley avoids me. Donnie smiles pleasantly at me but seems far away. Even Rocco doesn’t have much to say. Angela Pizzutti is polite but doesn’t tell me about the Kennedy conspiracy anymore. Donna Belini doesn’t want to be seen near me. Susan Weller never looks in my direction. When Myrna Levine sees me she doesn’t even giggle. Should I tell my mother there’s no chance for Myrna anymore? I suppose they all have their reasons. No one wants to discuss it, so I don’t know exactly what their thinking is. But I kind of do.

  My little brother, Sam, comes home from school and, without saying a word, closes his fist and throws a hard punch that lands on my chest. I am getting used to being hit. Actually, he throws a better punch than most of the big kids. It turns out my brother is mad at me because now he has to fight all the time because kids are curious to see if he will fight too. I tell him that if he shows them he won’t fight, kids will stop challenging him. But his only response is to throw another punch in my direction.

  I know that once baseball season starts again, if my batting is good, the whole thing about not fighting will be forgotten. Until then I’m going to school and coming home and spending my time next door at the Panicellis’. I am living like a German exchange student.

  I am helping Dickey work on a 1957 Chrysler, two-tone, turquoise and white. We have a hard time with the push-button transmission but finally get it working, and we rebuild the huge eight-cylinder Hemi engine. It takes two of us to handle, disassemble, and clean the giant 360-cubic-inch engine block and replace the gaskets.

  Mrs. Panicelli brings us little sugary Italian cookies. Popeye comes home in the late afternoon and talks about the Communists. He hates Communists. “The damn Communists.”

  “Honey.” Mrs. Panicelli reprimands him for his language. Soon he vanishes inside the house.

  I feel safe in the company of the Panicellis and it makes me feel good to have engine grease on my hands. At the end of the afternoon we wash up with this special glop for taking the grease off. But I don’t work at it very hard because, in truth, I like having a little black grease showing. My parents don’t like it, though, and always send me back to the bathroom at dinnertime to wash my hands again.

  I have made a deal with Dickey. In exchange for helping him with his Chrysler, he spends time pitching me balls so that I can practice hitting. I hope the Red Sox are doing the same thing. Even on the coldest days, I swing as long as Dickey is willing to throw pitches. Next spring has to be my best season ever, and with some practice it could be. Thank God for baseball.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Explosive Elements

  May 18, 1964

  Dear Diary,

  Once again I want to write down something I really can’t tell anyone because it is so weird. Here it is. I love Mr. Shaker’s chemistry class. There are two things that are wrong about this. One: nobody likes Mr. Shaker, and two: nobody likes chemistry. The chemistry teacher was Mr. Balard, a quiet man. He was so quiet that I could not hear anything he said. He would stand in front of this large chart of the elements and talk very quickly in a soft voice. Then something miraculous happened. Mr. Balard left. He just left and nobody told us why because they thought kids were too stupid to notice that Mrs. Pudheiski, the home economics teacher—who was so beautiful that all the guys kept saying they were going to take her course though none of them ever did—also left. And Mr. Pudheiski, the assistant principal, stayed, seemed sad, and started giving a lot of detentions. Why did they think we couldn’t figure this out?

  But that’s not why I am writing this. Mr. Shaker is filling in as chemistry teacher, and even though he is easier to hear, this is very bad news. Chemistry is bad enough without getting it from Mr. Shaker. I had him for history and I hated it the exact way that I always knew I would hate having him as a teacher. And now here he is in the chemistry lab and he’s even moved in his stupid Yankees banner.

  However, I have started to understand that the chart of elements behind him is actually very interesting. To begin with, many of them are extremely unstable and given to exploding. Sodium, for example, is a soft metal that tends to explode and give off hydrogen gas when mixed with water. It is interesting that so many of these elements are given to violent reactions because the elements are what everything in the world is made up of, and so many are violent. Take hydrogen. It is very dangerous, given to burning and to exploding. But Mr. Shaker says that hydrogen is the most common element, that 90 percent of the atoms in the world are hydrogen. No wonder the world is a dangerous place.

  But these explosive elements can be tamed by mixing them in the right compounds. When hydrogen is mixed with oxygen, you get water, which is very stable and puts out fires. Sodium can be mixed with chlorine, which is poisonous, and it makes salt. So when you look at a chart of the world broken down to its basic elements, the world looks dangerous. But it turns out it is just a matter of how you mix things up. Now I realize, after wondering for a long time, what I will be. I am going to be a chemist.

  Mr. Shaker, in his white laboratory coat, faces the class and demonstrates the explosiveness or stability of compounds. He mixes things in glass test tubes that he holds over the sink. Sometimes they turn bright colors; sometimes they give off smoke in different colors. Often they make a little pop and then the test tube shatters and a colored stain appears on Mr. Shaker’s white coat. He flinches when the test tube breaks and then looks sadly down at the sink and says, “Isn’t that a shame.” You never know if he is saying that about the experiment, the broken test tube, or the stain on his coat. Or is it about the way he flinches? Or does he just think it’s a shame that the kids are all laughing?

  I have a chemistry set and I try to do some of these experiments at home. I tell my little brother, Sam, that we are going to have a chemistry class and learn to explode things. He gets very excited and sits in front of me full of expectations. I model myself after Mr. Wizard, a television character that was popular when I was little. On the show, Mr. Wizard spoke very quickly and demonstrated dazzling science experiments. Only all of mine fail. I cannot produce even one explosion. Can I ever really be a chemist? Sam tells our mother that I promised explosions and haven’t produced anything. My mother has taken away my chemistry set.

  You know, I try to work with Sam, but he doesn’t make it easy.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The First Night of My War

  It is early August, the height of baseball season. Koufax is still pitching no-hitters for the Dodgers, but the Cardinals, the Reds, the Phillies, and the Giants all look good. The Yankees are also looking good, but so are the White Sox. The Red Sox are nowhere in sight. Maybe I should have stuck with the Dodgers, but to me the Dodgers aren’t the Dodgers anymore—just some team in LA using the same name.

  The Red Sox are beginning a three-day series with the White Sox tonight. It’s on the radio but not on television and Boston will probably lose anyway. A movie about the Battle of the Bulge is being shown on television and my uncle has come over to watch it with my brother and me. We have all snuggled into our places, my uncle in the overstuffed chair where he will seem to be asleep until suddenly he will utter something in a low voice.

  We have all settled in, but it is too early for the movie. We turn on the television anyway and watch the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. The show is a favorite of my parents’. Walter Cronkite has the world’s best voice and seems to know everything. He narrates a lot of shows about World War II that I have watched with my uncle. I have learned more about World War II from Walter Cronkite than from my family.

  Tonight there is news from a place called Tonkin—the Gulf of Tonkin. Lyndon Johnson, the president who replaced Kennedy but who is not young or charming, is on television. The president has a slow, soft, southern way of talking that makes everything seem a bit boring and unimportant.

  “Last night I announced to the American people that the North
Vietnamese regime had conducted further deliberate attacks against U.S. naval vessels …”

  I’m only half listening. I can tell by the sound of Johnson’s voice that this is nothing important or even interesting.

  “Communists,” my uncle mutters.

  What have the Communists done now? Why are they always making trouble? This time it is the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese. It seems to me that I have heard of this place, Vietnam, before. It must be near Laos, which is somewhere in Asia and has been in the news a lot. It has always seemed like a poetic name—Laos, the Laotians. “Vietnam” and “the Vietnamese” do not sound as beautiful.

  Some of our navy ships had been attacked in international waters. Johnson says that he ordered an “air action” against the boats and facilities that were used in the attack. The air action has already taken place, he says, “with substantial damage to the boats and facilities.”

  Wait a minute! What are they saying? “Substantial damage.” Johnson can slowly drawl anything away, but I know what he means. Suddenly I am seeing the whole thing. We have done substantial damage and they have shot down two American airplanes.

  This is a war! Just like World War II: soldiers attacked, damage was substantial, and airplanes were shot down. There were people in those airplanes and they are probably dead. And it is not going to stop there. Johnson has asked Congress for a resolution “supporting freedom and … protecting peace in Southeast Asia.”

  I know what “support freedom” is going to mean, though I am not exactly sure what is meant by “Southeast Asia.” Where is Southeast Asia? Somewhere near Laos, I guess.

  I can hear the seriousness, if not in President Johnson’s steady melting voice, certainly in the curt way Walter Cronkite is talking about it.

  Nothing seems changed. The evening news ends on schedule with no special programming or announcements like there were in the Cuban missile crisis or when Kennedy was shot. But I think this is very important news.

  The movie comes on. German tanks roll across the snow and American infantrymen trudge along in retreat. Whenever a place name comes up my uncle quietly repeats it. “Malmédy,” he says as if trying to memorize it, though of course he will never forget it. His life, his mind, were changed by this place called Malmédy.

  But I’m thinking about a place called Vietnam. Suddenly I realize something about this place. I realize that this is going to be my war. This is the war I have always known was coming. It will not be called World War III as I had often thought and as was often said. It will be called Vietnam. And it will change my life. I am fifteen. I still have two and a half years before registering for the draft, but Vietnam will be there waiting. I am going to be asked to support freedom and protect peace in Southeast Asia—at any price.

  It isn’t going to be exactly like this movie. I don’t know what it will be like, but I know that there will be no snow and no Germans. Maybe it will be more like my father’s war in the Pacific. But it is going to be a war. I am watching the actors shooting and killing and ducking for cover. I keep asking myself, “Could I do that?”

  I look at my uncle, watching the movie with his eyes shut. Someday I will sit in an overstuffed chair in front of a television with my eyes shut and repeat softly the word “Vietnam.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Here It Is

  Here it is, my war, and I don’t understand anything about it. I never thought it would be like this. My father and all those other fathers had a war they could understand—a fight over who was running the world. But now I can see that my war isn’t going to be a world war to make the world safe. It can’t be because of nuclear weapons. Now wars have to be small and mean and fought over little strips of land you might never have heard of a year before. Just because we can’t have any more world wars doesn’t mean we can’t have war. So it turns out that their war didn’t make the world safe after all.

  Everyone at school knows that somehow this is about us. The news has never before been about us; it was always about our parents. We thought Kennedy was passing the torch to us, but then we found out he was passing it to them—and to himself. But suddenly, here is something about us. Adults aren’t treating us any differently. They still act like our opinion doesn’t matter. But we now know that what we think and do will matter. The adults just don’t see it yet.

  We have things to understand and decisions to make, and we have all started asking where Vietnam is and where Tonkin is. Angela Pizzutti is especially concerned.

  “The Gulf of Tonkin is a big lie,” she says, coming up from behind me in the hallway as I am putting my bulky social studies book from the last class in my locker. “It’s a big lie, Joel.”

  “You mean there is no Gulf of Tonkin?” I ask with amazement. Rocco is standing behind his sister drawing circles at his head with a finger to indicate that he thinks she is crazy.

  “You mean the place?” she asks.

  “I looked it up,” says Rocco. “I saw it on a map. It’s in Vietnam, near Laos. All the same thing, I think.”

  “Well,” I say, “that would explain why the Vietnamese are there. But why are we there?”

  “Exactly,” says Angela. “Why did they kill President Kennedy?”

  “And why did they attack us?” says Rocco. “Were they crazy? Now we are going to really give it to them. What did they think would happen?”

  “Maybe it’s like Pearl Harbor,” I offer, but I am not at all sure that is right.

  “Suppose they never did attack,” Angela says.

  “Angela,” says Rocco, throwing out his hands in exasperation, “it was on the evening news.”

  “So what,” says Stanley Wiszcinski. “Remember them reporting the Orioles had lost when Brooks Robinson scored in the ninth?”

  “That was just a mistake because the game ran late,” I argue. “They corrected it later.”

  “Well, this isn’t a mistake,” Angela says.

  “No, it isn’t, Angela,” says Donnie LePine, with the confidence of a man who has all the facts. Angela is stunned. She fixes her eyes on him. Is Donnie LePine actually agreeing with her? Everybody believes Donnie. Or is he just making fun of her?

  “It wasn’t a mistake?” I ask Donnie.

  “No, but they did correct it later.”

  “What are you talking about?” says Rocco, who is also beginning to suspect that Donnie might be making fun of his sister.

  “They’ve been arguing about it in Congress,” says Donnie. “Turns out Johnson lied and there was no attack.”

  “Why would he do that?” I ask.

  “So we can go to war,” says Donnie.

  I am completely confused. “Why does he want to go to war?”

  “What?” Donnie asks, now looking a bit uncertain.

  “Why does President Johnson want to go to war?”

  Donnie just looks at me as though he is thinking of something else. He doesn’t know.

  “For the same reason they killed President Kennedy!” Angela insists.

  “So what happens now?” Stanley asks.

  Donnie is back in control. “So now they have to call the war off.”

  “Really?” I ask.

  “Looks that way,” says Donnie. Then the bell rings and everybody runs down the hallway to their next classes.

  But Rocco and I stay a moment. “Good thing they’re calling it off,” he says. “We only have a couple of years before we have to sign up for the draft.”

  Rocco is right; it is a good thing. The whole mood of the school has changed. Everyone seems a little happy. Whatever happens, Vietnam is not going to be my war after all.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The First to Go

  But it isn’t over. It is hard to say what exactly happened. Some say there were two attacks, some say one. Some say none at all. But why would somebody make something like that up? And why don’t we know the truth? How can you be on a ship and not know if you’ve been attacked or not? There are a lot of arguments about this, especiall
y in Congress, but they are going ahead with the war anyway.

  I ask my father why this war is so much more confusing than other wars.

  “Because you might have to fight it,” he answers, somewhat glumly, it seems to me. “War is very clear when someone else is going to fight it. It just becomes confusing when it’s you.”

  “But the War was clear to you, wasn’t it?” When you say “the War” it always means World War II. “I mean, you had to stop the Nazis.”

  He looks at me disapprovingly and says, “I was in the Pacific.”

  It is true—in the Pacific they were fighting the Japanese, not the Nazis. “Sure, I know, but the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.”

  He smiles a bitter smile. “Fighting the Germans would have made sense to me, but I didn’t have to fight them. It probably made less sense to your uncle. Because he had to fight them.”

  “But wasn’t Pearl Harbor clear? You had Pearl Harbor.”

  “Oh, it was clear. I remember before Pearl Harbor there were all these Jewish groups saying we had to fight the Germans. But no one agreed with that. Then after Pearl Harbor everybody agreed that we had to fight the Germans because the Japanese had attacked us. And that was supposed to make sense.”

  I have never heard anybody talk like this before. “I’ll tell you something, Joel,” he says, examining the label on a can of lima beans. “In 1945 I was in the Philippines. I was a major by then and I was being driven by an enlisted man in a jeep going through a mountain pass. Somewhere in the mountains was a Japanese sniper. You know, an expert shot with a rifle hiding far away and picking people off. Maybe he wasn’t a very good sniper, because he kept missing. But you could hear the bullets hit the rocks. Ping. Ping. And it occurred to me that he was shooting at me because I was a major, and maybe I should take off my maple leaves. Or somehow cover them up. Or hide them. ‘But maybe that would be an act of cowardice,’ I thought. Ping. Ping. And maybe if I appeared to be the same as the guy who was driving he would shoot at him instead of at me. But then if he hit him, it would be my fault. Ping. Ping. Then again, he was already in danger because of me.”