Battle Fatigue

by Mark Kurlansky

  College has changed Donnie as much as war changed Dickey—but maybe in the opposite direction. I’m not sure. Donnie’s straight brown hair flows and swirls toward his shoulders and the thick black beard that covers the lower half of his face is neatly trimmed. He looks like an Italian Renaissance version of Jesus Christ. Donnie invites me to a meeting of a student group that is against the war in Vietnam. It is hard to believe that a kid from Haley would be in such a group. But on the other hand, I have been thinking about this for years now and I cannot come up with a reason to fight in Vietnam. The Vietnamese don’t seem to be plotting to take over the world. Aren’t they just plotting to take over Vietnam? And now I realize that I am not the only one, not even the only one from Haley, having these thoughts.

  At the meetings I see that these kids are a lot different from the kids in Haley. No one mentions baseball or the Red Sox, even though the Sox have finally integrated and started putting together a real team for next season. These kids have all read books I have never heard of, and they like to argue about them. There is a German writer named Herbert Marcuse. He has come out with a new book called One-Dimensional Man. I am the only person there who hasn’t read it. I know I should but at the moment, to be honest, what has drawn my interest is not so much the ideas of Herbert Marcuse as the ideas of Rachel Apfelbaum.

  Rachel is also a freshman. Her head is covered with endless, indecipherable dark curls. She is wearing a flowing flower-print dress that she says she made herself. She says she makes all her own clothes. She looks great in them. But not only is she beautiful and not only does she make her own clothes and keep up with the latest German philosophers, but she has—what I used to call when I was back in Haley—clarity. She knows the Vietnam War is wrong. She has no doubts. It is wrong and racist and has to be stopped. She does not have to take a breath or swallow. She is sure of it. She is explaining this to me at two thousand words a minute and I am nodding my head like it is a language I don’t speak and I can’t let her know I’m a foreigner. Then she says, “You know, Marcuse says that there have always been subversives throughout the whole history of thought.”

  “Well, yes … Does he really … I think this—”

  She interrupts me. “Have you read One-Dimensional Man yet?”

  Now, if some girl in Haley said that to me I would say “Come on.” But it is the way Rachel says it. First of all, she gives me a smile that is like a gift, like a reward. What wouldn’t you do to get one of those smiles? But also it is the way she says the word “yet.” That word means that of course I would be reading Marcuse’s new book. It is just a question of have I done it yet. There is no judgment. But because of this, I cannot bring myself to disappoint her. So I say, “I’m reading it now.”

  And she says, “How is it going?” Which surprises me because it acknowledges that reading Marcuse may not necessarily go well.

  So I say, “Okay … I’ve got some issues with it.”

  Incredible. “Some issues with it.” Where did I get that?

  And then she says, “I do too. We should talk about this.”

  “Yes,” I say, getting nervous about how well this is going. “Yes … we should.”

  “Tonight at seven o’clock?”

  Rachel Apfelbaum has just asked me out on a date.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Crazy People

  Formal logic foreshadows the reduction of secondary to primary qualities in which the former become the measurable and controllable properties of physics.” Yes, that is what Marcuse has written in his new book. In anticipation of my date with Rachel Apfelbaum, I run to the campus bookstore and buy it. Do I have “some issues” with this book? Only this: I have no idea what he is talking about.

  Reading Marcuse reminds me of the novels I struggled through in high school French. Whenever I started to understand a passage it would then slip into the incomprehensible. I would underline the passages I understood because those would be the parts I could talk about. There are moments in Marcuse when I recognize some phrases and start to understand him and then he says something like “In advanced capitalism, technical rationality is embodied, in spite of its irrational use, in the productive apparatus.” I can’t argue with that because I cannot figure out what he is saying.

  But it doesn’t matter. It turns out that Rachel Apfelbaum doesn’t really want to talk about Marcuse after all. She wants to talk about absolutely everything, and we don’t stop talking for the rest of the year.

  We go to antiwar demonstrations in Boston, in New York, and in Washington. The police seem to have trouble with our ideas. They slowly encircle us as we march, then they fire off canisters of tear gas, which burn your eyes and make you feel ridiculous because you are supposed to be standing up for your beliefs but you end up doubled over and crying. We try bringing sliced limes, which everyone says counteract the effects of tear gas. But they don’t seem to help. We also wear helmets. Rachel and I have football helmets—she rolled her eyes contemptuously when I pointed out that they sold Red Sox batting helmets at the store in Fenway Park. But there are all kinds of helmets. Some demonstrators even have army helmets and it is starting to remind me of how we played war as kids. The reason we wear them is that after the tear gas the police move in with clubs and start beating us. Only there are so many of us that somehow the police never get to Rachel and me. But we can see demonstrators who don’t have helmets getting serious head injuries.

  Why do the police do this? A lot of people seem to feel really threatened by anyone who opposes war, as though there is some basic right that we are trying to take away from them. They live in a world where war is accepted and soldiers are heroes. But if Dickey Panicelli doesn’t feel like a hero, no one wants to hear from him. And certainly no one wants to hear that I don’t want to fight for my country. It goes against all their beliefs and they just want to beat us until we see things their way.

  Rachel, with her clarity, sees it differently. She says the police beat us because they are pigs. I’ve noticed that she loves the word “pig.” She never says “policeman” or “cop.” It is always “the pigs.” Is Popeye Panicelli a pig? Rachel, who calls for total revolution, has never known a policeman personally. We argue a great deal.

  “Don’t call them pigs.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re just people,” I say. “You call them pigs and it makes them mad.”

  “Tough.”

  “People don’t act well when they get mad.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  I can’t believe it. Is this like Kathy Pedrosky all over again?

  Rachel believes in violence. She says that eventually we will have to “take on the pigs.” I know this kind of talk from Haley. How you have to fight. I suppose when we take on the pigs, our school friends will wish us good luck and tell us to “show them what you can do.”

  This isn’t making much sense. If we are opposing war, opposing violence, why use violence to oppose it? Everybody seems to be going a little crazy.

  This is true in Haley too. I go back to Haley for spring break and I bring Rachel to meet my parents. What will they think of her flowing homemade dresses, of her arguments from German philosophy, of her talk of total revolution? Is she going to call our next-door neighbor a pig?

  But this is getting very weird. My mother and father are looking intently into her eyes, smiling, and nodding their heads. They love her. She is the first girl I have ever dated that they like. Now I realize why they didn’t like Haley girls. The only thing they notice about Rachel is that she is Jewish, and this pleases them. She talks about “ten million people, armed and on the streets,” and they nod and smile!

  To me, Rachel sounds completely crazy. But everyone else has gone crazy too. Popeye Panicelli has taken to walking around the neighborhood with his nightstick in hand, twirling it and swinging it and talking about how he is ready to “bust some heads.” Dickey smiles maliciously and stares off at some distant hill that only he can see. My uncle has s
tarted target practice, or so he claims, with the old bolt-action German rifle, getting ready for “when the hippies come.” I realize, though he doesn’t, that he is talking about my girlfriend. He has heard her kind of talk somewhere and he takes it seriously. Will the next war be between my uncle and Rachel Apfelbaum?

  I run into Rocco Pizzutti walking by the mills along the river, lost in thought. He does not know what to do because the Detroit Tigers, looking for a young left-handed pitcher to develop, have offered to sign him. It is a different era. Baseball is not about the Dodgers and the Yankees anymore. Koufax is retiring. The Red Sox are hot with Carl Yastrzemski. The dominant teams are the Cardinals and the Detroit Tigers. And the Tigers want Rocco Pizzutti.

  “Rocco, that’s fantastic.”

  He doesn’t look like he agrees. “Should I sign with them?”

  “You mean drop out of school?”

  “Exactly.”

  He doesn’t need to explain. He is eighteen years old. If he drops out of school and goes into the minor leagues and does well, he can be a major-league pitcher at twenty-two or twenty-three, which is the age they like to get them. But if he leaves the University of Massachusetts, he loses his deferment and he will be drafted. For an instant it occurs to me—here’s Rachel’s influence—that if the war continues, baseball is not going to be able to recruit young players and then Major League Baseball, a powerful ally, will also oppose the war.

  But meanwhile, what is Rocco going to do? If he leaves school he will be drafted and will go to Vietnam. If he stays in school it will delay his career three more years and then he still might get drafted into military service when he graduates. So it could be five more years before he can play and the Tigers wouldn’t be interested in him by then. Finally he decides that if he has to go into the military, he is volunteering for Vietnam because that will make his army time a few months shorter, which, if he times it right, could mean a whole extra baseball season.

  “If I sign up right now, I can be playing ball in a year and a half.”

  “I don’t know, Rocco.”

  At least Rocco was one person who had not gone crazy.

  Chapter Twenty

  Two Karls and one Che Guevara

  The letter was forwarded by my parents. It was from Karl Moltke in West Berlin.

  March 12, 1967

  Dear Joel,

  I hope you remember me. I am sending this to your parents because I don’t know where you are. But here in Berlin I am thinking of you as we learn in the movement about the great struggle in the U.S. and I hope that we are now brothers in the revolution. In the words of Che, “If you tremble with indignation at every injustice then you are a comrade of mine.”

  I am coming to Boston for the movement. “I am not a liberator … The people liberate themselves.” But I am coming to help. Are you going to the demonstration in April in Boston? We could meet there. Please write me and tell me how to find you.

  Yours for freedom,

  Karl

  I show the letter to Rachel and explain the story. She points out that more than half of the letter is actual quotations from the South American revolutionary Che Guevara. I don’t know what this means but certainly it is a good sign that Karl has not taken up his family’s politics.

  We are planning on going to the demonstration. Rachel has her little red Volkswagen Beetle, which we call the Mao-mobile because the Chinese leader is always waving red books and red flags. She is driving Donnie and me. Sam is meeting us in Boston to demonstrate with us. I have promised my parents that I will take good care of him and not let “anything happen to him.” Of course, I cannot guarantee this at a demonstration, but I am able to get away with it because my parents do not acknowledge how brutal the police are—even if they don’t mind Rachel saying it. Also they are comforted by the fact that Donnie will be there because Donnie was known in Haley as a kid who never got into trouble. It will be Sam’s first demonstration and it will change him and help him to not be so straight. A good whiff of tear gas gives a kid perspective. I only have to persuade him later not to give our parents all the details.

  What will Karl be like? How has he turned out? We arrange to meet at a small café off Commonwealth Avenue, where Boston University students spend hours in debate while lingering over twenty-five-cent cups of coffee. It was Karl’s suggestion. I wonder how he knows about this place. It is dark and smoky but still I immediately spot Karl. He is three times as tall as he was when I last saw him and probably weighs the same. But on top of the long, angular, bony body is the same face with the same pale eyes. Only the blond scraggly beard is different. He is dressed in a blue beret and green army fatigues with the epaulets running off his narrow shoulders and down his arms. I suppose the beret is intended to make him resemble Che, which he doesn’t because he is too tall and thin. The green fatigues resemble the Cuban uniforms of Fidel and Che but it is clearly someone else’s West German uniform because the name “Spieldorf” is printed on a breast pocket. I can’t help but think about him wearing a German army fatigues jacket that he hopes will look Cuban while I am wearing American fatigues worn to kill Germans.

  He recognizes me too and throws his long arms around me. “I knew we would be brothers in the revolution,” he says. I am not sure why but I always find this kind of talk embarrassing. I introduce Rachel, and Sam—who doesn’t remember him. Donnie does but Karl is not sure he remembers Donnie. We all sit down for a coffee and Karl expands on his revolutionary theory, which seems to involve killing a lot of people—“a million atomic lives.” I look at Rachel and she confirms with her eyes that he is quoting Che again. But she and Donnie seem to be largely agreeing with Karl while I can’t help thinking, “Why only a million and not six million lives?” But I am not going to say that and Sam says nothing. He is mostly looking around the café with great curiosity. I can see that he is impressed, that for once he thinks his big brother does interesting things.

  We all go off to the demonstration together, comrades in the revolution, agreeing that if it gets violent and we get separated, we will meet back in the café—except that I cannot let Sam out of my sight.

  Of course, it does get violent. Not too bad. A lot of tear gas and some clubbing. A few arrests. Donnie has brought his motorcycle helmet, bright yellow like a target. He always brings it to demonstrations, tucking his long hair into it and fastening the chin strap just as an event gets started. Only this time I talk Donnie into letting Sam wear it. Sam doesn’t want to but I tell him he has to.

  “What for?”

  “Because Mom will kill me if you get clubbed in the head.”

  The one I worry about is Karl. He is so tall and his head sticks out above the crowd, an obvious and tempting target. Karl wanders through the heart of the police line unafraid, without ever flinching or covering up, tear gas swirling below his high head.

  This is how we were spending weekends. But I have to get Sam out of here and Karl, a foreigner on a tourist visa, comes with me. Surprisingly, it is Sam who points out to Karl that as a foreigner he could not afford to get arrested. Rachel insists on staying longer, on “not backing off from the pigs,” and Donnie stays with her while we go back to the little café and wait. Sam, red-eyed, his cheeks wet with tears, has had a moving experience. I knew he would. He is now talking revolution with Karl, who enthusiastically says to him, “A revolution does not fall when it’s ripe. You have to pick it.” It is not difficult to guess the source of these words of inspiration.

  They are now engaged in an improbable conversation about New England–West Berlin solidarity. But what I am thinking is that Fenway Park is only about two blocks away and the Red Sox are playing the Yankees. Jim Lonborg, a great right-hander, is starting for the Sox against Mel Stottlemyre, who is also having a great year. Karl, remembering baseball from his brief American childhood, thinks going to the game is a great idea. Sam questions, “Is it right to go to a baseball game after a demonstration?”

  Karl smiles, cocks his beret approp
riately askew, and says, “One must harden without ever losing tenderness.” Sam wonders what that means while I wonder if there is any occasion for which Karl cannot find a Che Guevara quote.

  When Rachel and Donnie arrive Rachel has no enthusiasm for the plan. But Donnie wants to go. I know what he is thinking because I am having the same thought: Stanley should be here. The last time I went to Fenway Park was with Donnie and Stanley, right after our high school graduation. That was also a Yankees game. Stanley and I liked to harass Donnie about his rooting for the Yankees. Rachel looks like she is about to cry and I almost back down, but then I realize that her red eyes only have that look from the tear gas. She decides to come along, maybe because my eyes have the same look or maybe because young Che, the German revolutionary, is smiling so eagerly, nodding his head with such excitement—and looking so goofy.

  We buy the cheapest seats we can, high above right field. I have never understood why these seats are cheap. The batter is a long way away, but it is the lowest outfield wall so it is a good place to catch home run balls. Sam, Dad, and I used to go there with gloves hoping to catch a home run ball hit into the stands, though we never did. Sam and I explain this to Karl and he seems very excited. We point out the red seat only four rows behind us where Ted Williams hit a home run in 1946, the longest bomb ever hit out of Fenway Park. I tell Karl how it hit a man in that seat on the head, crashing through his straw hat. Karl looks very impressed.

  I can see that Karl, in his excitement, does not remember much about baseball because he is shouting something about a touchdown. The Yankees are leading for the entire game. Only Donnie, clutching his motorcycle helmet in his lap, is happy. The Yankees are two runs ahead in the seventh inning when the Red Sox get two singles and Carl Yastrzemski comes to bat. On the third pitch he sends the ball over the diamond, past the outfield, and right at us. While everyone around us strains to catch the ball, Karl, who has no fear of club-wielding police but remembers the poor man in the straw hat, folds up his long body, curling into the space in front of his seat, and covers his head, shouting, “Touchd-o-w-n-n-n,” holding the last note.