Battle Fatigue

by Mark Kurlansky

  I find it hard to talk to Rachel these days. I don’t think we see things in the same way. Meanwhile, every time I call home my mother always asks, “How is that nice girl Rachel?”

  Donnie and Rachel and some others have come up with this crazy idea about a bomb that would make a lot of noise but not hurt anyone. But I wonder, “If we get into this business of bombing, how are we better than the generals?”

  “Because,” Donnie says, lifting off a knit cap like an unveiling, his newly conditioned hair flowing down into view, “our bomb won’t hurt anyone.”

  “Maybe we should hurt someone,” says Rachel.

  After a moment of silence punctuated by the mute kid in the glasses excitedly nodding his head, Donnie says, “How does it look? I used this new herbal rinse. It’s a recipe from a Pueblo Indian group. The recipe is from before Columbus.”

  The kid in the wire-rimmed glasses continues his eager nodding.

  I have other ideas. John Kennedy’s brother Robert is running for president. It’s funny—when John Kennedy was president, I was the least enthusiastic Kennedy kid in Massachusetts. But I have a lot of hopes for the brother. Sam is already working for him. He is only a high school junior but he has gone to the Kennedy headquarters in New York as part of a youth movement and has even met Kennedy. They say Robert is the most serious of the Kennedys, so that is perfect for Sam. I think Kennedy will stop the war and I think he knows how to get elected, and I resolve that I will work for his campaign. And then the war will end at last. Donnie doesn’t say anything because we always have this sadness between us about the name “Kennedy.” But Rachel wants no part of this Kennedy campaign. “I want revolution, not another President Kennedy.”

  The kid in the wire-rimmed glasses nods in agreement.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Bomb

  Throughout my sophomore year the bad times keep getting worse. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed yesterday. How could something be so shocking without being at all surprising? Everyone always thought he might be killed. He did too. He talked about dying young all the time. He spoke about it just the day before he was shot. Even when we were kids in Haley this had been a topic. Some said he deserved to die. Well, only Tony Scaratini. But we grew up with Martin Luther King Jr. He was always there, never tiring, fighting towns, states, the government—demanding change. At our college he had grown out of fashion. Both black and white kids are listening to more radical black leaders who laugh at the peaceful ways of the civil rights movement. They preach revolution and call for violence. They don’t believe that big shows like demonstrations accomplish anything. And I have to wonder about it myself. Young blacks are calling for “direct action,” the same kind of thing Rachel and Donnie talk about for stopping the war. Now King is gone and in our apartment everyone is crying—except the kid with the wire-rimmed glasses, who just sits there looking like he is waiting for us to stop. But even Rachel, who always said King was too soft and just not the stuff of revolution, has so many tears running down her face that the top of her white shirt is getting wet.

  Immediately after King’s death it seems that everyone gets a little harder, a little meaner. We organize a demonstration on campus. It is not a large university so we do not expect too large a crowd. But about twenty thousand people show up. It is going well, peacefully, and the police are staying on the sidelines. They have shields, those clear plastic ones that look like motorcycle windshields, and they all wear blue helmets, though I don’t know why. What are they worried about? We are unarmed and peaceful. Maybe it is an example of judging others by yourself.

  Suddenly black vans are arriving—three … no, four … no, five. Out of them come helmeted men wearing strange padding and tugging on the leashes of large snarling black-backed German shepherds.

  The dogs are now running through the crowd lunging at demonstrators. It looks like they are going for their throats but I am not sure. When they jump on demonstrators they knock them down and somehow hold them. Two policemen with dogs still on leashes are heading straight for Rachel. I run toward her though I have no idea what I am going to do. The first dog is released—a burly athletic animal that leaps up and knocks her over.

  I would not believe this if I didn’t see it. One of the policemen rears back, almost in a batter’s stance, swings his club, and hits Rachel so hard on the head that even though I am still ten feet away I hear the melon-like thud of the club hitting her head. Her head snaps to the side in an unnatural movement. The police take their dogs and go off to the next victim. They’ve killed Rachel!

  When I reach her, her face is white and there is blood streaming from her forehead, but she is still breathing. She opens her eyes, faintly smiles, and says something I can’t hear. But I know what she’s saying—“Pigs.”

  “Let’s get her to the hospital, man,” says a voice over my shoulder. It’s Donnie, and as I look past him I see that we are the only ones left on the campus mall. There are no demonstrators, no other injured people, no police, and no dogs.

  “Everyone’s gone,” I say.

  Donnie shrugs.

  “You would think there would be some reporters or something.”

  Donnie looks around and shrugs again.

  “So they are just going to get away with it,” says Rachel, holding her head. “No one will know what they did.”

  “Let’s get her to the hospital.”

  “Wait,” says Rachel. “Suppose two hundred kids turn up wounded at the hospital. That will get some attention.”

  “Yes, but there’s only you,” says Donnie.

  “But we could get a lot more,” I hear myself say.

  So we have hatched a plot. I will run ahead with Rachel to the hospital and Donnie will get as many students as he can find and have them come to the hospital complaining of being beaten up, and then some newspeople will come.

  At the hospital the nurse asks Rachel what happened and she tells her that the police beat her up at a demonstration and everyone seems satisfied with that explanation. There are no more questions. They run some tests. She is fine. No concussion, no need for stitches. We try to stall longer, but no one comes, so we leave.

  Now I am ready to strike back. It is a beautiful spring, with warm sunny days and evenings of soft rain that make things bloom and grow. But I am angry. We all are. What have these demonstrations accomplished? The killing goes on and on. We are having a meeting in the apartment. My only condition is that we don’t physically hurt anyone. When I think about the reality that in a year or two I could be in Vietnam, I find it hard to believe that I would actually kill people. I can imagine being in the military, being in a war. I have imagined it all my life. But I can’t imagine killing Vietnamese people. More to the point, I can’t imagine how I will live with myself after I do. So I am not about to kill anyone here to try to stop the killing there. I don’t even want to hit the man who beat Rachel. I don’t want to be like him. But I also don’t want the incident to go unnoticed. So we come up with another plan.

  Close to town there is a statue of Thomas Pickering, who captured a nearby fort from the British in the Revolutionary War. No one guards this statue or even looks at it. Probably the one exception to that is a trustee of the college, C. Bradford Harrington, whom no one has ever seen but who claims to be a direct descendant of Thomas Pickering. Why would anyone lie about that? His family had the statue built. There are two extraordinary things about this statue that were pointed out to us by Donnie LePine. (The one consistent thing about Donnie in all the years I have known him is that he always does his homework.)

  The first extraordinary thing is that, although it is a bronze statue, it stands on a wooden base. The second is that the statue is on the edge of town next to a thick pine woods. Why are these two things significant? Because none of us knows how to make a bomb. I try to remember all the explosive elements from Mr. Shaker’s chemistry class and how to make something with nitrogen. In a world of volatile elements and unstable compounds it should
be easy, but I don’t know how to do it. Donnie, who was not interested in chemistry, claims to know how to make a Molotov cocktail. He learned this from a movie about anti-Nazi partisans in the mountains somewhere. By coincidence the movie, which I watched with my uncle, is set in a pine forest that looks a lot like the area behind the Pickering statue. A Molotov cocktail won’t blow up the statue but it could burn down the wooden base.

  The importance of the woods is that we could cut through the trees, throw the bomb, and disappear back into the woods—and no one would see us. We have a cardboard sign that we will leave near the statue: THIS FIRE WAS SET TO PROTEST THE CAMPUS MASSACRE OF MAY 29. Then the press will scramble to find out what the campus massacre on May 29 was. We make the sign by cutting random letters from magazines so there is no handwriting clue left. We learned how to do that from a movie about a kidnapping, starring Glenn Ford.

  A Molotov cocktail, according to Donnie, is just a bottle filled with rocks and gasoline and stopped up with some rolled cloth as a wick. We have made two because we had two large bottles, both from wine. We considered making a third with a ketchup bottle but decided it was too small. Two will be fine. There are five of us in the apartment and we draw straws for who will go. The short straws win.

  Naturally, Donnie draws one of the short straws because he always wins. Back in Haley he never even lost a coin toss. I have the other short straw. Donnie disappears into his bedroom and comes out a few minutes later and says, “All set.”

  I look up in wonder. Donnie is wearing a revolutionary guerrilla fighter outfit. He has on black boots, tight black jeans, a black turtleneck sweater, and a black knit hat.

  I guess I am staring because he explains, “Harder to see you in the dark.”

  That’s probably true. Has he done this before?

  He looks great! I am wearing these stupid brown loafers that I haven’t worn since Haley. I have boots, but they chose today for a heel to come off. I am wearing jeans, a blue shirt, and my Battle of the Bulge fatigues jacket, which now comes down barely below my waist because I have grown taller than my uncle.

  Rachel is driving us, with another kid named Trotsky—probably not his real name (it wasn’t even the real Trotsky’s real name) but it’s what everyone calls him. He claims to have a radical edge on all of us because he dropped out of Brandeis. Brandeis is a university near Boston but I do not know if his superior credentials as a radical are supposed to come from his having gone there or from having dropped out. Not many kids drop out of school these days because of the draft. But Trotsky isn’t being drafted, maybe because he is too fat. If you can be too fat for the military, Trotsky would qualify.

  It is a dark moonless night and Rachel and Trotsky are dropping us off at the far edge of the woods. The woods will be our cover and no one will see us go in or out. Rachel is driving us in her Mao-mobile. We did realize that a bright red Volkswagen might be conspicuous but Donnie had painted flowers all over his van, which seemed even easier to notice. We get out of the car. I have one bottle. Donnie has the other. I have the sign. Rachel and Trotsky have promised to periodically check back on us so that they can pick us up and the police won’t spot us suspiciously walking around. Suddenly it occurs to me that Donnie’s outfit may not be a good idea. Why advertise? If you were robbing a bank, would you wear a bank robber outfit?

  The car is about to leave when I remember something.

  “Wait!”

  The car jerks to a stop. Everyone is looking at me. Sheepishly I grin. “Anybody have matches?”

  Trotsky and Rachel fumble around and Donnie finds some in the glove compartment. He puts them in a pocket and we are off to attack Pickering.

  Donnie stops just as we are entering the woods. Even in the dark I can see his wide smile. “Off to war together at last, Aramis.”

  “Athos,” I say, and we embrace.

  “Hey, Joel,” says Donnie, his hands still on my shoulders, “remember the green stones?”

  “Jade.”

  “Montana jade.” We both laugh and then he asks, “Do you still have yours?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe at my parents’ house somewhere. You?”

  “Same. Maybe at my parents’. What do you want to bet Stanley still has his right in his pocket.” We laugh again and turn in to the woods.

  It is very dark in the woods. I take about three careful steps and then there is a sucking noise. I pull up my right foot and there is no brown loafer on it. I cannot see anything. Now I am wondering why we didn’t think to bring a flashlight. I could light a match, but the matches are critical and I shouldn’t waste them. I cannot find the shoe.

  I decide to hobble on. Donnie was right about his outfit. I cannot see him and I keep calling to him to find out where he is. Sometimes his voice is in front of me, sometimes behind me.

  After about an hour, maybe longer, I start to think that these woods are a lot bigger than I had thought. Strange, because New Hampshire’s not that big. Now I hear an odd sound from Donnie. He has tripped over a rock and can’t find his bomb. We grope around but can’t feel it. We consider lighting a match but then remember that matches are not a good way to hunt for gasoline bombs. We decide to leave it. One will be enough. We hope.

  I think it has been another hour now and I smell a lot of gasoline and think maybe some of it has spilled on my jeans. I would like to see, because if there is no more gas in the bottle there is no point in going on. The sign has fallen in the mud a few times and I am not sure it is readable. Maybe we should check on that. Actually I can almost read the sign because the lettering is against a white background. Maybe Donnie could stand away from me and the gasoline, and light a match. He takes the sign and walks ahead about six feet through the trees. I can see him clearly now. My eyes must be adjusting.

  Then I realize that I am seeing better because it is dawn.

  “If we wait a little longer it will be daylight and we can find our way back to the road.”

  “Or we can just go into town. Even if we do look strange, we didn’t do anything. Nothing has happened. So we can just walk through town,” Donnie points out.

  We leave the second bottle in the woods and fold up the sign. There is nothing to hide. Donnie is right. And I feel a little relieved about that. My days as a revolutionary guerrilla fighter are over. Soon there is enough light for us to find our way into town. It is not far away although in a completely different direction from where we had been heading. On the way back to the apartment, Rachel, who has been circling town all night, pulls up next to us. Nobody noticed the red Volkswagen driving around. But why should they, since nothing has happened? We give her the disappointing news. For some reason, she just laughs. Then we all laugh. Not knowing what to do, Trotsky laughs too.

  Ex-guerrillas, we are studying for our final exams. I take a break and turn on the television but I doze. I can hear they are running some old film of the Kennedy assassination. Suddenly I realize it is this Kennedy, the brother. They have killed Bobby too. Donnie walks into the room and I start to tell him but realize I can’t tell him about another Kennedy assassination. So I say nothing and he sees it on television.

  Rachel is right, I understand that now. You can’t change things if every time someone tries, he is killed. Maybe my thinking is completely wrong and I am not recognizing the way the world really is. Maybe, like Martin Luther King, I am too soft. And isn’t that just another way of not standing up, of being the German?

  I call Sam, thinking how upset he will be too. He is upset, but he is not thinking the way I am. He is talking politics. He is worried about the Kennedy delegates. Do they give them to McCarthy or to a new antiwar candidate? How do they stop Humphrey …

  I let him talk but I am not listening. It doesn’t matter to me because no one who will stop the war is going to get the nomination. And if someone could, he would just be shot.

  The war is still on.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Induction

  To me, Bobby Kennedy’s d
eath was the final death of wounded hope. I finished my last two years of college without believing there was anything much anyone could do. I studied biology and tried to understand why the world is arranged the way it is. Professor Moreland urged us to study Darwin and promised that if we understood the natural order we could understand ourselves. Like Moreland and most everyone else I know, I go to demonstrations but I realize they won’t stop the war. Nixon, whom I thought I had left behind in my childhood, is now president. Was this what Darwin meant by the survival of the fittest? At this rate we will be back to Eisenhower soon.

  But, bad as the world is, I don’t want to make it any worse. My college education, my draft deferment, has slipped by. Still, I know that no matter what happens, I will not be killing Vietnamese people for Richard Nixon or anyone else. In my mind I keep reviewing the alternatives as presented by Myron in Dorchester.

  But now there is another possibility. Now there is a lottery in which a number will be assigned to every day of the year. If your birthday has a high number you are probably free. If you have a low number you will almost certainly be going into the military. Donnie LePine, for whom everything always turns out well, draws number 347 and he is out of the draft. The only surprise is that he didn’t get number 365. Donnie has decided to drop out of school for a while and “work for the movement.”

  December 7, my birthday, pulls number twelve. My low number isn’t surprising to me. It is becoming clearer every day that this war is my destiny. I will have to face it—fight it or refuse to fight it. But I will not just get out of it by something as easy as a lottery number.

  I am officially no longer a student. I am twenty-one years old and I have just finished my last final exam. What this means to me is that my draft deferment has ended and I am eligible.