by Jack Cady
". . . there was no call to kill that kid," Burnside whispered. "We could have worked something out. We could have both kept running." His voice became harsh and controlled, the kind of voice a noncom uses when he reads out a total screwup. We take pride in not feeling sorry for ourselves, but Burnside took it a little too far. He had bullshitted around this issue for his whole life, and now the b.s. didn’t work. He would not be talking harsh if he was not eating away on guilt. You’d think, after all these years, the Japanese kid would be at peace. You’d think Burnside would have come to terms with it. Instead he sat, wiped, totally blown out of town.
"Shish kata ga nai. It can’t be helped," I said to him. "It was a fatality, a fatalism. Forget it."
"He was skinny at the time," Burnside said in a voice just above a whisper. "They were on short rations. Skinny and sick and dirty in that crappy way you only get in jungles. He had diarrhea. Even after he died."
The kid looked better as a ghost. Clean uniform, healthy smile. Death seemed to agree with him. I wasn’t proud of the way I thought. There is b.s. and there is sick b.s. I whispered, "Good luck, soldier."
"You know how it goes," Burnside said. "He maybe wasn’t the first, but he was the worst. Dammit, Ross."
I knew what he meant. I also owned problems in that line, but didn’t want to think about them . . . and thanks for the memories.
"Both of you were wrong," I told Burnside, "especially him. He was a soldier who acted like a priest. He sentenced you to life. You lived it. He didn’t. You’re both kicked in your ornaments." Some kind of flak erupted in the dayroom. A quavery voice began reciting poetry in the sing-song-y manner of school kids. The guy tried a passage from The Wreck of the Hesperus. Memorized in about sixth grade. He got it wrong, but mostly right.
"I’m so damn popular," Burnside said, "because I overcharge and do poor work." He lay down, turned his back to me. "If something’s gonna happen, let it."
Men sometimes acted this way in Korea. Temperatures dropped. Chinese artillery pounded. Chinese attacked. They came in swarms, and there did not seem enough explosive in the world to stop them. After the heat of attack, and as sweat began to freeze deep in our clothes, a man might climb into his sleeping bag where he would not be warm but could keep from freezing. And, the man became pupa, determined not to hatch. Men did that when they gave up. You couldn’t even kick them out of those bags. Men died in attacks because they lay snugged in, refusing that last ration of hell the world so generously served.
"I got a problem," I said to Burnside. "I don’t have the strength to club your sorry butt."
He grunted. "I know a guy," he mumbled, "that when he dies is going to have his ashes sprinkled on a farm in South Dakota."
". . . a thumbnail history of the Japanese on Guadalcanal," I told him. "Courage, combined with stupidity, does not make successful soldiers. Think about that before you check out." Here he was, talking about his ashes while I’m sweating his spirit.
Still, it was spirit. One man, one vote.
I sensed movement in the far corner of the room. Mist slowly gathered, and movement in the mist did not seem occidental. If our ghosts tried to help then Burnside lay as perfect fodder. The mist might contain a clot of Burnside’s personal ghosts. I didn’t say a word. Just shuffled away on legs not exactly inspired, but feeling less worse than usual. The Japanese kid, and maybe an entire slew of ghosts, formed up to do a number on Burnside. Either ghosts are a metaphor for history, or history is a metaphor for ghosts.
Nurse Johnson would think I was a real gad-a-bout. I moved back toward the dayroom feeling grim. Absolute Evil exists. As kids we geriatrics learned all about it, and no damn social worker had better come along and blame ‘evil’ on ‘conditions.’ Evil is a force in the universe, a force using any weakness it finds to do its dirt; and with Evil, Hell is just a sideline.
My mind sorrowed. Harvey had been snatched. He was an old, old soldier, but inside him lived a spirit that was blithe. If his spirit lay hostage, or destroyed, even ghostland took a loss.
Besides, Harvey was a good friend. We weep no tears, knowing he would be too proud of us to weep for us. Still, there are such things as invisible tears. Nurse Johnson weeps them, as well as the other kind.
And then there is nurse Johnson, a good kid in a bad world. Her world reeks with folk who hold no beliefs, or cheap beliefs; people who hope, when they die, to report to Saint Peter with clean bowels. They worry about cholesterol while their kids shoot each other down in the streets.
Nurse Johnson lives in a nation that whines over self-inflicted wounds while claiming itself a victim. At least the people I walked toward did not have minds filled with that kind of shinola. Like everyone else we are filled with a certain amount of crap, but not that crap.
. . . something feathered around my mind, almost like the touch of inspiration portrayed in Victorian pictures, or the whisper of someone long dead who wanted to pass me a tip. I almost understood our final act, and why we must act. Then the feathery thing went away. I started counting backward from 100; it’s the classic test to see if you’ve got Alzheimer’s. The feathery notion might return, because 99 went to 98, and so forth . . .
Evil uses Hell as a parking lot, and you don’t have to die to park. Evil sets people in the middle of war, famine, excess prosperity, or other of Hell’s appurtenances, then stands back as people freeze or sizzle; and screw themselves. The main interest of Evil is destruction of faith in gods and ethics, knowledge and honor. When faith is destroyed people create their own hells, and a sign stretches across the universe writ large for all to see. It reads: The Future Is Cancelled.
Maybe it was not simply our spirits at risk, because, as the world turns, faith these days is doing hard time. Maybe nurse Johnson, and all the other fine people I didn’t know, but who must be in the world, were at risk. When faith is destroyed, what happens to those who are faithful to their trust? I tottered along figuring that if evil was after me I could stand it, but if it came for nurse Johnson then this pilgrim was pissed.
No sound came from behind me, but ahead sounded a mixture of querulous voices. Mortar fire, properly timed, sounds like tearing paper, and so did the voices. Distance to the dayroom is sixty feet. At flank speed I could have made it in two minutes, but my own ghosts picked that moment.
I leaned against a wall and found myself looking down at a misted valley-plain of rice paddies, and for once I owned the high ground. Rocks lay scattered around a low crest of hills. Behind me rose a stark mountain blasted black by gunfire. My squad had our light thirties dug in across a broad ridge in Korea, early in the war. I watched the plain, watched ground mist rise from the paddies, and knew this was a rerun. I fought against doing this twice, because no one sane would want to do it once.
Five white specks appeared in the distance and moved toward me. I knew them, did not know their names. They were patriarchs, five old men dressed in white, men who should have died in the quiet security of their homes, surrounded by sons and daughters and grandchildren. They were men who had once been the man I would become, old, not wise, but smart for their day and time.
They moved slowly through mist, as reluctant as I to again confront madness. In mist behind them, like on a movie screen, rose pictures of a few faces of Hell; reels of Pathay News, the March of Time; buildings breaking beneath artillery, walls crumbling about women and children crouching in cellars. And from the far, far distance, far at sea, tattered life jackets still afloat, bobbing, the heads of sailors so thriftily held above the waves now turned to bleached and polished skulls.
The old Koreans moved toward me. Armbands with Korean writing showed them as Rok, Republic of Korea, allies. Two carried old-fashioned, long-barreled squirrel rifles, because there were bandits in these mountains. The other three walked with staffs. As they approached they smiled, but that is not the way it went the first time. The first time went like this:
My squad dug in behind a low ridge overlooking a valley. We had a long, thi
n line not well armed. We did not have enough men across a broad front, and North Koreans banzaied one section of the line, then another. They kept it up all afternoon. We stacked them up like cordwood, and they stacked us.
Night came down moonless, darker than the bottom of a nighttime sea. Only our ears hinted at movement in the valley. From far, far away an occasional moan or sigh sounded as dying men lay alone, because neither side of the line so much as wiggled. There might be wounded out there, or it might be a trick.
The North Koreans hit again at midnight. They banzaied the left of our line, then banzaied again. Night came alive with tracers, and action rolled beneath flares as our mortars illuminated the valley. The attack was too far to our left to mean anything, except indignation. The attack made so much noise we could not tell what might gather right in front of us.
I froze to the pistol grip of the m.g. We heard nothing. No flares danced overhead. Night seemed concentrated, pointed, directed at our very sanity. Night seemed ready to explode with oriental voices, faces, the screams of a mindless horde, hell-a-poppin’, Hell incarnate.
Then, to our left, the second attack stopped. Flares snuffed, darkness returned. The valley once more seemed covered with the dying.
"My momma didn’t raise me to be a ground pounder," one of our guys whispered, "so what are we doin’ . . ." and then he shut up.
Slightly to our right and so close as to seem underfoot, a noise clicked. Wood on rock, like a rifle butt carried too low. To my right the other m.g. opened at that first snick of sound. Riflemen fired blindly, hysteric. I fired like one insane, like a man trying to kill the night, finally forcing my finger off the trigger before the barrel melted.
From right in front of us came a cry, "Ai-gue! Ai-gue!" Then a torrent of words, and then a single voice, "Ai-gue! Ai-gue!" I burned the rest of the ammo belt, the m.g. bouncing like a mad instrument as I rose, trying to get further depression. The voice sobbed. "Ai-gue. Ai-gue."
"Do that sonovabitch," someone yelled. "For Chrissake stop the noise."
One of our guys hopped over the ridge, stumbled, then emptied a carbine in the direction of the voice. Silence. Silence. We shivered until dawn.
Korean bodies are no more remarkable than Chinese bodies, but they wear different clothes. As first light crept across the sky lumps of white shone nearly luminescent on the downhill slope. Light gathered to show the banzai attack we fought so hysterically was no attack at all. Five old men, two nearly headless from repeated hits, lay with white beards running red. White clothing shone black-stained with drying blood. The corpses lay small and tangled. They lay like the death of history.
Our company commander appeared through morning mist, checking the line, doing his job. He looked over the ridge, looked at the corpses, said, "Musta been one whale of a fight," and walked on down the line. We sat fully ashamed, wondering ‘what the hell,’ when along came a corpsman who knew a little Korean. He said ‘Ai-gue! Ai-gue!’ means ‘My Lord. My Lord.’
Now they stood before me. Koreans are taller than most Orientals, and these old men stood straight but not stiff. I leaned against the wall, waited, wondering if this was going to be death or a dry run.
They waited as well. Very polite, but not Jap polite. Koreans take a different fix on good behavior.
"Don’t think I haven’t thought about it," I told them, and did not know whether words ran from my mouth or only from my thought. "You guys were probably trying to cut a deal for your village. Maybe with us, maybe with the North. You carried two flags, depending on which army was in your neighborhood, and you did it to protect your kids."
They smiled. Koreans are not inscrutable, at least not when they’re being honest. One nodded. I actually saw them relax, like a sense of relief swept over them.
"And you heard all that fighting to our left, so you skirted the action around the base of that ridge." I watched them. So far, so good. They watched me with interest. "But your mistake was to move at night. You could not tell where the lines were dug in."
The tallest one framed the word, ‘anio,’ ‘no,’ with his mouth. No sound. Just the shape of the word.
"Then you had to move at night?"
The mouth framed ‘neh,’ ‘yes.’
"Then you were the advance . . ." I broke off, knowing after all these years, why those men suddenly appeared under our guns. Their entire village must have been fleeing south. The enfiladed valley could not be crossed. These old men led, trying to find a way across the ridge and onto the mountain before the sun rose over their women and children. Their young men would have been gone, pressed into service by the North, or held prisoner by the Allies.
"I pray your people made it," I said, "and I honor you."
They turned to look across the valley where people worked in rice paddies, where farmers’ houses sat small and distinct, and where raised paths carried the normal traffic of normal living. I heard music few occidentals can really understand, saw forms and shapes of costumes and dress, saw children sitting beside grandmothers. I saw old-fashioned cities, quiet streets, small shops, colorful flags and ornaments and decorations—life before machine guns, before communism and capitalism and the ambition of generals.
And then the scene changed as across the valley rolled a totality of darkness. It came crashing like a tidal wave, and, churning like a wave in the darkness, were flashes of neon, the static of electronics, the buzz and hiss and crackle of a brave new world. The old men stood facing the surge and thump of modern times. They stood squarely, waiting the approach of darkness, then stepped toward the darkness for all the world like men headed into an all-out fight. Darkness rolled toward them, the valley disappeared, and the scene faded, dispersed; and I found myself leaning against a hospital wall and pointed toward the dayroom.
It was about as much action as this child could take. I inched forward looking for a chair, even one before a TV. I would park my carcass and take a blow. Unreal spooks lived on television, electronic spooks with names and haircuts; mindless noise. It wouldn’t be the same but it might be restful. I wondered how Burnside made out back in our room. I wondered if Burnside’s ghosts were having any luck. I halfway wished he would show up.
In the dayroom patterns of light swirled, illuminated faces, cast shadows; and nothing looked restful. Light danced phantasmic as aurora borealis, flashing across old faces, wattled necks, scraggly limbs. Where normal light should fall through large windows, darkness glowered. Oppressive gloom lay beyond those windows. Even as I watched gloom fell to darkness, impenetrable, empty, deep as reaches of space. Black was not simply a presence, but an aggressive absence of light. It backgrounded weirdly illuminated figures of my companions, made them into pictures surreal as effusions of Dalí—fearsome as improbable laughter issuing from the depths of mausoleums.
Each person in that dayroom was surrounded by his own ghosts. Ghosts of the enemy mixed with ghosts of the Allies. Reinforcements seemed to be coming in from everywhere. I wondered if this was a last bastion, a place of some fateful and final resolution. I lined myself up in the direction of a chair and putzed forward. I heard the swish of a wheelchair.
"Be thankful for baldheaded people," Burnside said. "Ross, I got a problem." He wheeled his chair in front of me, twirled a couple of circles, and Burnside’s mouth might be tossing a minor load of b.s., but the line across that mouth was firm. The old sarge was back on top of things.
"You’re looking better," I told him. "Have you gained weight, or have you done something with your hair?" It was obvious that Burnside’s ghosts had given him some sort of reason to quit pouting.
". . . getting stuff settled with that kid. It cheered him somewhat." Burnside looked around the dayroom. ". . . like old home week at the pearly gates," he muttered. He watched some of the action, shook his head; steered his chair between me and the goings-on like a machine gunner covering a retreat. "The Good Book says ‘This too shall pass,’ and I’ve found that’s always true, except in the case of gallstones."
"Welcome back," I told him and found a chair. The TV bubbled mindlessly as I watched the dayroom. What with all the silent messages between ghosts and geriatrics, what I saw was wild and less than wonderful—like a Chinese fire drill—the Greek air force—the Estonian navy.
Mostly what I saw was blood and neon, history and the present, everything mixed; and, as everything mixed, darkness grew as people and ghosts became diminutive. We were getting cut down to size by darkness—and where it came from—what it wanted—I could not tell.
"Did you ever hate anybody you were shooting at?" It was a dumb question in Burnside’s mouth, the kind of question an old soldier is not supposed to ask. There are standard attitudes toward the enemy, and old soldiers are supposed to know them.
I was still pretty shaken up. My breath came fast and shallow. "Only when they shot back." That was not strictly true. I did not hate the standard Kraut or standard North Korean, but the German S.S. would never rest peaceful in my mind.
"Because," Burnside mused, "they were just dog soldiers. Doing a job. Nothing to get hateful about."
Either Burnside suffered a conversion, and angelic wings were about to whisk him to heavenly realms and walls of gold, or else his ghosts told him something that made him confidential. He talked about pretty personal stuff.
"The Bataan death march," I told him. "So much for your dog soldiers."
"You’re a man of many parts, though somewhat scattered. Don’t crap me about the Far East."
What I know about the Far East mostly has to do with broken cities and broken bodies. I did not spend time on R&R, and did not spend time on occupation. "History itself is scattered," I said, "and don’t crap me about Bataan. I reckon you’ve been in touch with the far side."
We watched the dayroom, the encroaching dark, as the show began to fade. Geriatrics stood wiped out. Ghosts winked out. People stared at empty space, then turned to each other; murmured, touched hands, checked the ‘realness’ of people and things. They jiggled chairs before sitting, just to be sure the chair existed. They did not sit quiet. Each and every one of those kids started beating his gums.
