“Could be. Or maybe shell shock or something. Better ask again.”
The major sucked his dentures halfway out of his mouth, frowned, then let the teeth slide back into place. “Can’t hurt nothin’. Okay, soldier, one more time—where’d you find that name of yours?”
“Inherited it, sir. From my father.”
“You crappin’ me?”
“No, sir.”
“And just where the hell’d he come up with it … your ol’ man?”
“I guess from his father, sir. It came down the line, sort of.” Paul Berlin hesitated. It was hard to tell if the man was serious.
“You a Jewboy, soldier?”
“No, sir.”
“A Kraut! Berlin … by jiminy, that’s a Jerry name if I ever heard one!”
“I’m mostly Dutch.”
“The hell, you say.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Balls!”
“Sir, it’s not—”
“Where’s Berlin?”
“Sir?”
The major leaned forward, planting his elbows carefully on the table. He looked deadly serious. “I asked where Berlin is. You heard of fuckin Berlin, didn’t you? Like in East Berlin, West Berlin?”
“Sure, sir. It’s in Germany.”
“Which one?”
“Which what, sir?”
The major moaned and leaned back. Beside him, indifferent to it all, the captain in tiger fatigues unwrapped a thin cigar and lit it with a kitchen match. Red acne covered his face like the measles. He winked quickly—maybe it wasn’t even a wink—then gazed hard at a sheaf of papers. The third officer sat silently. He hadn’t moved since the interview began.
“Look here,” the major said. “I don’t know if you’re dumb or just stupid, but by God I aim to find out.” He removed his sunglasses. Surprisingly his eyes were almost jolly. “You’re up for Spec Four, that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You want it? The promotion?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Lots of responsibility.”
Paul Berlin smiled. He couldn’t help it.
“So we can’t have shitheads leadin’ men, can we? Takes some brains. You got brains, Berlin?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You know what a condom is?”
Paul Berlin nodded.
“A condom,” the major intoned solemnly, “is a skullcap for us swingin’ dicks. Am I right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And to lead men you got to be a swingin’ fuckin dick.”
“Right, sir.”
“And is that you? You a swingin’ dick, Berlin?”
“Yes, sir!”
“You got guts?”
“Yes, sir. I—”
“You ’fraid of gettin’ zapped?”
“No, sir.”
“Sheeet.” The major grinned as if having scored an important victory. He used the tip of his pencil to pick a speck of food from between his teeth. “Dumb! Anybody not scared of gettin’ his ass zapped is a dummy. You know what a dummy is?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Spell it.”
Paul Berlin spelled it.
The major rapped his pencil against the table, then glanced at his wristwatch. The captain in tiger fatigues was smoking with his eyes closed; the third officer, still silent, stared blankly ahead, arms folded tight against his chest.
“Okay,” said the major, “we got a few standard-type questions for you. Just answer ‘em truthfully, no bullshit. You don’t know the answers, say so. One thing I can’t stand is wishy-washy crap. Ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
Pulling out a piece of yellow paper, the major put his pencil down and read slowly.
“How many stars we got in the flag?”
“Fifty,” said Paul Berlin.
“How many stripes?”
“Thirteen.”
“What’s the muzzle velocity of a standard AR-15?”
“Two thousand feet a second.”
“Who’s Secretary of the Army?”
“Stanley Resor.”
“Why we fightin’ this war?”
“Sir?”
“I say, why we fightin’ this fuckin-ass war?”
“I don’t—”
“To win it,” said the third, silent officer. He did not move. His arms remained flat across his chest, his eyes blank. “We fight this war to win it, that’s why.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Again,” the major said. “Why we fightin’ this war?”
“To win it, sir.”
“You sure of that?”
“Positive, sir.” His arms were hot. He tried to hold his chin level.
“Tell it loud, trooper: Why we fightin’ this war?”
“To win it.”
“Yeah, but I mean why?”
“Just to win it,” Paul Berlin said softly. “That’s all. To win it.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“Yes, sir. A fact.”
The third officer made a soft, humming sound of satisfaction. The major grinned at the captain in tiger fatigues.
“All right,” said the major. His eyes twinkled. “Maybe you aren’t so dumb as you let on. Maybe. We got one last question. This here’s a cultural-type matter … listen up close. What effect would the death of Ho Chi Minh have on the population of North Vietnam?”
“Sir?”
Reading slowly from his paper, the major repeated it. “What effect would the death of Ho Chi Minh have on the population of North Vietnam?”
Paul Berlin let his chin fall. He smiled. He knew he’d won the promotion.
“Reduce it by one, sir.”
In Quang Ngai they did not speak of politics. It wasn’t taboo, or bad luck, it just wasn’t talked about. Even when the Peace Talks bogged down in endless bickering over the shape and size of the bargaining table, the men in Alpha Company took it as another bad joke—silly and sad—and there was no serious discussion about it, no sustained outrage. Diplomacy and morality were beyond them. Hardly anyone cared. Not even Doc Peret, who loved a good debate. Not even Jim Pederson, who believed in virtue. This dim-sighted attitude enraged Frenchie Tucker. “My God,” he’d sometimes moan in exasperation, speaking to Paul Berlin but aiming at everyone, “it’s your ass they’re negotiating. Your ass, my ass … Do we live or die? And you blockheads don’t even talk about it. Not even a lousy opinion! I mean, Christ, doesn’t it piss you off, all this Peace Talk crap? Round tables, square tables! And here we sit, suckin’ air while those mealy-mouthed sons of bitches can’t even figure out what kind of table they’re gonna sit at. Jesus!” But Frenchie’s rage never caught on. Sometimes there were jokes, cynical and weary, but there was no serious discussion. No beliefs. They fought the war, but no one took sides.
They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory. No sense of order or momentum. No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win and hold for the duration. They did not have targets. They did not have a cause. They did not know if it was a war of ideology or economics or hegemony or spite. On a given day, they did not know where they were in Quang Ngai, or how being there might influence larger outcomes. They did not know the names of most villages. They did not know which villages were critical. They did not know strategies. They did not know the terms of the war, its architecture, the rules of fair play. When they took prisoners, which was rare, they did not know the questions to ask, whether to release a suspect or beat on him. They did not know how to feel. Whether, when seeing a dead Vietnamese, to be happy or sad or relieved; whether, in times of quiet, to be apprehensive or content; whether to engage the enemy or elude him. They did not know how to feel when they saw villages burning. Revenge? Loss? Peace of mind or anguish? They did not know.
They knew the old myths about Quang Ngai—tales passed down from old-timer to newcomer—but they did not know which stories to believe. Magic, mystery, ghosts and incense, whispers in the dark, strange tongues and strange smells, uncertainties never articulated in war stories, emotion squandered on ignorance. They did not know good from evil.
Forty
By a Stretch of the Imagination
It would not have ended that way: cops and customs agents, defeat, arrested like wetbacks at the wharves of Western Civilization, captured within mindshot of the lighted Propylaea and Parthenon, nothing fulfilled, no answers, the whole expedition throttled just as it approached the promise of a rightful end. It wouldn’t have happened that way. And it didn’t. Again—back for an instant in his observation tower by the sea—again, this wasn’t a madman’s fantasy. Paul Berlin was awake and fully sane. Not a dream, he thought, nothing demented or unconscious or fanatic about it. He touched his left wrist. The pulse was firm. His brain tingled, his vision was twenty-twenty. Nothing nutty, nothing unusual. Leaning against the wall of sandbags, his back to the South China Sea, he was in full command of his faculties. He was speculating. Figuring the odds. Was this so crazy? Didn’t everyone do it, one way or another, more or less? The pastime of whole armies—trench speculation, battlefield dreams, men figuring how, if suddenly free, they would deploy the rest of their lives. Everyone did it. Imagining how to spend freedom: squander it, invest it, use it like Monopoly money. Even Doc Peret admitted to daydreams like that. Even Eddie Lazzutti liked to talk about how he’d use a million dollars if it came to him. After the war … that was how it always started. After the war: buy a car, travel, visit Disneyland, screw everything in sight, spend a year in the woods, never worry about trivial stuff, enjoy life, live. What if? What then? That was all it was. It was speculation. A way of playing with the possibilities, figuring out step by step how it might be done.
So, no. No, it would not have ended at Piraeus. It didn’t. They were not arrested. Coming down the gangplank, weary and expecting the worst, they filed through platoons of police and customs agents, eyes down, breath held, passing like magic through the main loading yard, through a gateway guarded by two cops who only nodded and waved them by, through a sea-smelling corridor that emptied at last into a dark street.
“So easy,” Sarkin Aung Wan murmured. She hooked the lieutenant’s arm and helped him toward a waiting taxi. “Like blinking, so easy. Like breathing.”
The old man glanced behind him as if expecting pursuit. His uniform had the stale smell of sickness in it, an odor that couldn’t be washed away. He walked with a slight limp. Eddie and Doc and Oscar followed, then Paul Berlin. Easy, he thought. No passports, no money, hunted down like common crooks, runaways. But, still, it was easy. His imagination, keen as a razor’s edge, cut through the ordinary obstacles. He remembered what Cacciato had said on the morning he’d left the war: Make it to Athens and the rest is easy.
They spent two days there, or maybe a week. They rested, visited the Acropolis, made the usual inquiries about Cacciato. At first they hoped Stink might appear, wet and grinning and chastened, but as time passed so did their expectations. “He’ll be here,” Oscar kept saying. “The dude’s got staying power, he’ll make it.” But there was nothing. Each day Doc checked the English newspapers for notices of drowning victims: Oscar and Eddie scoured the wharves and seedy back streets behind the Plaka, even went through a file of grisly photographs at the police morgue. But nothing. So with great misgivings the lieutenant decided there was no choice but to move on. “I don’t like it either,” he said, ignoring Oscar’s steady stare. “But look, we gave it our best, didn’t we? Maybe—you know—maybe he’ll show up along the way. Maybe he’s waiting for us up the road.”
They boarded a northbound bus for Zagreb.
“Foolishness,” Oscar said, watching the city recede. “That’s what I’m gonna miss. Stinko, the dude had loads of foolishness. No foolishness, no fun. No purchase on life’s slippery runway.”
“Sure.”
“Dig my meaning?”
“Dig,” Doc said. “Consider it dug.”
In late afternoon they reached the border. The bus stopped outside a small wooden hut where six soldiers sat playing cards. The driver honked twice but none of the soldiers looked up. On the Yugoslav side it was the same smooth crossing, two honks and a wave, then the bus was moving fast again along the road to Zagreb.
Paul Berlin looked out on the dry, spare landscape. He could see mountains to the west, a long purply range that seemed endless. Behind the mountains was the sun. It was all so effortless. A matter of a few beginning steps, or a few thousand, and once started, it was as easy as sleep. Drowsy, listening to the sound of the tires on the road, Paul Berlin wondered why soldiers didn’t desert by the millions.
They spent the night in Zagreb. In the morning they hiked out to a tar highway and hitched a ride north with a girl from California. It was a battered VW van that smelled of grease and orange peels. The girl was a revolutionary. Between Zagreb and the Austrian frontier she lectured Doc on the meaning of doom: assassinations, cities on fire, students swarming through Washington, universities under siege.
“It’s coming down,” she said. “It’s happening.”
Doc nodded. He lay back in a pile of blankets at the rear of the van. Slyly, still nodding, he winked at Paul Berlin.
Outside, tiny white flowers grew on the melting mountainsides.
“The thing I can’t get over,” the girl said, “is that you dudes actually were there. I mean, like, you saw evil firsthand. Saw it and smelled it. The evil. Children getting toasted, the orphans, atrocities. And you had the guts to walk away. That’s courage.”
“Well, it wasn’t—”
“And the guilt.” The girl wagged her head sadly. “God, the guilt must be awful.”
“Guilt?” Oscar said.
“It must hurt something fierce.”
Oscar looked at Eddie. “You got guilt, man?”
“All over,” Eddie said, and smiled broadly.
The girl ignored him. From the shoulders up, she was all motion, her eyes constantly flickering from the road to the mirror and back again. She wore a red bandanna around her hair.
“Anyhow,” she said, “I really admire you dudes. I do. There’s so darned much rhetoric, hawks and doves, specialists and generalists—it drives you nuts. But you guys did something. You saw evil and you walked away.”
“Not quite,” Oscar said.
“No?”
“We nothin’ but soldiers on the march.”
The girl made a loud blowing sound through her teeth. “Cut it out. Look, I’m simpatico. We’re brothers and sisters, right? I understand how it is.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure, man. I’m a dropout myself. Two years at San Diego State, all the bullshit in the world. Couldn’t hack it. So, bang, I quit. Sometimes you’ve just got to separate yourself off from evil.”
Oscar stared at her. “You say it’s same-same? Nam and fucking San Diego State?”
“Not exactly, maybe. But I can empathize. That’s all, I can tell what it must be like. When you see evil you have to get away from it, right?”
“Evil?” Oscar tapped Doc’s shoulder. “You ever see evil in Nam?”
“What’s evil?” Doc said.
The girl smiled indulgently. They were passing through a small moated village full of spires and steeples. The van shimmied on the brick streets. When they were back in the forest, Oscar removed Cacciato’s rifle from its wrapping and began cleaning it.
“So all I’m saying,” the girl continued, “is I’m behind you dudes all the way. You’ve got friends. All over the world, everywhere, there are people who’ll be there to help. Sympathetic friends.”
“No kidding?”
“Sure. These people can plug you into anything you need. Money, jobs, housing. Tickets to Sweden. Contacts. I mean, it’s a whole underground network set up for guys like you. Resisters, des
erters. Guys with the guts to say no.”
Oscar let the rifle bolt fall.
“Stop,” he said.
“And isn’t that what friends are for? To help out when—”
Pausing, the girl glanced into the mirror. Oscar had the rifle against her ear. She pulled off onto the shoulder, stopped the van, and sat still while Oscar moved to the front seat.
She smiled at him. “Look, rape isn’t necessary. I mean, hey, I really dig sex. Really. We can rig up a curtain or something.”
“Out,” Oscar said.
The girl kept smiling. She wore blue jeans and a sweater and a khaki jacket. “Outside?” she said.
“You got it.”
“It’d be a lot more comfortable in back.”
“Out.”
Shrugging, glancing again into the mirror, the girl opened the door and stepped out. She watched while Oscar dumped out her suitcase and sleeping bag. She never stopped smiling.
Eddie drove, Oscar rode shotgun.
“You know,” Doc said wistfully, “sometimes I do feel a little guilt.”
It was springtime. The forests were wet. They saw lilacs and budding trees, melting snow high on the mountains, scrubbed villages, wide-open skies.
Through Graz and Linz, then northwest toward Passau, the Danube, through the dark, through Regensburg and midnight Nürnberg. It was easy.
In Fulda the van broke down. They left it behind, marched two miles to the railroad depot and boarded the next train west.
There was acceleration now. The nightlong rumbling of the train, crowded cars, the wind behind them.
Fast through the German heartland—Giessen, Herborn, Limburg—and at each stop Paul Berlin dashed for a window to watch as the conductor waved his lantern. There were streetlights in the towns and steeples over the churches and neon-lighted ads for Coke and Bromo-Seltzer. The end was coming. He could feel it. Already he anticipated the textures of things familiar: decency, cleanliness, high literacy and low mortality, the pursuit of learning in heated schools, science, art, industry bearing fruit through smokestacks. Wasn’t this the purpose? The goal? Some vision of virtue? Weren’t these the valued things? Wasn’t freedom worth pursuing? If civilization had meaning, weren’t these the reasons? Hadn’t wars been fought for these very promises? Even in Vietnam—wasn’t the intent to restrain forces of incivility? The intent. Wasn’t it to impede tyranny, aggression, repression? To promote some vision of goodness? Oh, something had gone terribly wrong. But the aims, the purposes, the ends—weren’t these fully virtuous and proper? Wasn’t self-determination a proper aim of civilized man? Wasn’t political freedom a part of justice? Wasn’t military aggression, unrestrained, a threat to civilization and order? Oh, yes—something had gone wrong. Facts, circumstances, understanding. But had the error been wrong intention, wrong purpose?