Once an Eagle

  Those had been the voices, the names that had set his blood to dancing, that had molded him and thrust him off along his own long, tortuous, troubled road.

  Destiny …

  He rubbed his jaw, watching these younger, firmer faces, not listening. The world had changed: the world he had grown up in. He remembered his father sitting at the kitchen table, his face dark and block-like just outside the soft flood of light from the kerosene lamp, saying, “No, I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do anything like that.” That was because a man named Fryeburg had come by to return some tools he couldn’t keep paying for because he’d lost his crop of winter wheat. That had been when Carl Damon had owned the hardware store. He needed the money, but he knew the man needed the tools more. After half an hour and two steins of beer he’d been able to talk Fryeburg out of it and sent him home. And then when his father was sick, legless and wasting away, Fryeburg, who had moved out to Keith County near Ogallala, drove all the way to Walt Whitman in a buckboard in bitter weather, bringing a side of beef and two great hams. And other neighbors had come around with eggs and vegetables, and sat and talked softly in the overheated kitchen. It was right. It was the straight thing to do …

  “You know what your grandfather did once?” he broke in on Joey, who was talking about the night assault across the Roer River. Their faces turned toward him, startled, deferential. “Some old friends, there were four of them, I think, came to him and asked him to invest some money for them, and he did. And later the company folded—it was one of those Great Lakes mining ventures, I believe—and they lost all their investment. And your grandfather insisted on paying for it. To the nickel. It strapped him for years, nearly broke him; but he did it.”

  “Yes, I remember something about that,” Krisler answered. “Dad said they’d have been pretty well fixed if Grampa hadn’t decided to pay them all off like that. He was an impulsive man, Grampa.”

  “But it was a personal obligation, Joey …” He stopped; he had spoken with more heat than he’d meant to. Their faces were grave, a bit constrained; they watched him levelly. They thought he was a tiresome old fool who had to be humored. Did they? Well, Rank Hath Its Pomposities, as Ben had used to say. Or should it read: Paralysis?

  “I know, Chief, but it seems to me his first obligation should have been to his own family. He wasn’t legally obligated to reimburse them—they knew the chance they were taking.”

  “You miss the point.” He felt nettled and professorial. “You weren’t in danger of starving. Don’t you see?—he saw it as a matter of responsibility, a point of honor … ”

  “I’ll tell you what I mean,” he went on. It suddenly seemed like a very important argument. “When we were driving to Erie in ’29—that was right after your Dad and I had completed the Company Officers’ Course at Benning—I stopped to get gas at a little town outside of Cincinnati. Sharonville, its name was. The owner said my left rear was soft, and offered to check it. I’d had a lot of tire trouble that day, and I thought he was making something out of nothing, maybe trying for a little extra work for himself, and I said it didn’t matter, let it go. And he told me he’d take it off and check it, and if he didn’t find a nail he’d put it back without charge. I said okay to that; and he found the nail and patched the tire … Now who does anything like that nowadays?”

  “People still do things like that, General,” Forbes said. “Or they want to.”

  “Maybe they want to …”

  “But there isn’t time for that kind of thing anymore. The personal touch—”

  “There’s always time. It’s the will that’s lacking. If there isn’t time for the personal touch, as you call it, we might as well give up and go home …” He subsided again, folded his hands. The light was copper now, a burnished copper on the walls, the thatched huts just beyond the squalid midway. The younger officers were quiet, a kind of deference. Responsibility was what it was. Yes, and more than that—pride. Pride in the thing itself, a sober reverence for intrinsic truth, for a task secretly met and mastered. How did those great lines of Yeats go? Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult. Magnificent. They thought he was big and easy: a sentimental old man. Maybe he was. Sorry about that, the GIs said now, in flat, sardonic intonation, not even bothering to smile; sorry about that, baby. In the Pacific they had said: Screw you, Jack, I got mine!—grinning like cats, half-meaning it. Now they seemed to mean it entirely … And who, knowing what they were asked to do, could take it on himself to blame them?

  “He’s not coming, General.” Joey had risen and was standing at a sort of easy attention, looking down at him; Joey always observed the military proprieties when there were other soldiers around. “With your permission, sir, I think we ought to go back to the compound. The security is none too great around here, and it’s getting late.”

  He studied Joey for a few seconds: the square, sturdy, snub-nosed face with its scar of slick, ruddy flesh that ran like a gross, misplaced lip from his nostril upward across his cheek into his hair; the mild brown eyes that measured everything with a slow, easy competence. Joey was a professional, more of a soldier than he’d ever been. Silver star, three bronze stars, Legion of Merit, DSM. Never once in trouble: no courts-martial, excellent efficiency reports, a nice clean 201 file. A good soldier. He would always be easy to get along with, he would never step out of line.

  “Keep your shirt on, Joey,” he said. “He’d have notified us before this if he’d been detained for any length of time. Bob, would you go over and check in with the message center, see if there’s anything? And take Gee with you.”

  “Right with it, General.”

  He watched Forbes and Giandoli move off down the street—beset immediately by a cluster of girls in bright silk slacks or skirts and blouses; their hands reached out like petals in the deepening bronze light. The soldiers shook their heads, pushing on through them—Gee a bit reluctantly, with a funny little embarrassed wave of his hand. Damon sighed: he felt defeated, thwarted and cast aside. It wasn’t plane trouble; Massengale had waylaid the Undersecretary or there had been a last-minute change of plans. They were going to relieve him, perhaps. Yes, that was most likely; because of the conference. But he was the man Hoanh-Trac wanted to work with …

  He encountered Joey Krisler’s eyes: the two men looked at each other for a short, silent moment.

  “I know what you mean,” Joey said, as though no time or talk had intervened. “But there isn’t a place for that kind of thing, anymore. Maybe when you and Dad were young, sure. But now there’s too many people, too much is going on. Everything’s become too complicated. That guy in Sharonville is probably working in a GM garage in Cincy, doing nothing but carburetor overhaul. The corporations are running it all now. And the PR people.”

  “There was a public relations man on Oom Paul Thiemann’s staff,” Damon said. “Gilfoyle. How your Dad hated him! He got up once after Wokai and gave one of those mealy-mouthed speeches on casualty figures, and Ben asked him if he was planning to declare a dividend.”

  Joey nodded. “Typical. The trouble with Dad was he let his heart ride his head.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Oh, nobody wants to be thought of as a walking computer. But he ran on his emotions—he was always fighting everybody. You know that. Christ, what a chip he carried! He was his own worst enemy.”

  “And everyone else’s best friend.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Except the people that counted—the ones who wrote up his fitness reports. Boy, you should have seen the reaction when I used to report in at a new post. ‘Krisler? Paprika Ben’s boy? Son, you want to walk mighty careful around here.’ And then the stories. I guess they expected me to punch the adjutant in the nose and toss a chair through the picture window at the club. Or cop a feel with the CO’s wife.”

  “Benjy would never have stopped with a feel.”

  Joey laughed. “I know. Don’t I know … Oh, he made a fine record—of its kind; only I’ve always h
ad to live it down, Sam. Dad made a religion of fighting City Hall. Which was great therapy for him, but rough enough on the rest of us. Hell, if it hadn’t been for you he’d have wound up in Leavenworth stockade.”

  “I never bailed him out of a thing,” Sam said.

  “That isn’t the way Mother tells it. Sure, when I was a kid I thought it was great, his telling some stuffed-shirt instructor where to get off. But where did it get him? I mean all the romantic malarkey aside. A 201 file that must have read like some GCM findings, and the longest lieutenancy since Homer. The only reason he got his chance to go out to Papua with you was because they were desperate to get rid of him down at Tarleton—and nobody else wanted any part of New Guinea at that stage of the game.”

  “That’s for sure,” Damon murmured.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I think he was one hell of a combat leader. But that isn’t everything—there’s a lot more to being a first-rate officer than that.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Now you take Courtney Massengale. I know you don’t like him, and Dad hated his very guts because of some row he got into with him at Garfield when he was tight. I was up at Baguio in school and I never got the full story on that, though Mom was awfully mad at him for a while. But that’s neither here nor there. Massengale’s a great military leader in my book. Not just with troops but in the full sense of the word. I know: they say he’s cold as a witch’s tit in December and he’s used political influence, all that. Who wouldn’t, in his shoes? That argument’s always struck me as sour grapes, tell you the truth. It’s the jokers without any connections who are always hollering foul. If I had an uncle in the United States Senate, I’m here to tell you I’d bend his ear till it dropped off.” He scrubbed his scalp once, briskly. “The point is, Massengale isn’t guilty of any waste motion: he never lets sentiment or personal feelings get in his way. He zeroes in on the primary objective and that’s it. He doesn’t let anything deflect him.”

  “No, he certainly doesn’t.”

  “Well, by God, that’s the way to be. The old hell-for-leather, hell-around, don’t-give-a-damn days are over, as far as I can see. Everything’s complicated now; everybody’s a specialist. And the guy that knows where he’s going and how to get there is the guy that’s going to make himself felt. That’s why Massengale’s effective.”

  “No argument there,” Damon agreed. “Only thing is: is this primary objective of his the best one?”

  “It’s what he wants.”

  “Sure. But is it going to be good for all the rest of us confused, emotional, mixed-up people?” He studied the younger man’s face a moment, leaned forward and said: “Joey: did you ever disobey a direct order?”

  “Only once. At Stoumont. The word was to pull out, drop back to Hamoir; and I couldn’t see it. I’d been running for two days and two nights and I was sick of it—I guess I was afraid if I kept on running anymore I’d never be able to stop.” He stared at the rows of bottles massed behind the bar. “Well, it was more than that, too—I guess I’d better level about it. There was this sunken road up from the river and they had to come single file—I figured if we could only get one of the bastards that’d be all she wrote, because there just wasn’t any place to push it out of the way. It was nature’s perfect roadblock. I knew if they ever got out on those fields behind us nothing would ever stop them.”

  “And you got the lead tank.”

  Joey nodded. “At fifteen yards. I never want to do that again, I can tell you. It was a highly emotional operation: just like the Old Man.”

  “And because you and a couple thousand guys like you indulged in a highly emotional operation, Peiper never made it into Liège.”

  “Yeah, sure, and I got a medal out of it and all that crap. Because it worked. But if it hadn’t, I’d have got court-martialed. Of course if it hadn’t worked I’d be dead anyway, so I guess that doesn’t apply. Well, an extreme situation like that … But I’ll never do it again. What’s the percentage? You only get called on the carpet.

  “A good friend of mine threw away a really promising career a few years ago—he took a pretty strong position in that hassle over arming the Krauts with tactical nuclear weapons. Maybe he was right, too: but what good did it do him? Now he’s selling athletic goods in Long Island City … ” He pushed his short legs out straight and crossed them. “Don’t get me wrong, Sam. I don’t hold for this dumb-blind-automaton stuff; a man ought to think for himself. But I’m not going to step out of line. Hell, I’m no hero, I know that—I’m no tactical genius like you, and I’m not a hotshot fireball like Dad, either; I’m just an average character who does what he’s told and keeps his nose clean. And that isn’t always easy …”

  No, it wasn’t always easy. What was it Raebyrne had said, that long-ago rainy afternoon in Lorraine? “But supposing the hoosier giving the commands is giving the wrong ones?” The Colonel’s words about Massengale had surprised him. He knew the kind of man Joey was, the cast and scope of his mind, from half a hundred casual conversations around campfires and in drifting rowboats; but hearing them now, at this moment, had shaken him subtly, added to his sense of depression.

  “Joey,” he said slowly, “if this mission should run into any kind of trouble—if anything should happen to me …” He paused; his senior aide was looking at him in frank surprise. Generals didn’t talk this way—at least successful ones didn’t. He thought old Sad Sam had gone dotty: senile. Well, maybe he was. Maybe after slogging the length and breadth of two world wars and the vagaries of the peacetime Army, he had a right to be …

  He grinned nevertheless, and shook his head. “No, I didn’t mean anything like that. No histrionics. But I may be derricked without much fanfare; rendered hors de combat one way or another.” He tapped the zinc table. “And I want you to go ahead and wind it up. No matter what. There’s a great deal at stake here, Joey. More than you know.” He paused. The Light Colonel was watching him now—attentive, thoughtful, a little wary. He said: “Massengale would like to torpedo this whole mission. In fact he may be doing something along those lines right now.”

  Krisler was looking at him blankly. “Why would he want to do that?”

  “Because he’s after something else. Something very different. Joey, I want you to go ahead with it. Nail it down, get those Chinese out of there. Just as quickly as possible. You can handle it, you’ve talked with Hoanh, you’ve talked with Ch’en’s people. No matter what Massengale decrees.”

  “But Sam, he’s COMMACK …”

  “I know. He’s a lot of things.”

  The younger man frowned. “Gee, I don’t know, Sam. I wouldn’t want to step out of line on a thing like this …”

  Damon paused. “Joey, he’s planning an invasion of China.”

  “China! But I heard him myself once—he said we ought never to—”

  “So did I. Once. But things are different now. That’s what’s in the works.”

  “But—with what units?”

  “That God damned hopeless Chinese rabble—first. Then US forces in support. They’re talking about eight assault divisions, with twelve to follow.”

  “Wow …”

  “Yes. By that time the money will be in the pot, with everyone raising against the opener.”

  Joey scratched his scalp—the sudden, arduous gesture that reminded him so of Ben. But the son’s eyes when he raised his face were constrained and puzzled. “I can’t believe it, Sam. He wouldn’t do a thing like that: he just wouldn’t. It runs counter to everything he’s said … Are you sure, Sam?”

  He saw it then: Joey was straining to accept this, believe this—but he couldn’t. It ran contrary to his practical, credent view of the world; he suspected the source—his father’s old friend and fellow rebel. Damon thought of Congressman Matt Bullen, biting on his cigar, his hands on the big oak desk. “Son, you still got to learn what the world runs on.” Well: he’d learned, all right; he’d learned; but that didn’t make it any more palatable …


  “Joey, I’m going to tell you something.” He took a deep breath and clasped his hands together. He had sworn he would never speak of it again, to anyone. Ever. He hadn’t even told Tommy—not even when she’d pressed him that night.