Dog Tags (20 page)

“That's a hell of a thing to say about a man.” The letter was in my waistband, between my shorts and my belly.

“Anyway,” Kinsella said, “you're confined to quarters. We'll try to square you outside, but stay put.”

It was from Carol. Often I could not remember her face. Joseph was well. Joseph would be a year old. “What about doctoring?”

“Forget it.”

“If they send for me?”

“You have to go. But you won't doctor.”

“Shucks,” I said, “that's what I signed on for.”

“You signed on to fight for your country.”

“I didn't sign on. I was drafted. To doctor.”

“To doctor your own.”

My own. “A doctor's like a virgin. He is or he isn't.”

“Sonny boy,” my major said, “you just lost your cherry.”

I followed orders and remained in the hut. Ou-yang sent for me and I explained that he had his own doctor now, and more coming, as he had told me, and that it was not seemly of me to neglect my own patients for consultations with the, ah, adversary. He discussed humanity. Doctor Li clucked and mentioned my duty to mankind. “Yessir,” I said. Ou-yang informed me coldly that I must no longer use the library. I must understand that there were difficulties with the mail, both incoming and outgoing. I was marched back to my hut. “Ewald's cut another record,” Kinsella said. “I suppose it was him informed.”

“That may be my fault too,” I said, and when pressed could not explain.

Carol loved me. I read her letter many times a day over the next two months. In the morning I took light exercise. I ate properly. I talked little. It was a time of unflagging stupor. The Chinese disliked me and the prisoners despised me. My roommates were cordial but remote. Often I lay awake at night. Often I remembered Carol's body, but not with my own, with my mind only. Doubtless a failure of the imagination, emotion disconnected in this infinite tranquility. I meditated various young ladies, including Ho Wenchen and finally, dismally, Nan. I wondered if I would ever love anyone again. Love. I pondered the eating of rats. I pondered war and decided that men liked it. Statistically. In a large population the number of men who love to kill is sufficient to form a modern army. War was here to stay. If men would die sooner than eat rats, then surely they would die in droves, singing vigorously, for any higher reason; would die willingly, proudly. Proud to die! Unspeakable. I was too inanimate for disgust and simply contemplated the obscenity: men were proud to die. And how much prouder to kill!

And what was I proud of? Once upon a time, making love. Once upon a time, healing. Shameful admission: I had been proud to be what I was. Schmuck! No despair? Four walls, silence, Benny the nothing. I was not angry and not sorry for myself. I was in limbo and it seemed not unnatural. Normal. A room. Food. Warmth. Doubtless I would be expelled in time, into a new and strange world.

Ewald was now a librarian, they said, living it up in a prog hut. Trezevant and Cuttis were well; so were Mulberg and Collins. Auld lang syne. Class of 1950.

In June I sat outside and was tanned.

We went swimming in the Yalu. My fellow officers were a guard of honor. Solidarity. Benny is one of us. Kinsella swam, dived, spouted spray. They laughed and ducked one another. They returned to the hut much cheered. In the bay our navy patrolled. Later I sorted the dead men's dog tags, a form of higher crossword puzzle. Many races, religions, blood types. I read Carol's letter. Jacob was well.

One day in the middle of July I was squatting, hunkered down like an Oriental peasant or a toad, except that with my face to the sun I was wondering how it was to be a turtle. I remember that: it would be good to be a turtle, I thought. I had seen them, brown and orange and green, lying on rocks in the sun, and it was a good life, free of malice. My eyes were shut against the hot yellow light. I was waiting for a princess to kiss me. I heard men shouting, playing a game perhaps, and I opened my eyes a slit to look at them. We were at the crest of a slope and I could see many huts, and men were piling out of the huts and congregating where they could, a mass of agitated blue beetles, and the shouting rose and fell against a wash of voices, like a crowd at a game, so I knew that the world had changed.

I stood up. My fellow officers came to stand beside me. We looked at one another and were puzzled. And then a squad of Chinese marched toward us, along the wire, and Ou-yang was in the midst of them, striding importantly like a prince among courtiers. They came to our hut, and Kinsella stepped forward. The squad halted, and Ou-yang pushed between two of them and stood facing Kinsella. All over the camp men were buzzing and hollering. I decided we had bombed Peking.

Ou-yang said, “Major Kinsella.”

“Colonel,” Kinsella said.

“I am happy to inform you, officially,” Ou-yang said, “that this week, along the thirty-eighth parallel, there was a meeting of Chinese, Koreans and Americans, at which negotiations began for a truce.”

We were stunned. Shocked speechless and groping. His words had a meaning but we could not grasp it. The sun was intolerably bright.

“You may join your men,” Ou-yang said.

After a breathless moment Kinsella said, “Thank you,” whispering, “thank you,” and stepped around Ou-yang, floated, tiptoed around the squad, and flew down the hill in long, ecstatic, gliding strides, and the others flew leaping after him. I stood where I was, and Ou-yang and I locked eyes, a peculiar exchange, smoldering, outlandish, monstrous, homosexual, secret understandings. Causeless and bizarre: it smote me. Again across centuries and continents. Linked, wedded, a common ancestor: ponies, flocks, stars; the passionate doomed unity of human blood.

I heard my name shouted. “Benny!” Kinsella called. “God damn it, come on. Come home, Benny, all is forgiven,” and he stared into the sun and laughed, and the others whooped and yodeled, and I ran to catch up, screaming and yipping, jumping and skipping, and then we were all hugging each other, all races, religions and blood types.

We waited two years.

14

Defeated, Cornelius chubbied and drooped; tilted far back in a swivel chair, he revealed the angles and swells of mortality, also an incipient pot. “At least we're on the way home. Otherwise it's a bust.”

“Not for us to decide,” Fontaine said briskly. “Be a year before we know anything.”

The black lieutenant said, “You're going to jug some of these men because of what I say. What we say.”

“You may jug me,” Benny said. “I gather there's been talk.”

“I doubt that,” Parsons said. “Couple of fellows said you ought to have a medal.”

“Good God, who was that?”

The lanky corporal—Benny thought of him now as the cowboy—widened his eyes in mock homage.

“Can't tell you that,” Parsons said comfortably. “Be nice, a medal, wouldn't it. I mean because you come from a long line of military folk.”

Benny laughed outright. He enjoyed the laugh and went on laughing for some moments, younger every second, goofy, warm and alive, suddenly ardent. There was possibly something to be said for mankind; the species was by now a stale joke but perhaps better than no joke at all. He sat voluptuously and allowed his body, his reprieved flesh, to mediate between past and future. He sighed aloud. “Some of the starch is washing away.”

“That's how I feel,” the older corporal said, almost resentfully.

“Let yourself go,” Gabol said. “Don't fight it.”

All these gleaming chairs and table-legs, minutely tooled portholes, sockets, speakers, switches, lamps and panels! A palace. And some day soon Benny would drive a car, clamber aboard an airplane. Practice the medicine he knew and loved. With instruments! with thermometers! with nurses! A fleeting vision, bobbling breasts, pink tones. A brief spasm shook him. “You must have quite a file on us,” he said. “Between the army and the FBI.”

“We have,” Parsons said. “You were exposed to a heavy dose of commie propaganda.”

“Commie,” the black lieutenant said. “Tell me why I hate that word.”

“We were also exposed to a heavy dose of life on the ragged edge,” the cowboy said. “What you folks need is a file on everybody who was
never
in prison.”

“Who never had to just hang on,” the smallish cook said.

“All you nice clean antiseptic fellows,” Benny said, “unreliable and unpredictable.”

“Right on up to the President,” someone muttered.

“That's the real bitch, isn't it,” Cornelius said. “You men are proud of yourselves. You, Beer, the way you fought to keep that chop, that souvenir.”

“No. That's not the way to put it.” Or was it? Possibly. Had he been purified? Deprivations, saint in the desert, fasts; had his soul been rendered translucent and supple, open to blood truths? “Maybe.” What language did they speak, these creatures of comfort? “Because of what he said,” and Benny gestured, “the ragged edge, real life. I hated it,” he burst out fervently, almost rapturously, “hated it, but I can't help a … a kind of … acid gratitude. It was real, it was real, it was realer than this boat or you people or the war itself. I'm only sorry we never ate rats.”

“Listen,” the cowboy told Cornelius, “you never lived that way.” He jammed a cigarette into the corner of his mouth and struck a wooden match with a sharp sweep of his right arm, and Benny watched the cigarette tremble, the flame shimmy, and was not surprised at the hoarse, urgent tone: “It's not like waiting for a bullet—bang, you're dead. It's not even living each day thinking it may be the last, like an old man afraid to go to bed. It's the feeling that the rest of your life—no, the rest of time,
forever
—is going to be like this.”

“It's a different kind of day,” the lieutenant said, “a different kind of hours.”

“The gut goes tight,” Benny said. “The fat melts off and every little choice is like walking a steel wire.”

“Right,” the cowboy said. “What you do is what you are.”

“No disguises and no pretties,” the lieutenant said.

Gabol scribbled.

“All right, you were surviving,” Cornelius said. “The whole war was for survival, your country's survival.”

“Country!” Benny grew hot with outrage; it was a reflex, and he would do better to control it. “Never mind,” he said. “I earned food and medicine by fraternizing. Did I betray my country?”

“No,” Cornelius said firmly. “You're a special case.”

“Ah yes. Yes. I am. Was. Will be. Lucky, different. Okay. I knew that. Oh hell,” he almost hollered, “I knew I'd survive too. Way down deep I knew it.”

“Me too,” the cowboy said. “Even when I told 'em to go shove it I wasn't worried.”

Murmurs and nods. Heroes all. Yet some in this room had been weak, had been human, had acquiesced.

“And why,” Cornelius asked patiently, “did you say no?”

They were silent.

“And why did some say yes?”

They were silent.

“Then I'll try it,” Cornelius said. “You won't like this: it was because they were spoiled. They were never properly disciplined. Never an army. Hence misconduct.”

A tattered cheer rose, and a crackle of applause; Cornelius was stunned. Gabol blinked, and left off writing.

“You mean you agree?” Cornelius was all but petulant.

“We do indeed,” the lieutenant said, and the others murmured with him. “You're
learning
,” the lieutenant said.

“Because they set their own survival above the survival of their country,” Cornelius went on.

A groan rose, hisses and boos. Cornelius grimaced.

“Now you sound like a newsreel,” Benny said. He contemplated these officers, inquisitors, tanned, firm flesh, toothpaste, liberty.

“But you just agreed with me,” Cornelius complained.

“Those napalm photos. Were they real?”

After a moment Gabol said, “You know they were.”

“That's war,” Cornelius said. “It's not an excuse for misconduct.”

“You're insane,” Benny said soberly. “If we could do that, why weren't we taught to eat rats? To tear out a Chinese jugular with our teeth? Survival? Good God, no!”

“Listen,” the cowboy said, “these kids were brought up to think they could be President some day. Their mommy told them.”

“Their god damn mommy in curlers,” Benny said, and winced in shame; insane, he too, he too, “hugging them and kissing them and making daddy pretty miserable. Her little boy was a winner, and he was going to be just like her. Wholesome and all.”

“Christ sake,” the black lieutenant said, “they started
out
better than everybody else. And they get sent out here to kill gooks, animals, wogs—shit, it was like hunting—and then surprise! we took a little beating. Listen, any man in the world fights like hell on his own turf, but you want to send men ten thousand miles to fight gooks on gook street, you better send killers.”

“What you did,” Benny said, “was you told them all men are created equal, and if we have to we can burn gook babies to prove it.”

“Christ,” the cowboy said, “some of those kids never been laid. All they know is the flag and mouthwash and necking after the god damn prom. They're not so good at burning people alive in the name of democracy and justice.”

“Easy on the profanity there,” the lieutenant said, and a few laughed.

“Then they're caught,” Benny said, “and flung into prison, and they whimper some and where the hell is mommy? And the mail and the weenies? And why shouldn't they cut a record if it means the kind of food and privileges superior beings are entitled to? And if survival's the goal, why shouldn't they kill their own men to survive?”

“Personal survival isn't a soldier's goal,” Cornelius said.

“I never heard such bullshit,” Benny said, “and you a major. Listen, the other guy's survival doesn't even matter at
home
. Up the ladder, right? Look out for number one, right? Business is business, right?”