Honorable Men (19 page)

He tried briefly to put down the elation that was flooding over him. He supposed it was giddy and immature to identify the power of industrial America that had brought to its knees a nation whose principal fault, in the opinion of many, had been simply to have come too late to the imperialist free-for-all, with the triumph of God's army in
Paradise host.
But wasn't it only human? he asked himself impatiently aloud, to the astonishment of the gunner's mate standing beside him. Wasn't it a point that these people had sown death and destruction, torture and mayhem, throughout Southeast Asia, and now were struck down? For one gorgeous, glorious hour at least, could the victor not allow his heart to pound to the thundering chorus of the Dies Irae? Even if he were succumbing to the forces of fantasy, could he not, for that little hour, have the pleasure of identifying himself with the good souls awakening on the terrible Day of Judgment, as shown in the old triptychs and tympanums that his mother had made him look at as a boy, and contemplating smugly the writhings and twistings of the damned? Sanity would come back soon enough.

It came in less than an hour. When the great ship had dropped her hook, he joined Gerry in the officers' mess for lunch. Most of the others were still on deck, and they had an end of a table to themselves. Gerry turned at once to business.

“We've got to see that our gunners get the word about proper behavior on shore. The old man's preparing a bulletin already. Apparently only yesterday four marines on liberty off the
Rochester
got drunk and held up a bank. It was kind of a lark, I suppose, but the admiral is livid. He says it's just the kind of thing that confirms what the Japs have always thought: that we're a nation of gangsters.”

“They should know about that.”

“Not at all. They're the most law-abiding country in the world. They have almost no lawyers, relatively speaking.”

Chip grinned. “Is that your criterion of civilization? What about the prison camps and the death marches?”

“That was what they did
outside
Japan. They've paid for that. That's over.”

“So now we can be the best of friends?”

“I don't know about friends. We can be allies. And we're going to need allies, too, in a reddening world.”

“Can you really turn around that fast, Gerry? When I think of how you went on about the Germans and Japs! I thought you'd be as unforgiving as Clemenceau at Versailles!”

“I'm a military man, Chip. You keep forgetting that.”

“It's precisely what I can never forget.”

“Then you still don't know what a military man is. Well, how could you, with all these reserves around? Let me explain. A military man doesn't identify the enemy with any particular nation. The enemy is a state of mind that develops
in
another nation and has to be extirpated. Once it's extirpated, there's nothing left to hate. Clemenceau, may I remind you, was a civilian.”

“I guess, then, I must learn not to think like a civilian,” Chip said with a sigh. “Particularly as I shall so soon be finding myself one again.”

“I'll send you a card every Christmas, saying, ‘Who's the enemy now? Think!' ”

Chip knew better than to ask Gerry about geisha girls; there were regular officers who had been to Japan before the war who were far better equipped to inform him, and in two days' time he managed to have, all to himself in a rented villa, one of the loveliest and most expensive girls in Sasebo. Her charm, her tact, her beautiful manners and quiet, muscular competence made her a new and enchanting experience. And her demonstrative pleasure at a bauble was the same that she showed if he gave her a diamond; he knew, for he did both. She carried artificiality to an art so high that it seemed even morally superior to naturalness.

Gerry had more to say to him about the nature of their conquered foe on a train journey they took to inspect the ruins of Nagasaki. Chip had tried to organize cultural expeditions in Sasebo for the men of their division—there were some beautiful shrines, a monastery and a palace—but he had had few takers. What the crew wanted to view was Nagasaki, an hour's trip away, which required a pass.

“What does it tell you about our countrymen,” he asked Gerry, “that the only thing they want to see is something that has been totally destroyed?”

“A gaping hole instead of a lovely shrine? What do you expect? Isn't there something quintessentially negative in a culture based on the sale of antidotes to bad breath and body odor?”

“With an occasional breakfast food thrown in,” Chip retorted. “No doubt it's the civilian in us.”

He organized a party of some forty men, obtained the passes and took them to the train. Gerry and he, boarding only a minute before departure, mistook the last car for the more luxurious one reserved for American officers. When the conductor pointed this out, they assured him they were happy where they were and wouldn't bother to move. But the man shook his head emphatically and barked his answer like a drill sergeant.

“No, no! This not officers' car! You go officers' car!”

And he insisted on holding the train until they had taken their seats where they belonged.

“Why does he care so about our being comfortable?” Chip asked.

“He doesn't give a damn about our comfort. He wants to see that we go where we are
told
to go. Orders are orders—for us as well as him. That's why the Japs are going to win this occupation. They accept the fact that they have to obey MacArthur. But what they also see—and what preserves their national dignity—is that we have to obey MacArthur, too. So instead of being drowned in self-pity, like the occupied French, they stick their chests out. Americans and Japs are equally subject to the new Mikado, who just happens to be an American general.”

“You really admire them, don't you? These men who, a month ago, you referred to as little yellow brothers?”

“Ah, but they were enemy then.”

Nagasaki, ell-shaped, had lost the whole of one ell. Because most of the houses had been of wood, the destruction by fire was almost total, and as the rubbish had been assiduously cleaned away, Chip and Gerry drove their jeep almost unimpeded over the vast red-brown wasteland, punctuated here and there by the twisted steel structures of burned factories looking like the skeletons of fallen dirigibles. Stopping before one of these to take photographs, they saw a group of boys staring at them. For the first time in Japan Chip recognized hate in native eyes.

“Could anything justify it?” he asked as they drove on.

“The bomb? How about saving a million American lives?”

Chip felt too bleak to want more of his friend's remorseless realism. He had been about to ask whether the bomb could not have been demonstrated on some less populated area, but then the whole stark horror of it silenced him. They completed their tour almost in silence and then returned to the station.

“I think I know something that I mind more even than the loss of life,” Chip said, ten minutes after the train back had started.

“The life lost wasn't so much more than what was caused by our incendiary bombs,” Gerry muttered. “And nobody gripes about them.”

Chip ignored this. “It's the loss of valor. Valor won't count for anything now. If your enemy can annihilate you, you have to give in to him. Churchill could have talked all day about fighting in the streets and in the fields, but if Hitler had had the bomb, ‘We will never surrender' would have been an idle threat.”

“Well, we'd better make damn sure no one else gets that bomb” was Gerry's only comment.

But Chip, as he pondered his new deduction for the rest of the ride, began to wonder whether there might not be an actual relief in the very core of this new horror. If men could exterminate each other, was it not possible—or at least conceivable—that they would not resort to war? And if they could no longer resort to war against an oppressor, they would have to come to terms with that oppressor. And presumably, in such a case, they would cease to dub him an oppressor. For what would such a dubbing be, after all, but simple bad manners? And without the nomenclature, perhaps some of the quality so denominated would disappear. If right could no longer beat down wrong, might right and wrong, having to live together, fusing perhaps, not become the same thing?

Chip could even speculate that a lifelong burden might be about to fall from his back, like Christian's in Bunyan's tale. It had always been his religion—or his obsession—or his superstition—that the world was made of evil, which had to be endlessly destroyed. Now perhaps it had become true that the process of destruction was futile. If so, was there anything to do but get on with one's life? Surely it was just as well that he would soon be going home.

O
NE'S LIFE
seems to divide itself into chapters of much varying length. In the beginning we need a new one for each school that we attend, sometimes each vacation, certainly each love affair. But then there come periods when whole years, maybe even decades, can be lumped into a single division, when our existence resembles nothing so much as a long western train trip over prairies that stretch uniformly to a constantly receding horizon. Such periods, however, need not be unhappy or even boring. Indeed, they can be the best of one's lifetime.

Such a period for me was the one that began with Chip's return from the war, early in 1946, and ended fifteen years later with our departure from Benedict to New York. During much of this time I experienced a happiness and peace of mind that I had not believed obtainable by a person of my nervous temperament.

Chip, released from the navy, practiced law briefly in New York in the Wall Street firm that represented the Benedict Company. He and Lars Alversen were soon put in charge of the not inconsiderable section of that firm that took care of the company's law business. Chip was afterwards moved to Benedict, where he became his father's principal assistant. In due course Elihu's master plan was implemented, under which Chip became the managing chairman of the company while retaining a more or less nominal partnership in the law firm, and Lars, remaining in New York, was placed in full charge of the company's legal affairs. Chip's father's lifetime ambition was thus achieved; he was able to look forward to a benign old age in which his brilliant son would take over all of his business and civic responsibilities. As evidence of our commitment, Chip and I built a wonderful modern house, all craggy gray brick where it was not all gleaming, view-filled glass, on the level of the residential hill immediately below his parents'.

But the great thing was what happened to Chip's personality. He had returned from the war with what I can only describe as a bursting appetite for peace. Never shall I forget his flushed countenance on the first night he arrived back from the Pacific and took me out to a night club. Never before had he spoken so openly of himself. And, to be truthful, almost never since.

“It's hard to describe what I'm feeling,” he kept telling me, making it less difficult, however, by constant replenishments of whiskey. His drinking that night seemed almost medicinal. He must have wanted to tell me something that would have seemed incredible in sobriety. “It's hard to describe an internal state that doesn't make any sense. And in which I don't intellectually even believe! But all my life I've been dogged with a sense that I was...wicked.”

“But we were taught that in Sunday school. Isn't it original sin?”

“Yes, but mine was somehow worse. Perhaps because I had such a swelled head. I had to be more damned. I couldn't be just like the others. I was Charles Benedict of Benedict! And then, in college, it seemed as if the whole world had suddenly blown apart in a veritable orgy of sin. The Japs started slaughtering everyone in China and Manchuria and down the coast, and the Germans tried to exterminate the Jews. In Russia, Stalin killed peasants by the million, and in Spain ... well, why go on with it? Mankind was damned, and this time there would be no ark. But then, Alida ... well, laugh at me if you want....”

“I'm not laughing at you, dearest. I'm not laughing at all.”

“No, you're not, it's true. You're a good girl. You're putting up with me.” He took another drink. “Well, anyway, it seemed to me that there might, after all, be some kind of redemption. I remembered what my grandfather had said about God loving the Germans but still wanting the Allies to win. I guess it was something like that I felt when Gerry Hastings and I lowered that dud shell from the bow of the LST. As if we were dumping with that grim black object the core of all the wickedness in the world. Or perhaps not really dumping it but planting it where it would take a long time to grow. And in that time was a chance for ... well, why not for redemption?”

“You believe in God, then?” I asked hesitantly. “It's funny, but I've never asked you.”

“I know. In our world that's considered bad form. Mr. B—my grandfather, I mean—belonged to a simpler time. But no, I don't think I believe in a personal god. And I'm not at all sure about divine mercy or even an afterlife. But I don't care about those things. What I've always been sure of is evil—evil in me and in other men. I've always believed that man was basically rotten, putrid, mean, that the universe was made out of bad things. But now it seems to me that wickedness is somehow temporarily in abeyance. Oh, very temporarily! But we have a period, a few years maybe—I don't know—in which we can
do
things! Live! I think now I can be a good husband and a good father and a good son.”

Well, the astonishing thing about all this was that it turned out so. Chip did become all of those things. He did not again discuss himself with me so personally, but he lived up to his three resolutions. Perhaps he was best in his third. Neither of his parents had aught but praise for him from then on.