Sons (37 page)

We marched across the Mall later to the Washington Monument and listened to speeches gently urging peace. Looking north across Constitution Avenue, we could see the White House, and to the southwest across the Tidal Basin, the glittering white temple of the Jefferson Memorial. I did not know what to think. President Johnson had only yesterday affirmed through his Press Secretary Bill D. Moyers that the anti-war demonstrations were “a part of the freedom guaranteed all Americans.” But Moyers had gone on to say that the President was “obviously impressed also by the other kind of demonstrations taking place in South Vietnam where tens of thousands of Americans were serving their country and offering themselves in support of freedom.” Johnson seemed certain that the great majority of Americans were in favor of his Vietnam policy (but not the many thousands who were gathered here at the monument) and he had delivered through Moyers what sounded ominously like a warning to those of us who were opposed to the policy there, asking us again to “weigh the consequences” of our actions. I did not feel we were accomplishing too terribly much as we listened to the speeches. I felt a sense of helplessness, a certain knowledge that however many of us rose in protest against what Norman Thomas later called “this monstrously stupid chess game in which the pawns bleed,” no matter how many of us made our views known and our voices heard, the course had already been charted; there were empires at stake of which we had no inkling.

All the way back to Talmadge, I could not shake my gloomy despair nor my edgy apprehension.

The Talmadge
Advertiser-Dispatch
published only two editions a week, one on Monday and the other on Thursday. Since the march had taken place on a Saturday, the earliest mention of it could only have appeared on the following Monday.

It was my father who brought the item to my attention. He had told my mother that he wanted to speak to me, and when I went into the living room, he was sitting in one of the Hogarth chairs flanking the fireplace. I took the chair opposite him. A pitcher of martinis was on the end table near his right elbow. It was nearly empty, and he was holding an almost-drained glass in his hand. I hoped he was not drunk.

“How come we never have heart-to-heart talks?” he asked.

“I don’t know. How come?” I answered.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “I used to go see all the Andy Hardy movies — you ever hear of Andy Hardy?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Old Judge Hardy would take Andy into the library for these heart-to-heart talks, and they would get things all squared away. I used to wish my father would take
me
into the library and have one of those talks with me, but he never did. We used to have a library upstairs in the house on East Scott, well, you’ve never seen that house, you wouldn’t know. It was a nice room. I’m sorry we never used it. I mean, to talk.”

I didn’t say anything.

“This is a nice room, too,” my father said, “though of course not a library. Your mother’s got good taste. This is a nice room, don’t you think?”

“Yes, it’s a very nice room,” I said. “I’ve always liked it.”

“Shall we have a heart-to-heart talk?”

“About what?”

“I try to be a good father,” he said suddenly.

Again, I said nothing.

“Did you see this?” he asked and handed me a copy of the
Advertiser-Dispatch
folded open to page four. I was surprised to see my high school graduation picture there, with a caption over it that read:

The single paragraph under the picture merely stated that I was one of an estimated thirty-five thousand protesters who had gone to Washington the week before.

“Is this today’s?” I said. Idiotically, all I could think was TALMADGE UTE MARCHES.

“You didn’t tell me you were going to Washington.”

“You didn’t ask me.”

“Do I have to ask?”

“I guess if you’re interested, you have to ask.”

“No, I
don’t
have to ask. A father doesn’t have to ask his own son what he’s up to. You’re supposed to
come
to me and tell me.
That’s
the way it’s supposed to be.”

“Pop,” I said, “maybe we ought to talk some other time.”

“No, let’s talk now.”

“Dinner’s almost ready...”

“Dinner can wait!”

“How many of those have you had?”

“I can drink you under the table anytime you’d like to try it, Wat, so don’t give me any of
that!
”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay,” he answered.

We sat opposite each other silently. I put the newspaper down on the oriental rug. My father poured what was left of the martinis into his glass.

“What’s your plan?” he asked.

“My plan for what?”

“You drop out of school, you go on a goddamn march, you get your picture in the paper for everybody to see...”

“I’m not ashamed of what I did.”

“No,
I’m
the one who’s ashamed.”

“Then I’m sorry. I guess we all have different things to be ashamed of. If I embarrassed you, I’m sorry.”

“You may be sorrier when your draft board sees that newspaper. You think they’re kidding up there? You think this war is a joke?”

“No, I most certainly don’t think it’s a joke.”

“You’ve been 1-A ever since you dropped out of Yale,” he said. “What’ll you do when they draft you? Refuse to go? Let them send you to prison?”

“No, I haven’t got the guts for that.”

“Then what? Run for Canada?”

“I don’t think I could leave America.”

“You love it so much you can’t leave it, huh? But you can go on a march...”

“Pop,” I said, “if you love something enough, you should be able to say it’s wrong.” I paused. Still without looking at him, I said, “The way I think you’re wrong, Pop.”

“About what?”

“About... a lot of things. About this. Your ideas about this.”

“And what else?” he said sharply.

“Nothing. Nothing else.”

“Join the Navy,” he said. “Nobody wants to get killed, that’s understandable. I joined the Air Force because I didn’t want to end up in the Infantry. The Vietcong have no fleet and no air power, you’d be safe in the Navy. Give them your two years or whatever you owe them, and then come home and live your life.”

“No,” I said. “It may be too late, but I’ve already decided to appeal my classification.”

“What do you mean, too late?”

“I’ve been lucky so far. They’re drafting guys left and right.”

“What kind of an appeal?”

“I want it changed to 1-A-O.”

“What’s that?”

“Noncombatant.”

“That’s very smart,” my father said, “you’ve got a lot of smart ideas. You’ll put yourself on a battlefield without a gun, very smart.”

“It’s a matter of principle,” I said.

“It’s a matter of bullshit, ” he said. “You anxious to get killed?”

“No, but...”

“The idea is to stay alive, Wat.”

“That’s only
part
of the idea.”

“Stay alive,” he repeated. “However you can. Do whatever you have to do to stay alive.” Our eyes met. “Do you understand me?” I shook my head. “What don’t you understand?”

“I don’t understand staying alive by hurting someone else. If... if that’s what
you
have to do to stay alive, Pop, then you go ahead and do it. But don’t ask me to... to hurt anyone. I can’t do that.”

“What are we talking about?” he asked, suddenly frowning.

“Pop...” I started, and then only shook my head.

“Say what you have to say, Wat.”

“No, I don’t have anything to say.”

My father drew a heavy breath. “If anything happened to you...” he said, and hesitated. “Do you want to kill your mother?”

“Do
you?”
I said.

That was the closest we came to bringing it out into the open. That was the closest I came to saying, You son of a bitch, who are you fooling around with, some cheap cunt from the office, some college girl you picked up on your lunch hour, some Park Avenue whore, how
(dare
you tell me how to live my life when you haven’t yet learned to live your own? That was as close as we came.

My father turned away from me. Looking into his glass, he said, “Son, I...” and shook his head. I had the sudden feeling that he was going to cry. Without looking up at me, he quickly said, “I don’t want you to get hurt.” His lip was trembling. He kept staring into his glass. “Wat, I only...”

It occurred to me that I could help him. It occurred to me that he was trying to say he loved me. But I watched him from across the room, watched him struggling with whatever it was inside that made it impossible for him to say the words to his own son, and when at last he began sobbing, I swiftly left the room.

I did not stop hating myself for a long time afterward.

She came limping away with her number four engine gone, Ace and I hovering above her, the pilot already feathering her number two; we were going to have a straggler not a minute and a half off target. Major Kander, our flight leader, said, “Springcap Seven-Nine, cover her,” and I pressed the transmitter button in the center of the control wheel, and said into the oxygen mask microphone strapped over my chin and mouth, “Springcap Seven-Nine, Wilco,” and peeled off with Ace on my wing not four feet to the right.

There was a big hole in the bomber’s belly, and I saw now as we dropped down over her that the rear turret was gone as well, how the hell were we going to get her back to Foggia? The heavies were supposed to cruise at one-sixty after target, but if she was doing a hundred and thirty, she was lucky, already beginning to lose altitude and dropping more speed as the blades on her number two feathered and the propeller stopped. She had made a sharp right turn away from the bombing line and was now flying on a southerly course to the rally point, but there was no question of her keeping up with the other B-17s, we would have her on our hands all the way back to Italy. In the far distance, I saw some of the bombers already forming up, and suddenly Ace’s voice shouted, “Break left!” and without stopping to think or to question, I immediately turned the wheel to the left, put in the left rudder, went into a roll, sucked back on the stick, goosed the airplane into a screaming climb with Ace clinging to my wing, and only then looked down to see what he’d been yelling about — four FW-l90s dropping out of the clouds for a pass at the bomber’s right side, apparently unaware as yet that Tail-End Charlie was gone and that the bomber had a blind spot. They came in on her in trail, all their firepower — four 20-mm cannons and two 13-mm machine guns for each plane — spraying the bomber in sequence from her nose to her tail as they made their first pass. It was too late to break up their formation, they came screaming up level on the poor stuttering bastard, approaching her over half the clock, twelve to six, staggered four abreast and filling the sky with thunder, black-spinnered each and every one of them, big black white-trimmed crosses on their gray flanks, smaller black swastikas on their tails, cannons blasting from the wing roots and the wings themselves, machine guns spitting from the cowlings of each plane as they came in level, one after the other, and then swung low under her for a try at the ball turret in the belly.

We were waiting above them as they broke clear of the bomber on her left-hand side and began to climb. The ball turret had swung around, and the gunner was following them as they rose, joined in firepower now by the gunner in the upper turret, and the waistgunner on the left, all of them shooting steadily as the enemy planes screeched for the cover of the cirrus clouds above, through which Ace and I dropped down on them, hoping the B-17’s gunners would let up when we joined the fray and not get two of their own little friends. We did not surprise the Germans; they had known we were there when they began their attack. But their own surprise was complete; as we dropped down on them, a second pack of FW-190s appeared on the bomber’s tail and a third formation dove in on the right again, all of them apparently having hidden in the cloud cover until the first pass was completed. Their timing was absolutely perfect. The attackers aft came in one behind the other in a single line, their flight leader learning immediately that the tail position had been knocked out by flak over the target, and safely diving and firing and ripping the tail assembly to tatters and then swooping under the belly as the three other planes in the flight followed close astern. I knew the bomber was done for. As the tail attackers dropped out of sight to reform for another pass, the third pack came in, using the same tactics the lead flight had employed, four planes attacking in trail at two, three, four, and five o’clock, perpendicular to the bomber’s long right flank, in slightly escalated altitudes from the tail to the nose. They raked the big ship and then pulled up over her this time, and I saw the upper turret explode with what must have been a direct cannon hit, and Ace shouted, “Three o’clock high!” and it was then that I thought we’d
all
had it, the bomber, Ace, me, every fucking United States Army Air Force plane in the sky over Poland that day because just then a pack of six Messerschmitts dropped out of the clouds on my right wing.

The bomber was losing altitude fast. Smoke was pouring from the waistgunner’s position aft of the radio compartment. The first flight of FW-190s had reformed and were diving on her nose now in an attempt to deliver the knockout blow, coming in one after the other in a straight single line, shooting at the cockpit and then peeling off just out of range of the nose guns. Ace was swearing into his radio. We had not seen the Luftwaffe on our last six missions, their habit being to hoard ships and gasoline for strikes they could be certain were coming, and now the sky was swarming with them. They were not concerned with us, we were only incidental. They were after the B-17. To each of those German pilots, the big brown bomber must have seemed the symbol of everything that was destroying the German dream, relentlessly pounding oil refinery and synthetic plant, aircraft factory and railway line. We had lost three B-17s to flak over the target, and now the German Air Force wanted to make it four, and they furiously attacked that poor descending bastard in successive determined waves as Ace and I tried desperately to break up their formations, buzzing in and out and around their superior force, going for the lead ship each time, diving in at the nose, pressing the machine-gun button on the rear of the wheel the instant an enemy spinner appeared in the illuminated ring sight, trying to rake the cowling and the cockpit, and then pulling back on the stick and climbing for another dive as another flight zoomed in on the bomber.