To the End of the War (5 page)

“Ah,” said Gettinger with sympathetic disgust. “It was the same way at Buna. We hung onto that place for days and couldn’t even make an attack to clean it up. Just laid up there day after day, losing men. And then old Eichelberger comes up after the fighting’s all over and
Life
magazine makes pictures of him aiming a rifle and peeking over the top of a trench. And there ain’t a Jap within twenty miles. It’s all part of the game.”

“Part of the game hell,” said Wilkinsson. “The Jap made a break-through on Attu. We had the last of them backed up in cul-de-sac, and they came down out of there in a suicide march. We was supposed to be waiting for daylight—with one sentry for security. They swept down from there like a wind from hell; they went through two or three companies before we finally got ’em. They swooped right into our rear area, bayoneting the wounded and killing and raising hell, and then when they used all their ammo, they blew themselves all over the place with their last grenade. You can’t play war games with the Jap, because he don’t know the rules.”

“There ain’t no rules,” said Johnny.

“I know it. And there ain’t no game.”

Something about Wilkinsson’s face disturbed Johnny. He was reminded of many things he had almost forgotten during his ten months in the hospital. Wilkinsson’s face made him think of a boy named McCulloch from his old company, Johnny had run into McCulloch in a bar one night in Miami Beach while he was on his convalescent furlough staying at his brother’s home. McCulloch had been stationed in Miami Beach for a month, ever since getting out of the hospital at Battle Creek. There was a startling similarity between the faces of Wilkinsson and McCulloch; and Johnny wondered what kind of a person Wilkinsson had been before the war. Mac had come from a small farm in Ohio.

McCulloch had been a sergeant in the old company, a squad leader, and he had seen his whole squad shot down all around him at almost the same instant. Johnny could still remember it. Mac had run screaming down the hill, yelling that his whole squad was dead and that he was dead too. Mac had lived with the men in his squad for over two years and he felt a strong sense of responsibility for them; he took his job as a squad leader seriously because he had the responsibility of so many lives; he had been looked upon by the officers as one of the best non-coms in the company. He and Johnny had been good friends, and Johnny remembered him as an intelligent sensitive very naive farmboy who didn’t drink or whore around like the rest of them. He always had a happy good-natured grin on his face. When he had seen Mac in the bar, Johnny was shocked at the change in him.

“. . . think it’s a game,” Gettinger said. “What I don’t understand is these sons of bitches back here. You’d think they ran the goddam war. What right has a bastard like O’Flagherty got to talk to me like he does. If he’s so hopped up on the war, whyn’t he go overseas himself. Because he’s a frigging captain and I’m a buck-ass private, he sits back here on his big ass and tells me I’m a goldbrick, and explains the war to me. Whyn’t he do something himself, the son of a bitch.”

“He ain’t the only one,” said Johnny.

“I know it. They’re damn near all like that.”

“I was the happiest man in the world,” said Wilkinsson with a humorless grin, “when I hit that Golden Gate. I didn’t expect milk and honey, but I did expect at least common decency. But they don’t even give you that. They drive you, from morning till night, one of these sons of bitches like O’Flagherty is always on your neck. They try to make you feel ashamed for being in the hospital, like you got wounded on purpose to get out of something.’’

“It ain’t that so much,” Gettinger said. “The guys in the army act like you were a damned fool for letting yourself get shoved into combat. And yet the goddamned civilians shake your hand and fall on your neck for a hero. One’s as bad as the other. Then they all go home and forget there ever was a frigging war.”

“I used to dream about coming back to the States,” said Wilkinsson. “When I get back, I don’t find anything I expect. The people talk about V for Victory and buying war bonds, work in the war plants and read the newspapers, but it’s all like a movie they can turn off anytime they want. They don’t know nothing about war and they don’t want to know. I don’t know how to explain it,” he finished lamely and looked away from the table at the wall.

“V for Victory,” snorted Gettinger. “No two-finger salute ain’t going to win this war.”

“I know what you mean,” Johnny said to Wilkinsson. “It’s in everything you see; the movies, the magazines, the books, the advertisements. And it ain’t even about this war. It’s about, something else altogether.”

Johnny thought about his own return: the big ship, a Matson liner, unescorted out of New Zealand to the States; it docked at San Diego first, to put off sailors and marines. There were airfields on the edge of the water; there were big enormous planes taking off and landing; there were buildings and docks and oafs and ships and people. Everything was indication of the enormous strength and power, all converted to the prime use: the war. And tears had come into his eyes at being home and at the feel of this enormous source of energy flowing into one single channel out across the Pacific carrying hope and power and faith. But when he had passed through the front picture, like Alice through the looking glass, he had found a different world entirely; an indifferent world—strong, sweating, powerful, full-blasting; but it was uncaring, selfish power, indifferent to and unmoved by itself and what it was supposed to do.

“. . . but they won’t do that,” said Wilkinsson.

“I wouldn’t mind going back overseas so much, if I could go back to my old outfit.”

The look upon Wilkinsson’s face was very much like the look that had been on McCulloch’s face when Johnny met him in the Miami Beach bar, and Johnny wondered suddenly if his face ever bad that same look that he saw upon their faces and upon the countless faces in the hospital. His mind went back to McCulloch sitting in the bar, and the conversation passed over his ears untapped.

Mac’s face had lighted up when he saw Johnny. They felt very close, having been through so much together. Mac had been sitting alone, and when Johnny sat down beside him, they immediately started talking hungrily about the old company. The company had gone up to New Georgia after the ’Canal, and Mac began to tell Johnny. Mac had had a letter from Seaburt: Rosa was dead; Watson was dead; Berry had lost a leg; Cramm was dead; Horner had been blinded and had lost a hand from a short-fused grenade; Cooper was dead; Morello was dead, Mac went on sounding the knells indefinitely, Seaburt had said in his letter to Mac that there was only five men of the original old company left in the outfit.

Johnny thought of Wilkinsson’s remark; what was the use of going back to your old outfit if the men you knew were gone? The outfit was the men in it, and not the number of the regiment.

Telling Johnny all these things across the table in the Miami Beach bar, Mac’s face had lost its twisted acidulous look and tears had come into his eyes. They got drunk that night and Mac took Johnny up to see Quiller, who was also from the old company. Quiller was stationed at Miami Beach too, but he had gotten married since coming back to the States, and he had partially achieved another world.

But as the three of them set on the floor in Quiller’s little room (there was only one chair) while Quiller’s wife had a board laid across the bed and was ironing, the feeling of the old company had come back to them. And they had recalled and smiled at things that were stories of the old company and its men. Quiller was glad to see them and he drank with them from the bottle they brought, but later when they left, Quiller stayed with his wife who was in her fifth month of pregnancy; Quiller was worried because his landlord would not allow children in the building, and Quiller would have to move as soon as his child was born. And there was no place to move.

Seeing Quiller’s room (for which he paid $60 a month) and finding out about his having to move because of the baby offended both Mac and Johnny, and after they left they got drunker still. Mac had talked about Quiller’s predicament, and he told Johnny that he had decided the only way for a man to live in the United States was to get a couple of .45s and take what he wanted and to hell with the rest. Johnny had disagreed with him and had told him to take it easy, that everything would work itself out, but he didn’t believe it himself. Secretly, he was forced to think that Mac was right. Mac told him how he got busted to a private for going over the hill. He once had been proud of his sergeant’s rating, but now he did not care; if he had to be in the army, he thought it better to be a private who did not have to be responsible for anybody’s life but his own. Mac told Johnny, too, about how he and another fellow had stolen a car, just for a joyride over to Miami from the Beach. Mac had grinned and his eyes lighted up when he told the story. Mac had told Johnny he was not going back home after the war, that he could not stay around his family because the things he said and did shocked them, and he no longer liked to be with them. He was thinking about getting into the merchant marine, if he lived through the rest of the war. Johnny was puzzled and upset; Mac was vastly different from the good-natured responsible farmboy he had once known, but Johnny could think of no argument that would show Mac how and why he was wrong. Everything Mac said fitted the facts and was the truth. He could not blame Mac for having changed.

“. . . plenty of men,” Wilkinsson said. “And they ain’t going to send this soldier back overseas. I figure I’ve done my part winning this war, and nobody like O’Flagherty can jump on me for being a goldbrick. A man can just stand so much.”

Johnny pulled his mind away from the memory of Mac, but a residue of generalities remained. He was sick with hatred of war, hatred of the cause of war, hatred of the result of war. In combat you had little time to think. You fought and hated, but you did not think much. The thinking came later, after you came back home and passed below the superficial surface of the war. Then you could not help but think, you could not help but wonder. Why did a man have to suffer combat? What was he fighting
for
? Was it so he could be pictured in an advertisement as the reason (for some poor frigging civilian to buy a new refrigerator and a new automobile? Was it so the manufacturers could have a world market as he had heard people say? Surely not. Was his suffering to be displayed as the reason why there should be a porcelain commode in every home? Was that all that what he went through meant: a refrigerator in every kitchen? a commode in every bathroom? an automobile in every garage? It was an indignity Johnny could not swallow. It was a personal affront to every man who had been in combat. If that was all it was, it was not worth it.

When he had been carried back to the aid station after being hit he had noticed his own fingernails. They were cracked and broken and there was a roll of black dirt under each nail. The surface of each nail was covered with a gritty film of dried mud. While he was being carried out, he had stared at his fingernails and the personal affront of the sight of them had never left him. He could see them now as clearly as when he had first noticed them. He had spread his fingers gropingly and stared at them. They had felt heavy and queer and he had divined that to touch them together would be painful. His hands had dangled from his wrists helplessly, and he had been afraid to touch them to his body or to the stretcher on which he lay.

The memory of his own fingernails had become a symbol of the indignity he had had to suffer, only to find that that indignity was being used to sell post-war refrigerators and automobiles and commodes—even before the war was won, even before these things were made,
even while there was still a great chance that the war would be lost
! A raw scabrous hatred of civilians began to rise up in him. They did not understand the war or the men in it, and they did not want to understand. They only wanted to go on playing their little game: The reality was something they could not face, so they escaped it by reading advertisements, by buying war bonds, by making V signs with two fingers. Children, playing at children’s games, because they could not face something they feared the thought of.

But Wilkinsson had faced it. Gettinger had faced it. McCulloch had faced it. He had faced it. It was in their eyes. Was O’Flagherty to deride them for it? Were the chief clerk and the first lieutenant to be allowed to play their little disciplinary games with them for it?

Johnny’s fists clenched themselves in his lap. His jaw muscles tightened in frustrated anger. His hatred for the pompous self-righteous O’Flaghertys, caustic and domineering; his hatred for the chief clerks and first lieutenants who saw the war as a means of asserting their own obnoxious egos; his hatred for the smugly patriotic citizens who knew nothing and cared nothing about the real war; all of these rose high in him and burned so hotly that the sweat popped out upon his forehead. It was with a painfully deliberate, buttock-tightening effort that he forced himself to relax and refrain from smashing the beer glasses, the table, the whole bar.

He looked at his watch and saw it was almost time for the train. He deliberately finished his beer, his fourth, and looked at Wilkinsson and Gettinger. After Wilkinsson’s last remark they had stopped talking, as if the talking itself had dwindled away at the futility of ever explaining. They drank their beer in silence, each lost in his own thoughts and oblivious to the others. Johnny did not break the silence for several moments. He sat and watched them, his jaw muscles twitching.

“Listen,” he said suddenly. “You guys have been itching to figure out a way to get away from me so you can go over the hump without getting turned in before you get out of town.” Both of them were jerked up out of their own thoughts by the harshness of Johnny’s voice, and they stared at him, startled momentarily, “Well, I’m giving it to you,” he went on. “You think I’m taking that looey’s guff, you’re crazy. I figure I’ve got a vacation coming myself, so you can leave any time you want. You don’t have to worry about me turning you in, because I’ll be over the hill myself.”