What It Takes (20 page)

But the best thing was, he always watched out for the other guy, the younger men, the weaker ones. The great thing about Poppy, other fellows at school used to say, was that
a fellow like him
would still talk to everybody, just as friendly to the juniors and lower-middles as he was to the grandest senior. In fact, he could drive you nuts: when the basketball coach told him he ought to suit up and play, Poppy said, “Oh, I couldn’t do that! The other fellows worked hard to make the team! ...” Finally, the coach, Frank DiClemente, had to tell him to shut up and put on his gym clothes. It was that, or wring his noble little neck. ... But the point was, Poppy never sought his honors: he never had to, he had so many friends. And that
was
the Andover Way. One time, the
Phillipian
polled the students: “Do you think studies, friendships, or athletics are the most important in the long run?” Seventy-eight percent chose friendships. “The average student,” the newspaper concluded, “came to Andover with making contacts uppermost in his mind.”

It was the surest mark of his stardom that he never had to be out for himself. It was bad form to be out for oneself. Andover men not only wore the Blue like the fellows at Yale, there was an ethic they had in common, too: they were for God, Country, and Old Blue. An Andover man had to put something larger ahead of himself. Of course, Poppy was sound on that.

That was at the root of the excitement, as the war in Europe filled the papers, during their last two years, and it began to look like the men of ’42 would have their chance to act in the world’s highest drama: a war to rival their dads’ Great War, a world for them to remake thereafter; this time, perhaps, more in their image. Clearly, Stimson heard the call to duty in 1940, when he took the post as War Secretary. (The word on campus was that Stimson was for U.S. entry, but FDR, as usual, dithered in politics.) If the U.S. did get in “over there,” no one on Andover Hill doubted these young men would be called, to lead. What a chance! To serve, to prove their mettle, to lead as they’d been raised to do, to command! Stimson came to speak to the seniors that year, 1940, while the Battle of Britain crackled from the radio every night. Certainly the world faced dark days, the great man said.

“But as I look into your faces and realize your responsibilities, I am filled, not with pity for you in what you are facing, but with a desire to congratulate you on your great opportunity.

“I envy you that opportunity.

“I would to God that I were young enough to face it with you.”

All at once, the alumni news was filled with pictures of dashing young men in helmets, goggles, leather jackets: flying was just the thing, the only single combat in mechanized war, the knighthood of the modern service. The Andover men were leaving Yale, crossing the border, to sign up in Canada with the Royal Air Force. How could an Andover man stand idly by?

And, then, just on that glorious autumn day when Andover beat Exeter (by one point!) to finish an undefeated football season, the Japanese fleet sailed for Pearl Harbor. And two weeks later, just as Poppy was thrashing George “Red Dog” Warren in a long, do-or-die Ping-Pong match at AUV (the top club at school), the Japanese struck Pearl, the news spread in minutes, and Poppy and Red Dog put down their paddles and hurried back to the dorm. It was the same path they trod every day, from AUV, past the Cochran Chapel ... but now, everything was different. The air was electric. They were at war! ...

“We stand,” trumpeted the
Phillipian
, “as a unit against the common foe ... the yellow peril of Nippon.”

But all at once, their elders got cold feet! The young men of Andover Hill were told right away: they must stay in school! Dr. Feuss tried to keep P.A. calm, and bent to its business. At a special assembly, the following day, he told the men they must not run off to war, but let the draft fill the ranks, according to need and scientific methods. Pres Bush wrote to Poppy the same day: he ought to stay in school, go on to Yale. There’d be time after that to serve the flag.

But they were at war! This was his chance! Sure, Poppy would ask his coaches and teachers what they thought, but this was a personal thing, a matter of the code. The point was to know your own mind! If anyone doubted what Poppy would do, they had only to watch him on stage at that assembly, December 8, the morning after ...

At ten o’clock, the whole school gathered in George Washington Hall, and Poppy was up front as senior class president. And when “The Star-Spangled Banner” started, the men were still slouching in front of their seats, as they always did in assembly. “Your country’s at war!” said Dr. Feuss. “I expect when ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is played, I expect everyone here to be at attention!” But still there were a few wise guys who didn’t know their world had changed. They were dicking around in the back! Poking each other and laughing, like they always had! And up on stage, Poppy Bush was burning! They were mocking the flag! They were mocking Dr. Feuss! The bald doctor was standing there, helpless and frail, while they ignored him!
While we’re at war!
Poppy Bush took a small step forward, and stared them down. He glared at them so hard, so visibly, that soon he had their gaze on him. And from the stage, in front of the men, likely for the first time in his life, Poppy Bush curled his upper lip in an ugly sneer of contempt.

By the time Christmas break rolled around, and he went to a dance, back home in Greenwich, where he met an auburn-haired beauty, Barbara Pierce, sixteen years old (and so eager to know him!), he didn’t even mention staying in school. They sat out a waltz (Poppy never could waltz), and then sat out the next dance, and the next. But in all that talk, there was no confusion about what he was going to do. He was going to war. All the best fellows were. He would turn eighteen on Commencement Day, just a week after The Game (baseball with Exeter!) ... and that was the big day. Poppy was going to sign up to fly. The Navy had a program that would get him his wings in less than a year. Gold Navy Wings! The knighthood!

On that day, Stimson arrived once again, in his bulletproof car, to address the school: the war would be long, the Secretary said. In good time, they would be called upon to lead, to rescue the right, to remake the world. But they would serve their country better by going on to college and getting as much education as they could, before they donned the uniform.

Wait, Stimson said, and let the draft do its work.

After the speech, Pres Bush met Poppy in the hallway outside the auditorium. Pres didn’t have to bend down now to look straight into his son’s eyes. “Well, George,” he said in his big bass voice, “did the Secretary say anything to change your mind?”

“No, sir,” Poppy said. “I’m going in.”

Pres nodded, then shook his son’s hand.

This was where it ended? The promise, the service, great doings to come, ended here in a world of green water, blue mist, alone, small ...
this is it
? What was all that for, all the doing, trying, dear God, the blessed ...
life,
what was that for? ... But he kept searching the edge of his world, the hazy divide between air ... green water ... for the grand, bulking, blooming island of steel with the Stars and Stripes—all the guys! They had to come back! God, where were they ... where were they where were they where were they ...

Have to keep going, keep away, paddle, slap, pull, paddle, nothing out here, nothing but water, no water, no water, haze and water, blue and green, a speck over there, spots, bright bursting spots, and a speck, maybe it’s a ship! No, not a ship, too small, not growing, yes growing, too small, not a ship, not the guys, slap to where, my hand! What’s that thing it’s taller, yes it’s taller! It’s taller, dear God, it’s there yes what? Not a ship! Can’t be a ship, just a speck, black dot, is this how it ends, seeing spots? God, God it’s growing. A SUB! A SUB! A PERISCOPE DID THEY SEE ME GOD DID THEY SEE ME OVER HERE! OVER HERE HEY HERE HEY HERE I AM HERE ME HERE HEYYYY!

The conning tower rose from the water, and Bush, dazed, bobbing, saw the hatch open and there was a man. Jesus, what if it’s Japs? ... There was something on his face. He had something up to his face. Something black. A beard! He had a beard! NO JAPS WITH BEARDS! A bearded seaman was holding something up, as Bush slapped and tore at the water toward the sub. A U.S. submarine, in three thousand miles of ocean, here was a U.S. submarine, come to get him! Dear God, come for HIM!

They got him, sailors on the deck now, the shape of the sub on the water, they pulled his raft, grabbed for him, pulled him up on shaky legs onto the steel deck, sweet Jesus, steel! And the seaman he saw was standing there, watching with this thing up to his face, a camera, a movie camera. They were filming. Three thousand godforsaken miles of ocean. They came to get him. They pulled him out. And they filmed it.

He’d been on the raft two hours.

“Welcome aboard, sir ...”

The steel stairs poked up crazily at his legs as they half hauled him, half lowered him into a world of dark red light and overused air, clanking steel and the smell of men. The hatch closed. They were getting out, getting the hell out of there.

“Welcome aboard, sir ...”

They stretched him out flat, swabbed his head. He’d be all right, he heard them say. The guys on the Finback always liked this, this pilot rescue duty, when they fished them out and watched them wake up to a new world below the sea. ... What would the guy say?

“Welcome aboard the Finback, sir ...”

But as the guys on the Finback remembered it, Bush was distraught, kept asking for his crew, half-delirious. ... Then, no words, just tears.

He was on the sub for a month, while it hunted the Pacific for Japanese ships, and when the
Finback
dropped him off at Midway, he likely could have fiddled a ticket home. The Navy didn’t want shaky pilots, men with second thoughts. But Bush hitched a ride west across the ocean, and then another to his ship, back to the guys. Of course, they greeted him like a lost brother:

“George Herbert Walker Bush!”

No one asked much about the day he was shot down. They knew how it was: he’d lost two friends.

There were a half-dozen more missions in the Philippines, but VT-51’s number was up. By December, they were steaming home. Bush got to Greenwich on Christmas Eve. Poppy made it back! After that horrible telegram, saying he was shot down! He was
here
! Christmas Eve! Everyone was crying, laughing, hugging. He looked great! He was home! It was like a movie!

And then, after New Year’s, in his snappy dress blues, he married his dark-haired sweetheart, Barbara Pierce. What was the point of dawdling? It could all end in a puff of smoke—just like
that.
There was a honeymoon, just a few days, on Sea Island, off the Georgia coast, and then a new posting to Virginia Beach. Of course, he’d have to go back to the war. They were only halfway to Tokyo. He’d get another squadron, and Bar would go back to college, to Smith. ... But then, Truman dropped the bomb, and they got the news: the Nips had folded! No invasion! No more war! It was over! The Blessed Confluence!

Poppy was out of the Navy in a month, off to Yale the same September. What was the point of dawdling? Three years of his life were gone. There was a child on the way. There sure wasn’t time to moon about the war, to talk about the day the plane went down, Delaney and White (never did know what happened to them), or the way they came to get him, Lieutenant George Herbert Walker Bush, out of thousands of miles of ocean. He had the Air Medal and two Gold Stars, and then the Distinguished Flying Cross: he was a hero, but he wasn’t going to bring that up. He’d done his part. That was all he’d say.

He didn’t even pick up any cheap points with Bar, saying he’d thought of her when he thought he was a goner, in the ocean. And she, being Bar, didn’t ask if he did.

No one in his family could remember talking about it. Must have been dreadful, they agreed. And, being Walkers, and Bushes, they didn’t bring it up.

It was only years later, when he got into politics and had to learn to retail bits of his life, that he ever tried to put words around the war.

His first attempts, in the sixties, were mostly about the
cahm-rah-deree
and the spirit of the American Fighting Man. The Vietnam War was an issue then, and Bush was for it. (Most people in Texas were.) He said he learned “a lot about life” from his years in the Navy—but he never said what the lessons were.

Later, when peace was in vogue, Bush said the war had “sobered” him with a grave understanding of the cost of conflict—he’d seen his buddies die. The voters could count on him not to send their sons to war, because he knew what it was.

Still later, when he turned Presidential prospect, and every bit of his life had to be melted down to the coin of the realm—character—Bush had to essay more thoughts about the war, what it meant to him, how it shaped his soul. But he made an awful hash of it, trying to be jaunty. He told the story of being shot down. Then he added: “Lemme tell ya, that’ll make you start to think about the separation of church and state ...”

Finally, in a much-edited transcript of an interview with a minister whom he hired as liaison to the born-again crowd, Bush worked out a statement on faith and the war: something sound, to cover the bases. It wasn’t foxhole Christianity, and he couldn’t say he saw Jesus on the water—no, it was quieter than that. ... But there, on the
Finback
, he spent his time standing watch on deck in the wee hours, silent, reflective, under the bright stars ...

“It was wonderful and energizing, a time to talk to God.

“One of the things I realized out there all alone was how much family meant to me. Having faced death and been given another chance to live, I could see just how important those values and principles were that my parents had instilled in me, and of course how much I loved Barbara, the girl I knew I would marry. ...”

That was not quite how he was recalled by the men of the
Finback
. Oh, they liked him: a real funny guy. And they gave him another nickname, Ellie. That was short for Elephant. What they recollected was Bush in the wardroom, tossing his head and emitting on command the roaring trumpeted squeal of the enraged pachyderm; it was the most uncanny imitation of an elephant.