Hocus Pocus

6

“What’s the hurry, Son?” he said. And then, “If you’ve got a minute, I’d like to talk to you.”

So I stopped. That was the biggest mistake of my life. There were plenty of other exits, and I should have headed for 1 of those. At that moment, every other exit led to the University of Michigan and journalism and music-making, and a lifetime of saying and wearing what I goshdarned pleased. Any other exit, in all probability, would have led me to a wife who wouldn’t go insane on me, and kids who gave me love and respect.

Any other exit would have led to a certain amount of misery, I know, life being what it is. But I don’t think it would have led me to Vietnam, and then to teaching the unteachable at Tarkington College, and then getting fired by Tarkington, and then teaching the unteachable at the penitentiary across the lake until the biggest prison break in American history. And now I myself am a prisoner..

But I stopped before the 1 exit blocked by Sam Wakefield.

There went the ball game.

Sam Wakefield asked me if I had ever considered the advantages of a career in the military. This was a man who had been wounded in World War II, the 1 war I would have liked to fight in, and then in Korea. He would eventually resign from the Army with the Vietnam War still going on, and then become President of Tarkington College, and then blow his brains out.

I said I had already been accepted by the University of Michigan and had no interest in soldiering. He wasn’t having any luck at all. The sort of kid who had reached a state-level Science Fair honestly wanted to go to Cal Tech or MIT, or someplace a lot friendlier to freestyle thinking than West Point. So he was desperate. He waS going around the country recruiting the dregs of Science Fairs. He didn’t ask me about my exhibit. He didn’t ask about my grades. He wanted my body, no matter what it was.

And then Father came along, looking for me. The next thing I knew, Father and Sam Wakefield were laughing and shaking hands.

Father was happier than I had seen him in years. He said to me, “The folks back home will think that’s better than any prize at a Science Fair.”

“What’s better?” I said.

“You have just won an appointment to the United States Military Academy,” he said. “I’ve got a son I can be proud of now.”

Seventeen years later, in 1975, I was a Lieutenant • Colonel on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, keeping everybody but Americans off helicopters that were ferrying badly rattled people out to ships offshore. We had lost a war!

Losers!

I wasn’t the worst young scientist Sam Wakefield persuaded to come to West Point. One classmate of mine, from a little high school in Wyoming, had shown early promise by making an electric chair for rats, with little straps and a little black hood and all.

That was Jack Patton. He was no relation to “Old Blood and Guts” Patton, the famous General in World War II. He became my brother-in-law. I married his sister Margaret. She came with her folks from Wyoming to see him graduate, and I fell in love with her. We sure could dance.

Jack Patton was killed by a sniper in Hue—pronounced “whay.” He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Combat Engineers. I wasn’t there, but they say he got it right between the eyes. Talk about marksmanship! Whoever shot him was a real winner.

The sniper didn’t stay a winner very long, though, I heard. Hardly anybody does. Some of our people figured out where he was. I heard he couldn’t have been more than 15 years old. He was a boy, not a man, but if he was going to play men’s games he was going to have to pay men’s penalties. After they killed him, I heard, they put his little testicles and penis in his mouth as a warning to anybody else who might choose to be a sniper.

Law and order. Justice swift and justice sure.

Let me hasten to say that no unit under my command was encouraged to engage in the mutilation of bodies of enemies, nor would I have winked at it if I had heard about it. One platoon in a battalion I led, on its own initiative, took to leaving aces of spades on the bodies of enemies, as sort of calling cards, I guess. This wasn’t mutilation, strictly speaking, but still I put a stop to it.

What a footsoldier can do to a body with his pip-squeak technology is nothing, of course, when compared with the ordinary, unavoidable, perfectly routine effects of aerial bombing and artillery. One time I saw the severed head of a bearded old man resting on the guts of an eviscerated water buffalo, covered with flies in a bomb crater by a paddy in Cambodia. The plane whose bomb made the crater was so high when it dropped it that it couldn’t even be seen from the ground. But what its bomb did, I would have to say, sure beat the ace of spades for a calling card.

I don’t think Jack Patton would have wanted the sniper who killed him mutilated, but you never know. When he was alive he was like a dead man in 1 respect:

everything was pretty much all right with him.

Everything, and I mean everything, was a joke to him, or so he said. His favorite expression right up to the end was, “I had to laugh like hell.” If Lieutenant Colonel Patton is in Heaven, and I don’t think many truly professional soldiers have ever expected to wind up there, at least not recently, he might at this very moment be telling about how his life suddenly stopped in Hue, and then adding, without even smiling, “I had to laugh like hell.” That was the thing: Patton would tell about some supposedly serious or beautiful or dangerous or holy event during which he had had to laugh like hell, but he hadn’t really laughed. He kept a straight face, too, when he told about it afterward. In all his life,

I don’t think anybody ever heard him do what he said he had to do all the time, which was laugh like hell.

He said he had to laugh like hell when he won a science prize in high school for making an electric chair for rats, but he hadn’t. A lot of people wanted him to stage a public demonstration of the chair with a tranquilized rat, wanted him to shave the head of a groggy rat and strap it to the chair, and, according to Jack, ask it if it had any last words to say, maybe wanted to express remorse for the life of crime it had led.

The execution never took place. There was enough common sense in Patton’s high school, although not in the Science Department, apparently, to have such an event denounced as cruelty to dumb animals. Again, Jack Patton said without smiling, “I had to laugh like hell.”

He said he had to laugh like hell when I married his sister Margaret. He said Margaret and I shouldn’t take offense at that. He said he had to laugh like hell when anybody got married.

I am absolutely sure that Jack did not know that there was inheritable insanity on his mother’s side of the family, and neither did his sister, who would become my bride. When I married Margaret, their mother seemed perfectly OK still, except for a mania for dancing, which was a little scary sometimes, but harmless. Dancing until she dropped wasn’t nearly as loony as wanting to bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age, or bombing anyplace back to the Stone Age.

My mother-in-law Mildred grew up in Peru, Indiana, but never talked about Peru, even after she went crazy, except to say that Cole Porter, a composer of ultrasophisticated popular songs during the first half of the last century, was also born in Peru.

My mother-in-law ran away from Peru when she was 18, and never went back again. She worked her way through the University of Wyoming, in Laramie, of all places, which I guess was about as far away from Peru as she could get without leaving the Milky Way. That was where she met her husband, who was then a student in the university’s School of Veterinary Science.

Only after the Vietnam War, with Jack long dead, did Margaret and I realize that she wanted nothing more to do with Peru because so many people there knew she caine from a family famous for spawning lunatics. And then she got married, keeping her family’s terrifying history to herself, and she reproduced.

My own wife married and reproduced in all innocence of the danger she herself was in, and the risk she would pass on to our children.

Our own children, having grown up with a notoriously insane grandmother in the house, fled this valley as soon as they could, just as she had fled Peru. But they haven’t reproduced, and with their knowing what they do about their booby-trapped genes, I doubt that they ever will.

Jack Patton never married. He never said he wanted kids. That could be a clue that he did know about his crazy relatives in Peru, after all. But I don’t believe that. He was against everybody’s reproducing, since human beings were, in his own words, “about I ,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are.”

I myself, obviously, have finally come around to his point of view.

During our plebe year, I remember, Jack all of a sudden decided that he was going to be a cartoonist, although he had never thought of being that before. He was compulsive. I could imagine him back in high school in Wyoming, all of a sudden deciding to build an electric chair for rats.

The first cartoon he ever drew, and the last one, was of 2 rhinoceroses getting married. A regular human preacher in a church was saying to the congregation that anybody who knew any reason these 2 should not be joined together in holy matrimony should speak now or forever hold his peace.

This was long before I had even met his sister Margaret.

We were roommates, and would be for all 4 years. So he showed me the cartoon and said he bet he could sell it to Playboy.

I asked him what was funny about it. He couldn’t draw for sour apples. He had to tell me that the bride and groom were rhinoceroses. I thought they were a couple of sofas maybe, or maybe a couple of smashed-up sedans. That would have been fairly funny, come to think of it: 2 smashed-up sedans taking wedding vows. They were going to settle down.

“What’s funny about it?” said Jack incredulously. “Where’s your sense of humor? If somebody doesn’t stop the wedding, those two will mate and have a baby rhinoceros.”

“Of course,” I said.

“For Pete’s sake,” he said, “what could be uglier and dumber than a rhinoceros? Just because something can reproduce, that doesn’t mean it should reproduce.”

I pointed out that to a rhinoceros another rhinoceros was wonderful.

“That’s the point,” he said. “Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they’re wonderful, and that they’re going to have a baby that’s wonderful, when actually they’re as ugly as rhinoceroses. Just because we think we’re so wonderful doesn’t mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.”

During Jack’s and my cow year at the Point, I remember, which would have been our junior year at a regular college, we were ordered to walk a tour for 3 hours on the Quadrangle, in a military manner, as though on serious guard duty, in full uniform and carrying rifles. This was punishment for our having failed to report another cadet who had cheated on a final examination in Electrical Engineering. The Honor Code required not only that we never lie or cheat but that we snitch on anybody who had done those things.

We hadn’t seen the cadet cheat. We hadn’t even been in the same class with him. But we were with him, along with one other cadet, when he got drunk in Philadelphia after the Army—Navy game. He got so drunk he confessed that he had cheated on the exam the previous June. Jack and I told him to shut up, that we didn’t want to hear about it, and that we were going to forget about it, since it probably wasn’t true anyway.

But the other cadet, who would later be fragged in Vietnam, turned all of us in. We were as corrupt as the cheater, supposedly, for trying to cover up for him. “Fragging,” incidentally, was a new word in the English language that came out of the Vietnam War. It meant pitching a fizzing fragmentation grenade into the sleeping quarters of an unpopular officer. I don’t mean to boast, but the whole time I was in Vietnam nobody offered to frag me.

The cheater was thrown out, even though he was a firstie, which meant he would graduate in only 6 more months. And Jack and I had to walk a 3-hour tour at night and in an ice-cold rain. We weren’t supposed to talk to each other or to anyone. But the nonsensical posts he and I had to march intersected at I point. Jack muttered to me at one such meeting, “What would you do if you heard somebody had just dropped an atom bomb on New York City?”

It would be 10 minutes before we passed again. I thought of a few answers that were obvious, such as that I would be horrified, I would want to cry, and so on. But I understood that he didn’t want to hear my answer.

Jack wanted me to hear his answer.

So here he came with his answer. He looked me in the eye, and he said without a flicker of a smile, “I’d laugh like hell.”

The last time I heard him say that he had to laugh like hell was in Saigon, where I ran into him in a bar. He told me that he had just been awarded a Silver Star, which made him my equal, since I already had one. He had been with a platoon from his company, which was planting mines on paths leading to a village believed to be sympathetic with the enemy, when a firefight broke out. So he called for air support, and the planes dropped napalm, which is jellied gasoline developed by Harvard University, on the village, killing Vietnamese of both sexes and all ages. Afterward, he was ordered to count the bodies, and to assume that they had all been enemies, so that the number of bodies could be in the news that day. That engagement was what he got the Silver Star for. “I had to laugh like hell,” he said, but he didn’t crack a smile.

He would have wanted to laugh like hell if he had seen me on the roof of our embassy in Saigon with my pistol drawn. I had won my Silver Star for finding and personally killing 5 enemy soldiers who were hiding in a tunnel underground. Now I was on a rooftop, while regiments of the enemy were right out in the open, with no need to hide from anybody, taking possession without opposition of the streets below. There they were down there, in case I wanted to kill lots more of them. Pow! Pow! Pow!

I was up there to keep Vietnamese who had been on our side from getting onto helicopters that were ferrying Americans only, civilian employees at the embassy and their dependents, to our Navy ships offshore. The enemy could have shot down the helicopters and come up and captured or killed us, if they had wanted. But all they had ever wanted from us was that we go home. They certainly captured or killed the Vietnamese I kept off the helicopter after the very last of the Americans, who was Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Debs Hartke, was out of there.

The rest of that day:

The helicopter carrying the last American to leave Vietnam joined a swarm of helicopters over the South China Sea, driven from their roosts on land and running out of gasoline. How was that for Natural History in the 20th Century: the sky filled with chattering, man-

made pterodactyls, suddenly homeless, unable to swim a stroke, about to drown or starve to death.

Below us, deployed as far as the eye could see, was the most heavily armed armada in history, in no danger whatsoever from anyone. We could have all the deep blue sea we wanted, as far as the enemy was concerned. Enjoy! Enjoy!

My own helicopter was told by radio to hover with 2 others over a minesweeper, which had a landing platform for 1 pterodactyl, its own, which took off so ours could land. Down we came, and we got out, and sailors pushed our big, dumb, clumsy bird overboard. That process was repeated twice, and then the ship’s own improbable creature claimed its roost again. I had a look inside it later on. It was loaded with electronic gear that could detect mines and submarines under the water, and incoming missiles and planes in the sky above.

And then the Sun itself followed the last American helicopter to leave Saigon to the bottom of the deep blue sea.

At the age of 35, Eugene Delis Hartke was again as dissolute with respect to alcohol and marijuana and loose women as he had been during his last 2 years in high school. And he had lost all respect for himself and the leadership of his country, just as, 17 years earlier, he had lost all respect for himself and his father at the Cleveland, Ohio, Science Fair.

His mentor Sam Wakefield, the man who recruited him for West Point, had quit the Army a year earlier in order to speak out against the war. He had become President of Tarkington College through powerful family connections.

Three years after that, Sam Wakefield would commit suicide. So there is another loser for you, even though he had been a Major General and then a College President. I think exhaustion got him. I say that not only because he seemed very tired all the time to me, but because his suicide note wasn’t even original and didn’t seem to have that much to do with him personally. It was word for word the same suicide note left way back in 1932, when I was a negative 8 years old, by another loser, George Eastman, inventor of the Kodak camera and founder of Eastman Kodak, now defunct, only 75 kilometers north of here.

Both notes said this and nothing more: “My work is done.”

In Sam Wakefield’s case, that completed work, if he didn’t want to count the Vietnam War, consisted of 3 new buildings, which probably would have been built anyway, no matter who was Tarkington’s President.

I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.

In terms of basketball alone, almost everybody has to lose. A high percentage of the convicts in Athena, and now in this much smaller institution, devoted their childhood and youth to nothing but basketball and still got their brains knocked out in the early rounds of some darn fool tournament.

Let me say further to the chance young reader that I would probably have wrecked my body and been thrown out of the University of Michigan and died on Skid Row somewhere if I had not been subjected to the discipline of West Point. I am talking about my body now, and not my mind, and there is no better way for a young person to learn respect for his or now her bones and nerves and muscles than to accept an appointment to any one of the 3 major service academies.

I entered the Point a young punk with bad posture and a sunken chest, and no history of sports participation, save for a few fights after dances where our band had played. When I graduated and received my commission as a Second Lieutenant in the Regular Army, and tossed my hat in the air, and bought a red Corvette with the back pay the Academy had put aside for me, my spine was as straight as a ramrod, my lungs were as capacious as the bellows of the forge of Vulcan, I was captain of the judo and wrestling teams, and I had not smoked any sort of cigarette or swallowed a drop of alcohol for 4 whole years! Nor was I sexually promiscuous anymore. I never felt better in my life.

I can remember saying to my mother and father at graduation, “Can this be me?”

They were so proud of me, and I was so proud of me. I turned to Jack Patton, who was there with his booby-trapped sister and mother and his normal father, and I asked him, “What do you think of us now, Lieutenant Patton?” He was the goat of our class, meaning he had the lowest grade average. So had General George Patton been, again no relative of Jack’s, who had been such a great leader in World War II.

What Jack replied, of course, unsmilingly, was that he had to laugh like hell.