Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Friedman was sitting at his desk with his lips pursed staring into inner distance, his small fragile-looking hands playing with a pencil. When Friedman finally noticed him, he seemed almost embarrassed to have been so abstracted, but he had trained Daniel as well as his own staff not to bother him when he was working through a problem. Daniel would have stood there all day sooner than interrupt.

  “When is your move scheduled?” Friedman asked, scanning the sheaf of papers rapidly. The Navy was moving to one girls’ school, Mount Vernon, as Friedman’s operation was moving to another, Arlington Hall. There seemed to be an excess of former finishing schools around Washington, Daniel thought idly. Perhaps all the girls had been finished off.

  “We hope to move next month, if hope is the word. There aren’t even screens on the windows out there.”

  “Then you’ll have more employees than you counted on, and ninety-nine percent of them will have six legs and bite. You should equip yourself with a good entomological field guide and enjoy the swarm.”

  Daniel was not sure Friedman was joking, as his face remained sober, still scanning the runoff. He made some marginal notes. “I’ve just been thinking,” he said, “that perhaps Jews are quick at learning languages, because we learn several early regardless of our place of birth.”

  Daniel felt a little rattled. He had been expecting a comment on the baron’s wire, but Friedman’s mind was running on Daniel’s study of Japanese, which Friedman had told him he regretted not having the time to learn. Daniel adjusted. “Oh, you mean because of learning Hebrew. And Yiddish or Ladino or whatever is spoken at home. Then the language of the country. Within my own family, my father’s four brothers and their families must speak ten languages. Maybe more.” He started counting them mentally.

  Friedman finished the sheaf. “This strikes me as more a wish list of Hitler’s than anything real, but I presume it’s gone up through channels?”

  “Yes, sir, of course.”

  “You’ve been working on Purple since you arrived. Too bad we can’t simply transfer you over here.”

  “I’d love that,” Daniel said frankly. “More than anything. But I can just imagine the Navy saying, Sure, go work for the Army. We’ll transfer you tomorrow because it’s a rational choice.”

  “Sometimes they behave as if their worst enemies are the other forces.” Friedman sighed. “They used to be poor relations, all the services, going to Congress cap in hand asking for fodder for their mules and paint for their old rusting ships. They’ve taken to power in an amazing fashion.”

  “Doesn’t war automatically do that? Give all power to the military?”

  “The British and the Soviets haven’t given over ultimate power to the military, but the politicos run the show—whether for good or ill. Alone among the allies, we leave what ought to be decisions of political policy to the generals.”

  Dismissed, Daniel went back happy. At least Friedman would take him if he could, and that was the highest compliment he had ever received. Later that same day he saw Friedman standing with a group of the top Army brass outside the Munitions Building, three and four star generals all hefty, beefy men, with whom he had obviously just been at some quasi-historic meeting. Friedman was standing to the side with a slightly bemused half smile. He looked as if he had wandered among the generals by accident, a sleek Oriental cat, a Siamese, caught suddenly among a herd of snorting bulls, careful to avoid their hooves and not sure in what language to address them. Yet Daniel knew that when Friedman gave the military a presentation, they listened. He did in fact know how to talk to them so that they understood, for he had been educating their officers for years. He had created their whole educational system in signals and codes.

  Getting rid of Purple did not lessen the pressure in OP-20-G; the tension increased until the office was shimmering with it. It was as if a high-pitched voice whined out of the ceiling, Got to, Got to, Got to, all the time. They must crack the Japanese naval codes yesterday; they must decipher and translate those vital messages. So much of the American fleet had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor, there was not one battleship to fight with and only four aircraft carriers. Admirals King and Nimitz had to know what the Japanese were going to do before they did it, so they could move their few pieces across the vast blue board to the right spot. Even then they would be outgunned, but without that advance knowledge, they would have no chance at all of preventing further Japanese invasions.

  Therefore they worked without ceasing, shorthanded until more young officers should be discharged from the language programs in Boulder and Harvard. Therefore they worked all night. Therefore they worked a seven-day week. Therefore Daniel found himself sitting one Saturday night in a restaurant with a menu of southern cooking before him trying to decode it and unable to believe it meant what it said and unable to remember what those words that seemed to be dissolving into component letters and then into black marks might stand for.

  The tension got to everyone. The normally soft-spoken Rodney threw his dictionary on the floor and swore, while the hotter tempered crypt-analysts spat insults at each other. One of the older women, Sonia, wept and Ann barricaded herself behind a wall of books in self-protection over which her sleek Oriental beauty could no longer be glimpsed. Ann never lost her temper; she merely shrank from the excesses bursting like ripe boils. Several people had requested transfers, and some of the Navy men got them, heading happily for an assignment on a ship and action.

  A naval engagement was occurring, the few American ships trying to block a Japanese invasion of Port Moresby on the southern coast of New Guinea, only three hundred miles from Australia. The OP-20-G unit had broken enough of the Japanese Naval Code (nicknamed Red) to know roughly what the Japanese were planning, and had given advance warning to Admiral Nimitz. Nonetheless during the battle that the papers dubbed the Battle of the Coral Sea, they could decipher few Japanese messages. Even when the battle was over, it seemed inconclusive to people in the unit, at the same time that they realized the Japanese Navy was planning a new and bigger action. The papers called the battle a victory, but OP-20-G knew how desperately the Navy needed a victory. This did not seem to have been it, but it wasn’t a disaster. The Japanese invasion was averted. Maybe they had to settle for celebrating nondisasters.

  The best thing about that battle was that with so many intercepts piled up, enough evidence accumulated to break through many code groups in the next month. The atmosphere in the office was a barely controlled hysteria, because now they knew exactly what they were working toward, and they had demonstrated to the Navy brass, who tended to mistrust their work, that they were not only useful but necessary. That did not diminish the pressure, for their deadline had been set by Yamamoto himself, the great Japanese sea lord who had conceived of and led the Pearl Harbor attack.

  Yamamoto was at sea on the flagship Yamato, and from that ultramodern battleship, he gathered two hundred other ships for a forthcoming attack intended to finish wiping out the American fleet. By mid-May, between Washington and the Hypo unit in Pearl Harbor, they could read ninety percent of the relevant signals. So far Daniel had counted five carriers, eleven battleships, sixteen cruisers and forty-nine destroyers. The Americans had three carriers, zero battleships, eight cruisers and fourteen destroyers. On the large map, colored pins marked the latest known positions of the converging Japanese forces. The Hypo unit invented a ploy that proved the Japanese were invading Midway for sure.

  Slowly as the codes began to be transparent to them, so did their work make sense to Daniel. Messages went out by radio. If the Americans could read Japanese signals, they would know as soon as the Japanese officers what the Japanese were going to do. Finally the immense amount of work done round the clock in this cranky place began to have some payoff, because most of those strange five-letter clumps now meant something concrete.

  June third the battle began, as OP-20-G and Hypo had told Nimitz it would, and Daniel with all the others waited in the grey room heaped with IBM runoff
from the machines upstairs. They had broken so many of the codes used in battle after the Coral Sea engagement that they were able to follow the fighting from Japanese signals. After hours of disappointing decrypts, Daniel wished they couldn’t. Nothing but reports of ineffective attacks, easily beaten off. One attack after the other, but no damage reports, no damage at all, besides the Japanese reports of American planes shot down. B-17s from Midway attacked the Japanese vessels and did no damage. American fighters attempting to drive off Japanese carrier bombers were decimated by the superior Zeros. B-26s roared off Midway and failed to touch the Japanese. Then the Avengers and Devastators from the two American carriers began to arrive over the Japanese ships, launch their bombs, miss and be shot down. A raid of Vindicators came over from Midway, with identical results. Daniel thought, picking up the club sandwich a yeoman had brought him and putting it down again untasted, we’re going to lose this war. I’ll never go back to the Orient. It will be closed to us for a generation. We’re losing. We started too late with too little.

  They could read the Japanese signals and tell the Americans what Yamamoto was planning, but OP-20-G could not make the American torpedoes explode, as they were failing to do; could not correct problems with the planes; could not give them more warships or pilots as experienced as the Japanese. To judge by the total wipeout of the first torpedo squads sent against the Japanese carriers, it did not look as if American pilots would survive long enough with their ineffective torpedoes and less maneuverable planes, the clumsy Devastators, to get that experience.

  Then came a message from the captain of the Akagi, one of the Japanese carriers: his carrier had been badly hit and was burning. “We got one,” Daniel cried out, and everybody cheered as if it were a baseball game coming over the radio, the Senators for once beating the Yankees. The Dauntless dive bombers had arrived from the American carriers.

  They were still talking about the hit when a yeoman handed him another note. He glanced at it quickly. “I’ve already seen this one, Yeoman.”

  “Sir … that’s not the same one.” The yeoman swallowed.

  Daniel looked again. One group different. This time it was the Kaga that was hit. Something astonishing was happening on the other side of the world, something which they, with their lists of five- and four-letter groups and constant poring over Japanese dictionaries and special lexicons of Japanese naval terms, had miraculously prepared for. The Americans had surprise on their side and for once they appeared to be winning. Daniel realized from his dazed shock that he had not expected a good outcome; perhaps they had all grown accustomed to defeat. People looked at each other across the office far more openly and frankly than they previously had, before they bent to their usual frenzied tasks.

  Ann, barricaded behind books for months, removed part of the barrier. When he smiled at her, she blinked quickly and then gave him a tiny flash of smile before lowering her eyes. How delicate she was, how special and fragile. In the midst of the battle, Daniel paused wondering how he could penetrate those formidable defenses. She seemed an exquisite princess from The Tale of Genji.

  The atmosphere of barely suppressed guilt that had hung over the office dissipated, and the humid air of a Washington June felt more breathable. Everybody was suddenly addressing each other by name and looking each other in the eye. Sonia offered him half of her roast beef sandwich, while Rodney grinned at him. Sometime in the half hour between the message of the Soryu being hit and the message of its having to be abandoned to sink, the people in the long room began to feel less like souls condemned to hell together, Daniel thought, and more like a team. They began to be proud of their work and each other. This battle was their victory too.

  JEFF 2

  The Creature from the Logey Swamp

  Jeff had learned to shoot when he was fourteen. The Professor had not taught him; indeed his father had not approved. Jeff was lonely but did not always want to be hanging around with the other faculty brats. After his mother’s death, he began wandering out into the surrounding countryside sometimes on his bike, sometimes hitching a ride on the running board of a rickety Model T along a gravel road, sometimes riding in the back of a farmer’s pickup. He sought escape, and hanging around with kids on the hill farms had given him a ticket out from his misery. There he was no longer shy, because they did not know him as shy and bookish. He was free to assume a more adventurous spirit. He was special, the one full of ideas, a leader who could think up new adventures in an environment overfamiliar to the other boys.

  He learned every side road and trail in the hills, which represented escape, adventure, companionship, which gradually he began to love with first a pencil, then watercolors, finally with oils. Perhaps his need to possess and celebrate that landscape had made him a painter.

  He had learned to shoot and although it had always remained difficult for him to kill birds and animals, he did so because it was expected and the price of not being accepted was being cast out of his chosen adventure. Deer he would not hunt, but he went out with his friends for ducks and geese and shot rabbits and squirrels. He preferred skeet shooting, which he took up in college. Zach was a decent shot, but Jeff was better. Because he had borrowed so many rifles and shotguns over the years from other people, he was good at picking up the peculiarities of a weapon and allowing for them. When he was working on the dude ranch, Quinlan had him show off with a Colt .44 for the delectation of the guests and occasionally give lessons in target shooting.

  It remained for the Army to punish his long flirtation with firearms, for he was stuck in Alabama bored to the intellectual level of the fungus growing between his toes and his ears, drinking far too much and feverish with some minor bug he had caught, a recurrent fever that weakened him but never quite laid him out. He was an instructor in the M-1 rifle. His classes arrived and left, but he was growing moss on his back.

  The one redeeming feature had just been shipped out, his nurse Betty Jo who outranked him a full grade. She was a redhead from Tennessee who could also outdrink him, the hard-talking brown-eyed daughter of a coal miner. Betty Jo glared at the world through eyes a little slitted and lips a little sucked in until she took her shoes off, and then a ribald affectionate self emerged surprising as her soft body under the uniform. He had met Betty Jo when one of his riflery students winged his arm. The soldier had not been able to understand why Jeff had not had it in for him after the accident.

  She had been lonely too. Jeff figured out why the Army made all nurses officers. She could not go out with any of the enlisted men, for regulations forbade that mixing. Therefore making them officers was a way of keeping the nurses off-limits sexually to anyone except male officers. Sometimes the Army moved in mysterious ways, but sometimes their intent was brutally clear.

  Now she was gone, leaving Jeff depressed. His life appeared a series of stagnant lagoons connected by barely moving sewers. When he had first enlisted he had thought a great deal about violent death, but now he thought of perishing of boredom and inertia, rotting through like a log sunk in the swamp waters. Summer had never been his favorite season, and summer here came in April. Muggy was a permanent condition.

  He was sourly amused to remember that he had told Bird he was attracted to a more verdant, more southern landscape. At first he had tried to sketch here, but paper and canvas alike wilted and rotted. His commanding officer made his life miserable, calling him Hey Rembrandt. Finally inertia overcame him and he did not think of light or color. He ceased to wake in the morning with that sense of possession, of shapes looming in the mind, of sharpening hues. He never saw paintings and he never painted. He was an animal, not even a dog or a raccoon, but low and somnolent as a salamander in rotting leaves.

  He asked for a transfer and nothing happened, and indeed, the Army disposed of second lieutenants much as he dealt with used razor blades. Thus he was astonished when a letter came to him from an unknown Captain Cunningham inquiring if he wished to join the Office of Strategic Services and enclosing the usual quantit
y of Army application forms. He filled them out and shipped them off, wondering what they were talking about. In Army bullshit, Strategic Services could be delivering the mail or organizing recreation for the brass. Nothing would come of this latest attempt to escape the water moccasin farm to which he had been posted.

  Ten days later his commanding officer called him in. “You’ve weaseled your way out, Rembrandt. I don’t know who you know, but this sounds like some cushy Washington job shuffling paper.”

  His orders read very simply that he was to report to OSS in Washington on the following Monday. In the intervening time his CO gave him the dirtiest details he could invent, marching the men into the swamps for a day of jungle warfare and then a night of camping out, which Jeff considered simply a way to feed the mosquitoes. His fever rose until his teeth chattered in the heat palpable as a smothering wet wool blanket.

  Monday in Washington he learned little more, except that OSS generated as much paper as the other sections of the Army, and that from the inside it was called OSS and never The OSS. He filled out his educational background on five different forms and his next of kin on six. A Major Cod gave him a stern address of welcome, stressing that the work he would be entering upon involved intelligence gathering behind enemy lines, and was of a confidential and highly dangerous nature, and that OSS training was both strenuous and hazardous, requiring stamina of mind and endurance of body. The major liked to speak in yoked phrases. Gathering that OSS was some sort of commando group, Jeff wondered why they had picked him.

  He was driven out to a compound that looked as if it had been a country club. Tents were erected on what had clearly been tennis courts. The chief instructor, a Captain Spinnaker, prematurely balding, for he could not have been more than thirty, told him he would be assigned to Special Operations and in the meantime would be developing his skills in guerrilla warfare and in clandestine intelligence gathering.