If You Survive
Page 25
The peacetime Army wasn’t too bad at that point. We managed to keep ourselves occupied with much routine and a halfhearted training schedule. I couldn’t help but notice that some of the men marching out to remote training areas seemed to have extra bulges inside their shirts and that some of their rifles looked an awful lot like soft-ball bats.
Finally the Army faced the inevitable and set up a system of priorities for releasing its guests. They awarded points for time in service, with extra points for overseas duty and five points for each major campaign and every medal. I was one of the lucky ones to get an early release, rolling up over a hundred points with my three years’ service, fifteen months overseas, five major campaigns, three Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars, and one Silver Star.
On September 30, 1945, one day after my twenty-fourth birthday, I became a full-time civilian. Three years and eleven days had passed since my first encounter with the United States Army.
Jobs were scarce, and many people were out of work now that war production was over. I could have returned to my old job on the railroad, but I just didn’t want to; I was a different person. I found I liked to deal with people face to face, person to person, and it seemed the best place for that was in sales. I started off with vacuum sweepers, which I sold fairly easily until the company went on strike. I went into other lines until I wound up in insurance. There seems to be further irony in my life in the fact that I, who as a young man saw so much death and destruction that carried with it no compensation whatsoever—except perhaps the honor of having fought with courage and distinction—should go into a business that attempts to put a price on a loss.
Out of all this damned useless war I hope I am entitled to a few simple observations.
The cost in grief and devastation, if it’s on the scene, is so immeasurably expensive that no one really wins. No human being disputes this fact of life, so why can’t human beings think of this before a war?
If war there must be, then above all it must be kept away from our shores. If I and all of my fellows learned one thing, it was that. Keeping war at arm’s length may not be possible with modern long-range weapons, and so there must be no war in the first place. Such prevention seems possible, with human beings, only if there is strength overwhelming enough, and obvious enough, that no one would dare take the first step toward war.
The war we fought in Europe was uneven enough when calculated in terms of puny men in the face of incredible firepower and colossal war equipment, unfair enough when seen in terms of the futility of strategy in the face of brute strength. It was surely the last war in which strategy could still be employed and make a difference in outcome. Nuclear weapons are bound to render this time-honored convention of war null and void.
One of the most visible religious leaders of the world, the Pope, stood at the memorial to the dead at Hiroshima and proclaimed that mankind must take a step forward in wisdom and emotional maturity so that this sort of catastrophe will never happen again. I hope we are up to it.
Let there be peace!