by Joe Haldeman
“You hit an MP? With a gun?”
“Yeah, that was stupid, I know. They got me down on the ground and cuffed me. Then they took off the cuffs and put me in a strait-jacket and left me in a room with the one I’d knocked down. He pushed me off the chair and proceeded to kick the stuffing out of me. I passed out.”
There was a long pause. “What, you woke up here?”
“No, hell. There was a couple of hearings and some shrink talked to me, I thought he was on my side. But then they say I’m not competent to stand trial and send me here.” He coughed hoarsely. “When I’m competent I guess I go back to Germany and they hang my ass.” He coughed again and threw his cigarette into the butt can on the wall. “The bitch.”
“They’d hang you for that?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Not unless she dies. She got infected with para something. Para-nitis.”
Spider looked up at the door. “Here comes the Pill-down Man.” Specialist Knox, a tall, heavy black man, came into the ward pushing a shiny metal cart with lots of trays and compartments. On the top there were thirteen small white paper cups containing pills, matched up to small square Polaroids of each patient’s face.
Spider was his fourth customer. He emptied the cup into his hand and said, “Juice or water?”
Spider looked at the pill and capsule. “These aren’t what I got last time, though.”
“Don’t give me any shit, man, I just work here. Juice or water?”
“The little orange one’s Thorazine,” the blond man said. “Make you behave. I don’t know about the other one.”
“Antibiotic,” Knox said. He poured Spider a paper cup of juice.
Spider tried to hide the Thorazine under his tongue but he swallowed it reflexively. The juice was watery and acrid.
Knox handed the other man his pills but then looked back at Spider. “Yeah, you Speidel.” He reached behind the cart and brought out a spiral notebook and a ballpoint pen. “Captain My Captain say you supposed to write somethin’ out for him.” He handed it to him and said in a low voice, “Where you from in the Nam?”
“II Corps, here and there. I was attached with the 1st of the 8th when I got wounded.”
“Yeah, up Pleiku, Kontum. I been through there.” He glanced back at the door. “Look, don’t you sweat the Tho’azine. That’s the smallest they got, twenty-five mikes. You been gettin’ ten times that much, injected, over on the other ward. Pretty soon you be able to count up to ten.”
“Oh. Thanks.” Knox nodded absently and moved on down.
“He’s okay for a lifer,” the blond man said. “You must of been pretty much a zombie over there.”
“Guess so, I don’t remember much. Hell, I don’t remember goin’ from Vietnam to the States.” He smiled. “You sure this is Walter Reed? I mean, they could build a place like this in Nam and keep all us paranoids there.”
The other man stretched out on his bunk. “Hey, you don’t have to worry about bein’ paranoid. You’re in the army. There really is somebody after your ass.” He chuckled at his own joke and lit up a cigarette. When Spider didn’t respond, he glanced over.
Spider was staring at the doorway, his face pale and waxen, mouth half open.
“What the fuck? What is it, man?”
“Nothin’. Just a guy I see sometimes. He’s not real.”
“Not real?”
“He’s there but he’s not, like, not real. I mean nobody else can see him.”
“You ever talk to him?”
“Huh uh.” Spider rubbed his face hard and blinked twice with his whole face. He looked at the other man. “Sometimes he talks to me.”
MARCH
The fourth version
Sarge said it was going to be a “walk in the park.” Some park; some walk.
It was about local noon by the time we got our shit together, suited up, out of the ship and ready to hike, just like we’d done every other day for the past ten. But all the other expeditions had been through the grassy plain that lay between our landing site and the sea. This was our first foray into the hilly jungle to the rear.
To give Sarge some credit, there was no reason for anybody to expect trouble. All the action on this planet had been thousands of klicks to the south, in frozen tundra. But I guess the powers that be were using us as bait, trolling us in various directions to see whether we could lure the enemy into a new environment. If that was the goal, we were to be wildly successful.
I was nervous from the very beginning. We were used to an unobstructed line of sight all the way to the horizon, and if you wanted to see further, you could just hit bounce and your suit would shoot you up about a hundred meters.
But here, you could only see a few meters in any direction. The jungle was a riotous tangle of brush and vines, knobby vines as thick as your arm with spikes like tenpenny nails. Everything was a sickly chartreuse and brown, like the grass but more washed out. If you bounced, you’d come back down in the middle of the briar patch somewhere. Your laserfinger could cut through it easily enough, but how would you know which direction to go? (Actually, I guessed you could spin around at the top of your bounce and take a reading on the ship. I hadn’t really thought it through.)
Sarge took point, cutting us a swath several meters wide with the heavy laser. The stuff was still smoldering when I walked through, at the end of the line. That was not anybody’s favorite position. I spent a lot of time checking the rear, which in the cumbersome suits means lumbering around in a semicircle. The things need rearview mirrors.
I trusted the two guys in front of me. Batman was weird, an Allied observer from Sirius IV, wings and all, but he’d seen a lot of combat and was absolutely cool. Moses was from Earth like me, a Jew from Iowa, which some guys thought was funny, like in the movies the Jewish guy is always from Brooklyn. He’s always the first one to die, too, him or the black dude, which in this case would have to be Batman. We kidded Moses about that (and Batman, too, but Sirians don’t have any sense of humor) and he went along with it, but you could tell it spooked him. Rightly so, as it turned out.
After a couple of hours it was starting to get routine, up and down the hills, splash through the slimy sulfurous streams, every now and then see a flowering plant or one that wiggled at you. That was a little eerie, as if they were reaching out.
We came to a natural clearing, like a dell where three hills came together, and Sarge told us to take five. Moses started to say something sarcastic, and then the top half of him just disappeared. Nothing left but two legs, toppling, and a fine mist of red spray. Then Batman got it; his blood was bright blue.
I bounced, by reflex, but I didn’t bounce far. I must have crashed into a tree limb a few meters up. It knocked me out cold, which evidently saved my life.
When I woke up, there was a Bug walking around the clearing, making sure people were dead. He would scrabble along sideways up to the head and use a sonic blaster, pretty messy.
I didn’t move. My arm was stretched out, and he had to walk right over the laserfinger to get to me. I squeezed and it sliced him in two.
I got up and looked around. There weren’t any other Bugs, but it didn’t look like there were any of us left alive, either.
I went to the center of the clearing. For some reason they had sliced Sarge’s suit open, I guess just to watch him die in the poisonous atmosphere. His skin was bright red.
I checked overhead and bounced. At the apex of my bounce, I turned around to locate the ship, broadcasting my emergency beacon.
But there was no one to come help. The Roger Young was a smoking ruin. I drifted back down into the clearing full of carnage. I guess I went a little crazy.
Sexual release
Spider’s father stepped diffidently into the open doorway. “Dr. Folsom?”
The captain did not correct him. “Ah, Mr. Speidel; come in, come in.” He gestured at the chair across the desk from him. “Have a seat. Just a minute.” He returned the file on his blotter to a desk drawer and searc
hed for another one. “Here we go.”
There were actually only two files in the drawer. This was not Folsom’s office. He did not like to have other people in his office; it was too small even for him alone.
He took out his pipe and pouch and began the filling ritual. “John is doing well, quite well. He responds well to his medication; there have been no further violent outbursts.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. He’s about as un-violent a kid as I’ve ever known.”
“Yes, that’s interesting. Yet it did take four men to restrain him at one time.” They both shook their heads. “I wanted to speak to you alone, without Mrs. Speidel, because a couple of the matters I have to discuss are sexual in nature. I saw no reason to embarrass her.”
“I appreciate that.”
“First of all, John’s syphilis has responded dramatically to penicillin. That’s lucky. There are some virulently resistant strains in Vietnam.”
Mr. Speidel made a strangled sound. “Pardon me?” Folsom said.
“Good.” Mr. Speidel fired up a Camel. “That’s … that’s good.”
Folsom lit his pipe carefully, twice. “He does still have, well, hallucinations. He hears voices, sees people who aren’t there, Vietnamese. But he does know they’re not real. That’s important”
“People he killed?”
“As far as I know, John never killed anybody. Or if he did, he’s repressed the memory. That wouldn’t be uncommon.
“By themselves, these hallucinations wouldn’t be enough to keep John in the hospital.”
“Really?”
“As long as he doesn’t think they’re real, no. He understands that he’s sick and that these illusions are part of the sickness. He knows not to pay any attention to what they say.”
“You mean, uh, he might be coming home?”
Folsom raised his eyebrows and didn’t say anything.
“I mean, look. Do you have any children?”
He studied his pipe. “No.”
“A teenage son is, uh, is like a kind of wild man. It was a real sigh of relief when he went off to college, you know?”
“And now he’s coming back, and crazy, too.”
“Yeah. I guess that’s about it.”
“And homosexual. That bothers you.”
“Sure it does. I mean, he’s still, he’s still my boy.…”
“It would bother me, too.” He squared the papers in front of him. “Look. There might be something we can do.”
“To make him, make him normal?”
“Well, to make him prefer girls to boys. It’s called aversion therapy. We’d have to keep him a while longer.”
“Well, sure.”
“And we’d like to give him electroconvulsive therapy, too. It would make him more receptive.”
“Sure. You’re the doctor.”
He slid over a piece of paper. “John’s still a minor, of course, and also not mentally competent. Would you sign this release for him?”
Mr. Speidel looked at it. “But he’s in the Army. Can’t you do anything to him you want?”
“It’s just a formality. Besides, John won’t be in the Army much longer. He’ll be getting a medical discharge as soon as we feel comfortable about him leaving.”
His brow furrowed. “But then if he has like a relapse? Can we bring him back here?”
“No, he’d go to the nearest VA hospital. We’ve already started the paperwork for his disability rating. If he gets a fifty-percent disability or more, which is likely, he can go to the VA for anything—free medical care for the rest of his life. But no matter what, he’ll always be able to receive treatment for this problem.”
“His homo, homosexuality?”
“Any mental problem whatsoever. Anything that’s service-connected.” He set his pipe down in the ashtray and looked steadily at Mr. Speidel. “Before the Army, John was interested in girls. Very interested, you said.”
“Definitely. It was a problem.”
“Well, sometimes that can be a smokescreen. A man will pretend to be interested in girls so no one will suspect. You know?”
“He could get an Oscar, then.”
“Well, yes. But there’s also ‘situational’ homosexuality. A guy is in prison, or aboard ship in the Navy, or at a boarding school—or out in the jungle with a bunch of other guys …”
“But wait. I’ve been in situations like that. I mean, I was in the Army, too. We didn’t go around—”
“Of course not. But some people, boys who have an unusually strong sex drive …” He shrugged. “All we really have to do is repattern him. Sort of make him regret what he’s done—and get interested in girls again.”
Mr. Speidel nodded vigorously, took out his fountain pen and signed the release and dated it. “He’ll be grateful to you for the rest of his life, I know it.”
Speidel nodded. “He’s a good boy. We just have to put him back on the right track.”
Homosexuality
In 1991, people investigating the difference between male and female brains found that there was a region of the hippocampus that was twice as large in heterosexual males as in females and homosexual males. The next year, researchers claimed to have found a gene that apparently predisposes men toward homosexuality.
Socrates and Plato, who had a love relationship as well as a scholarly one, probably would have been mystified by a supposedly advanced culture that made a big deal out of this. There have been other cultures, like the Etero in New Guinea, in which homosexuality is mandatory for a certain period of a man’s life. All primates and most mammals do it under some conditions. Only humans, presumably, worry about it.
Captain Folsom worried about it a lot. He had authority to back him up, too; the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual, DSM-I, still classified homosexuality at the top of the list “302. Sexual Deviation.” In May of 1968, this manual would be superseded by the DSM-II. That would still call homosexuality a deviation, but would note “this diagnosis is not appropriate for individuals who perform deviant sexual acts because normal sexual objects are not available to them.” Captain Folsom would ignore that. As he ignored Spider’s absurd contention that he had never indulged in a homosexual act.
The poor boy was irrational about Lee, the pinko queer. But it was not too late to save him.
Suggestions
Lee and Beverly sat together on the couch, reading the paper and a textbook, the house cat scrunched impartially between them. Lee scratched the animal’s head and it purred loudly. Beverly set her book on the floor and leaned back, rubbing her eyes. “I’m not going to learn this.”
“Is that a prediction or a declaration?”
“Algebra.” She yawned. “If I’d dropped out last week I could’ve gotten some tuition back.”
“Why do you need two courses in algebra, anyhow? I got away with one.”
“Yeah, but you’re dumb.” She leaned up against his shoulder. “It’s for stat. Need stat for Historical Methods.”
Lee put his hand on her thigh and the cat scrambled for freedom. “You ought to drop out. Larry’s offer’s still open.”
“Sounds like fun, slap paint all day. I’ve seen how tired you get.”
He shrugged. “It’s twice minimum wage.”
“Huh uh. Minimum wage went up to $1.60 on the first.”
“Larry’d go $3.20 if we asked him. He’d like to have a girl on the job.”
“Sure, stare at my butt all day. Larry gives me the creeps.”
Lee took a pencil and scribbled on the newspaper. “Look, I get five an hour. If we both put in a thirty-hour week, we’d clear almost a thousand a month.”
“Really?” She studied his figures.
“And last month I made more than two hundred on the grass. We can almost live on that.” She rolled her eyes but didn’t say anything.
“We could put away a solid eight or nine hundred a month. Summer comes, we say fuck it and split for California.” They had talked about that. “Haight-Ashbury, man
. It’s another world.”
“Yeah,” she said. She leaned over and picked up the book and opened it where a folded-over sheet of graph paper was holding her place. “See how I do on this test.” She stared at the page without reading.
Lee slid his hand up to her crotch and stroked lightly with his fingertip. She smiled. “I’ll give you ten minutes to stop doing that.”
The fifth version
Captain Folsom’s “office” was actually one fourth of a large office that had been quadrisected by six-foot-high government-gray dividers. He had a Playboy calendar up on one wall and diplomas from his two degrees framed on another. His desk blotter was an expensive-looking leather artifact embossed with the seal and motto of the University of Oklahoma.
He hung up his hat and coat and looked with mild satisfaction upon his orderly domain. There was a single piece of interoffice mail in his In box, and the person who had delivered it had taken care to center it precisely.
He sat in the swivel chair and opened the envelope and frowned. It was another one of Specialist Speidel’s fantasies. He should never have given the boy that tablet.
We didn’t know what to expect when we came up out of the shelter. Nothing but ashes, I figured, even though it was a park. Washington was a prime target, not even fifteen miles away.
But it was surprisingly green. Normal-looking at first, but then you realized there weren’t any big trees; there weren’t any plants that looked like they were more than about two years old. We’d been in the shelter for three.
There was a sparrow hopping around in a bush that looked bigger than a normal bird. I stared at it. It had a long curved beak and three eyes.