Battle Fatigue

by Mark Kurlansky

  The ball lands in Karl’s seat with an enormous cracking sound that makes him look up. When he does, the ball bounces into his lap. Karl has Yaz’s home run ball. That is all it takes to turn the three of us into little boys again. Donnie and I argue about what kind of pitch Yaz hit. Donnie insists that between Mantle and Joe Pepitone the Yankees will come back.

  “Yeah, you always think that, but they’re through,” I say.

  Rachel is listening with quiet disdain. After the Red Sox win, Sam says to Karl—who is studying his souvenir—“You’ve got to get Yaz to sign it, man!” Over Rachel’s protests we elbow our way into the crowd in narrow Yawkey Way and wait for Yastrzemski to come out. By then the crowd is smaller and we manage to get up to him. The ballplayer, a head shorter than Karl, looks surprisingly small. Karl is so excited to talk to him that his English fails him. He says, “Meine Nom is Karl too and I am from Germany. I caught dis from your touchdown.”

  “He means home run,” Sam shouts anxiously.

  “Jah, could you sign it ‘From Carl to Karl’?”

  “Sure,” Yaz says with a big smile. As he writes on the ball, Sam, who knows the value of a good souvenir, shouts, “But don’t forget to add ‘Yastrzemski.’ ”

  He reclicks his pen and adds his last name.

  What a night. I could stay up talking to Karl until dawn. But Rachel points out that we have to get Sam back. Our parents are probably worried.

  Karl (Moltke, not Yastrzemski) and I swear we will stay in touch, but for some reason I think we probably won’t. We hug and then touch fists, and he says, “Friends and brothers in the revolution.” If I read about West Berlin exploding and Germany in flames, I will know that at the center of it will be a radical revolutionary with a home run ball signed by Carl Yastrzemski.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Our First Trip to America

  We are all back in Haley for the summer and when Rachel comes for a visit, I introduce her to Rocco. We talk about his problem and Rachel tells us she knows a draft counselor in Boston. Rocco goes to talk with him and discovers that because his father died in combat in Korea, he will not be drafted. So he signs with the Detroit Tigers and is sent to a class-B team called the Warsaw Warriors. When Stanley hears that they sent him to pitch for a team in Warsaw, he laughs, since his family left Warsaw and never had anything good to say about it. But this turns out to be Warsaw, Indiana, in a midwestern league called the Triple I—Illinois, Indiana, Iowa.

  Donnie comes up with the idea of us all going to Warsaw to see Rocco play. Donnie has a big blue van, a Ford Econoline. He has taken out the back seats and put in two beds and calls the van “the love machine.” He points out that with the love machine we have no need for the expense of motels and we can get there quickly by driving and sleeping in shifts. We have little money, and what we do have we are saving for college. We also have little time because our summer jobs are about to start. Stanley is working at the tool-and-die plant. Donnie is working in the front office of a textile company. And I have been hired to spend my summer in the cool comfort of a large, dark walk-in refrigerator, keeping the shelves of the dairy store stocked.

  Stanley comes up with the idea that during the trip we can live on canned food, and he puts a case of Campbell’s Pork and Beans in the van. So I contribute some cans of tuna and Donnie brings cans of soup. Now with the Cold War getting hotter we are all eating from our family shelters.

  We leave Haley and only get as far as Connecticut when Stanley hungers for some pork and beans. Then we remember that no one thought to bring a can opener and we have to stop in a store to buy one. This keeps us laughing until New Jersey. At eighty miles an hour on the wide lanes of the Pennsylvania Turnpike we are singing Motown—the Four Tops, Smokey Robinson, and Martha Reeves. We take turns driving and sleeping. Cold canned food tastes a lot better than you might think and soon we are in Warsaw, Indiana.

  This is a different place and we are foreigners. It reminds me of being at sea on a calm day, but there is no water. It is just so flat, the horizon is always straight ahead, and the houses and even the people stick out against a too-bright blue sky. Maybe that is why the girls all dress in bright colors—no browns or grays, only true red, blue, or yellow. The men, even the ones our age, wear short-sleeved white shirts and have haircuts like Dickey Panicelli’s when he got back from boot camp.

  We don’t fit in. Our hair is longer, especially Donnie’s. He has a beard, I have a mustache, and Stanley has a lot of facial hairs though they don’t seem to add up to much. We’re still wearing our World War II clothes—Stanley in his Eisenhower jacket and me in my uncle’s field jacket.

  Though nobody says so, they don’t like us. They grumble a lot about hippies, college students, and draft dodgers—which are all the same thing in their minds and they think that’s what we are. And, of course, they are right. Several times, police order our van to pull over. They study us and ask what we are doing in Warsaw. Everything changes when we tell them that we have a friend on the Warriors. Then we all talk baseball.

  But we don’t really speak the same language. They have a twang, though a policeman, whom we were getting along with, became very angry when Stanley asked him why he spoke with a southern accent. They have trouble understanding us too. They say we have a “Kennedy accent,” which isn’t true and clearly they don’t mean it as a compliment. At the baseball stadium we ask an attendant where to park and he says contemptuously, “What do you mean, ‘puk’?” But then I realize that he really doesn’t understand what we are asking.

  The home of the Warsaw Warriors is no larger or in any way better than the ball fields we played on in high school. But the players are. The catcher knows how to catch Rocco’s hard fastball and guides him, and he is getting more control, looking better than I ever saw him in Haley. They only let him throw about ten pitches a day, which is good for us because it means we get to see him play all three days we are there. And we can see from the attention the manager and coaches give him that he is being seen as a serious prospect. He seems very happy to see us in this town where everyone speaks differently and where he is the only short dark person with thick curly black hair. He is in training and refuses to eat canned food and makes us go to this local restaurant that is so cheap we wonder why we have been eating canned food.

  The only women in the restaurant are waitresses. The customers are all men and they are mostly talking about “the Negroes.” Sometimes they use less polite words. They are very angry about “the Negroes.” There have been race riots in Cleveland and a few other cities, and the men of Warsaw have strong ideas about what to do in Warsaw when “the Negroes” start rioting. This seems odd because, as far as I can tell, there are no Negroes, not even at the baseball games.

  They also talk about the war and how we are winning in spite of the hippies. We eat very quietly. Probably the only reason they let us in is that we are with a baseball player.

  At the baseball game we sit next to a group of men who are talking very loudly about “the Negroes.” Then they leave, all but one. He looks about our age and is very tall with enormous ears—or does the haircut just make it look that way? I can’t help myself. I have to ask someone.

  “I notice everyone here is talking about the Negroes coming. Who is coming?”

  He smiles and slowly looks around and then laughs. “Damned if I know. I keep asking my dad the same question.”

  He introduces himself as Lester Parkman and I say, “Joel Bloom.” We shake hands. My hand hurts from his grip.

  “You fellows aren’t from here,” Lester says.

  “No, Massachusetts.”

  “Damn,” he says, seeming genuinely excited. “That’s why you have those Kennedy accents.” Then he moves his face closer to mine, staring. “You Jew?” asks Lester.

  Is he saying “You Jew, you,” or is he really asking? Stanley is looking very worried. I say that I am and his face lights up. “Damn! I’ve never seen a Jew before. You fellows too?” he says to Stanley
and Donnie. When they shake their heads he looks disappointed.

  Lester has volunteered to be a marine infantryman. He is leaving in four days. As I talk to him I realize he is not that different from me. He doesn’t know where Vietnam is and he doesn’t want to go. “I don’t have anything against Vietnamese people. I don’t even know what they want,” Lester says. “I guess they just want people to stop invading their country.”

  “So if you feel that way, how can you go kill them?”

  Lester shrugs. “No choice. I’m not going to be a draft dodger.” When Lester gets out of the marines he wants to go to college, and he hopes to eventually be the principal of the high school in Warsaw. For two days we go to ball games and little restaurants and walk around town and talk and talk. He keeps saying that he doesn’t want to kill Vietnamese but he has no choice. I cannot convince him that he does have a choice. And under his terms he doesn’t, because he knows that if he doesn’t go to Vietnam he will never be the principal of the Warsaw high school.

  The last time I see him we hug. I wish him good luck and he wishes me good luck, which reminds me that I haven’t figured this out either, I have just deferred the decision by going to college. I hug Rocco too and tell him next time I watch him play it will be on a class-A team, and he smiles and pats my shoulder so hard it hurts.

  In the van again, on canned food again, singing more Motown, we talk all the way back about baseball and Rocco and Lester. I feel like it would be very hard to stop a war in this country. No matter what you did in New England, there would always be Indiana. But the truth is, as Stanley glumly says, “Lester isn’t any different from us.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It’s not that Easy

  He is beautiful, my new roommate. Donnie LePine talked me into getting an apartment with him. It is in a small building on the edge of town. Donnie is resplendent in his long locks. But it doesn’t come easy, and I see hours of shampooing, brushing, setting it in a stocking cap. Rachel, who spends no time at all on her hair, is more beautiful.

  There are other people living in the apartment. There is someone sleeping on our couch right now. His boots are on the couch and he is snoring but I have no idea who he is or who most of the people here are.

  Influenced by one of the most famous professors at Whiting, Henry B. Moreland, I have decided to major in biology. Moreland is the author of a dozen books on Darwin and the natural order. He is also an outspoken presence at antiwar marches in Washington and around the country. He is one of the celebrity marchers—well-known writers, lawyers, and scientists who are always seen at the heads of the marches. The police seem to avoid clubbing that front row though I am sure Moreland has inhaled his share of tear gas.

  My favorite Moreland moment was during a lecture when a student in an Air Force ROTC uniform challenged him.

  “Professor Moreland, would you say that violence is natural?”

  Moreland squinted through his thick-lensed glasses and pushed his long gray hair off his forehead. “Well, that would depend on the act. But I would say that the tendency to react with violence is common in nature. Most animals, including human beings, are built with an instinct for violence as a survival mechanism.”

  “Then,” said the young recruit, certain that he had the old professor, “war is a natural thing. It is what we are built to do. What we are supposed to be doing.”

  The hall was completely silent, waiting for Moreland’s answer. “War may be caused by biological impulses, but impulses being biological does not make them natural and it does not make them right. We have biological impulses to be naked and eat with our fingers. That doesn’t mean anyone wants to see you like that.”

  The class broke into loud laughter. In some ways this was a fun time to be going to college. In other ways it was not.

  The war goes on and that is what we are all talking about most of the time. Walter Cronkite, that same distinctive voice from the evening news who explained World War II to me in my childhood, is on television every night reporting on the deaths, the killings, the ever-larger numbers of troops being called up. Almost twenty thousand Americans and maybe a million Vietnamese have been killed. The generals think that if we kill enough of them the Vietnamese will give up, but that isn’t happening.

  We seem helpless to stop this killing. We don’t want to be like the Germans we learned about as children. We want to speak out. We want to do something. We have constant demonstrations. They are all over the country. The crowds keep getting bigger. But it doesn’t do anything except maybe make the police, Rachel’s “pigs,” even crazier. They are becoming more violent with every march.

  Donnie and I still talk about Lester. He must be a marine by now. We wonder if he is in Vietnam, if we are about to see him on television, if he will survive to be a principal. “It’s the Lesters of the country that we have to organize,” says Donnie.

  “I don’t think you can,” I say. “Until they get back. Then they will be ready.”

  “Then you have the base of a real revolution,” says Rachel. “Organize the veterans. That’s how the Bolsheviks won.”

  Home for a visit I find that Popeye Panicelli angrily approves of the beating of demonstrators. I wonder if he understands that I am one of them. He says, “Those kids get what they deserve.” And I guess a lot of the police feel that way. Dickey served, so why don’t I? But then Dickey, who always gets attention when he speaks because he hardly ever does anymore, says, “And we’re getting what we deserve in Vietnam.”

  Popeye doesn’t answer. I don’t think they talk to each other much. At night I can still hear Dickey screaming.

  There are a lot of draft counselors. They are mostly just kids like me. Sometimes they are parents of kids like me. They don’t know that much about the draft but they meet with someone who gives them information and then they go to the poor parts of cities and work as counselors. I don’t want to do that. But I do keep thinking about Dickey. Suppose I had tried to talk him out of going. Suppose I had convinced him. Wouldn’t that have been a good thing to do? But why would I have had any more luck with him than I had with Lester?

  Still, I want to start trying to talk guys out of it, so I go see Rachel’s friend Myron, in Boston, the one who helped Rocco. He is in a storefront on Blue Hill Avenue in Dorchester, the widest street in a three-story neighborhood. It used to be a Jewish neighborhood but now it is black. Myron is one of the last Jews. His office is next to the Black Panthers’ office. These Panthers are as beautiful as Donnie. They dress in black with black berets on their heads.

  Myron, on the other hand, is in blue—blue jeans, blue work shirt, and, for contrast, a string of red beads. His office, called “The Draft Project,” is an empty room except for five folding chairs. The walls are covered with posters, mostly against the war but also supporting the United Farm Workers, a California-Mexican group calling for the boycott of grapes. I am not sure why we should be boycotting grapes but I think we should all support each other’s causes, so I resolve to eat no more grapes—though I wasn’t eating them very much before.

  “There is always a choice,” says Myron. “You can refuse the draft on moral grounds. They will give you a hearing. If you lose, your choices are to go to jail or to Canada.” Myron is very concise about this, like a professor laying out the semester’s curriculum. “Those are your options,” he says.

  But they are not my options. They are the options of the guys I want to talk to. I talk to kids who aren’t going to college about not going into the army. I tell them they can refuse or find a way out. But they go in anyway. Sometimes about a year later they come back looking different and they track me down just to say “You were right.” That’s what Dickey would have said too. But so far I haven’t talked anyone out of going.

  It occurs to me that maybe there were a lot of Germans who wanted to stop the Nazis. Maybe they couldn’t figure out what to do. But no one would accept that excuse from them afterward.

  At our apartment my roommates a
re trying to figure out what to do. “We have to bring the war home so the average American is paying, so he feels it,” Donnie keeps saying.

  “Doesn’t he feel it now?” I ask.

  “Apparently not,” says Donnie. “He needs to bleed some. We need more blood on the streets.”

  The odd thing is that while Donnie is saying these things he is always shampooing or brushing or setting his shining hair. There is this one small kid who’s been staying in the apartment, with wire-rimmed glasses, the kind Benjamin Franklin wore. There are always kids staying here that I don’t know. For a while there was Tubs, who played a clarinet and was very funny. You have to like a fat man who calls himself Tubs. I never learned his real name. Then there was Wet Wendy. I suppose her name really was Wendy. We called her Wet Wendy because she was constantly taking showers and her hair was always wet. We were all glad when she left because it freed up the bathroom. Now there is this guy. I don’t know his name or if he is a Whiting student or anything about him, but he is always here and he never says a word. No matter what anyone proposes, no matter how wild or violent or dangerous, he nods his head eagerly in agreement.

  I think he must be an informer. He probably works for the FBI. If I am right, this is bad news for Rachel because she is always making comments about the “pigs” and what we ought to do to get back at them. If this is getting reported to the FBI, they will find a way to get her. I have told her this and she laughs and says, “Not if we get them first.”