I could see, but I couldn't move.
Gurley's Quonset hut looked like the official Army Air Corps circus tent. Ropes and tackle were everywhere. Strange metal-crates, for lack of a better word-lined the walls. Piles of sandbags appeared at regular intervals. And those tarps I'd seen-with the light, I could tell they were much more than that: great fabric teardrops, upended (or balloons, once I'd thought about it), all of them limply hung from on high.
GURLEY'S OFFICE WAS an even stranger sight. Tyrannically neat, of course. Everything was gunmetal gray-the desk, the lamps, the filing cabinet, and a locker against the wall. Even the walls themselves were covered in gray metal paneling. My first impression was that the army had stuffed Gurley into a giant footlocker. I later decided that the metal fixtures and smooth walls resembled something else: I had picked my way into a bomb.
Along the back wall, a series of clocks, each labeled with a Roman numeral-up to VII, I believe. But much more interesting was the map below the clocks. It stretched across the entire rear of the office. It was a map, mostly of the North Pacific-except that it extended all the way south to Hawaii, and as far east as Michigan -and it was the only untidy thing in the room. Bright pushpins spread across the map's rinsed-out blue, brown, and green like a virulent disease, appearing singly and in clumps.
“Fifty,” Gurley said.
“Looks like more than that, sir,” I said, still staring at the map. The truth was, it would have been impossible to count the pins. There were dozens of them, maybe hundreds. At first I took them to be army bases, but dismissed that idea. Then I decided that Gurley had marked the map wherever he'd struck a man. White for where he'd wounded them, red for where he had killed them. There was a cluster of red just outside Anchorage.
“Fifty men,” he said. Maybe I was right.
“What I am about tell you, no more than fifty men in the country now know.” I started to believe him, but wondered, as he took a deep, melodramatic breath, if Gurley had not delivered this line dozens of times before. I could see him savoring the moment; he had that slight suggestion of a smile I now know steals across some actors' faces before a favorite speech. If I were mapping my own path in the war, I would stick a pin right there to mark that moment, in that office, in the light of that smile, because that's when I should have seen how helpless Gurley really was. It was as though he thought of the theaters of war as theaters, and that his role in the war was exactly that, a role.
He had paused after his “Fifty men” preamble, and now leaned forward to deliver the coveted secret. “The Japs,” he intoned, “have reached North America.”
I sat back: I think I was supposed to be frightened, but instead, I was confused. “The Aleutians, you mean?” A lot more than fifty people knew about that debacle.
Kiska and Attu, two brutally wet and cold islands at the end of the Aleutian chain, had been occupied by Japanese troops in 1943. The islands were of little strategic value, except in the sense that Roosevelt was enraged that the Japanese were occupying American soil. The U.S. had stumbled in its initial response; America 's Army, Navy, and Air Corps all fought each other for a while before turning their attention to the Japanese. Then the weather set in. Then the Japanese dug in. Three thousand Japanese on Attu held off an American force triple their size for days. The Japanese eventually lost, but they fought to the last man, or just about. Just twenty-eight of the three thousand Japanese soldiers on Attu survived to be taken prisoner. Most of the patients in their field hospital committed suicide. Those who couldn't, or wouldn't, were killed by their doctor before he killed himself.
After the bitter slog on Attu, the U.S. brought in even more forces for the assault on Kiska, where the main Japanese garrison was located. Tens of thousands of Americans stormed ashore, guns blazing, only to discover that the Japanese had abandoned Kiska two weeks before. More than one hundred U.S. soldiers still died, all from friendly fire.
So, if the Japanese had returned-well, I couldn't speak. This is why the colonel back in California had laughed when he heard I was being taken to Alaska. The Aleutians! It was where the world ended, careers ended, lives ended. Suicides were rampant. So were courts-martial. GIs sent there weren't even told of the destination until they were safely aboard ship and through the Golden Gate, a practice Gurley himself surely approved of.
“The Aleutians?” he said. “Good God, Belk. This means you're literate-you do read, and read the papers, to boot-” He feigned awe, and then resumed. “But no. Hell no. I'm not talking about the Aleutians -the islands or the swarthy Lilliputians who populate them. I'm talking about the fucking homefront, my brother-in-arms. The watch-fires of a hundred circling camps.” He started tapping the map. “ Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana.” His eyes grew wider, his voice deeper. He was a prophet. A leader. The Wizard of Oz.
I should clarify: recognizing his theatricality wouldn't have immunized me against it. I think I'd have to be as unconscious as Ronnie here to have resisted Gurley's performance. But I wasn't unconscious, I was alive, and I shivered- the enemy is here! Japs all around!-and you know what? It was wonderful. It was wonderful the same way it's wonderful to flinch at some frightening point in a book or a movie; there's a certain dizzy pleasure that comes with knowing you've succumbed, you've been duped.
And, back then, it was a lot more than that: it was wonderful to know the war was real. You had to be young to think this; the country had to be younger, too. But that's the way it was with kids like me: it was wonderful to know that this enemy we'd read so much about was really out there, that I would finally get to fight, and that Gurley would somehow wave a magic wand, take me through a back door, and usher me right into the middle of all of it.
All of it: Japanese soldiers, hiding in trees, leaping out of mailboxes late at night. Bombs in the sky. Balloons in the clouds. A giant red rising sun on a white field, strung between the twin towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. But gradually, as Gurley rambled on, talking more to himself now than to me, my excitement began to give way to a kind of panic.
What he was talking about was preposterous. Evidence of Japanese activity in a dozen states or more? And nobody other than fifty men (fifty-one now?) knew about it? I looked around the office; I looked at Gurley as he stared at the map with red-rimmed eyes. I wondered if fifty men now knew what I thought I knew: here, in this lonely Alaskan outpost, Captain Thomas Gurley U.S. Army Air Corps, had gone mad.
And he'd dreamed himself up a new front line in the process. Even as a work of insanity, it was impressive: his line stretched clear across North America-through Canada and into Michigan. He rattled on, and I marveled at the performance, and at the magnitude of the fiction. I began to wonder which would come first: my transfer away from Anchorage, or Gurley's? Who would assume his post, and its attendant, if imaginary, duties?
What a world this was, wartime Alaska. Half-naked palm readers, rampaging drunken sailors, lunatic captains raving in darkened Quonset huts, and me. If I had been older, I would have been too scared to speak.
But I was young, stupid, and, once the panic subsided, bemused, so what I finally said was “Incredible.”
Gurley frowned, furious. I was not as good an actor as he. “Not enough for you,” he said.
“No, no, it's-incredible. You've-you've come up with quite a, a map.” I tried furrowing my brow, but it was no use-I don't even think I knew what the word furrowing meant back then.
Gurley would have known, though, and he knew I was mocking him. He scrambled across the desk, right over the top, growling and sputtering.
For a minute, I feared (even hoped) that I had provoked the inevitable and total breakdown. I calculated whether I could get to the door before him and raise the alarm with the MPs. I decided to jump clear. He jumped after me and then fell horribly short. I took a moment to take in the scene: he was sprawled at my feet, while the better part of his left leg was separated from him, dangling off the desk.
He extended a hand, and I hesitated, unsure what horro
r had just happened and what horror would now follow.
“You didn't hear a word I said, did you, you sanctimonious shit?” he hissed. He closed his eyes for a second; I could see the mask fall, instantly. But then his eyes opened, the mask was back, and it had all happened too quickly for me to see what had been revealed. He extended a hand to me, and I automatically hauled him up. He teetered back to the desk and leaned on it. On the floor behind him lay two red pins that had fallen from the map.
Gurley recovered his artificial leg and regarded it for a second. “Maybe I should just beat you with this instead of going through it all again.” I stared at the leg, then at Gurley. What part of him would fly apart next? “Here's the short version: the Japs are bombing North America. Believe the map, or believe this, you insolent fuck.” He hiked up the pant leg that was missing a leg below the knee and revealed a stump that looked more rock than human-angry purple and brown, mottled with scabs. He spent a moment trying to get the leg back on, and then gave up, letting it clatter to the floor. He hobbled around to the back of the desk and fell into his chair.
I slowly bent down and picked up the leg. It was heavier than I imagined, and it took two hands to place it on the desk with any care.
“Exhibit A,” he said, nodding to the map. “The past.” He dragged his leg back across the desk. “Exhibit B, the interminable present.” Then he took out a small key, unlocked a desk drawer, and drew out a small, leather-bound book, about the size of a priest's breviary. “Exhibit C,” he said, brightening again. “The future.” He looked at the book for a full minute. He didn't open it. Then he looked at me.
“Let's start at the beginning,” he said, and with that, began to recount the history-his history-of the balloon program to date. The first, mysterious explosions and fires. The eventual discovery of an intact balloon. The determination of the balloon's origin. The recovery of ever-growing numbers of balloon shrouds and payloads, evidence of which sat just outside the office.
“And the most recent chapter, August 1944, wherein a certain bomb disposal sergeant looks on, dumbstruck, while a balloon sets fire to a golden hillside. Said fire roasts alive several men.” He sat back. “Sergeant? Am I missing anything?”
“Sir?” I asked, but even as the word was coming out of my mouth, my mind was finally making the connection. It seems odd to me now that it took that long, but of course, the balloons-as patent an impossibility as there ever was-were still new to me then.
I almost leapt from my chair: “The weather balloon! Fort Cronkhite! Sir, I-”
“Failed in your first encounter?” Gurley suggested, somehow managing a face that was half sneer, half sympathy. That wasn't what I was going to say-I had no idea what I was going to say-but his words had all the effect of his having reached over and pulled the pin from a grenade I hadn't known I was carrying.
What a cruel thing to put on a child-sure, I was a young man, a soldier in uniform, but I had the wild conscience and boundless shame of a Catholic kid, one raised by nuns, no less-and how sinister of Gurley to attempt to make the death of those soldiers on the hill my legacy, my burden.
Hours, days later, when I thought about it, I realized his gambit was only that; I knew nothing about the balloons that day in California. And if I had? I was too far away to do anything. But it didn't matter. Gurley knew what he was doing. He'd planted a seed, an irritant, deep inside me that I could smother with excuses but would still know was always there. The fact was, I had known-felt-that something was wrong, that it wasn't a weather balloon. The fact was, I'd gone running toward it. The fact was, I hadn't made it there in time.
If Gurley's aim had been to provoke in me an instant and towering resolve to avenge their deaths (while expiating my own apparent guilt), I suppose the ends would have justified his means: my commitment to the war then was naïve and relatively shallow.
But his next words made me think he had another aim altogether. He wasn't looking to stir up some fight in me; he simply wanted to commiserate.
“That's okay, Sergeant,” he said. “My first time out, I failed, too.”
GURLEY EXPLAINED that he'd begun his wartime service with the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. The OSS was the war's headquarters for Ivy Leaguers, spies, scientists, and anyone with an unusual idea for waging war. Poison cigars, exploding pens, buttonhole cameras, and worse. At the bidding of a favorite professor, Gurley had left Princeton a semester early to work in OSS research and development. He should have been a natural. Articulate, cosmopolitan, heir to a fortune (from fountain pens, of all things), he'd also spent his Princeton years studying “the men and minds of the Orient”-in particular, all things Japanese. He was even somewhat fluent. He pointed to an impressively worn Japanese-English dictionary on a shelf behind him.
Yet he'd foundered after enlisting. His ideas-fueled by “ educated insight”-were dismissed. He watched as colleagues championed ridiculous ideas that later turned out to be quite effective, and he watched those colleagues go on to greater rank and glory As the months wore on, Gurley was desperate to find the idea that would make him a star. A huge star: not for him invisible ink or a corncob pipe revolver.
He wanted something spectacular.
He brainstormed and came up blank, and then brainstormed with friends. Blank again. Then he found a memo in a stack of papers that had been left on his desk. A scrap of a confidential memo, actually stamped with a security classification beyond the level Gurley possessed. He should have stopped reading immediately and reported the security breach, but (he admitted) he did not. How could he? The memo referred to a piece of intriguing, if bizarre, research: the enemy- the Japanese-considered blue foxes a bad omen. (I thought, but didn't ask: Who wouldn't?)
Gurley took up the case. His first discovery was the existence of an actual animal- “Alopex lagopus” he took pleasure in informing me-a type of arctic fox whose coat turned bluish-gray in winter. “But it didn't look the least bit frightening-or blue,” Gurley said. Rather, he decided to press ahead in secret with elaborate plans for a truly blue, truly scary fox of his own design, Vulpes livida.
He tested and discarded the idea of air-dropping blue fox leaflets or releasing live, paint-dipped foxes (via parachute? I wondered. Torpedo tubes? Rubber rafts?), and decided on something far more spectacular: projecting a blue fox in the sky above enemy troops. It was bold, theatrical-terrifying. The enemy would panic and throw down their weapons in fear.
It was also impractical, silly, and foolish-but so were dozens of other ideas that the OSS researched, and many of those (including a rotating gun that attached to a railroad car's wheel) had gone forward.
“The fated day came,” Gurley said. “I was to present to the full committee. Now, word had spread of all the hours I had put in. And while most didn't know the details, everyone knew that I was hoping to make my reputation. Some might have uncharitably said, repair my reputation.” Gurley looked at the ceiling a moment, as though he were being fed lines from above. I had a slight urge to look up myself.
“Project Hannibal,” he continued. “Foxtrot-the obvious, and therefore fatuous, choice. Hannibal: Sergeant?”
“Sir?”
“Why ‘ Hannibal ’?”
I had no idea. It rhymed with cannibal, which seemed a bit gruesome, even for Gurley. Then I remembered that Mark Twain had grown up in Hannibal, Missouri. I mentioned this.
“Who?” Gurley said. “No, Sergeant. This is a war. Not bedtime stories. Hannibal, the Carthaginian general. Takes his elephants over the Alps. Hannibal: the perfect code name for the deployment of an unusual animal to seek a military victory.” He studied my reaction. “No, no one got it. But I pressed on.”
He took his audience through the background first: why this would frighten the soldiers, why it would, in fact, be more deadly than any conventional weapons. American bombs were certainly decimating Japanese ranks-but it was hard to claim that they had caused fear. Indeed, the Japanese fought more tenaciously the more casualties they suffered.
“And I was winning, Belk. I guarantee you. One man at a time. I could see, I could look around the room and watch as their smiles faded into a kind of-not awe, no, not that, but a kind of respect. Maybe that's even too strong a word. Interest, then. I saw them grow curious, despite themselves, one face at a time. I don't think I've ever seen anything lovelier.”
Gurley said that he finished his presentation and sat. He wanted to look around the room-he could hear the murmurs of interest and appreciation on all sides-but kept his eyes on the colonel who had been chairing the meeting. The colonel should have been his staunch ally Gurley said: they were both Princeton men; the colonel had graduated some ten years before. But the colonel had rarely deigned to speak with him, nor even meet his eyes, and he did neither now.
Instead, the colonel looked around the room and smiled. “What's Bob Hope say?” he asked. Gurley's stomach began to turn, slowly. Everyone's faces began to warm into smiles-not, Gurley was sure, in anticipation of the joke, but of his demise. Gurley held his breath. The colonel waited before going on. He was enjoying himself. Worse: he was playing to the crowd.
Quoting Bob Hope? What Gurley needed was a minute or two alone with the colonel. Man to man. One Princetonian to another. Some setting where the colonel wouldn't feel a need to appeal to the base instincts of a base crowd.
Gurley paused his recounting now, as well. At first I thought it was for theatrical effect, an attempt to wring whatever more suspense he could out of his story, but he looked down at his hands for a moment-only for a moment-and I saw something else. He'd left his little stage. He'd been kicked off the stage, in fact, at that meeting, and try as he might, had never quite found his way back on, at least not before audiences larger than, say, a solitary, teenaged sergeant. When he started speaking again, his volume had dropped by half or more, and I would have sworn he was crying. But he wasn't; I checked, his face was clear.
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