Honor and Duty

by Gus Lee

  The chaplain spoke. A week ago, the Fideli brothers had been in a verdant jungle.… I jolted as the honor guard fired its salute, the sharp cracks of the M-14s echoing across the cold hills and the icy river. After honors, the guard captain passed the folded American flag to Mario. Mario gave it to the young woman in black.

  The three of us sighed: the woman was Marco’s widow. Somehow, in the last eighteen months, Marco had married. As the bugler sounded taps, she collapsed in Mario’s arms, her slight frame shuddering as she tried to stifle her wails. Her mother-in-law bowed her head and surrendered, weeping with her. I clamped my jaws together and tried to imagine the jungle that the Fidelis had left. Through the snow I saw the face of the enemy. The Vietcong and the NVA, victors over the Japanese and the French. I was a Chinese soldier preparing to fight Reds. I trembled with hate and blood lust. I would kill them all with fire and knife. I crept up on them and cut them down without mercy. The enemy looked like me.

  “Mario,” I said later, “I’m sorry.”

  He nodded, his mouth compressed in a massive effort of will to stop his emotions. He was thin and older, pale under sunburned skin. “Thanks, Kai,” he said. Tears ran down his face. “Marco’s honored that you came.” His strong voice trem-ored. “So am I.” He handed me an envelope with my name on it. We shook hands. Later, I would learn, Mario would never sing again.

  I started to approach the parents and Marco’s widow, and Mario gently, almost imperceptibly, shook his head. My Asian face was unwelcome at this moment, at this American funeral for a son who had been killed by Asians. By gooks. I nodded. “Good luck, Mario,” I said, and immediately left the cemetery in long strides, panting, thankful for the heavier pelts of falling snow. I began to run, fleeing the loss, the hatred, the confusion. Clint called and I ran faster. Pee Wee could outsprint me, but he gave up the chase.

  I ran all the way to the Thayer. Jean was on duty, and she gave me a table on the lower patio, where no one sat in winter.

  God love you, Marco Fideli. Thank you for your warm heart, for your cheering of me in a hard year, for teaching me how to laugh in the face of Beast, for teaching me the geography of my soul. Even if we kill them all, I’ll still miss you.

  Inside the envelope was a gold lieutenant’s bar. It was corroded with the humidity of the Far East, scratched by unknown causes, so unlike the impeccable appearance of its owner. I would be honored to wear it. I leaned forward, holding it to my forehead.

  I would never attend another funeral for a Vietnam fatality. I hated funerals with a deep and undefined passion and was not strong enough to do this again. Pain filled me, and I expected blood to run from my ears. Don’t mean nothin’. After a while, it was true. By evening, I could no longer remember the theme of the chaplain’s eulogy.

  I did remember my expected failure of the Juice whufer. I opened the textbook. My mathematical mind, absent since youth, was facing its grandest opportunity to realize what Buddhists seek—nothingness. Beset by an endless siege of invidious calculus problems, battered by three years of bad engineering grades, and finally victimized by my wretched study habits, the architecture of my thinking, such as it was, now approached rubble.

  The small, fine edges of linear thought, the clear geometric cutting devices and bright boundary lines that allowed analysis in any subject, were becoming tseuh, porridge. My synapses were clogging, the neurons in retreat, and my thinking apparatus assumed a negative personality that sounded like a roll call of the Seven Stupid Dwarfs: Surly, Cranky, Dumb, Dopey, Grouchy, Foolish, and Unprepared. When it came to engineering, I concluded, there was only so much one could do with wishful thinking. Now, it seemed, wishful thinking was no longer in season. If I had a wish, I’d bring Marco back. Thinking about academic failure was more comforting than acknowledging his loss. I slammed the book shut.

  I thought of Pearl. “Chinese honor,” Pearl had said. “Honor at all costs. It’s a sacrifice. The highest value.”

  Marco’s life was the price. He had told us, near the end of Beast, that we were entering a ground war in Asia, against all good military advice. When it was time to go, he had said cheerfully, “We’re off to win a war.”

  I could live to be a hundred and I would not have his great human spark, his strength and mirth, his sense of Honor. He was dead. He had wanted me to forget my fears. Byron Maher wanted me to do my duty by zapping classmates who were cheating. Cathy Pearl Yee wanted me to help Maher, and to be a man not only with emotions, but one who admitted them. She had brought me love. Townsend Fan Yee wanted me to compete for his daughter and to protect his wealth.

  My father and Edna wanted me to be an American West Pointer. Schwarzhedd wanted me to be conscious. Tony had wanted me to be a college man with a hat and a briefcase. Uncle Shim wished me to be a Chinese man of letters, opposed to violence and committed to the past. But Tony was gone and Marco was dead, and I didn’t know what to do with all these feelings which were rushing to the surface like so many boiling gases.

  Sonny was drilling me for the whufer, and my roommates had evacuated to the library to give us workout space. Sonny started with the basics. “It’ll hurt more to face your dad if you flunk than to squeeze Juice data into your iron head. Right?”

  Sonny presented what he considered to be the standard problems and walked me through them. I understood what he was doing. He then gave me a new problem. With much struggle and a great deal of rote memory work I solved it. He pulled out his red pen and drew a large five-pointed star and circled it. A star from the starman. He grinned, and so did I, with less enthusiasm.

  He created a variant problem. But however minor the variation, I had no idea how to proceed. He made hissing noises and ran his hand through his thick black hair, his heavy eyebrows dark with concentration and frustration, tinted with a look of fear.

  Clint returned early. I expected him to look as defeated as I felt, but he undressed and racked out quickly. I turned out the ceiling lights and we went to the subdued desk lamps.

  “Ready for tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Hmm,” Clint said.

  Sonny Rappa sighed. “Okay. Try it like this,” he said, but he lost me. He tried again. By now my mind was in full retreat.

  “Back to basics,” he said. “Do these differential and integral equations,” and he drew out a series of them. I worked them.

  “Kai, got two problems. One, your calculus sucks. Two, there’s somethin’ in your brain that doesn’t let the stuff in. You got a series of heavy-duty resistors in line with your reasoning circuits. I can’t find connections on your main circuit board. I end around, and I’m in the jungles of Brazil or something. Let’s get some of Chad’s high-octane java. I need a jolt.” Chad “the Man” Enders made the strongest coffee this side of the ordnance lab.

  “Works for me,” I said. “I need a break.”

  When we returned, Deke was in the rack. Neither the java nor the break changed matters, as we hacked our way through the uncharted areas of my math-disabled brain. The ten-minute bell before taps sounded.

  I shook my head. “Sonny, thanks a lot, really,” I said. “I feel like I wasted all your time. You could be working on pulling a cold max.”

  “Naw” he said. “I know the poop—better I’m here. I like buttin’ my head up against a brick wall.” He hit me on the arm. “Good luck tomorrow. Just grab down some rack. Don’t stay up late. This stuff’ll come to you—trust me. I know what I’m talkin’ about. Just pull seventy-one percent. Your mind’ll be clear tomorrow.”

  “That’s my problem,” I said. “My mind’s always clear; it’s ’cause there’s nothing in it.”

  “Hiya, buddy!” said Bob Lorbus to Sonny as he came in the door. He smiled and shook his head as he piled his books on his desk. “This stuff is awful.”

  Sonny grimaced; no one liked his favorite subject. He gathered his books and his slide rule, put on his gray company jacket, and I walked him out. At the stairs, he gave me a thumbs-up, and headed out to return to his barracks
on the far side of the Cadet Hilton.

  Bob racked out. I stayed up for an hour, shuffling meaninglessly through my notes and Sonny’s materials. I stood by the radiator and looked out the window at the Area, avoiding Venus’s jaws and letting Para-Rat-Trooper grab my pinkie with his little claws as I shelled a peanut for him. There were only a few other lights on. I knew who they were: goats like me, struggling with tired brains against the challenge of tomorrow’s final writ, hoping stupidly that sacrificing sleep and rest would produce results.

  At midnight I collapsed on top of my brown boy, wondering what strange twist of fate had led me, a ham-fisted slide-rule klutz, to survive this long in a school that so dearly loved math. Above me, in the upper bunk, snored Deke in his steady, reliable, hypnotic buzz-saw rhythm that meant no Nam nightmares tonight. My eyes followed the sound. Taped to the underside of the bedsprings were some papers. On the top sheet were five electrical engineering problems, surrounded by a great deal of explanatory script.

  I stared at them. I thought overconsumption of saltpeter from the mess hall, or too much of Chad’s atomic coffee, had induced hallucinatory misperception. I scrunched my eyes closed and rubbed them, but when I opened them, the papers were still there.

  I pulled the masking tape from the springs. Ten sheets, each with five problems. They were typed. Homework sets were run off on blue ditto machines, with space to enter your work. In the spaces appeared to be the answers, in neat, approved solution form.

  Why were they taped to the bottom of Deke’s bunk? Were they for him, or me, or neither? They had been in direct line of sight above my pillow. I went to my desk and examined them.

  “Sinusoidal Input to RL and RC Circuits … Impulse Response … Sinusoidal Steady-state Solutions of Parallel Circuits … Automatic Control Systems … Linear Approximations to Machine Analysis … Electronic Analog Computers.…” This was a roll call of the key topics of second semester—the exam topics of the WFR.

  1. For the circuit shown above, find the natural response, i(t), for t ≥ 0. Hint: Use KVL to write an integro-differential equation in i(t); differentiate to form a 2d order linear homogeneous differential equation.

  Solution:

  Note: Minus sign because i(t) is UP through the capacitor!

  Apply to KVL

  Differentiate

  Characteristic equation

  Natural response is:

  Each of the problems had an underlined answer, Q.E.D. Looking at the sheet gave me an otherworldly sensation. There were going to be fifty problems on tomorrow’s final. Intuitively, I knew I was looking at correct answers to real problems. I was holding department material. It was today’s whufer, a pass on tomorrow’s final. This wasn’t Maher’s dummy with the fake problems. It was the real thing.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said, suddenly looking around the room, as if I had been under observation. My heart slugged heavily. How’d this thing get here? I had been here all night, leaving only to get Chad’s java and to walk Sonny down the hall. Clint had come back early; Deke returned during the coffee break, and Bob walked in as Sonny was leaving. I felt chills. Who could’ve come in here without one of us seeing him? Ts’ao Ts’ao had stolen the march.

  I turned the sheets over. On the backside of the tenth and final page, in red, was a circled star. Sonny was a lefty, and his stars canted to the left, with the two lateral points the largest. I rustled through my notes, finding the one he had given me for my one correct answer. It was his star.

  29

  HONOR

  West Point, January 11, 1967

  I stood up. I put the papers into a folder.

  I looked at the figure of Guan Yu on my desk, casting a small shadow onto the folder with the papers. I thought of Uncle Shim.

  This is a big journey, when you leave the home of your father for the house of the Son of Heaven. Brigands, robbers and misfortune wait in your path, but the Confucian scholar with rectitude knows no fear, and his steps are morally bold and knowing.

  This was in Uncle Shim’s letter to me during Beast Barracks, in 1964, when he wrote about his departure from home as a youth to take the three days of Confucian tests en route to becoming a “superior man.”

  “Good evening, Dababa,” I said into the phone. “This is Kai Ting. I am so sorry to call you so late.” It was after ten in California. “How are you?”

  “I am happy to hear your young voice. Are you well?”

  “Dababa, I want you to tell me one of your stories, about someone who faced the Fork of Pain. Where he has two choices—to destroy a friend, a Confucian friend, or to dishonor himself.”

  “Do you ask for your own moral guidance? Or for someone else?”

  “For me,” I said.

  “How prophetic a woman was your mother.”

  “Pardon me?” I asked.

  “Hausheng, your mother said you would ask me someday for a story of moral guidance. She said you would not ask your father, or your father’s second wife. You would ask me.”

  “She knew my father would remarry?”

  “Everyone knew that,” he said. “Your father had two small children. Naturally he would find a new mother. It was his duty.”

  “Did my mother—did she have advice for me?”

  “She was your mother,” he said.

  “Did she ever face the Fork?”

  “Hausheng, we all do.”

  “What was her advice?”

  “It is already known to you; it caused you to call me.”

  I hesitated. “Oh, you mean it’s one of those general things. So, Uncle, what’s the answer?”

  “K’e ji fu li,” he said.

  Silence.

  “You think this does not help you? Then you are not thinking. You find no comfort in these words? Then you are not accepting. There is no guidance in the edict? Then I have been a most miserable teacher. Think, Hausheng. What does the Master tell you to do?”

  I sighed. “To subdue the self and honor the rites, the bonds and relationships. First to the father, then to the emperor, and of the young to elders,” I said.

  “Your mother, whom you do not know, whose face is no longer known to you, says to you, ‘Go forth into the world in peace; be of good courage; hold fast to that which is good; render to no one evil for evil; support the weak; help the afflicted; honor all persons; love and honor God.’ ”

  “Is that Taoism?” I asked.

  “It is the teachings of her Jewish Lord Jesu.”

  I sighed. “That’s no help. I’m looking for Chinese guidance. This place is lousy with American, Christian regulations.”

  “Hausheng, I am not trying to help you. I am performing my duty to my friend, who was your mother. She asked me to say those words to you when you requested help. She believed your family would be plagued with inherited problems, reaching down to you, ‘unto the third generation.’ She saw consequences to entire families over time, instead of Eastern, individual yeh, karma. These are not my precepts. They are hers. I have remembered them for fifteen years.”

  “Is that your advice—k’e ji fu li and my mother’s Christian stuff?”

  He repeated the advice for me. I wrote it down. It had been authored by “the other woman”: the bad mother, superstitious, illiterate, crude, confused about God and the gods, a fanatic for Jesus Christ, prone to the passions and death. She had abandoned us by dying.

  I felt confused. But his words seemed right, and familiar, and I felt stirrings in the hollow parts of me.

  “But Dababa” I said. “Master K’ung didn’t even mention mothers in the chain of obedience. Only men—the father, the emperor, the elder brother, and the elder friend.”

  “I am the scholar, not you,” he said. “Your mother was learned and I tell you to also honor her by following her advice.”

  I looked at the advice. Christian liturgy. I smelled Edna.

  “You must not lose her face in your mind,” he was saying. “Remember her. Goodbye, Hausheng.”

  I hung up. I conc
entrated, returning in my memory, trying to conjure the face of my first mother. I saw a Chinese woman; it was my sister, Jennifer Sung-ah. She was brushing our mother’s hair, smiling. Our mother was laughing next to her, but she had no face.

  “Sonny,” I whispered. “Wake up.”

  He jolted up, confused, looking to the right, at me, and then to the left, at the wall. He started to say something, and I clapped my hand over his mouth and held my left index finger across my lips. His eyes were bugged open, uncomprehending. He had been in the best sleep we get, in the hour before reveille.

  “Look at this,” I said to him in the sinks. I watched him.

  The color in his face drained. “Where’d you get this?”

  “Above my bunk, last night. Look at the back, last page.”

  “Jesus,” he said, twitching, squirming.

  “Your star,” I said. “Function symbols look like yours.”

  “Dammit to hell!” he spat. “Sorry. Hail Mary, full of grace. Forgive me, God.”

  “Sonny,” I said, my heart in my throat. If he’s cheating, and admits it, I have to turn him in—for helping me. If I don’t turn him in, we are animal shit scum, forever. Guys who had spit on the Code, screwed in the inner sanctum of our brains and hearts. In what Uncle Shim called hsin fa, the mind-heart system, what Western people called “conscience,” but with stronger obligations and duties to doing the correct thing. We would become the servants of Ts’ao Ts’ao.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “I was asked for a star. I gave one, on a blank page.” He flipped the paper. “This stuff wasn’t on it.”

  “Who was it?” I asked. “Who asked you?”

  He took a breath. “Big Bus. Bob Lorbus.”

  “Bob wouldn’t do anything like this. That’s bullshit!”