by Dean Hughes
“I’ll meet with you. I’m happy to,” Alex said. “But I’m not as far gone as you think. I was doing a lot better, and then that loud noise caught me off guard. That’s all.”
“I’ll tell you what, Thomas. You know just as well as I do that there’s more to it than that. Don’t you?”
Alex had gotten off his bed. He had grabbed his trousers from the little closet, but then he turned around. “Well, sure,” he said. “I mean, I know I get nervous. But—”
“You gotta stop lying to yourself. That’s the first thing.”
Alex bent over, stepped into his pants, pulled up one leg, and then stepped into the other. He pulled the trousers
up, under the flimsy robe he had been told to wear. He finally looked at Doctor Kowallis. “I’m not crazy,” he said.
“I didn’t say you were. But you’ve got problems, and you need to deal with them.”
Alex nodded. He just wasn’t sure that “dealing with them” meant meeting with this guy. But he agreed to do it so he could get out of this ward, where half the people mumbled to themselves or stared at the walls. What bothered Alex most was that so many of them were young men.
Alex finished getting dressed and then sat on his bed and waited, but he was surprised when he saw Wally at his door, not Anna, and Richard standing behind Wally. “Anna had to leave Gene with Mom most of the day yesterday,” Wally explained. “I just thought it might be easier if I ran over to get you. I asked Richard to come along.” But there was something unnatural in Wally’s voice, a hint of tension. “And actually,” he admitted, “the two of us wanted to talk to you.”
“Dad sent you over, didn’t he?”
“Not exactly. But he did think it might be a good idea.”
“Wally, everyone’s making too much out of this. I’m just fine.”
Wally stepped all the way into the room, and so did Richard, and then Wally shut the door. “Could we just sit down and talk for a little while?”
“No. I don’t want to stay in this nut house another minute.” He stood up and walked to his closet. “I know Dad’s got it in his head that you two were in the war, so you understand what’s going on with me, but we were all in different situations. I don’t think our experiences were much alike.” He got his coat down and put it on.
“That’s probably true, Alex. But we understand better than other people do. You’ll have to admit that.”
“Let’s go. I think what I’d like to do is go down to the plant. I was supposed to get a letter off yesterday, and I—”
“No, Alex. You’re not going down there today. We’re taking you home. I’ll take care of the letter myself.”
But that was the worst thing Wally could say. Didn’t he think Alex could take care of something as simple as that? What had everyone decided about him? He glanced at Richard, who hadn’t said a word and was standing with his hands tucked into his overcoat pockets, looking grim and worried. They were all giving up, assuming the worst, but Alex wasn’t going to let them do that to him. He had to keep pushing forward.
“Fine. Take me home,” Alex said. “Then I’ll head back over to the U. I don’t want to miss my ten o’clock class.” But Alex couldn’t remember what day it was and whether he really had a class at ten today. How was he going to get that paper done and study for his test when he couldn’t seem to think straight?
“Alex, the doctor told Anna that you need to take it easy for a few days. He wrote up a prescription for something that will help you relax. How about if we just take the long way home and go for a ride. Richard and I feel like we do have some things we want to talk to you about, and then you can rest tomorrow, and over the weekend, and start fresh at school on Monday.”
But Alex knew better. His paper was due next week. He needed to put in more time at the library before he finished it, and the test was . . . but he couldn’t think about that now. He could feel that his breathing was coming in hard gusts, and his heart had begun to pound, the sound filling up his ears. Wally had seen that something was wrong, and Richard. They were staring at him, and then Wally stepped to him and took hold of his arm. “Alex, are you all right?”
“Sure. Sure. Let’s just go.”
But by the time they had stopped at the hospital office, signed some papers, and made it out to the parking lot, Alex was feeling frantic. Maybe he could call his professors, tell them he had been in the hospital, and get a little delay on his paper and take the test late, but they would only want to know what was wrong. He didn’t want to tell them that. And what about work? Alex needed to get some more hours in before the next paycheck. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have enough to cover his bills. He had figured that out very carefully, just a few days before. Dad, of course, would cover him on anything like that, but he didn’t want that—didn’t want that—didn’t want
that. He was breathing in gasps again when he sat down in the back seat of the car.
As Wally backed the car out of the parking spot, Richard, who was also sitting in the front, twisted and looked at Alex. “There’s something I wanted to tell you,” he said.
Alex didn’t care. He told himself he would let these guys talk, but he wouldn’t let them tell him how nuts he was.
“I think you know I’ve had a rough time since I got home. Maybe not as bad as you—I’m not sure—but bad enough. Something happened to me that I didn’t want to talk to anyone about. But Bobbi finally just wouldn’t put up with it anymore, and she made me tell her. I’ve got to tell you, Alex, that’s helped me a lot more than I ever thought it would. It didn’t change anything, but I feel better than I have for a long time.”
“Tell him what you and Bobbi decided,” Wally said.
Richard looked back at Alex again. “I’m going back to school next fall. We’re saving until then, but then I’m going
to do what you’re doing—go to school full-time and work part-time. I really don’t like working at the plant, and I guess I felt trapped down there. I know you’re ahead of me on that one, but I just think talking things out, figuring out what’s best for me, and for Bobbi, that’s been really a good step forward.”
Alex nodded. But he knew what Richard didn’t know. He was walking into a pressure cooker, trying to go to school, work, and raise a family all at once. That wasn’t going to be as great as Richard thought.
Maybe he could get the paper done if he didn’t go to work at all for a few days, and maybe he could delay a bill or two and catch up next month. But by then finals would be coming on, and how would he find extra time to work then?
“Alex, would it help you to get some things off your chest?” Wally asked. “Are you holding some feelings inside, like Richard was doing, that you ought to tell someone? You could tell us, if you don’t feel like telling Anna. We certainly know the kinds of things that go on in a war.”
Alex waited for a time, not wanting to answer, but he knew he had to say something. “No,” he said. “I’d just rather leave it alone.”
“But maybe you can’t, Alex. You told us once that you had to kill young boys. Is that what keeps eating at you?”
“Nothing’s eating at me exactly, Wally. It’s not like that.”
“Something’s wrong, Alex.”
“Look, Wally, don’t do this. I’ve been nervous, I know that. But I have a lot going on in my life, that’s all. And loud noises still scare me. A lot of soldiers have that problem. It’s no reason to stick me away in a loony bin.”
He wasn’t going to say anything else. He couldn’t get into this kind of conversation. He felt like the top of his head was going to blow off. Wally was driving west, down Broadway. He wasn’t taking Alex home. But Alex didn’t protest. He would let them have their say, and then maybe that would be the end of it.
Out the window, Alex saw two little boys, brothers probably, both too young for school. They were bundled up in matching wool coats and hats with ear flaps. The weather wasn’t quite that cold, but he was sure some mother had made them put all that st
uff on. He remembered that, of course, remembered himself out there with Wally and Gene. He liked how simple it looked, the two boys playing together, there in that nice neighborhood.
Richard was still looking back. “Alex, I think you know,” he said, quietly, “I was on a ship that was sunk in the Leyte Gulf. I was one of the guys who ended up on a life raft—mainly because I had gotten burned. But most of our crew went into the water with only their life jackets on, and I’m sure they knew they didn’t have much chance of surviving that way. A lot of them saw our boat and swam toward us. But the boat couldn’t take any more weight without swamping.”
Alex was looking up now, listening. He thought he knew what Richard was going to say.
“The men on the boat kept screaming for the ones in the water to stay away, but those poor guys were terrified, and they kept grabbing at us. Guys started using oars to knock away all the reaching arms. Some of them even hit those guys over the head.” Richard hesitated and then added, even more quietly, “All the men in the boat lived—except for two who were burned real bad, worse than me. The biggest share of the guys in the water died.”
Alex had lost his breath. “Richard, that’s . . . rough.”
No one tried to explain it, discuss it. But Alex understood. He knew what Richard had been carrying around with him all this time.
Wally kept driving west and then turned north on Highway 89, heading out of Salt Lake toward Bountiful, and all this time no one spoke. But eventually, in the same kind of quiet voice, Wally said, “I had two friends who got me through the death march: Warren Hicks, a Mormon guy, and another friend from my unit, a kid named Jack Norland. We stuck together in our first camp, shared any food we could scrounge, and just tried to keep each other going. You get real close to guys in a situation like that. But one day those two got sent out on a one-day detail, and while they were gone, I got shipped off on a long-term job. I got trucked into a jungle with a lot of other POWs. The Japs made us cut a road through all that dense growth out there. Men started dying, almost from the beginning, and they kept dying every day. We would work long hours, with hardly anything to eat, and then come back and bury our friends every night. Almost everyone on that job died—something like three hundred men. Only forty or fifty of us lived. I got really sick too, and there wasn’t much left of me by the end. But I made it out and got taken to another prison, back in Manila. After a while, I got a chance to talk to some guys from Camp O’Donnell, where I’d been at first. That’s when I found out that Warren and Jack had both died while I was out there. I’ve never told anyone that—not even Lorraine. But I think about those guys every single day of my life.”
“How’d you stay alive, Wally?” Alex asked.
“I don’t know. Some of it was being able to pray and think about my family. Some of it was finding some other good buddies who helped me. A lot of it was luck—or maybe God looking out for me. But I don’t like to say that, because that makes it sound like God didn’t care about the guys who died.”
“I know. I used to think about that too,” Alex said. “Guys kept going down, and bullets kept flying right on by me.”
Alex was breathing better, even feeling a little better.
“I think every soldier comes home wondering about that,” Wally said. “Why did I live when guys all around me died?”
“Toward the end of the war,” Alex said, “I got dropped into Germany, behind the lines. I was with a German guy named Otto. A couple of military cops picked us up, and we had no choice but to kill them. That got people looking for us, and we ended up blowing the cover for our underground contact man over there. I found out later that because of us, this guy was tortured and killed by the Gestapo. He had a wife and two little boys, too. And then, after we’d made it through the whole thing, and we were getting out, some quick-trigger GI shot Otto—even though he had his hands in the air. Our own guys killed him, after I thought we’d made it through. There I was standing right next to Otto, but they killed him and not me.”
Wally and Richard told Alex how hard they thought that would be, but Alex knew that wasn’t the whole thing. “A lot of things have stayed in my mind,” he said. “I try not to think about them, but all of a sudden, they’re just there. When Otto killed one of those MPs, he got behind him and cut his throat. The blood spurted from his neck, just like it was coming out of a hose. It got all over my clothes. Sometimes now, when I dream, I see that blood squirting, and I try to run from it, but it keeps flowing, just covering me all up. It’s all crazy, you know—it doesn’t make any sense. But I wake up . . . I don’t know . . . all upset. A lot of times I can’t go back to sleep after that.”
Alex didn’t want to let go of his emotions, but he felt himself beginning to shake. He turned, curled up a little, and leaned his head against the seat, and only then did he realize that he had begun to weep.
“You were out there in the battle so long,” Richard said. “We got attacked a few times, but I never had to face all those days in combat. And I never had to kill anyone.”
“It was the same with me,” Wally said. “We suffered, but we never had to kill.”
“It’s part of war. It’s something you have to do,” Alex said. He was trying to tell that to himself, mostly, had been trying for such a long time.
“Maybe it’s part of war,” Wally said. “But that doesn’t make it part of you.”
Alex knew there was something else he wanted to tell. He gritted his teeth and tried to get his control. “On the first morning after we dropped into Normandy, on D-Day, we took some German prisoners. I talked to this one young German. He said he was from Mannheim. I’d spent some time in Heidelberg on my mission, not far from there, so I’d been to Mannheim, and I said something to him about that. He was a nice kid, you know—scared, hoping we wouldn’t kill him. We only talked a little, but he told me I spoke good German—a couple of things like that. It was just enough to feel like I knew him a little. And then we got caught in an ambush. Somewhere in the middle of everything, I looked over, and that boy was reaching for a rifle. So I had to shoot him. That was the first guy I killed—this nice kid I’d been talking with. I’ve never forgotten his face. It comes back to me. I dream about it, or suddenly, for no reason, I’ll see his face in my mind, right when I’m trying to do my work, or study, or something like that.”
“Alex, bad dreams are really common,” Wally said. “I dream that the Japs are beating us, that I’m still back there shoveling coal and getting nothing to eat.”
“I saw a whole sea full of dead Japanese soldiers one night, floating in the water, out behind our ship,” Richard said. “I’ve had dreams about them ever since.”
Wally glanced back at Alex. “I guess if you’re nuts, then so are we, Alex.” Wally tried to laugh. “Does that make you feel any better?”
Alex took the question seriously. It did make a difference to know they had some of the same problems, and he hadn’t thought it would.
Wally said, “Alex, most guys who went to war didn’t really see combat, or at least not much, the way you did. I think the guys who went through as much as you did are having a lot of the same kind of struggles. You’re not crazy, but you do need to keep talking. You need to see a doctor who understands how to deal with some of this stuff, and you need to stop hiding what you feel from yourself.”
Alex took a long, smooth breath, one that felt deep and satisfying. “Maybe so, Wally. But I’d like to talk to you guys more. This has helped more than anything ever has.”
“Sure.”
And so they kept driving north, all the way to Ogden, and Alex told more of what he had seen and done. He told about the men in his squad, what they had meant to him, and how almost all of them had gone down sooner or later, dead or badly wounded, and how he assumed that he would have to die too, before he got out—and never see Anna again. He told about the mud and rain in Holland, the day he huddled in a foxhole as the Germans attacked with tanks, and how certain death had seemed. And then abou
t Bastogne and the cold, and he told them more about Howie. “I promised Howie I would keep him alive, and I thought I could do it,” he said. “But I let him down. I never should have made him that promise.” And finally he told about the boy in the snow, the German boy lying in the field of white with the half-circle of blood around him—the boy who had become Christ, in his mind, slaughtered and forsaken.
Wally told more too, about hunger and disease, and eventually about forgiveness, and Richard told about losing a friend to a fighter attack, right before his eyes. And at one time or another, all three of the men cried. When they finally pulled up in front of Alex’s house, Alex said, “Thanks, you guys. I guess I’ve been needing to say some of these things—ever since the war ended.”
“The truth is, the war doesn’t end,” Richard said.
“No, I guess it doesn’t. That’s the problem. I guess I have to stop thinking that it will.” But it was good to admit that—more important than he ever could have suspected. He thanked them again, and after he had gotten out of the car, he leaned back in and said, “I think I’d like to talk to you guys again.”
“That’s what we were thinking, too,” Wally said. “I think it will help all three of us.”
“It doesn’t exactly solve the problems, though, does it?”
“No. It doesn’t. The memories don’t go away. But they don’t go away when you try to hide from them either.”
“Yeah.”
Alex walked to his house. He found Anna in the living room. She was picking up some toys Gene had scattered there. She stood straight and came toward him hesitantly, looking worried, and it struck him how difficult he had made her life lately. “Wally and Richard took me for a ride,” he said.