Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [16]
Here are the first words Sam Wakefield ever spoke to me, when I was 18 and he was 36:
“What’s the hurry, Son?”
6
“WHAT’S THE HURRY, Son?” he said. And then, “If you’ve got a minute, I’d like to talk to you.”
So I stopped. That was the biggest mistake of my life. There were plenty of other exits, and I should have headed for 1 of those. At that moment, every other exit led to the University of Michigan and journalism and music-making, and a lifetime of saying and wearing what I goshdarned pleased. Any other exit, in all probability, would have led me to a wife who wouldn’t go insane on me, and kids who gave me love and respect.
Any other exit would have led to a certain amount of misery, I know, life being what it is. But I don’t think it would have led me to Vietnam, and then to teaching the unteachable at Tarkington College, and then getting fired by Tarkington, and then teaching the unteachable at the penitentiary across the lake until the biggest prison break in American history. And now I myself am a prisoner.
But I stopped before the 1 exit blocked by Sam Wakefield. There went the ball game.
SAM WAKEFIELD ASKED me if I had ever considered the advantages of a career in the military. This was a man who had been wounded in World War II, the 1 war I would have liked to fight in, and then in Korea. He would eventually resign from the Army with the Vietnam War still going on, and then become President of Tarkington College, and then blow his brains out.
I said I had already been accepted by the University of Michigan and had no interest in soldiering. He wasn’t having any luck at all. The sort of kid who had reached a state-level Science Fair honestly wanted to go to Cal Tech or MIT, or someplace a lot friendlier to freestyle thinking than West Point. So he was desperate. He was going around the country recruiting the dregs of Science Fairs. He didn’t ask me about my exhibit. He didn’t ask about my grades. He wanted my body, no matter what it was.
And then Father came along, looking for me. The next thing I knew, Father and Sam Wakefield were laughing and shaking hands.
Father was happier than I had seen him in years. He said to me, “The folks back home will think that’s better than any prize at a Science Fair.”
“What’s better?” I said.
“You have just won an appointment to the United States Military Academy,” he said. “I’ve got a son I can be proud of now.”
Seventeen years later, in 1975, I was a Lieutenant Colonel on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, keeping everybody but Americans off helicopters that were ferrying badly rattled people out to ships offshore. We had lost a war!
LOSERS!
I WASN’T THE worst young scientist Sam Wakefield persuaded to come to West Point. One classmate of mine, from a little high school in Wyoming, had shown early promise by making an electric chair for rats, with little straps and a little black hood and all.
That was Jack Patton. He was no relation to “Old Blood and Guts” Patton, the famous General in World War II. He became my brother-in-law. I married his sister Margaret. She came with her folks from Wyoming to see him graduate, and I fell in love with her. We sure could dance.
Jack Patton was killed by a sniper in Hué—pronounced “whay.” He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Combat Engineers. I wasn’t there, but they say he got it right between the eyes. Talk about marksmanship! Whoever shot him was a real winner.
The sniper didn’t stay a winner very long, though, I heard. Hardly anybody does. Some of our people figured out where he was. I heard he couldn’t have been more than 15 years old. He was a boy, not a man, but if he was going to play men’s games he was going to have to pay men’s penalties. After they killed him, I heard, they put his little