Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [17]
Law and order. Justice swift and justice sure.
Let me hasten to say that no unit under my command was encouraged to engage in the mutilation of bodies of enemies, nor would I have winked at it if I had heard about it. One platoon in a battalion I led, on its own initiative, took to leaving aces of spades on the bodies of enemies, as sort of calling cards, I guess. This wasn’t mutilation, strictly speaking, but still I put a stop to it.
What a footsoldier can do to a body with his pipsqueak technology is nothing, of course, when compared with the ordinary, unavoidable, perfectly routine effects of aerial bombing and artillery. One time I saw the severed head of a bearded old man resting on the guts of an eviscerated water buffalo, covered with flies in a bomb crater by a paddy in Cambodia. The plane whose bomb made the crater was so high when it dropped it that it couldn’t even be seen from the ground. But what its bomb did, I would have to say, sure beat the ace of spades for a calling card.
I DON’T THINK Jack Patton would have wanted the sniper who killed him mutilated, but you never know. When he was alive he was like a dead man in 1 respect: everything was pretty much all right with him.
Everything, and I mean everything, was a joke to him, or so he said. His favorite expression right up to the end was, “I had to laugh like hell.” If Lieutenant Colonel Patton is in Heaven, and I don’t think many truly professional soldiers have ever expected to wind up there, at least not recently, he might at this very moment be telling about how his life suddenly stopped in Hue, and then adding, without even smiling, “I had to laugh like hell.” That was the thing: Patton would tell about some supposedly serious or beautiful or dangerous or holy event during which he had had to laugh like hell, but he hadn’t really laughed. He kept a straight face, too, when he told about it afterward. In all his life, I don’t think anybody ever heard him do what he said he had to do all the time, which was laugh like hell.
He said he had to laugh like hell when he won a science prize in high school for making an electric chair for rats, but he hadn’t. A lot of people wanted him to stage a public demonstration of the chair with a tranquilized rat, wanted him to shave the head of a groggy rat and strap it to the chair, and, according to Jack, ask it if it had any last words to say, maybe wanted to express remorse for the life of crime it had led.
The execution never took place. There was enough common sense in Patton’s high school, although not in the Science Department, apparently, to have such an event denounced as cruelty to dumb animals. Again, Jack Patton said without smiling, “I had to laugh like hell.”
HE SAID HE had to laugh like hell when I married his sister Margaret. He said Margaret and I shouldn’t take offense at that. He said he had to laugh like hell when anybody got married.
I am absolutely sure that Jack did not know that there was inheritable insanity on his mother’s side of the family, and neither did his sister, who would become my bride. When I married Margaret, their mother seemed perfectly OK still, except for a mania for dancing, which was a little scary sometimes, but harmless. Dancing until she dropped wasn’t nearly as loony as wanting to bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age, or bombing anyplace back to the Stone Age.
MY MOTHER-IN-LAW MILDRED grew up in Peru, Indiana, but never talked about Peru, even after she went crazy, except to say that Cole Porter, a composer of ultrasophisticated popular songs during the first half of the last century, was also born in Peru.
MY MOTHER-IN-LAW RAN away from Peru when she was 18, and never went back again. She worked her way through the University of Wyoming, in Laramie, of all places, which I guess was about as far away from Peru as she could get without leaving the Milky Way. That was where she met her husband, who was then a student in the university’s School of