Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [19]
The cheater was thrown out, even though he was a firstie, which meant he would graduate in only 6 more months. And Jack and I had to walk a 3-hour tour at night and in an ice-cold rain. We weren’t supposed to talk to each other or to anyone. But the nonsensical posts he and I had to march intersected at 1 point. Jack muttered to me at one such meeting, “What would you do if you heard somebody had just dropped an atom bomb on New York City?”
It would be 10 minutes before we passed again. I thought of a few answers that were obvious, such as that I would be horrified, I would want to cry, and so on. But I understood that he didn’t want to hear my answer. Jack wanted me to hear his answer.
So here he came with his answer. He looked me in the eye, and he said without a flicker of a smile, “I’d laugh like hell.”
THE LAST TIME I heard him say that he had to laugh like hell was in Saigon, where I ran into him in a bar. He told me that he had just been awarded a Silver Star, which made him my equal, since I already had one. He had been with a platoon from his company, which was planting mines on paths leading to a village believed to be sympathetic with the enemy, when a fire-fight broke out. So he called for air support, and the planes dropped napalm, which is jellied gasoline developed by Harvard University, on the village, killing Vietnamese of both sexes and all ages. Afterward, he was ordered to count the bodies, and to assume that they had all been enemies, so that the number of bodies could be in the news that day. That engagement was what he got the Silver Star for. “I had to laugh like hell,” he said, but he didn’t crack a smile.
HE WOULD HAVE wanted to laugh like hell if he had seen me on the roof of our embassy in Saigon with my pistol drawn. I had won my Silver Star for finding and personally killing 5 enemy soldiers who were hiding in a tunnel underground. Now I was on a rooftop, while regiments of the enemy were right out in the open, with no need to hide from anybody, taking possession without opposition of the streets below. There they were down there, in case I wanted to kill lots more of them. Pow! Pow! Pow!
I was up there to keep Vietnamese who had been on our side from getting onto helicopters that were ferrying Americans only, civilian employees at the embassy and their dependents, to our Navy ships offshore. The enemy could have shot down the helicopters and come up and captured or killed us, if they had wanted. But all they had ever wanted from us was that we go home. They certainly captured or killed the Vietnamese I kept off the helicopter after the very last of the Americans, who was Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Debs Hartke, was out of there.
THE REST OF that day:
The helicopter carrying the last American to leave Vietnam joined a swarm of helicopters over the South China Sea, driven from their roosts on land and running out of gasoline. How was that for Natural History in the 20th Century: the sky filled with chattering, man-made pterodactyls, suddenly homeless, unable to swim a stroke, about to drown or starve to death.
Below us, deployed as far as the eye could see, was the most heavily armed armada in history, in no danger whatsoever from anyone. We could have all the deep blue sea we wanted, as far as the enemy was concerned. Enjoy! Enjoy!
My own helicopter was told by radio to hover with 2 others over a minesweeper, which had a landing platform for 1 pterodactyl, its own, which took off so ours could land. Down we came, and we got out, and sailors pushed our big, dumb, clumsy bird overboard. That process was repeated twice, and then the ship’s own improbable creature claimed its roost again. I had a look inside it later