Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [2]
DURING THAT WAR, which was about nothing but the ammunition business, there was a microscopic possibility, I suppose, that I called in a white-phosphorus barrage or a napalm air strike on a returning Jesus Christ.
I NEVER WANTED to be a professional soldier, although I turned out to be a good one, if there can be such a thing. The idea that I should go to West Point came up as unexpectedly as the finale of the Vietnam War, near the end of my senior year in high school. I was all set to go to the University of Michigan, and take courses in English and History and Political Science, and work on the student daily paper there in preparation for a career as a journalist.
But all of a sudden my father, who was a chemical engineer involved in making plastics with a half-life of 50,000 years, and as full of excrement as a Christmas turkey, said I should go to West Point instead. He had never been in the military himself. During World War II, he was too valuable as a civilian deep-thinker about chemicals to be put in a soldier suit and turned into a suicidal, homicidal imbecile in 13 weeks.
I had already been accepted by the University of Michigan, when this offer to me of an appointment to the United States Military Academy came out of the blue. The offer arrived at a low point in my father’s life, when he needed something to boast about which would impress our simple-minded neighbors. They would think an appointment to West Point was a great prize, like being picked for a professional baseball team.
So he said to me, as I used to say to infantry replacements fresh off the boat or plane in Vietnam, “This is a great opportunity.”
WHAT I WOULD really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don’t mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-way-twice music the American black people gave the world. I played piano in my own all-white band in my all-white high school in Midland City, Ohio. We called ourselves “The Soul Merchants.”
How good were we? We had to play white people’s popular music, or nobody would have hired us. But every so often we would cut loose with jazz anyway. Nobody else seemed to notice the difference, but we sure did. We fell in love with ourselves. We were in ecstasy.
FATHER SHOULD NEVER have made me go to West Point.
Never mind what he did to the environment with his non-biodegradable plastics. Look what he did to me! What a boob he was! And my mother agreed with every decision he ever made, which makes her another blithering nincompoop.
They were both killed 20 years ago in a freak accident in a gift shop on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, which the Indians in this valley used to call “Thunder Beaver,” when the roof fell in.
THERE ARE NO dirty words in this book, except for “hell” and “God,” in case someone is fearing that an innocent child might see 1. The expression I will use here and there for the end of the Vietnam War, for example, will be: “when the excrement hit the air-conditioning.”
Perhaps the only precept taught me by Grandfather Wills that I have honored all my adult life is that profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.
THE MORE ALERT soldiers who served under me in Vietnam would comment in some amazement that I never used profanity, which made me unlike anybody else they had ever met in the Army. They might ask if this was because I was religious.
I would reply that religion had nothing to do with it. I am in fact pretty much an Atheist like my mother’s father, although I kept that to myself. Why argue somebody else out of the expectation of some sort of an Afterlife?
“I don’t use profanity,” I would say, “because your life and the lives of those around you may depend on your understanding what I tell