Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut [79]
If the entire submarine fleet were converted into jails, I’ve heard, the cells would be filled up at once. When this place stopped being a college and became a prison, it was filled to the brim before you could say “Jack Robinson.”
I WAS CALLED into the Warden’s Office first. When I came back out, with not only a job but a place to live, the TV set was displaying a program I had watched when I was a boy, Howdy Doody. Buffalo Bob, the host, was about to be sprayed with seltzer water by Clarabell the Clown.
They were in black and white. That’s how old that show was.
I told Donner the Warden wanted to see him, but he didn’t seem to know who I was. I felt as though I were trying to wake up a mean drunk. I used to have to do that a lot in Vietnam. A couple of times the mean drunks were Generals. The worst was a visiting Congressman.
I thought I might have to fight Donner before he realized that Howdy Doody wasn’t the main thing going on.
WARDEN HIROSHI MATSUMOTO was a survivor of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima, when I was 5 and he was 8. When the bomb was dropped, he was playing soccer during school recess. He chased a ball into a ditch at one end of the playing field. He bent over to pick up the ball. There was a flash and wind. When he straightened up, his city was gone. He was alone on a desert, with little spirals of dust dancing here and there. But I would have to know him for more than 2 years before he told me that.
His teachers and schoolmates were executed without trial for the crime of Emperor Worship.
Like St. Joan of Arc, they were burned alive.
CRUCIFIXION AS A mode of execution for the very worst criminals was outlawed by the first Christian Roman Emperor, who was Constantine the Great.
Burning and boiling were still OK.
IF I HAD had more time to think about it, I might not have applied for a job at Athena, realizing that I would have had to admit that I had served in Vietnam, killing or trying to kill nothing but Orientals. And my interviewer would surely be Oriental.
Yes, and no sooner did Warden Matsumoto hear that I was a West Pointer than he said with terrible heaviness, “Then of course you spent time in Vietnam.”
I thought to myself, “Oh oh. There goes the ball game.”
I misread him completely, not knowing then that the Japanese considered themselves to be as genetically discrete from other Orientals as from me or Donner or Nancy Reagan or the pallid, hairy Ainus, say.
“A soldier does what he is ordered to do,” I said. “I never felt good about what I had to do.” This wasn’t entirely true. I had gotten high as a kite on the fighting now and then. I actually killed a man with my bare hands 1 time. He had tried to kill me. I barked like a dog and laughed afterward, and then threw up.
MY CONFESSION THAT I had served in Vietnam, to my amazement, made Warden Matsumoto feel that we were almost brothers! He came out from behind his desk to take me by the hand and stare into my eyes. It was an odd experience for me, simply from the physical standpoint, since he was wearing a surgical mask and rubber gloves.
“So we both know what it is,” he said, “to be shipped to an alien land on a dangerous mission of vainglorious lunacy!”
32
WHAT AN AFTERNOON!
Only 3 hours before, I had been so at peace in my bell tower. Now I was inside a maximum-security prison, with a masked and gloved Japanese national who insisted that the United States was his Vietnam!
What is more, he had been in the middle of student antiwar protests over here when the Vietnam War was going on. His corporation had sent him to the Harvard Business School to study the minds of the movers and shakers who were screwing up our economy for their own immediate benefit, taking money earmarked for research and development and new machinery and so on, and putting it into monumental retirement plans and year-end bonuses for themselves.
During our interview, he used all the antiwar rhetoric he had heard at Harvard in the ’60s to denounce his own country’s overseas disaster. We were a quagmire. There