Charles Taylor: Boomer

His eyes fell back on the kids. At least I’m not an android. They may have programmed me and packaged me, but that family is one thing they couldn’t manufacture … and I picked the dog!

Wayne Newell loved his kids. He took secret pleasure in bringing up an adolescent son, even through all the challenges Charlie could throw at him. And Kathy … well, she was becoming a handful, what with all those pimply-assed orangutans she brought home, every one probably trying to screw her. You just had to show girls your love in a different way — by denying the sins that could spoil them for later.

But his children were something none of those bastards, the KGB types who ran the “Charm School” outside of Moscow, could have planned for him. They wanted a pure American — they got a pure American.

The wife he wasn’t so attached to. She was more American, more suburban than he could imagine, more than most men could take no matter where they came from. But that’s the way so many of them turn out. It could be one hell of a lot worse. Myra Newell wasn’t so bad when he compared her to some of the other wardroom wives, especially some of those who’d been military brats or some of the husband-hunting debs who’d hung around the eastern shore waiting to grab unsuspecting middies when they graduated.

And that golden was all right. When Newell was ashore, he used to take long walks with the dog and discuss his situation in detail with the animal. Old Jack Tar never argued, never talked back, never suggested that maybe all this introspection might mean that he was gradually giving in to this American lifestyle. Hell, he’d thrown himself into it forever — that’s what they wanted. Instead, Jack Tar would run ahead and sniff all the good smells, but not so far that he wouldn’t come racing back to jump up for a pat and lick Newell’s face. Dogs don’t care who you are, or what you are, as long as you give them a little affection. And, in turn, their love is unquestioning. That had saved him much soul-searching.

It wasn’t just Newell’s dog ready to give him the benefit of the doubt. Myra had never really suspected anything about him, and she probably wouldn’t believe it if she were told the truth. She was loyal. What more could a man ask for? From that first moment when he caught her watching him out of the corner of her eye when he was drilling the NROTC midshipmen at Berkeley, she’d accepted him for what he claimed. How could you knock that?

And there were so, so many others. Ever since he had been eased into the United States and assumed the name of the orphaned and now-dead Wayne Newell, there had been so many other trusting people. The administrators at Berkeley believed it, his professors believed it, the bureaucrats who got him into NROTC believed it, the girls he dated believed it … hell, they all did! And Myra had swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

Most of all, Wayne Newell finally came to believe it. He couldn’t remember the exact moment when he came to that conclusion, but at that point in time his transformation had become complete. He had been created by masters of the art of new identities, patient men who were willing to sacrifice so very many years to see their creation actually pay them back. But he was no android! I am a father! I am a living, breathing human being, and there are a number of people who have grown to love me as Wayne Newell.

The interviewer, the one whom he had no idea was a KGB agent at the time, the one who had used the android terminology, was also the one who remarked on his ability with languages—”not the technical aspects so much, but your ability to grasp the nuances of the accent.” That’s what had attracted them to him. And he had to admit they also understood his ego, even before he did. That was how they recruited him!

It was hard to believe that an actual school — no, not a school, almost a seminary, because its teachers were solely oriented to one goal — existed so close to Moscow. It might as well have been on Mars as far as foreign intelligence agencies — and the Kremlin power structure itself — were concerned. The less anyone, even in Moscow, knew, the better. The KGB had actually succeeded in developing a school that produced Americans; not a Soviet version but good, old-fashioned, all-American “Americans.”

And no one could tell them from the “real McCoy,” as they’d learned early in their schooling. That was because much of the faculty were the “real McCoy,” Americans, pilots exchanged by Hanoi for missiles. There were some other native-born Americans who’d had the misfortune to disappear and end up at the Charm School, but Newell never learned whether they’d been purchased, too. It was a faculty that had been tortured and brainwashed until they weren’t sure who they might have been, or become if they’d survived. But they never forgot the background that is forever imbued in each human being. It was amazing what could be accomplished with chemicals and new methods of mind control, for these Americans had once been the most loyal and patriotic of their generation. They now existed in a village exactly like one might find in the United States, except that it was just outside Moscow, and they trained Russians to become Americans — perfect Americans — so perfect that not one of the graduates sent off to the United States to assume their new identities had yet been found out!

When they graduated, they weren’t replicas or mimics. They were real. They knew the music and the dances of their eras, they played baseball and they knew how to toss a bat to choose up sides, they memorized bubble-gum cards and batting averages, they knew Z-type cars, how to buy beer with a phony ID, local politics in the towns they would settle in … the KGB could go on forever describing how perfect they were, but they never said a word.

Wayne Newell was a perfect example of the Charm School, an ideal graduate who had achieved exactly what his KGB managers had in mind when they designed him. And Berkeley was a perfect place to be inserted. It was the type of school where no one questioned you, and that gave him time to assume a role that convinced even the Navy, who gave him an NROTC scholarship.

Conversations with a fraud — that was the terminology he often invoked when he considered the photograph of his family. They were real. They were flesh and blood — his flesh and blood. Love. Trust. Those were undefined gifts that he could never really return. And the only one who really understood and offered no argument was old Jack Tar, who just wagged his tail and offered an occasional slobber of affection.

Newell put on a freshly starched shirt and perfectly creased pants before he headed for the control room.

“Feeling rested, Captain?” His executive officer turned and smiled.

Even Dick Makin trusts me implicitly! “Just like I’d put in eight hours in the rack, XO.” He rubbed his hands together enthusiastically. “Looks to me like they intend to keep the best sub in the fleet busy.”

“Did you ever think it was going to be this way, Captain?” There was an odd inflection in Makin’s voice, not challenging, not questioning authority, just identifying a concern that had not been evident earlier.

Newell looked at him curiously. “What do you mean, Dick?” he asked, using the XO’s first name awkwardly.

“What’s happening….” Makin hunched his shoulders as he searched for the proper words. “It’s just so different. None of us ever expected it would end up like this — the war, I mean. It just seemed in the past that we’d see it coming … that we’d know we were going to war, that we were going out to do the job we were trained for, and kiss our families good-bye before we got under way.”