Evan Hunter - Sons

I honestly did not know how appropriate or fitting it was because I honestly did not know just what was going on over there. Nor did anyone seem anxious to tell me. There were rumors that Maxwell Taylor, our ambassador to South Vietnam would soon be recalled because of differences with General Nguyen Khanh, the current head of the Saigon government, not to be confused with Nguyen Cao Ky, the Vice Air Marshal, he of the black jump suit and white crash helmet, Nguyen apparently being a Vietnamese name as common as Tom. I had no idea what Khanh looked like because the South Vietnamese seemed to change their leaders as often as Roger Nurse changed his underwear, very often leaving them in little piles in the corner, too. Our new man who’d been sent to Saigon to investigate the developing situation was called McGeorge Bundy. (I didn’t believe his name, either.) He was the President’s top White House foreign relations adviser. To show how important he was, it was shortly after he arrived in Saigon that the Vietcong decided to kick hell out of us. General Westmoreland, who I guessed was running the whole shooting match for us over there, was shocked by Charlie’s audacity. “This is bad,” he said, “very bad.”

I, too, was beginning to think maybe it wasn’t so good.

On the other hand, President Johnson assured the nation that there had been no change in the position of the country in regard to our desire or our determination to help the people of Vietnam preserve their freedom. “Our basic commitment to Vietnam,” he said, “was made in a statement ten years ago by our President Dwight Eisenhower, to the general effect that we would help the people of Vietnam help themselves.” Dana’s respect for Eisenhower was exceeded only by her respect for Johnson, but she doubted that our policy of containing Communism had originated with dear old Ike, preferring to believe instead that we’d been chasing Reds at home and abroad for such a long time now that anyone becoming President was duty-bound to continue the pursuit, the present echoing the past, the course already charted, the future preordained, and all that jazz. Ten years ago, when Eisenhower made the statement to which Johnson now alluded, I was only eight years old and thought the President was that nice bald man who sounded a lot like Sally Lawrence’s grandfather. I had no idea what he was saying about the country or what he was doing for it. (“Nothing,” Dana insisted.) What I did remember about ten years ago was being led into the basement of the Talmadge Elementary School, which had been stocked with food and water and blankets and battery-powered radios, and being told by Mrs. Weinger that this was a practice air raid and that we would remain in the basement until we heard the all-clear sounding from the firehouse roof. She then went on to tell us a little about radiation, all of us sitting wide-eyed and fearful, and I could remember wondering aloud what would happen if my father was caught in New York when the bomb fell (Shhh! Mrs. Weinger warned me) and my mother was at our house on Ritter Avenue, and I was here at school — would we ever get to see each other again? I was terrified.

Now, everyone seemed to have forgotten all about shhhh the bomb, everyone seemed to have passed it off as just another nasty little weapon no one in his right mind would use, the way no one in his right mind would have used gas in World War I, the way no one in his right mind would even think of waging war in this day and age, because war was hell (we had been taught to believe), war was foolish, and war was suicidal. Yet we were waging war in Vietnam. Or so it seemed.

Something was happening, and I didn’t know what. But whereas I was confused, I did not begin to get frightened until Sunday, February twenty-first.

Dana had an old beat-up straw hat she used to wear whenever she was studying for an exam. She had bought it six years ago when she’d gone to Nassau with her parents, and it was just about falling apart now, its red ribbon faded and torn, its edges jagged, its crown full of open holes. But it was her “study hat,” and she compulsively pulled it down over her ears before cracking a book, as though isolating herself from the outside world within its tattered straw confines. She was wearing the hat and nothing else that Sunday, sitting cross-legged and naked in the center of Lenny Samalson’s bed, surrounded by open French textbooks. She was in the midst of intoning some Baudelaire out loud, Ma jeunesse ne fut qu’un ténébreux orage, when the news announcement interrupted the music, this must have been, oh, a little past three in the afternoon, Travers é ça et la par de brillants soleils, and the music stopped, and the announcer said that Malcolm X had been shot to death by a man with a double-barreled sawed-off shotgun at the Audubon Ballroom on upper Broadway in Manhattan. The announcer went on to say that Malcolm’s murderer had been a Negro like himself (small consolation to the dead man) and that he had been immediately apprehended by the police and charged with homicide.

I don’t think either Dana or I experienced any great sense of loss. But sitting in the center of Lenny’s bed, wearing only her study hat, she began to weep softly, and I went to her and took her in my arms, and we huddled together, suddenly chilled, as the radio resumed its program of recorded music.

Columbus, Mississippi, in 1944 was hardly a serviceman’s paradise, so I guess we were all moderately grateful that a dance was being held on the post that Friday night. Besides, the propwash around the field had insisted that girls from places as exotic and as distant as Memphis, Tennessee, were being brought in by the bus-load as Colonel Chickenshit’s big St. Patrick’s Day gift to the cadets. (It was later rumored that the colonel had initially decided to limit the festivities only to those men who, like himself, were of Irish descent. But it had been pointed out to him by a tactful Chair Corps officer that Purim had come and gone only eight days before with scarcely a nod of recognition to the Jewish cadets, so maybe it would be a better idea to give all the men a well-earned and much-needed opportunity to dance till dawn with southern belles from far and wide, eh, Colonel? The colonel had reluctantly agreed.)

I had been sent to Columbus Army Air Field on February 27, to begin flying twin-engine AT-9s in preparation for the P-38. Michael Mallory, who was in Advanced Flying School at Luke Field in Arizona, had postulated the theory in one of his letters to me that both the quality and quantity of nookie in any given American community diminished in direct ratio to the quantity of servicemen there. His observation certainly applied to Columbus. I went to the dance that night only in desperation, hardly believing that Old Chickenshit was really bringing in girls from all over Dixie. As it turned out, I was absolutely right.

The mess hall had been decorated with green crepe-paper streamers, green cardboard cutouts of leprechaun hats and shamrocks, white cutouts of clay pipes. A makeshift bar had been set up on sawhorses in front of the steam tables, and bottles of 3.2 beer were being handed over it as I came into the building. A seven-piece Air Force orchestra was playing at the far end of the hall near the doors leading into the kitchen, with an inept lead trumpet player struggling vainly to imitate Ziggy Elman in “Opus Number One.” There were perhaps two dozen couples dancing. Some thirty girls lined the walls, sitting in ante-bellum splendor, easily recognized from previous sorties into town as nothing but local talent. Fifty hungry aviation cadets ogled these beauties, entertaining lewd thoughts of getting them out behind the PX, fat chance. Fifty more crowded the bar (similarly decorated with pipes, shamrocks, and hats) laughing a lot and telling stories in loud voices of their aerial exploits that day. “Opus Number One,” clumsily modulated into “Tuxedo Junction.” A cadet, already drunk on the mildly alcoholic beer and in imminent danger of washout, kept striking his hand on the scarred piano top in time to the music, throwing the trumpet player off beat, as if that poor soul needed an additional handicap. The band droned on interminably against a counterpoint of girlish southern voices clacking away in augmented fifths, mingled and mixed, bouncing off the high-ceilinged room, echoing, streaked with the sharp aroma of tomorrow’s chow being stewed in tonight’s kitchen. The whole scene looked dismal and sounded bleak, an entirely unsatisfactory substitute for a weekend pass, which privilege was undoubtedly forbidden by some secret Air Force regulation to the effect that no aviation cadet be permitted to have any fun whatsoever during his training period, lest this somehow diminish his effectiveness as a fighting unit of the United States Army. I decided to have a beer before leaving, and then I decided the hell with the beer, I’d just leave. I was turning to go when I heard someone just behind my shoulders say, “Beautiful, absolutely gorgeous” with such dripping sarcasm that I imagined for a moment I’d spoken my own thoughts aloud. I turned to find myself looking directly into the amused eyes of a cadet I recognized as Ace Gibson, reputed to be the hottest student pilot at Columbus. He was shorter than I, about five foot eight, and he looked like one of Walt Disney’s little forest animals, with wide wet brown eyes, a pug nose, and slightly bucked teeth. I would have disliked him immediately even if I had not been jealous of his reputation or prejudiced by his nickname.