Sloan Wilson - Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

That vision had always given way to another, on the eve of a combat jump. He’d start thinking about how he’d never go to bed with Betsy again. And he’d start thinking about all the cold beer he was never going to drink, and the rare steaks he was never going to eat. Then he’d start getting mad.

By the time he’d got his parachute on, or had “chuted up,” as they had called it in the ’troops, he had usually widened his self-pity to embrace all the others aboard the plane. The poor bastards, he had thought. The men had sat in their bucket seats on each side of the aisle of the plane, as expressionless as the men on the commuter train — about the only difference was that during the war they had had no newspapers. Tom had often sat there, expressionless as the others, thinking of a whole platoon of Western Union boys delivering the War Department’s regrets. He had heard men talk about premonitions of death before a battle, and often when someone was killed, it would turn out that he had told someone about a premonition, but Tom had had premonitions all the time.

The worst part of the whole nightmare had always come just a few minutes before the jump. A sharp image of a compound fracture of the right thigh would suddenly flash into his mind. During his first combat jump the man beside him had landed wrong and suffered a compound fracture of the right thigh. A long jagged splinter of bone had come through the trouser leg, and the man had sat there staring at it until someone had given him a shot of morphine. Tom had never seen him again, because the Germans had started moving in on them, and it had been necessary to abandon the man with the broken thigh, lying there doped up, still staring at the splinter of bone. Tom had never been able to forget it, and almost every time after that he’d catch himself gripping his own right thigh a few minutes before he had to jump. It was at such times that this silly sentence would come into his mind, and he’d start to relax.

“It doesn’t really matter.”

The words had had a marvelous effect on him. He had often repeated them to himself, until they began to sound like some kind of revelation. By the time it had been necessary to stand up and walk toward the open door of the airplane, he had always been able to move as casually as though he were just going to step into the next room.

“Geronimo!” a lot of the men used to yell as they jumped, trying to sound fierce as hell. Tom used to yell it too when it was expected of him, but what he was really thinking, with a curiously comforting air of detachment, was “It doesn’t really matter.” And then, just as Tom went through the door into the prop blast, the second part of the charm had always come to him: “Here goes nothing.” And when the parachute had opened, with its terrific wallop at the back of his neck, and he found himself floating down in that curious moment of complete quiet and calm which immediately precedes a combat landing, the third part of his incantation had always come to him: “It will be interesting to see what happens.”

All this seemed incredible to Tom as he looked back at it, but those three catch phrases still had the power to soothe him as he sat on the train, one of many men holding newspapers on their laps, and thought about a new job and what Betsy called “the start of a new regime.”

By the time he got to New York, he felt relaxed. What the hell is all the crisis about? he thought. After the whole damn war, why am I scared now? I always thought peace would be peaceful, he thought, and laughed. As he walked through Grand Central Station, he looked up and for the first time in years noticed the stars painted on the blue ceiling there. They seemed to be shining brightly, and feeling slightly theatrical, he wondered if it were legitimate to wish on a painted star. He decided it would be all right to make a phony wish, so he wished he could make a million dollars and add a new wing to his grandmother’s house, with a billiard room and a conservatory in which to grow orchids.

IT WAS while he was walking up Forty-second Street from Grand Central Station to his office at the Schanenhauser Foundation that he saw the man with a leather jacket. It was an ordinary brown leather jacket with a sheepskin collar — it was only unusual that the man should be wearing it in the summer. The man was a swarthy, rather rumpled individual, wearing dungarees, a T-shirt, and the leather jacket, unzipped. Somehow the jacket nagged at Tom’s mind — he had seen one like it somewhere a long while ago. It was ridiculous to have one’s mind keep returning to a leather jacket when there was work to be done. The memory of the leather jacket was like a riddle, the answer to which had been half forgotten, obscurely important, as though someone had told him a secret he was never to repeat, a secret with some hidden meaning, but now he couldn’t remember it.

Trying to put the jacket out of his mind, he hurried along the street. While he was waiting to cross Fifth Avenue, a man standing beside him coughed painfully. Then Tom remembered about the leather jacket — remembered everything about it as clearly as though he had never forgotten.

It had been back in 1943, not many months before Germany started to disintegrate. Only he hadn’t known then that Germany would fall to pieces — it had seemed as though the war would go on forever. It had been in December, early in December, that he killed the man in the leather jacket, simply because he needed the jacket for himself.

No, it hadn’t been like that at all. There was no use making it worse than it was. The man in the leather jacket had been armed, he had been an enemy, legally decreed such by several governments. He had been a German, and the Germans were different from other people, or at least it had seemed so at the time. How hard it was to remember what the Germans had seemed like then! They had been unconquerable. They had been efficient. They had been professionals at war, while everybody else was an amateur. They had been cold and pitiless. They had been Jew beaters. They had shot, burned, and gassed millions of innocent people. They had laughed at weakness, they had taken joy in cruelty, they had been methodical, they had done things According to Plan. They had started the war, they had been infinitely guilty. The man with the leather jacket had been eighteen years old.

Jesus Christ, that doesn’t make any difference! Tom looked up at the traffic light on Fifth Avenue. The man beside him coughed again. The boy with the leather jacket should not have coughed; it had been his cough which had given him away.

“Now listen. One thing you’ve got to get through your heads is we’re not playing games!”

That was a curious sentence to remember. It had been spoken in a harsh voice, matter-of-fact rather than fierce, perhaps a little exasperated, the voice of a teacher confronted by slightly stupid pupils, the voice of the old master sergeant who had prepared Tom for his assault on the boy with the leather jacket, the old master sergeant to whom, in a sense, Tom owed his life, for if he had not learned the lesson, he himself, rather than the boy with the leather jacket, might now be only a painful memory.

“Now listen. One thing you’ve got to get through your heads is we’re not playing games! When you’re behind the enemy lines, you don’t take prisoners — if you do, you have to stay awake all night to watch them, and the odds are they’ll trip you up someway, anyhow. There’s no use taking a chance. You see a Jerry, you don’t go through this cowboy crap of telling him to put up his hands; you just shoot the bastard, in the back if possible, because you take less chances that way. We ain’t playing games. And let’s not have any tend-the-wounded crap. The wounded can get you with a hand grenade or a pistol — I’ve seen it happen a hundred times. There’s no use taking a chance. Either don’t go near the wounded, or finish them off before you go near them. We ain’t playing games.”