Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus

And then Father came along, looking for me. The next thing I knew, Father and Sam Wakefield were laughing and shaking hands.

Father was happier than I had seen him in years. He said to me, “The folks back home will think that’s better than any prize at a Science Fair.”

“What’s better?” I said.

“You have just won an appointment to the United States Military Academy,” he said. “I’ve got a son I can be proud of now.”

Seventeen years later, in 1975, I was a Lieutenant • Colonel on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, keeping everybody but Americans off helicopters that were ferrying badly rattled people out to ships offshore. We had lost a war!

Losers!

I wasn’t the worst young scientist Sam Wakefield persuaded to come to West Point. One classmate of mine, from a little high school in Wyoming, had shown early promise by making an electric chair for rats, with little straps and a little black hood and all.

That was Jack Patton. He was no relation to “Old Blood and Guts” Patton, the famous General in World War II. He became my brother-in-law. I married his sister Margaret. She came with her folks from Wyoming to see him graduate, and I fell in love with her. We sure could dance.

Jack Patton was killed by a sniper in Hue—pronounced “whay.” He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Combat Engineers. I wasn’t there, but they say he got it right between the eyes. Talk about marksmanship! Whoever shot him was a real winner.

The sniper didn’t stay a winner very long, though, I heard. Hardly anybody does. Some of our people figured out where he was. I heard he couldn’t have been more than 15 years old. He was a boy, not a man, but if he was going to play men’s games he was going to have to pay men’s penalties. After they killed him, I heard, they put his little testicles and penis in his mouth as a warning to anybody else who might choose to be a sniper.

Law and order. Justice swift and justice sure.

Let me hasten to say that no unit under my command was encouraged to engage in the mutilation of bodies of enemies, nor would I have winked at it if I had heard about it. One platoon in a battalion I led, on its own initiative, took to leaving aces of spades on the bodies of enemies, as sort of calling cards, I guess. This wasn’t mutilation, strictly speaking, but still I put a stop to it.

What a footsoldier can do to a body with his pip-squeak technology is nothing, of course, when compared with the ordinary, unavoidable, perfectly routine effects of aerial bombing and artillery. One time I saw the severed head of a bearded old man resting on the guts of an eviscerated water buffalo, covered with flies in a bomb crater by a paddy in Cambodia. The plane whose bomb made the crater was so high when it dropped it that it couldn’t even be seen from the ground. But what its bomb did, I would have to say, sure beat the ace of spades for a calling card.

I don’t think Jack Patton would have wanted the sniper who killed him mutilated, but you never know. When he was alive he was like a dead man in 1 respect:

everything was pretty much all right with him.

Everything, and I mean everything, was a joke to him, or so he said. His favorite expression right up to the end was, “I had to laugh like hell.” If Lieutenant Colonel Patton is in Heaven, and I don’t think many truly professional soldiers have ever expected to wind up there, at least not recently, he might at this very moment be telling about how his life suddenly stopped in Hue, and then adding, without even smiling, “I had to laugh like hell.” That was the thing: Patton would tell about some supposedly serious or beautiful or dangerous or holy event during which he had had to laugh like hell, but he hadn’t really laughed. He kept a straight face, too, when he told about it afterward. In all his life,

I don’t think anybody ever heard him do what he said he had to do all the time, which was laugh like hell.

He said he had to laugh like hell when he won a science prize in high school for making an electric chair for rats, but he hadn’t. A lot of people wanted him to stage a public demonstration of the chair with a tranquilized rat, wanted him to shave the head of a groggy rat and strap it to the chair, and, according to Jack, ask it if it had any last words to say, maybe wanted to express remorse for the life of crime it had led.

The execution never took place. There was enough common sense in Patton’s high school, although not in the Science Department, apparently, to have such an event denounced as cruelty to dumb animals. Again, Jack Patton said without smiling, “I had to laugh like hell.”

He said he had to laugh like hell when I married his sister Margaret. He said Margaret and I shouldn’t take offense at that. He said he had to laugh like hell when anybody got married.

I am absolutely sure that Jack did not know that there was inheritable insanity on his mother’s side of the family, and neither did his sister, who would become my bride. When I married Margaret, their mother seemed perfectly OK still, except for a mania for dancing, which was a little scary sometimes, but harmless. Dancing until she dropped wasn’t nearly as loony as wanting to bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age, or bombing anyplace back to the Stone Age.

My mother-in-law Mildred grew up in Peru, Indiana, but never talked about Peru, even after she went crazy, except to say that Cole Porter, a composer of ultrasophisticated popular songs during the first half of the last century, was also born in Peru.

My mother-in-law ran away from Peru when she was 18, and never went back again. She worked her way through the University of Wyoming, in Laramie, of all places, which I guess was about as far away from Peru as she could get without leaving the Milky Way. That was where she met her husband, who was then a student in the university’s School of Veterinary Science.

Only after the Vietnam War, with Jack long dead, did Margaret and I realize that she wanted nothing more to do with Peru because so many people there knew she caine from a family famous for spawning lunatics. And then she got married, keeping her family’s terrifying history to herself, and she reproduced.

My own wife married and reproduced in all innocence of the danger she herself was in, and the risk she would pass on to our children.

Our own children, having grown up with a notoriously insane grandmother in the house, fled this valley as soon as they could, just as she had fled Peru. But they haven’t reproduced, and with their knowing what they do about their booby-trapped genes, I doubt that they ever will.

Jack Patton never married. He never said he wanted kids. That could be a clue that he did know about his crazy relatives in Peru, after all. But I don’t believe that. He was against everybody’s reproducing, since human beings were, in his own words, “about I ,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are.”

I myself, obviously, have finally come around to his point of view.

During our plebe year, I remember, Jack all of a sudden decided that he was going to be a cartoonist, although he had never thought of being that before. He was compulsive. I could imagine him back in high school in Wyoming, all of a sudden deciding to build an electric chair for rats.

The first cartoon he ever drew, and the last one, was of 2 rhinoceroses getting married. A regular human preacher in a church was saying to the congregation that anybody who knew any reason these 2 should not be joined together in holy matrimony should speak now or forever hold his peace.

This was long before I had even met his sister Margaret.

We were roommates, and would be for all 4 years. So he showed me the cartoon and said he bet he could sell it to Playboy.