Battle Fatigue by Mark Kurlansky

Author:Mark Kurlansky
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Chapter Sixteen

The First to Go

But it isn’t over. It is hard to say what exactly happened. Some say there were two attacks, some say one. Some say none at all. But why would somebody make something like that up? And why don’t we know the truth? How can you be on a ship and not know if you’ve been attacked or not? There are a lot of arguments about this, especially in Congress, but they are going ahead with the war anyway.

I ask my father why this war is so much more confusing than other wars.

“Because you might have to fight it,” he answers, somewhat glumly, it seems to me. “War is very clear when someone else is going to fight it. It just becomes confusing when it’s you.”

“But the War was clear to you, wasn’t it?” When you say “the War” it always means World War II. “I mean, you had to stop the Nazis.”

He looks at me disapprovingly and says, “I was in the Pacific.”

It is true—in the Pacific they were fighting the Japanese, not the Nazis. “Sure, I know, but the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.”

He smiles a bitter smile. “Fighting the Germans would have made sense to me, but I didn’t have to fight them. It probably made less sense to your uncle. Because he had to fight them.”

“But wasn’t Pearl Harbor clear? You had Pearl Harbor.”

“Oh, it was clear. I remember before Pearl Harbor there were all these Jewish groups saying we had to fight the Germans. But no one agreed with that. Then after Pearl Harbor everybody agreed that we had to fight the Germans because the Japanese had attacked us. And that was supposed to make sense.”

I have never heard anybody talk like this before. “I’ll tell you something, Joel,” he says, examining the label on a can of lima beans. “In 1945 I was in the Philippines. I was a major by then and I was being driven by an enlisted man in a jeep going through a mountain pass. Somewhere in the mountains was a Japanese sniper. You know, an expert shot with a rifle hiding far away and picking people off. Maybe he wasn’t a very good sniper, because he kept missing. But you could hear the bullets hit the rocks. Ping. Ping. And it occurred to me that he was shooting at me because I was a major, and maybe I should take off my maple leaves. Or somehow cover them up. Or hide them. ‘But maybe that would be an act of cowardice,’ I thought. Ping. Ping. And maybe if I appeared to be the same as the guy who was driving he would shoot at him instead of at me. But then if he hit him, it would be my fault. Ping. Ping. Then again, he was already in danger because of me.”

“What did you do?”

He doesn’t answer. He is suddenly fascinated by lima beans.

My father has just told me a war story. It is the only one he has ever told me.

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