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“the whole challenge of life [is] to act with honor and hope and generosity.… You can’t help when or what you were born, you may not be able to help how you die; but you can—and you should—try to pass the days between as a good man.”
He will be great and grand, she thought, rapt in the very contemplation of it; he will do something fine and noble and earth-shaking, and I will be standing there behind him while they all cheer.
And that, praise God and Allah and Thor and Zeus the Thunder Darter, would be that …
“Sam: do you honestly believe people are going to stop being greedy and resentful and full of pride and prejudice? Do you think they will quit hating and fearing—do you think the lordly heads of government are going to abandon their methods of seizing and holding power, of gaining advantages over their neighbors? Why should they change? What should cause them to abhor the only rules to the game they know? And even if they were to do so, do you believe for one minute their own citizens would let them get away with it?”
Now everybody wants to race back home and make a million dollars. And there’ll be precious little talk of the war or the army until the big, hot holidays, when they’ll suck in their bellies and get into their uniforms and strut down Main Street behind the band. And stand perspiring in front of the bandstand beside the town hall and listen to some red-faced fool rant on for three-quarters of an hour about that last full measure of devotion and valorous sacrifices on the field of honor. And that’ll be all they’ll remember. Until the next time …”
What conclusions, then, was he to draw? War: war was not an oriflamme-adventure filled with noble deeds and tilts with destiny, as he had believed, but a vast, uncaring universe of butchery and attrition, in which the imaginative, the sensitive were crippled and corrupted, the vulgar and tough-fibered were augmented—and the lucky were lucky and survived, and they alone
With the wives of rank you spoke softly, you smiled in agreement, you listened, and listened, and listened; and agreed. Even if what you were hearing happened to be a morass of lies and prejudices and misinformation.
your better half gave forth a shriek that rent the welkin, I bore up and she bore down and voilà!—a lusty babe with the eyes of a poet and the body of a raw worm, roaring with rage at this great stage of fools … ”
Tommy frowned. One of the things she disliked about post life was the incessant intimacy among army wives: the confidences, the unburdenings, the gossip—and the inexorable division of this narrow, isolated world into hostile forts of trapped, put-upon women and carefree, self-indulgent men.
Tommy glanced at the girl. Her cheeks looked white and drawn; there were great strokes of fatigue under her eyes. Oh God, she’ll begin to weep now, she thought crossly; if there’s anything I can’t stand it’s weepy women: can’t they get a grip on themselves? Then in the next instant she felt an overpowering rush of affection.
With a tremulous rush of affection she caught him up and pressed him against her heart. “My baby,” she murmured. “My own baby boy.” And her eyelids stung with tears.
“Probably went to the latrine and fell in.” “Nope—God protects all fools, drunks and field-grade brass.”
Anybody can accuse anybody of anything. There’s no action on earth, from Adam on down, that can’t be misconstrued, if the beholder has the inclination.”
Your whole life was chance. They could say anything they liked, they could tell you it was hard work or brute strength or being sharper than the next man or getting to know the right people, but all that was small potatoes. What ruled a man’s life was lucky accident, and the power to read signs clearly, as his grandmother had told him. Some were false, some true, and it required the greatest wisdom to read them purely.
Give me an officer who can do anything a PFC can, and do it double. And then do it again. For Christ sake, give me an officer who thinks like a private soldier!”
“When you ask men to die, to endure great hardship, they have the right to know the purpose that demands that sacrifice,” Lin said softly. “They have the right to be treated like men—with all honor due them—all honor due their inextinguishable souls …”
“It’s all just a matter of going through the motions. We’re in the habit of loving each other so we go on doing that, too; that’s all.”
Here they slept together, not berthed separately under the neat serration of the crosses but rolled together into one long trench—Christian and Negro and Jew, patrician and laborer: all of them were good enough to die, to sink to mortality and lie together. Only in time of peace were they unworthy.
Punishment had never cured it: she seemed to welcome punishment in the same way the dutiful child approaches the reward for good conduct. He could not touch her. Charming, malignant, devious, she had danced through life—fighting him, tormenting him, eluding him. He could never know what she was thinking …
Oldest daughter vibes
“That’s the whole challenge of life—to act with honor and hope and generosity, no matter what you’ve drawn. You can’t help when or what you were born, you may not be able to help how you die; but you can—and you should—try to pass the days between as a good man …”
His own son was dead, that boy out there on outpost was his son, they all were. Death was not an individual matter. We liked to think it was, but it was not. The death of one man touched us all, stripped us all. We were all one erring family, and nothing made us more conscious of this unalterable fact than loss. We were all one.
To him, to everyone she was the same woman they had seen yesterday, and the days before. But that wasn’t true. She thought all at once of the day she’d first begun to menstruate, down at Fort Sam: the pain, deep and alien and burdensome, the faint, lonely fear—and after that a kind of timorous pride. Walking around in the post exchange later she had smiled at the service wives, thinking, No one knows about me, but I am a different person from yesterday, from what they know of me: I am a woman now, but none of them knows it … Now again she was altered, but in a different way.
My son. I saved my son once. Shot and killed a rattlesnake and saved my son’s life, so that he could be burned to death in a foreign war …
“Yes. Right now. This seems to be an occasion for frank talk. If I could have had one year with a man like Sam—just one year!—I’d thank my stars for all eternity. You’re a damn fool and your own worst enemy: but then, you always were. Now take a good stiff drink and make a move.”
One of them sank into the water, her skirts billowing, gently dousing the naked child who crowed with delight, waving his tiny arms. “That’s the only thing that matters. That right there.”
“Darling, I look on all the time between us as a wonderful present I never expected. I feel I’m lucky just to have laid eyes on you.”
“Well, for one thing, men don’t like to remember times when they were inadequate, or miserable, or frightened; they’d rather remember times when they were brave and resourceful and good. So they—sort of swivel things around a bit. It’s a human failing, and we’re all human beings.”
But for the dead, in their tens of thousands, there had been no newsreels, no papers, no grand strategy, no jubilation. There had been only that one cataclysmic moment of terror and pain—the shock of realization that for them time had stopped, all things had rushed to a halt in the chill dark. They were the ones he would speak for, then: for all their hopes and dreams, their terrible fragility before that iron moment.
“We stand at an immense fork in the road. One way is the path of generosity, dignity and a respect for other races and customs; the other leads most certainly to greed, suspicion, hatred and the old, bloody course of violence and waste—and now, God help us, to the very destruction of all the struggles and triumphs of the human race on this earth.
The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say … ”
Damon said quietly: “In my life I have only known one man who was afraid of nothing; and in my opinion he was worthless as a human being.”
if it comes to a choice between being a good soldier and a good human being—try to be a good human being …”
