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.
I asked him what was funny about it. He couldn’t draw for sour apples. He had to tell me that the bride and groom were rhinoceroses. I thought they were a couple of sofas maybe, or maybe a couple of smashed-up sedans. That would have been fairly funny, come to think of it: 2 smashed-up sedans taking wedding vows. They were going to settle down.
“What’s funny about it?” said Jack incredulously. “Where’s your sense of humor? If somebody doesn’t stop the wedding, those two will mate and have a baby rhinoceros.”
“Of course,” I said.
“For Pete’s sake,” he said, “what could be uglier and dumber than a rhinoceros? Just because something can reproduce, that doesn’t mean it should reproduce.”
I pointed out that to a rhinoceros another rhinoceros was wonderful.
“That’s the point,” he said. “Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they’re wonderful, and that they’re going to have a baby that’s wonderful, when actually they’re as ugly as rhinoceroses. Just because we think we’re so wonderful doesn’t mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.”
During Jack’s and my cow year at the Point, I remember, which would have been our junior year at a regular college, we were ordered to walk a tour for 3 hours on the Quadrangle, in a military manner, as though on serious guard duty, in full uniform and carrying rifles. This was punishment for our having failed to report another cadet who had cheated on a final examination in Electrical Engineering. The Honor Code required not only that we never lie or cheat but that we snitch on anybody who had done those things.
We hadn’t seen the cadet cheat. We hadn’t even been in the same class with him. But we were with him, along with one other cadet, when he got drunk in Philadelphia after the Army—Navy game. He got so drunk he confessed that he had cheated on the exam the previous June. Jack and I told him to shut up, that we didn’t want to hear about it, and that we were going to forget about it, since it probably wasn’t true anyway.
But the other cadet, who would later be fragged in Vietnam, turned all of us in. We were as corrupt as the cheater, supposedly, for trying to cover up for him. “Fragging,” incidentally, was a new word in the English language that came out of the Vietnam War. It meant pitching a fizzing fragmentation grenade into the sleeping quarters of an unpopular officer. I don’t mean to boast, but the whole time I was in Vietnam nobody offered to frag me.
The cheater was thrown out, even though he was a firstie, which meant he would graduate in only 6 more months. And Jack and I had to walk a 3-hour tour at night and in an ice-cold rain. We weren’t supposed to talk to each other or to anyone. But the nonsensical posts he and I had to march intersected at I point. Jack muttered to me at one such meeting, “What would you do if you heard somebody had just dropped an atom bomb on New York City?”
It would be 10 minutes before we passed again. I thought of a few answers that were obvious, such as that I would be horrified, I would want to cry, and so on. But I understood that he didn’t want to hear my answer.
Jack wanted me to hear his answer.
So here he came with his answer. He looked me in the eye, and he said without a flicker of a smile, “I’d laugh like hell.”
The last time I heard him say that he had to laugh like hell was in Saigon, where I ran into him in a bar. He told me that he had just been awarded a Silver Star, which made him my equal, since I already had one. He had been with a platoon from his company, which was planting mines on paths leading to a village believed to be sympathetic with the enemy, when a firefight broke out. So he called for air support, and the planes dropped napalm, which is jellied gasoline developed by Harvard University, on the village, killing Vietnamese of both sexes and all ages. Afterward, he was ordered to count the bodies, and to assume that they had all been enemies, so that the number of bodies could be in the news that day. That engagement was what he got the Silver Star for. “I had to laugh like hell,” he said, but he didn’t crack a smile.
He would have wanted to laugh like hell if he had seen me on the roof of our embassy in Saigon with my pistol drawn. I had won my Silver Star for finding and personally killing 5 enemy soldiers who were hiding in a tunnel underground. Now I was on a rooftop, while regiments of the enemy were right out in the open, with no need to hide from anybody, taking possession without opposition of the streets below. There they were down there, in case I wanted to kill lots more of them. Pow! Pow! Pow!
I was up there to keep Vietnamese who had been on our side from getting onto helicopters that were ferrying Americans only, civilian employees at the embassy and their dependents, to our Navy ships offshore. The enemy could have shot down the helicopters and come up and captured or killed us, if they had wanted. But all they had ever wanted from us was that we go home. They certainly captured or killed the Vietnamese I kept off the helicopter after the very last of the Americans, who was Lieutenant Colonel Eugene Debs Hartke, was out of there.
The rest of that day:
The helicopter carrying the last American to leave Vietnam joined a swarm of helicopters over the South China Sea, driven from their roosts on land and running out of gasoline. How was that for Natural History in the 20th Century: the sky filled with chattering, man-
made pterodactyls, suddenly homeless, unable to swim a stroke, about to drown or starve to death.
Below us, deployed as far as the eye could see, was the most heavily armed armada in history, in no danger whatsoever from anyone. We could have all the deep blue sea we wanted, as far as the enemy was concerned. Enjoy! Enjoy!
My own helicopter was told by radio to hover with 2 others over a minesweeper, which had a landing platform for 1 pterodactyl, its own, which took off so ours could land. Down we came, and we got out, and sailors pushed our big, dumb, clumsy bird overboard. That process was repeated twice, and then the ship’s own improbable creature claimed its roost again. I had a look inside it later on. It was loaded with electronic gear that could detect mines and submarines under the water, and incoming missiles and planes in the sky above.