saliva, gangrene was commonplace. He visited the wounded
soldiers day in and day out. He didn’t eroticize suffering, no; it
was the communion o f being near, o f touching, o f a tender
intimacy inside a vale o f tears. He saw them suffer and he saw
them die and he wrote: “ (Come sweet death! be persuaded O
beautiful death! / In mercy come quickly. )” I got to say, I don’t
think a three-minute fuck was his meaning. I don’t. It’s an
oceanic feeling inside and you push it outward and once you
start loving humanity there is no reason to make distinctions
o f beauty or kind, there’s something basic in everyone that
asks love, forgiveness, an honorable tenderness, a manly
tenderness, you know, strong. He was generous. Call him a
slut. I f a war happens, it marks you for life, it’s your war.
Walt’s was the C ivil War, North against South, feuding
brothers, a terrible slaughter, no one remembers how bloody
and murderous it was. Mine was Vietnam; I didn’t love the
soldiers but I loved the boys who didn’t go. M y daddy’s war
was World War II. Everyone had their own piece o f that war.
There’s Iwo Jim a, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima; Vichy and the
French Resistance; sadists, soldier boys, S . S., in Europe. M y
daddy was in the Army. M y daddy was being sent to the Pacific
when Truman dropped the bomb; the bomb. He says it saved
his life. Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved his life. I never saw
him wish anyone harm, except maybe Strom Thurm an and
Jesse Helms and Bull Connor, but he thought it was okay,
hell, necessary, for all those Japanese to die so he could live. He
thought he was worth it, even if it was just a chance he would
die. I felt otherwise. He had an unreasonable anger against me.
I would have died, he said, I would have died. He was peace-
loving but nothing could shake his faith that Hiroshima was
right, not the mass death, not the radiation, not the pollution,
not the suffering later, not the people burned, their skin
burned right o ff them; not the children, then or later. The
mushroom cloud didn’t make him afraid. To him it always
meant he wasn’t dead. I was ashamed o f him for not caring, or
for caring so much about himself, but I found what I thought
was common ground. I said it was proved Truman didn’t have
to do it. In other words, I could think it was wrong to drop the
bomb and still love m y father but he thought I had insufficient
respect and he had good intuition because I couldn’t see w hy
his life was worth more than all those millions. I couldn’t
reconcile it, how this very patient, very kind, quite meek guy
could think he was more important than all the people. It
wasn’t that he thought the bomb would stop Jew s from being
massacred in Europe; it was that he, from N ew Jersey, would
live. He didn’t understand that I was born in the shadow o f the
crime, a shadow that covered the whole earth every day from
then on. We just were born into knowing w e’d be totally
erased; someday; inevitably. M y daddy used to be beat up by
other boys at school when he was grow ing up. He was a
bookworm , a Je w , and the other boys beat the shit out o f him;
he didn’t want to fight; he got called a sissie and a kike and a
faggot, sheenie, all the names; they beat the shit out o f him,
and yes, one did become the chief o f police in the Amerikan
way; and then, somehow, an adult man, he knows he’s worth
all the Japanese who died; and I wondered how he learned it,
because I have never learned anything like it yet. He was
humble and patient and I learned a kind o f personal pacifism
from him; he went into the A rm y, he was a soldier, but all his.
life he hated fighting and conflict and he would not fight with
arms or support any violence in w ord or deed, he tried
persuasion and listening and he’d avoid conflict even i f it made
him look weak and he was gentle, even with fools; and I
learned from him that you are supposed to take it, as a person,
and not give back what you got; give back something kinder,
better, subtler, more elevated, something deeper and kinder
and more human. So when he didn’t mind the bomb, when he
liked it because it saved his life, his, I was dumb with surprise
and a kind o f fascinated revulsion. Was it just wanting to stay
alive at any cost or was it something inside that said me, la m ; it
got sort o f big and said me. It got angry, beyond his apparent
personality, a humble, patient person, tender and sensitive; it
went me, I am, and it said that whatever stood between him
and existence had to be annihilated. I would have died. I might
have died. As a child I was horrified but later I tried to
understand w hy I didn’t have it— I was blank there, it was as if
the tape was erased or something was just missing. If someone
stood between me and existence, how come I didn’t think I
mattered more; w h y didn’t I kill them; I never would put me
above someone else; I never did; I never thought that because
they were doing something to annihilate me I could annihilate
them; I figured I would just be wounded or killed or whatever,
because life and death were random events; like I tried to tell
m y father, maybe he would have lived. When someone pushes
you down on the ground and puts him self in you, he pushes
him self between you and existence— you do die or you will die
or you can die, it’s the luck o f the draw really, not unlike
maybe yo u ’ll get killed or maybe you w o n ’t in a war; except
you don’t get to be proud o f it i f you don’t die. I never thought
anyone should be killed ju st because he endangered m y
existence or corrupted it altogether or just because I was left a
shadow haunting m y own life; I mean really killed. I never
thought anyone should really die just because one day he was
actually going to kill me, fucking render me dead: inevitably,
absolutely; no doubt. I didn’t think any one o f them should
really die. It was outside what I could think of. Is there
anything in me, any I am, anything that says I will stop you or
anything that says I am too valuable and this bad thing you are
doing to me will cost you too much or anything that says you
cannot destroy me; cannot; me. If someone tortures you and
you will die from it eventually, someday, for sure, one w ay or
another, and you can’t make the day come soon enough
because the suffering is immense, then maybe he should die
because he pushed him self between you and existence; maybe
you should kill him to push him out o f the way. Do you think