Going Nuclear. Stephen Hart
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for one thing, you probably wouldn’t even see combat duty, seeing as how your brother just got killed over there. But even if you did, and the unthinkable did happen, there is no greater honor than laying down your life for your country. None. And I don’t want to hear anything to the contrary either, not today, not with your brother’s body lying less than a hundred yards away.”
Arthur gave his father an incredulous look. “What are you talking about? Do you think dying for a cause means anything? Ever? It never settles anything. Can’t you see that? There’s always another cause, always another battle, always another reason to die.”
“I guess I should have expected a reaction like this from you,” Arthur’s father replied. He tightened his lips and shook his head. “Of course I should have. It takes a degree of maturity to get outside of yourself, to think of the greater good, the big picture.”
“Maybe you just don’t want to face the reality of the situation,” Arthur argued. ”Maybe you and your friends at the Pentagon can’t admit that the war is a terrible mistake and that Tom and all the others like him are dying for nothing.” Arthur was immediately sorry that he had responded so strongly. He sat back quietly as his father stared through the windshield.
“You know,” his father replied softly, after a long silence, “I could sit here and talk to you about honor and duty until the cows come home. But if you don’t get it, you just don’t get it. You’re supposed to be so damned bright. Maybe you’ll figure it out for yourself someday. In the meantime, I don’t want to see any sign of disrespect for your brother today, not from you or anyone else. You’ve never seen me when I’ve really lost it, I mean really lost it, but I’m telling you right now, man to man, you could.”
“Right,” Arthur said, nodding his head slightly.
Arthur’s father opened his door, slid out, and slammed it without looking back. Arthur let him go. After a few minutes, Arthur climbed out of the car himself and walked slowly to a park-like area behind the funeral home. Sitting down under a budding tulip tree, he leaned back against the knotted trunk, pulled a joint from his jeans, and lit it, the last of five he had recently purchased. He took a deep drag, a needed drag, a drag that temporarily purged all unpleasantness from his mind.
So why not join up and volunteer for Vietnam? he mused. Take his brother’s place, serve his country, make his father proud. His grandfathers had both served in World War I, his father in World War II and Korea, his brother in Vietnam. Wasn’t it his turn now? Nobody in his family had actually wanted to go to war, not even his father. But when their time came, they went. So what was so special about his case? Arthur took another drag. The war was considered stupid by most of his friends, the guys he knew in college, but what did that really mean? Are they just cowards? he thought. Am I a coward? The idea of going into combat clearly gave him pause, no question about that. So, was calling the war stupid just a rationalization to justify avoiding it? Who was he to question government policy? Did he know more about the intricacies of world events than the State Department, CIA, and military establishment combined? Probably, he concluded. Most of those bastards were as full of shit as his father.
He took another hit and remembered that he still had to pay his respects to Tom. He released a gust of rich smoke, took another drag, and held it, recalling the days when he and Tom had been kids together. Although Tom had been only a year older than Arthur, he had been obsessed throughout childhood with maintaining his position over Arthur in the family pecking order. It was always Tom who led the way, who told Arthur what was cool and what wasn’t—at home, at school, around the neighborhood. And it was always Tom who stepped in when other kids wanted to start something, always Tom who backed his younger brother up. Arthur recalled the one all-out fight that he had gotten into with Tom, when he was thirteen and Tom was fourteen. It had taken place at a park in front of a growing crowd, over some girl they both had wanted to impress. An adult eventually stepped in and stopped it, but to Arthur’s surprise, there had been no clear winner. Each boy had managed to inflict several cuts or marks on the other. And following the fight, there had been a period of mutual respect, a period that brought them closer together and made their father’s value system, based on physical confrontation, seem like a work of pure logic. Arthur smiled as he let his mind drift back through various childhood conflicts with his brother. But he was always drawn back to the same stark fact: Tom was gone. Any unresolved issues between them would remain unresolved forever.
Back in the funeral parlor, in a room laced with sickeningly sweet floral aromas, Arthur walked up to the casket. He looked down at his brother’s face and took in the tranquil expression but didn’t feel particularly moved by it. The whole experience seemed too bizarre to support any emotional response. He simply observed that, despite any efforts made by the mortician, his brother did not appear to be sleeping peacefully; he looked dead. Humans are such weird-looking animals, he thought. As he turned to leave, Arthur saw his mother approaching, a woman with blonde hair, nearly as tall as his father. His eyes met hers, and Arthur could see that she had been crying. But as she drew nearer, he was relieved to see that she did not appear to be as on edge as he had expected. In fact, her expression seemed almost placid. Arthur waited for her by the casket. Once there, she asked him how he was doing, as if, it seemed to Arthur, it were just another day.
“Fine. How are you doing?”
“Better.”
“I can’t believe something like this happened.”
“Yes, I know.” She looked down at the floor.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yes. Your father keeps asking me that. I don’t know what he expects me to say.”
“Well, the whole thing is such a shock.”
“It was a shock. I had a lot of trouble dealing with it at first.”
“You’re doing better now?” Arthur studied her demeanor as she answered.
“Sort of.” Their eyes met again.
“Something happened last night that helped.”
“What?”
His mother glanced up at the ceiling before answering. “Well, I was looking at your brother here, having trouble believing this is really him, when I reached down to touch his hand. And when I did, I was really surprised at, I don’t know, at how inanimate he felt. He didn’t feel like a person at all. He felt like a chair or something. It was kind of strange.” She glanced at Tom’s body and then looked back at Arthur. “And then, all of a sudden, it hit me. If he isn’t here anymore, I mean in his body, and he certainly is not, then he must be someplace else, someplace better. And then my faith came back to me full force, and I felt like a weight had been taken off my back. I still feel that way now.”
“You think he’s in heaven?”
“Yes. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. I just know I want to live.”
“What does that mean?” his mother asked softly.
“I don’t want to go to Vietnam.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about that. I really don’t.”
Two days later, at the airport waiting for the plane back to school, Arthur sat reading, for the third or fourth time, the popular novel The Catcher in the Rye. After about half an hour, he sat the book face down on his lap and wondered why he found the main character, Holden Caulfield, so easy to identify with. After all, Holden had flunked out of two prep schools, whereas he was graduating from college with honors. And Holden dreamed of running away to a cabin near the woods, whereas he would soon be working on a Ph.D. in physical chemistry. Maybe it had something to do with Holden’s candid insights into school life, or his willingness to resist parental authority, or maybe it was his awkwardness with girls. A guilty pleasure at best, Arthur noted with a faint smile.
As he picked