Settling Accounts: In at the Death

You have to understand what you’re fighting for. Otherwise, you were an animal—a brave animal, maybe, but an animal all the same.

After a case like that, writing about the work O’Doull had done during the war didn’t seem so bad. That, at least, had mattered. This? While he was sewing and splinting and cutting, he looked forward to this with a fierce and simple longing. Now that he had it again, he discovered the danger of getting exactly what you thought you wanted. It could prove as unfortunate in real life as in fairy tales.

Jonathan Moss didn’t like Houston. It was even hotter and muggier than Georgia and Alabama, and that was saying something. New Orleans was supposed to be just as bad, or maybe worse, but you could have a good time in New Orleans. If you could have a good time in Houston, Moss hadn’t found out how.

Nothing the government touches ever ends up looking just the way you thought it would before you started—you need to understand that right from the beginning, or else you start going crazy.

The only way you could keep from getting old was by dying before you made it.

“Aren’t you lucky…sir?”

“Yeah. I’m lucky like snow is black,” Morrell answered.

“When I started, no one was sure what the machine gun was worth. Now FitzBelmont talks about blowing up Rhode Island with one bomb.”

“Best thing that could happen to it,” Abell observed.

“Do you know what Mobile is?” Sam Carsten said.

“Tell me,” Lon Menefee urged him.

“Mobile is what New Orleans would’ve been if it was settled by people without a sense of humor,” Sam said.

Pound got back into his uniform. “See you again, maybe,” he said. She nodded. If she was enthusiastic, she hid it very well. She didn’t mind his money, but she sure wasn’t thrilled about him.

Well, he was old enough to be her father. And he was a damnyankee. And she was a whore and he was a trick. That left it fourth down and time to punt.

“Glad you’re back safe. I heard you were wounded—happy it wasn’t too serious.”

“Yeah.” The only wound that wasn’t serious was the one that happened to the other guy.

That wasn’t even remotely fair, but politics wasn’t about being fair. Politics was about getting your guy in and keeping the other side’s guy out. Once you’d done that, you could do all the other neat stuff you had in mind. If you stood on the sidelines looking longingly toward the playing field, all the neat ideas in the world weren’t worth a dime.

Pound saw problems and solutions with an almost vicious clarity. As far as he was concerned, everything was simple. And damned if watching him in action didn’t make you wonder whether he had it right and everybody else looked at the world through a kaleidoscope that made everything seem much more complicated than it should have.

“Stuck in fucking Alabama,” Armstrong Grimes grumbled. “What could be worse than this?”

Squidface was cleaning his captured automatic Tredegar. He looked up from the work. “Well, you could be in hell,” he said.

“Who says I’m not?” Armstrong said. It’s a godforsaken miserable place, and I can’t get out of it. If that’s not hell, what do you call it?”

“Pittsburgh,” Squidface answered.

Then he realized what it really was: a possum. It looked like a cat-sized rat that had got its nose stuck in a pencil sharpener. The long, bare pinkish tail seemed vaguely obscene. Lieutenant Colonel Torricelli was looking in the same direction. “If that’s not the ugliest thing God ever made, damned if I know what it is,” he said.

“Now that Jake Featherston’s dead, I agree with you.”

In war, proving the other guy was wrong often meant proving he had no business breathing.

You volunteered for this, Cincinnatus reminded himself. Were you born stupid, or did you have to study?

“Is it better to get shot in a war your side wins than in one where you lose?” O’Doull persisted.

“Better not to get shot at all,” McDougald said, a great and obvious truth to which too many people who went down in history as statesmen were blind.

Yes, they’d learned plenty of lessons from the enemy, but so what? Where you learned your lessons didn’t matter. That you learned them did.

“We’re in a race, and we’d better win.”

Eight words. As far as Flora could see, they said everything that needed saying.

“Got any rations you don’t need?” one of them asked, stretching out his hands imploringly to Cassius.

“You feed me if I was in there?” Cassius asked.

“Well, I hope so,” the man answered after a perceptible pause for thought. “I’m a Christian, or I try to be.”

“Reckon Jake Featherston’s a Christian, too?”

“Sure he is,” the POW said, this time without hesitation. “He loves Jesus, same as you’n me. Jesus loves him, too.

“Fuck you, you ofay asshole.” Cassius turned away. “You can starve.”

“You ain’t no Christian,” the Confederate called after him.

“If Jake Featherston is, I don’t want to be.”

It was like trying to kill a butterfly with an axe.

That was true, but, like a lot of true things, didn’t tell the whole story or even most of it.

“We can beat the enemy,” he said to nobody in particular, “but God help us against our own side.”

“Headquarters being stupid again?” Scullard asked sympathetically.

“They’d have to wise up to get to stupid.” Warming to his theme, Pound added, “They’ve got their headquarters in the their hindquarters.”

“Shit!” Pound said, without originality, but with great sincerity.

The landing craft was as graceful as a fat man waddling along with an anvil. But a fat man lugging an anvil would sink like a stone if he went into the water. The landing craft didn’t. God and the engineers who designed it no doubt knew why it didn’t. Irving Morrell had no idea. He took the notion on faith. Somehow, believing in the landing craft was easier than his Sunday-school lessons had been.

“I’m not afraid,” Edith said. “God will watch over all of us. I know He’s on our side.” Everybody in every war since the world began was convinced God was on his side. Half the people in every war since the world began ended up being wrong.

I’ve always tried to be a rational man. I don’t have much use for the idea of miracles. Things are what they are, that’s all.

He could speak clear English when he wanted to. Why didn’t he want to more often?

Well, what was life but the difference between what you planned and what you got?

They smelled of old sweat and leather and tobacco and mud: like soldiers, in other words.

“Sinner!” Selfe said again. “Even the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes.”

“No doubt,” Dowling said. “Which of us do you suppose he’s speaking through? And how do you aim to prove it one way or the other?”

“You may not care about famous, buddy, but famous is gonna care about you,” the photographer predicted.

Quantity had a quality of its own.

“I’ve given up having suspicions. They end up getting confirmed, and then I’m unhappy,” the medic said. “I don’t like being unhappy. It makes me sad when I am.”

“Did anybody know what a nasty war this would be before they went and started it?”

“Does anybody ever?”

I think this is called peace. We used to have it all the time.

“Do you see things in black and white, or are there shades of gray for you?”

“I hope there’s gray, Menefee said. “Black and white make things easier, but only if you don’t want to think.”

Patton stared at him. “Then why doesn’t he throw you in irons, the way you deserve?”

“Because he knows I think with my head, not with my heart or my balls,” Potter answered. “It’s really a useful technique. You ought to try it one of these days…sir.”

Hal Williamson shook his hand and said, “Good luck to you, buddy. Goddamn if I didn’t learn something from you.”

“What’s that?” Cincinnatus asked.

“Colored guys—you’re just like anybody else, only darker,” Hal answered.

Cincinnatus laughed. “Shit, I’ll that that. Good luck to you, too, man.”

The difference between what you counted on and what you got explained why so many people had unhappy marriages.

Only thing worse than fighting a war and winning is fighting a war and losing.

Cincinnatus Driver hadn’t been under fire for more than twenty-five years. He’d forgotten how much fun it wasn’t.

Had optimism run that far ahead of common sense?

Spend all your time thinkin’ ’bout tomorrow, you ain’t gonna live to git there.

Order did not want to be born; chaos wasn’t ready to die.

Was that savage cynicism or sage common sense? When it came to gauging the chances of peace and war, how much difference was there?

Down underneath, there wasn’t much difference between people and animals. War brought that out all kinds of ways.

What did he do for fun? Anything? Poor bastard, Sam thought. Zwilling probably got his kicks telling other people what to do. If that wasn’t a dead-end street, Sam had never seen one.

Somewhere between half a mile and a quarter of a mile from what the officers were calling ground zero, there was no sidewalk or even rubble under foot. Everything has been fused to what looked like rough, crude glass. It felt like hard, unyielding glass under Flora’s feet, too.

“My God,” she said over and over. She wasn’t the only one, either. She watched a Catholic Congressman cross himself, and another take out a rosary and move his lips in prayer. When you saw something like this, what could you do but pray? But wasn’t a God Who allowed such things deaf to mere blandishments?

The roll of the dice, the turn of the card…Some guys had a shell burst ten feet away from them and didn’t get badly hurt. Some turned into hamburger. Who could say why? God, maybe. From everything Jorge had seen, He had a rugged sense of humor.

Potter knew perfectly well that it was true. He also knew that what was true and what made good propaganda often had not even a nodding acquaintance with each other.

A rocket can’t be that accurate…can it? But that’s only a wild-ass guess—excuse the technical term.

“Half of being smart is knowing what you’re not smart at,” Jake said. “Plenty of folks reckon that ’cause they know something, they know everything. And that ain’t the way it works.”

“I never said it was,” Goldman answered primly.

“Yeah, I know,” Jake said. “You make one.”

“We sure is crazy,” someone would say. “If you ain’t crazy in dis here place, you gots to be nuts.”

Reverend Selfe glowered. He was good at glowering. His physiognomy gave him a head start, but he had talent, too.