Amy would be marching forward with no obstacles in front of her, but the plans of the three others were contingent on what happened to them during and after their army physicals, which were scheduled to take place that summer, Howard’s in mid-July, Noah’s in early August, and Ferguson’s in late August. In the event they were called up, Howard and Noah had each decided to follow Luther Bond’s example and go north to Canada, but Ferguson, who was more stubborn and hotheaded than they were, had decided he would be willing to risk going to prison. The pro-war faction had names for people like them—draft dodgers, cowards, traitors to their country—but the three friends would not have objected to fighting for America in a war they felt to be just, since none of them was a pacifist who believed in opposing all wars, they were opposed only to this war, and in that they considered it to be morally indefensible, not just a political blunder but an act of criminal madness, they were enjoined by their patriotic duty to resist taking part in it. Howard’s father, Noah’s father, and Ferguson’s stepfather had all been soldiers in World War II, and their sons and stepson admired them for having fought in the battle against fascism, which they considered to have been a just war, but Vietnam was something different, and how comforting it was for everyone in the large, tangled-up tribe to know that the three veterans of that other war stood by their sons and stepson in opposing this war.
The Battle of Hamburger Hill, Operation Apache Snow in the A Shau Valley, and the Battle of Binh Ba in Phuoc Tuy Province. Those were some of the names and places drifting back from Vietnam in the weeks before and after the three of them graduated from college, and as they prepared for their visits to the draft board in Newark (Howard) and the one on Whitehall Street in Manhattan (Noah and Ferguson), both Howard and Noah consulted doctors about imaginary ailments they hoped would earn them a classification of either 4-F (unfit for military service) or 1-Y (fit for military service, but only in cases of utmost urgency), which would spare them from having to move to Canada. Howard suffered from allergies to dust, grass, ragweed, goldenrod, and other airborne pollens during the spring and summer (hay fever), but his sympathetic, anti-war doctor wrote a letter declaring that he also suffered from asthma, a chronic disease that might or might not have warranted Howard a medical exemption. Noah went armed with a letter as well, a statement from the anti-war psychoanalyst he had been visiting twice a week for the past six months attesting to his patient’s neurotic fear of open spaces (agoraphobia), which in times of undue stress blossomed into full-blown paranoia, and which, when coupled with his latent homosexual tendencies, made it impossible for him to function normally in all-male environments. When Noah pulled out the letter and showed it to Ferguson, he shook his head and laughed. Look at me, Archie, he said. I’m a danger to society. An out-and-out lunatic.
Do you think the doctor believes any of this junk? Ferguson asked.
Who can say? Noah replied. Then, after a brief pause, he let out another laugh and said: Probably.
In his own best interests, Ferguson supposed he should have gone to a doctor himself and done something similar to what Howard and Noah had done, but as the reader will have observed by now, Ferguson did not always act in his own best interests. On Monday morning, August twenty-fifth, he appeared at the induction center on Whitehall Street with no letter to present to the army medical staff about any real or imagined physical or mental complaints. It was true that he had suffered from hay fever as a child himself, but he seemed to have outgrown it in recent years, and the one condition he did have, which had condemned him to the status of talking mule, was irrelevant to the matter at hand.
He wandered through the building in his white underpants, accompanied by a mob of other young men walking around in their white underpants. White young men, brown young men, black young men, and yellow young men — all of them in the same boat. He took the written exam, his body was measured, weighed, and scrutinized, and then he went home, wondering what would happen to him next.
3) Ho Chi Minh died on September second at the age of seventy-nine. Ferguson, who was on his fourth job for Mr. Mangini since the start of the summer, heard the news on the radio as he stood on a ladder painting the kitchen ceiling of a three-bedroom apartment on Central Park West between Eighty-third and Eighty-fourth Streets. Uncle Ho was dead, but nothing would change because of that, and the war would go on until the North conquered the South and the Americans were booted out. That much was certain, he said to himself, as he dipped his brush into the can for another swipe at the ceiling, but many other things were not. Why the letter announcing the date of his physical had been sent to him a full month after Howard and Noah had been sent theirs, for example, or why Howard had already been given his new classification from the board in Newark (1-Y) but after an equivalent length of time Noah still had heard nothing from the board in Manhattan. It was all so arbitrary, it seemed, a system that functioned with two independent hands, each one unaware of what the other was doing as they performed their separate tasks, and now that the physical was behind him, it was unclear how long he would have to wait.
He was preparing himself for the worst, and throughout the summer and into the fall he thought endlessly about prison, about being locked up against his will and having to submit to the capricious rules and commands of his jailers, about the threat of being raped by one or more of his fellow prisoners, about sharing a cell with a violent, shiv-toting con serving out a seven-year sentence for armed robbery or a hundred years for murder. Then his mind would drift off from the present and he would start thinking about The Count of Monte Cristo, the book he had read as a twelve-year-old boy, the falsely accused Edmond Dantès held captive for fourteen years in the Château d’If, or Darkness at Noon, the novel he had read in the eighth grade, with the two imprisoned men in adjoining cells tapping out coded messages to each other on the walls, or the inordinate number of prison movies he had watched over the years, among them Grand Illusion, A Man Escaped, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Dreyfus on Devil’s Island in The Life of Emile Zola, Riot in Cell Block 11, The Big House, 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, and The Man in the Iron Mask, another Dumas story in which the evil twin brother is choked to death by his own beard.
Jittery, darting thoughts hatched in the dual incubators of uncertainty and steadily growing panic.
Summer had always been a time of intense work for him, but that summer Ferguson accomplished little except to read the first four rejection letters that came in for The Capital of Ruins. One month after Ho Chi Minh’s death, the number was up to seven.