Jack’s “coffee” arrived, about half of it still in the cup, the rest in the saucer, lapping around the grimy thumb of Jack’s server.
“One coffee,” the server said. “Enjoy your meal.”
The fact that Jack was clearly not having a meal was of no concern to this boy, whose instructions were to say “Enjoy your meal” on delivery of every order, and that was what he did. Jack reflected on the problems of imposing a corporate culture. There was simply no point attempting to make English kids into Americans. You could put the silly hat on the British teenager, but you still had a British teenager under the silly hat. You could make them say, “Enjoy your meal,” “Have a nice day,” and “Hi, my name is Cindy, how may I help you right now?” as much as you liked, but it still always came out sounding like “Fuck off.”
Jack was restless. He could not be bothered with the newspaper. Mrs Thatcher would win the election and she would probably stay in power for ever. The Brits weren’t stupid; they had a winner there. Hadn’t she just won a war, after all? A war! Even a year after the event Jack could still scarcely believe the good fortune of his British colleagues. It was so unfair. America was the world’s policeman; they had the best army, they should have got to fight the wars. And yet all of a sudden, just when everybody least expected it, those lucky bastard British had arranged themselves a real live, proper, non-nuclear, blood-and-guts, old-fashioned war. Jack and his comrades had suffered agonies of jealousy when it happened and, of course, being in Britain at the time had made it a hundred times worse. There they were, young eager members of the most powerful army on earth, and they had had to sit around in Britain, of all places, guarding cruise missiles while the dusty, down-at-heel old British sailed off halfway round the world to defend the Queen’s territory in the South Atlantic.
Jack put the frustrations of the previous year from his mind and took a sheet of writing paper from his pocket. Perhaps he would pass the time by writing to his brother. Jack had been meaning to write for some time but had kept putting it off because it was too depressing. What had he to say for himself? Only that it was starting to look as if Harry had been right all along. Harry had always said that joining the army was throwing your life away.
“OK, Harry, I admit it,” Jack wrote in his small, precise hand. “You were right all those years ago and you’ve been right ever since. The army is a pain in the ass. It’s boring and there isn’t any glory any more. Are you pleased, you son of a bitch? Maybe you should put it in one of your damn poems!”
This was a cheap shot. Harry no longer wrote poems, although for a brief period as a teenager he had attempted to. Jack had never, ever let Harry forget this.
“Yeah, I’ll bet you’re pleased,” Jack continued. “Tell Mom and Pa the black sheep is bored. Tell them they saw more action shouting slogans at LBJ and fighting cops in ’68 than I’ve seen in the fifteen years since I joined the fucking army.”
This was not true at all. In fact Jack had seen plenty of action, having served with distinction in Vietnam, but Jack was in a sour mood. Besides, Jack’s South-East Asian service had been at the end of the war, beating the retreat, so to speak, a great power cutting its losses. The US disengagement from that bloody adventure had not felt very glorious at the time and it still rankled with Jack. It was one of the many things for which he somehow managed to blame his parents, an attitude his brother Harry found pathetic.
“What?” Harry would exclaim. “It’s Mom’s fault you didn’t get enough Vietcong to shoot at! Jesus, Jack, you are such an asshole.”
“Well, it was the enemy at home that stopped the war, wasn’t it?” Jack would counter. Those students and hippies and campus fucking heroes! They had their Vietnam War, oh yeah! Outside the White House and on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial! And then they ruined it for me! I didn’t get sixties Vietnam, no, not me. I got seventies Vietnam. I didn’t get to play Beach Boys music and fight a jungle guerrilla war. No, I finally get out there in ’73, just in time to help load a bunch of fat fucking failures onto helicopters in the compound of the Saigon Embassy. That was my introduction to the new global reality. Even the music was shit. You can’t fight a war with Donny and Marie at number one.”
Jack and Harry had fought all the time as kids and they still did whenever they got the chance. Harry certainly had no sympathy for Jack’s frustrations with army life. He had never made any secret of the fact that he thought Jack’s life choices incomprehensible. As far as Harry was concerned, in the army there could only be two states – bored and terrified – and neither seemed very attractive to him. Harry’s theory of why Jack had chosen the course in life that he had was the old favourite that he had done it to spite their parents. They had been teenagers during the sixties and while their mother and father had not embraced the counterculture entirely, they had certainly inhaled. Being college teachers, it would have been almost impossible for them not to. The sixties had been a very difficult decade to opt out of. Even the Brady Bunch and the Partridge Family had hippy values. Almost overnight unorthodox behaviour had become the new orthodoxy, long-haired weirdos became the norm and patriotic boys with crew cuts started to look like freaks. Jack felt like a stranger in his own home. He had wanted proper parents at a time when the concept of formal generations was breaking down. Anybody could be hip; greyhaired old men were on the TV extolling the glories of drugs, and grizzled beat poets and blues men were becoming folk heroes. Whereas traditionally adults had encouraged young people to act like grown-ups, suddenly grownups were acting like kids. Jack was fifteen and he felt like the only adult in his house. He had cringed away his teens while his mother swapped dresses for caftans and his father’s thick wavy hair got longer and longer and stupider.
Jack’s mind had wandered. He returned to his letter and current dissatisfaction with army life.
“I bet you’re laughing to read this,” he wrote. “I know you think I’m in this situation because I wanted to embarrass Mom and Pa. I still can’t believe that. You actually think I joined the army because Mom wore a see-through blouse to my high school graduation! You’re such a jerk, Harry. You just can’t bear the simplefact that however bored I may feel right now I love the army. You hate the fact that somebody with virtually identical DNA to yours actually loves and respects the armed forces of his country. Just like you love your damn chairs or washstands or whatever it is you whittle out of trees in your stupid wood in Ohio. I didn’t join the army because all the guys in my class got to see my mother’s nipples. I joined because I want to kill people in the cause of peace and freedom, OK? Something I am unlikely to get the chance to do at RAF Greenham Common, the shithole of the planet. If England had haemorrhoids, believe me they’d be here.”
Jack had hated the Greenham base the day he had arrived, and the three grim years he had spent there since had done nothing to change his mind. Three grinding years. Years that lived in Jack’s memory as one, long, wet miserable winter’s afternoon. He supposed that the sun must have shone at some point during the previous thirty-six months but if it had it had made no impression on him. Concrete and steel, steel and concrete, that was what the camp meant to Jack, and the very sky itself seemed to be constructed of the same joyless stuff. A Cold War sky, grey, flat and impenetrable, like the belly of a vast tank. Jack had spent a thousand ghastly hours of duty staring up at that gloomy canopy. He often thought that if ever the missiles for which he and his comrades were responsible were to be fired, they would just bounce off that sky and fall right back to earth, blowing them all to hell.