These were all possible. We knew there were cars that sped that fast, and all of us there in Coney Island had relatives living elsewhere who were better off than we were and had those cars that might go a mile a minute or more. Ours lived for the most part in New Jersey, in Paterson and Newark, and came in their automobiles on summer Sundays, to walk the boardwalk to the carousel or as far as Steeplechase, to use the beach or wade in the ocean. They would stay for the dinner that my mother liked to cook, my sister helping, to serve them the breaded veal cutlets with roasted fried potatoes she made deliciously, to "give them good eat." Civil service jobs were coveted, for the pay, the steady, white-collar work, and the vacation and pension benefits, and because they went to Jews too, and those who obtained them were looked up to as professionals. You could start as an apprentice in the U.S. Government Printing Office, my older brother read to me from a civil service newspaper, and then work as a printer at a starting salary of sixty dollars a week-there was that dollar an hour, almost in reach, and more-once the apprenticeship was over. But I would have to live and work in Washington, and none of us was sure I ought to leave home for that. A shorter stint at the Norfolk Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia, as a blacksmith's helper, with a bunch of the other guys from Coney Island working in the navy yard too, seemed a more inspiring idea, while we waited to see if the war would be over before I reached nineteen and whether or not I was going to be drafted into the army or navy. At 30 Bank Street in the city of Norfolk, we'd been told, a ferry ride across from Portsmouth, was a cathouse, a brothel, but I never had nerve enough to go, and lacked the time. I lasted at hard physical labor there close to two months, working fifty-six consecutive days for the time and a half on Saturdays and Sundays, before I gave up in total exhaustion and came back home, and finally found a job as a file clerk with an automobile casualty insurance company for much less money, in the same building in Manhattan, coincidentally, the old General Motors building at 1775 Broadway, in which Joey Heller had worked in his uniform as a Western Union messenger, delivering and picking up telegram messages.
Where were you?
When you heard about Pearl Harbor. When the atom bomb went off. When Kennedy was killed.
I know where I was when the radio gunner Snowden was killed on the second mission to Avignon, and that meant more to me then than the Kennedy assassination did later, and still does. I was in the tail section of my B-25 medium bomber in a dead faint, after coming around from the crack on the head that knocked me out for a while when the copilot lost control of himself and put the plane into a sheer drop and then wailed on the intercom for everyone in the plane to help everyone else in the plane who wasn't answering him. Each time I came to and heard Snowden moaning and saw Yossarian doing something else in his vain struggle to help him, I fainted again.
Before that mission, I had crash-landed once with a pilot we all called Hungry Joe, who had loud nightmares when he was not on combat duty, and I had ditched once with a pilot named Orr, who they said later wound up safe in Sweden somehow; but I was not injured either time, and I still could not make myself believe it was not honestly only like the movies. But then I saw Snowden with his insides out, and after that saw a skinny man frolicking on a raft at the beach cut in half by a propeller, and I believe now that if I'd thought earlier that either one of those things could occur in my presence, I might not have been able to make myself want to go. My mother and father both knew that war was a more dreadful thing than any of us kids in the neighborhood could picture. They were appalled later when I told them I had been accepted for flying duty as an aerial gunner. Neither had ever been up in a plane. Nor had I, or anyone else I knew.
Both walked with me to the trolley stop on Railroad Avenue, near the second candy store we had on our street. From there I would ride to Stillwell Avenue and, with the three others, take the Sea Beach subway line into Manhattan to Pennsylvania Station to report for duty on my first day in. I learned years later that after my mother hugged me good-bye with a gentle smile and a straight face and I'd gone away on the trolley, she collapsed in tears right there and wept inconsolably, and it was nearly a half hour before my father and my sister could get her back down the street into our apartment.
The day I went into the army my standard of living practically doubled. I was making sixty dollars a month as a file clerk in the insurance company and had to pay my carfare and buy my lunches, or bring them. In the army I was paid seventy-five dollars a month as a buck private from day one, and food and clothes and rent and doctors and dentists were all free. And before I was out, as a sergeant with flight pay, overseas pay, and combat pay, I was making more a month than a government printer and was already closer as a young man to that hundred dollars a week than I'd believed I ever would be able to get.
Where did all that money come from?
As my mother might say, in Yiddish: On Monday one third of the nation was ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed. And on Thursday there were ten million people in the military making more than most had been able to earn before, and two million civilian employees, and tanks, airplanes, ships, aircraft carriers, and hundreds of thousands of jeeps and trucks and other vehicles pouring out of the factories almost too rapidly to count. Suddenly there was enough for everything. Does all the credit belong to Hitler? Capitalism, my father probably would answer with a smile of resignation, as though for this humane socialist all of the evils of inequality could be clarified in that sinful single word. "For war there is always enough. It's peace that's too expensive."
From that first train ride out from Pennsylvania Station to the reception center on Long Island, I experienced in the army a loss of personal importance and individual identity that I found, to my amazement, I welcomed. I was part of a directed herd, and I found myself relieved to have everything mapped out for me, to be told what to do, and to be doing the same things as the rest. I felt unburdened, more free than as a civilian. I had more free time too, a sense of greater liberty, once the orientation phases were over.
The four of us who'd enlisted together came back unharmed, although I had a pretty bad time of it on both missions to Avignon, and Lew was taken prisoner and kept in a prison camp in Germany for half a year before he was set free by the Russians. He knows what a long shot it was that he survived at all after Dresden was bombed while he was there. But Irving Kaiser, who had been our Toby Tenderfoot in the skit by Joey Heller and me, was blown apart in Italy by artillery fire and I never saw him again, and Sonny Ball was killed there too.
By the time of Vietnam I did know what war was like, and White House wickedness, and I swore to Glenda I would do everything conceivable, legal and illegal, to keep the boy Michael from going if he came even close to passing his physical and being called up. I had doubts that could happen. Even before he was old enough to be on drugs or medication he showed signs of behaving like someone who was. He was good at facts and figures but was lost with things like maps and floor plans. His memory for things statistical was phenomenal. But he was not much good at algebra or geometry, at anything abstract. I let Glenda continue to think he'd been affected that way by the divorce. I outlined heroic plans to move to Canada if the draft board called him. I would even go to Sweden with him if that looked safer. I gave her my word but did not have to keep it.
Lew wanted the paratroops or a tank with a cannon in front to roll over Germans who were persecuting Jews, but wound up in the infantry after training in the field artillery. Overseas, he made it to sergeant when his own sergeant was killed. Even earlier, in Holland, he had taken that position of command when his sergeant grew unsure of himself and began relying on Lew for orders to give. I wanted to be a fighter pilot and fly the P-38, because it looked so fast and flashy. But I had no depth perception, so I became an aerial gunner instead. I saw the posters stressing the need for gunners and volunteered. It was the most dangerous game of all, rumor had it, and it was going to be a cinch. And for me, as it turned out, it pretty much was.