“What’s that?” asked Heinzerling.
“You wouldn’t know,” said Ekland. “First World War.”
“I guess you were there,” said Heinzerling. “You weren’t even a glint in your old man’s eye.”
Ekland estimated Heinzerling’s age. “I was at a place called Iwo,” he said, “when you were a junior in high school. That is, if you got that far.”
“Well, what I would like to know,” said Petrucci, “is who picked out this goddam icebox full of fleas and gooks and goons and Chinks in uniforms that look like those old-fashioned comforters they used to put on beds. Who did it? Who’s responsible?”
“I guess MacArthur,” said Ackerman.
“It wasn’t MacArthur,” said Ekland. “It was Truman.”
Petrucci made a rude noise.
“I don’t think it was Truman,” said Heinzerling. “I think it was that Republican, Duller, or Dullest, or whatever his name is, in the State Department.”
And they argued politics. Both were too young to vote, and their thoughts on politics were vague and juvenile, and based on faulty information, but still they wrangled, and got mad, and perhaps might have fought with their fists if Ekland had not told them to shut up.
Ekland walked over to the map they had tacked to the top of an ammunition case and nailed to their tentpole. He swung the light so he could see better. They had everything, there alongside the reservoir, everything except women. Everything had come up behind them from Wonsan, even the mobile generators. That was American efficiency. That was the way this generation of Americans liked to fight their wars—with all modern conveniences. If death came they could accept it, providing it was a clean, antiseptic death, preferably in the shining aluminum shell of a fighter plane in the clean sky, or the shining steel armor of a ship in the clean sea. The high command recognized that Korea was filth, the anal passage of Asia, which American foot soldiers would consider an unfit place to die in unless proper facilities were provided. Ekland looked at the map and said, “It doesn’t look like much, does it?”
The map was a full page torn out of Stars and Stripes. It was a good map, for its size, just as Ekland was a good man, for his size. He wasn’t large, nor were his shoulders particularly broad or his chest deep, although he was tidily constructed, as if nature had fashioned him economically, to get the most energy out of the least poundage. “It doesn’t look like much,” Ekland said, “but I say it is much. I don’t give a damn who put us in here—MacArthur or Truman or the UN—I say it was right. Because if we lost Korea, we’d lose Asia. All Asia. India. The N.E.I. Hong Kong. Malaya. Indo-China. The Philippines, and finally Japan. Know what would happen then?”
“No,” said Heinzerling, somewhat awed. “What would happen then?”
“Then the Russians would have secured their Eastern flank, and they’d be free to pile it on the west. As it is now they don’t dare move in the west. We’re too close to Vladivostok and Khabarovsk. Those are their big bases out here. That’s where they stage their supplies for the Chinese. If we’d folded without a fight here in Korea, we’d have folded everywhere. If we didn’t fight here, then the French would know we wouldn’t fight for Indo-China—or France—and the Italians would know we wouldn’t fight for Italy, and the Germans—hell, they’d be speaking Russian. You know what Churchill said about the Germans—‘They’re either at your throats or your heels.’ Well, they’d be at our throats again, if we gave up Korea.”
“Where did you learn all that crap?” asked Petrucci.
Ekland wheeled on them. When Ekland began to speak, or move, as now, he increased in stature. Until then he had appeared simply an average young man with close-cropped red hair who had been an assistant engineer for NBC in the Merchandise Mart, Chicago. He started to explain where he had learned it, and then he realized that being much younger, and without his sophistication, they wouldn’t understand. You couldn’t explain the long, early morning seminars in Al’s Diner with Si Cooper. Si had been a foreign correspondent until his paper merged, and the new management considered foreign correspondents a useless luxury. Now Si covered Chicago crime, or tried to, for NBC. Nor could Ekland explain the long talks with Molly, and how stubborn she was for a girl of twenty-three, insisting that their only real security lay in a stable world. He remembered one phrase. “When we have babies,” she said, “I want to be pretty sure they’ll grow up. That’s the kind of social insurance I want.” And he couldn’t talk of the nights in the control room, when everything ran smoothly and there was time to read the fascinating books on the Balkans, and India, and Afghanistan, and the Middle East, that apparently nobody else wanted to read because you could buy them from publishers’ overstock in any book store. He and Molly joked about what she called his “nineteen-cent education,” and yet he always knew she was glad the walls of his two-room apartment were lined with such books, because she had plans for him. All he said to Petrucci was, “Never mind where I learned it. Logical, isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” said Petrucci. Petrucci would never dare talk to a platoon sergeant, or the Marine Gunner, like that, but Ekland, after all, was only a technical man, and a private could talk to a technical man who did not command troops. Men who commanded troops were different. They knew everything, and you didn’t dare dispute them.
“Not only that,” said Ekland, “but if the Russkies got Europe, then they’d have the Med too. They’d have the steel of the Ruhr, and the oil of the Middle East, and steel is the muscle of war, and oil is the blood of war. And when they got Belgium they’d get the Belgian Congo, and its uranium, and England would be helpless. We’d have isolation, all right. We’d have it!”
“Well,” said Ackerman, polishing his spectacles, “that made sense back in June, but what’s the sense in going on, now that we’ve won it?”
“Look, Milt,” Ekland said, “I’m not so sure we’ve won it.”
“That’s what you think,” said Ackerman. “What’s the scuttlebutt? What’s MacArthur say? Home by Christmas.” Ackerman took the sergeant’s buckboard from its nail on the tentpole, found a pencil, and radio dispatch blanks, sat cross-legged on his sleeping bag, and began to write.
“I suppose you’re telling her we’ll be home by Christmas,” said Ekland. “Well, you’re nuts. If we all started right now we couldn’t get home by Christmas. Not even with an air lift.”
Ackerman looked up from what he was writing. “No, I don’t say we’ll be home Christmas. I’m just telling her to go ahead and buy the car, because we’ll sure be home soon. She ought to get a good used car, say ’forty-nine Chevvy or Plymouth, for under thirteen hundred, don’t you think?” The Ackermans had been wanting to buy a car ever since they were married in 1948, but Priscilla wouldn’t have a jalopy, because she said it would be bad for their morale. And Milton didn’t believe in buying things on time. But now, with everything going so well, and the allotment money piling up, now was the time to buy one.
“Sure, I think she ought to get a car,” Ekland agreed.
“When I get home,” said Petrucci, “I’m going to get a convertible. Cream-colored.”
“I think she ought to get a car right now,” Ekland went on, “because I think this thing is going to last a long time, and it’s going to get worse, and pretty soon it’ll be like last time. No cars.”
“MacArthur says it’s all over. Ekland says it’s just starting. Who knows more, Ekland or MacArthur?” said Petrucci.
“About some things, MacArthur. About other things, me,” said Ekland. “MacArthur hasn’t been home in a long time. Years. He doesn’t know what the people are thinking. He remembers how it was after the last war, everybody screaming to bring the boys home. So it’s smart, politically, to talk about bringing the boys back home. That’s what he thinks, but he’s operating on past performance, and this is a different horse. Nobody wants us to come home this time. They want us to stay out here and fight. They’d rather have us fight on the Yalu than on theMississippi.”