Battle Fatigue Read Free

Poland?”
    â€œEchhh.”
    He never explains.
    â€œThey all had terrible lives in Europe,” my mother says.
    â€œWhy was it terrible?” I ask.
    â€œThe Poles hated the Jews. They rode through the towns on horseback beating people and killing them and setting houses on fire.”
    I tried to imagine this. The only thing I had ever seen that sounded anything like this was something I once saw on television about people covered with sheets who rode through a town setting things on fire. They were called the Ku Klux Klan.
    â€œWas it like the Ku Klux Klan?” I ask.
    â€œSomething like that,” she says. “And we would have all lived like that if my parents hadn’t gotten us out. Then it got even worse.”
    â€œThe concentration camp.”
    â€œYes,” she says. “You know about that, Joel?” Why wouldn’t I know about that? The grown-ups talk about it every day. “But they got out, walking all the way to Hamburg.”
    â€œAnd that’s why we were not in the concentration camp?”
    â€œYes,” she says.

    So I understand that fighting for America is a very good thing. My father did a good thing fighting the Japanese because they attacked America in Pearl Harbor and so America made them pay, dropping atomic bombs on them. It was a good thing. My uncle killed the Germans who wanted to poison people in the shower. That was a good thing too. All the men in my neighborhood had done great things and someday I would be called on to do a great thing.

Chapter Two
    The Right Way to Play War
    I owe my popularity to a Nazi sign—my parents call it a “swastika.” I don’t know what this word means but it is a bent and broken cross that stands for the Nazis who ran concentration camps—I have some. We all play war and we have good things for playing it because our fathers brought home great stuff from the real war. We have brown-green uniforms, field jackets with instructions printed inside by the U.S. Army on how to stay warm and dry while fighting. Mine is very baggy and goes down to my feet but it is a real combat jacket, which my uncle calls “combat fatigues.” I also have a wool jacket, called an Eisenhower jacket, which has shoulder pads that make me look big and soldierlike. Maybe that was why Eisenhower liked it too. Eisenhower was a general, so this must have been an officer’s uniform, which is why it looks so good.
    A bunch of us have German helmets. But I have something even better—two gray fur hats with Nazi swastikas on the front. And two canteens with the same signs. Kids in the neighborhood want to play war with me because I have the hats and canteens.
    Dickey Panicelli has the best thing. He always has the coolest everything. His father is a policeman and carries a gun and is the only person, aside from the woman at the bakery, I ever saw with a tattoo. He was in the navy and has an anchor on his forearm, which makes him look like Popeye in the cartoons. We all call him Popeye and he doesn’t seem to mind.
    Popeye Panicelli brought back from his war a big white Japanese flag with a large red dot in the center. He also has a Japanese sword but we are not allowed to play with it. Popeye showed it to me once. He took it out of its case and waved a piece of paper across the blade and the paper was cut in two. That’s how sharp it is. The Japanese used these swords to chop off their own heads rather than surrender. That’s what Popeye says, but then he starts staring past the sword, that same stare that my uncle has, and he doesn’t say anything for a minute.
    â€œDad!” says Dickey. Popeye looks at him and then he is okay and smiles and starts putting the sword away. So I decide to bring Dickey over to my uncle’s house to show what I have—also something we are not allowed to take outside—a German rifle. It is dark wood and the metal part where you put the bullet has a black