If I Die in a Combat Zone Read Free

think so?” he said. “Out completely ?”
    “No question about it.” Bates put on a solemn face. He was a teaser and he loved going after Barney. “Way I figure it, pal, Uncle Charles shot his whole wad yesterday. Follow me? Boom, it’s all gone. So today’s got to be quiet. Simple logic.”
    “Yeah,” Barney murmured. He kept wagging his head, stirring his ham and eggs. “Yeah. ”
    “We wore ’em out. A war of fucking attrition.”
    Things were peaceful. There was only the sky and the heat and the coming day. Mornings were good.
    We ate slowly. No reason to hurry, no reason to move. The day would be yesterday. Village would lead to village, and our feet would hurt, and we would do the things we did, and the day would end.
    “Sleep okay?” Bates said.
    “Until two hours ago. Something woke me up. Weird—sounded like somebody trying to kill me.”
    “Yeah,” Barney said. “Sometimes I have bad dreams too.”
    And we gathered up our gear, doused the fires, saddled up, and found our places in the single file line of march. We left the hill and moved down into the first village of the day.

Two
Pro Patria
          I grew out of one war and into another. My father came from leaden ships of sea, from the Pacific theater; my mother was a WAVE. I was the offspring of the great campaign against the tyrants of the 1940s, one explosion in the Baby Boom, one of millions come to replace those who had just died. My bawling came with the first throaty note of a new army in spawning. I was bred with the haste and dispatch and careless muscle-flexing of a nation giving bridle to its own good fortune and success. I was fed by the spoils of 1945 victory.
    I learned to read and write on the prairies of southern Minnesota.
    Along the route used to settle South Dakota and the flatlands of Nebraska and northern Iowa, in the cold winters, I learned to use ice skates.
    My teachers were brittle old ladies, classroom football coaches, flushed veterans of the war, pretty girls in sixth grade.
    In patches of weed and clouds of imagination, I learned to play army games. Friends introduced me to the Army Surplus Store off main street. We bought dented relics of our fathers’ history, rusted canteens and olive-scented, scarred helmet liners. Then we were our fathers, taking on the Japs and Krauts along the shores of Lake Okabena, on the flat fairways of the golf course. I rubbed my fingers across my father’s war decorations, stole a tiny battle star off one of them, and carried it in my pocket.
    Baseball was for the summertime, when school ended. My father loved baseball. I was holding a Louisville Slugger when I was six. I played a desperate shortstop for the Rural Electric Association Little League team; my father coached us, and he is still coaching, still able to tick off the starting line-up of the great Brooklyn Dodgers teams of the 1950s.
    Sparklers and the forbidden cherry bomb were for the Fourth of July: a baseball game, a picnic, a day in the city park, listening to the high school band playing “Anchors Aweigh,” a speech, watching a parade of American Legionnaires. At night, fireworks erupted over the lake, reflections.
    It had been Indian land. Ninety miles from Sioux City, sixty miles from Sioux Falls, eighty miles from Cherokee, forty miles from Spirit Lake and the site of a celebrated massacre. To the north was Pipestone and the annual Hiawatha Pageant. To the west was Luverne and Indian burial mounds.
    Norwegians and Swedes and Germans had taken the plains from the Sioux. The settlers must have seen endless plains and eased their bones and said, “Here as well as anywhere, it’s all the same.”
    The town became a place for wage earners. It is a place for wage earners today—not very spirited people, not very thoughtful people.
    Among these people I learned about the Second World War, hearing it from men in front of the courthouse, from those who had fought it. The talk was tough. Nothing to do with causes