Early one dark morning in the winter of 1966, my twin brother Bobby and I were force-marched in a freezing drizzle with a lot of other young men to a building the Air Force was pleased to call the Dining Facility, for an institutional meal of fish sticks and french fries. This was in Illinois, at the old, now defunct Chanute AFB, an Airtech training facility 130 miles south of Chicago. The base was old when we arrived there, having been built in 1917, upon America’s entry into what was then called the Great War. Airpower was new in 1917, of course, and President Wilson saw the importance of it. Chanute had been in operation since then. And by the winter of 1966, 25,000 men a year were being trained there for duty far and wide—anywhere in the world, from stateside, as it was called, to overseas bases in Europe or Southeast Asia.

Bobby and I were at Chanute because, at 20 years of age, we had been on the verge of being drafted. The Air Force was our father’s suggestion. He had served in the infantry in 1944, and he knew all about being a foot soldier in a war, which, he told us, excluding the less frequent hand-to-hand fighting, hadn’t substantially changed since Caesar. He said, “Getting drafted means the Army, and the Army means the infantry. I know that getting drafted means just two years of service and enlistment means four, but let me tell you, four years in the Air Force is better than one minute in the infantry, slogging through a jungle carrying a rifle and getting shot at. You just don’t want that, believe me. And I don’t want it for you, either.”

We had joined a day or two later. And in fact, most of the guys with whom we signed up had made the same choice for the same reason.

So, on this early evening, a Friday in late January, we had been marched through the rain and were all fairly drenched, trying to get warm, sitting side by side and across from each other on long benches, like picnic benches, eating the fish sticks, which tasted fishier than fish should ever taste, and wondering aloud where the government might see fit to send us when we were through with tech training. We all knew Vietnam was a possibility, but that was distant, almost unreal, like the possibility of getting into an auto wreck or suffering some other misfortune that happened to other people. Also, we knew that, being in the Air Force, if you weren’t flying you would most likely be manning an office with telephones or working maintenance, managing equipment. Generally out of the line of fire.

Because it was Friday, we would have a day and a half of relative freedom. On Monday, Bobby and I were scheduled, at last, to begin a nine-week training course in Survival and Survival Equipment, after which we would be sent out “into the field.” We had been waiting more than a month for our course to begin, long days spent being marched reasonlessly from one end of the squadron area to the other, drilling, doing calisthenics, tending to our barracks, polishing and performing maintenance tasks, and working K.P. (kitchen patrol). Drudge work all day, with attendant harassment from the training instructors, or T.I.s, as they were termed by the Air Force.

The T.I.s called us all “draft dodgers” with what felt like an added element of derision beyond the usual expected hazing involved in military training.

No matter, really, that it was Friday. We were, all of us to a man, tremendously unhappy to be in freezing Illinois in January.

But one of the most miserable among us was a tall, dark, Spanish 19-year-old kid from Vermont named Simpson. And in fact he had good and sufficient reason for his particular misery: it so happened that one week after he’d been sworn in to spend four years in the Air Force, his mother won a fortune in some state lottery, enough money to have paid for him to enter college and be classified as S-2, thus avoiding the draft. He saw this as his particular bad luck in the middle of lucky circumstance; he was wealthy, but he was also stuck at Chanute.

And he was obsessed about getting out.

The first time I ever really noticed him, he was perched on the top bunk of room 16 in our barracks, a room he shared with a guy named Weinberg (who in fact, temperamentally at least, seemed a good fit for him—we called Weinberg “Whiner” for his perpetual complaining about everything). Several of us had gathered in 16 because it was the room farthest from the front of the barracks and the barracks commander’s room. It was past midnight, and we were telling stories—or, more accurately, we were listening to Bobby tell jokes. He and I knew plenty of them, being from a big family of storytellers (our father and his four brothers), but Bobby was better at it than anybody, including me. Simpson, from that top bunk, scooted closer to the edge of it and interrupted the joke-telling with an announcement. “Listen. I’ve got a surefire way to get out of this shit.”

We all looked at him. Five or six of us.

“It’s simple. You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna let myself fall knees-first off this bunk. I’ll break my kneecaps, and then they’ll fuckin’ have to let me out.”

We waited. I don’t think anybody really believed he would do it. The whole thing seemed a bit clownish. Finally, Bobby said, “What if you do it and you end up in the base hospital for six weeks and then they put you back in line waiting for your course to start?” We watched him slowly fail to gather the courage. Finally, he flopped back and let one leg dangle over the side. “Goddamn it,” he said.

But the next morning he was still talking about finding a way to make the armed forces, as he called the Air Force, see that he wasn’t right for them. “It’s all such a waste of taxpayers’ money,” he announced, as though he had just encountered the fact of it in a newspaper. “They’ve already spent so much money keeping us here while we wait and wait and fuckin’ wait.”

This was true.

All the tech courses were backed up. Every one of them. The nearly six weeks Bobby and I had been waiting was below the average wait time for others, in other schools. Poor Simpson had been marking time for more than 22 weeks to start his 53-week course in the Missile School. Indeed, later that same day, the top sergeant called out to him in the dayroom meeting, “Hey, Simpson, good news, buddy. You only got eight weeks left to wait now.” Simpson responded very quietly: “Oh, well pardon me, while I go out of my fucking mind.”

We thought he was already well on his way there.

That winter Friday, we were eating our fish and someone remarked that in England this food we were eating was called fish and chips.

Bobby said, “More like chips and shit.” And laughter went up and down the table.

“I hope they send me to Italy,” someone I didn’t know said. He was a big, blocky, boy-faced guy with a unibrow and teeth the color of yellow corn. “There’s a base in Vincenza. That’s for me.” He looked at Bobby. “Tell us a joke, man. I hear you’re a fountain of them.”

“Hard to tell me one I haven’t heard,” Bobby said.

“Yeah?”

“Try me.”

I thought of someone challenging a gunfighter with a reputation for being fast on the draw. The unibrow guy shook his head. “I can’t remember them.”

It was a good-natured exchange. He went on talking about Italy. And then Bobby interrupted him, indicating me. “Our dad got wounded over there. Near Cassino.”

“My whole family on my mother’s side comes from there,” the other said. “Well, Sicily.”

“I want to be somewhere close to home,” Weinberg said. “If it’s possible.”

“Where you from?”

“Baltimore.”

“Andrews,” Bobby said. “Us, too.” We had dreamed of being sent to Andrews, where the Air Force would then simply be a job we went to. We might even do something with “Operation Bootstrap,” as it was called, where you got an education toward becoming a commissioned officer. We might even make the Air Force a career.

“There’s Bolling, in D.C., also,” Unibrow said.

“I heard that’s closing,” said Weinberg.

Simpson was across from me. He reached over suddenly and took hold of my forearm. “Listen, will you tell everybody I’ve been acting crazy? Will you do that?”

I pulled away. “Cut it, will you, Simpson. Nobody wants to be here.”

He reached the other way, to Bobby. “Hey, Bausch.”

Bobby was listening to a joke Unibrow was telling, about a foul-mouthed parrot. The only one he could ever remember, he said. I knew Bobby knew it, because I did, and I turned back to Simpson, who was mumbling, chewing his fish, staring off. I saw the muscles of his jaw working. “Can’t,” he said, low, chewing. “No fuckin’ chance.” Then he looked directly at me again, swallowed, and burst forth, “Don’t you understand?” It was as though we’d been arguing with him about it, and he’d been going over it all in his thoughts. “They have the power to get us killed, man. Dead like this fork I’m holding. Or this fish we’re eating. The government. The fucking giant. Ordering us to where we can die. And there’s not a thing we can do about it. And it’ll all be for nothing. It’ll be that we died to save the fucking world for time-release cold capsules and dog food! This ain’t even a real war, man. It’s just a lot of murder. Just slaughter. Meat wagons.”

“Cool it, Simpson,” Bobby told him. “We all know this.”

Simpson stared, hands pressed to the table on either side of his plate. “But we’ve gotta do something. Somebody’s gotta stop it, don’t they?”

The question was too rhetorical to draw an answer or response from anyone.

“If I do something,” he said to Bobby. “Will you tell everyone I’ve been acting crazy?”

“Yeah, OK. Sure. Whatever.”

He got up and walked over to the doorway leading out of the building. Some of us followed him. He braced himself, standing a few feet away from it, swinging his arms back and forth, and then got up on his toes like a ballet dancer and marched fast, head forward, into the cylindrical hinge mechanism at the top. He lay down, actually got down on the floor, acting dazed, and said, “Oh, I’ve been acting crazy. Tell them, Bausch. Tell them how crazy I’ve been acting. I just hit my head on purpose. You all saw it. Tell them, Bausch.”

Bobby said, “He’s been acting crazy.”

“There,” Simpson said to the gathered few airmen. “See? I’m very crazy. Go tell the T.I.s.”

No one did anything. And then a T.I. came strolling in from the cold. He saw Simpson and stopped and looked around at all of us. “What the fuck’s this?”

No one spoke.

He looked at Simpson, who said, “They’ll tell you, sir. Ask any one of them. I’ve been acting crazy.”

“Acting,” the T.I. said.

Simpson simply stared helplessly back at him.

“You’re gonna have a bump on your head, there, Airman—” he paused and looked at the name in sewn letters above the left pocket of the other’s fatigue jacket. “Simpson. Be careful, there, buddy—a big enough bump makes you qualify as being out of uniform.” He laughed a little and went on to the noncommissioned officers’ part of the facility.

“Goddamn,” Simpson said, getting up and brushing at his pants. “It’s coming for us.”

“Shut up, man,” one of the others said. “Jesus.”

“I can’t. I’m crazy. And it’s coming for us.”

We all stood there, watching him move back to where his plate was, with his unfinished dinner on it.

I got a piece of blueberry pie from an array of pie slices and made my way back to sitting across from him. A bruise had started in the middle of his forehead.

Seeing this, I thought of something that took place in my first week at Chanute. I was in the common latrine of the second floor, standing at one of the sinks, shaving, trying to decide what I might say that wouldn’t be mere complaining in a letter home. Out the eye-level window to my left, I saw what looked like a dusting of snow drifting on the air and then realized that it was ashes from the waste dump behind the base hospital a half-mile off, out of view. I looked past the water tank in the near distance, at the vast sweep of black Illinois farmland, flat as a table all the way to the level horizon. I decided I would go back to my letter writing and just describe what I was gazing at. As I returned to shaving, I heard a fighter jet take off from the flight line only a hundred or so yards away, a powerful roar, and abruptly I understood that I was part of the mightiest military force in the history of the world; that America was an empire as Rome had been during Pax Romana. Something like a shiver of pride ran through me. It was pride. I thought of a Roman soldier 20 years old, experiencing an ordinary day, an ordinary soldier who would certainly be far stronger and tougher than anyone I knew—but here was the roar of that fighter jet fading on into the distance. I looked at my own hand, with the little Gillette razor in it, imagining how it would be to hold a sword, and in the next instant the whole chain of thought dissipated like the cloud of breath on a cold window. I finished shaving and then wrote my letter about the scene out the window and the fall weather in Illinois.

Now, looking at the welt on Simpson’s head and hearing the fright in his voice, I thought of the ordinary Roman and looked over at Bobby, who was smoking a cigarette and listening to another guy tell another joke I knew he had already heard. Bobby would be polite again and laugh anyway. He did so, as always, then glanced at me and said, “What?”

He had seen into me. I looked down, forcing a smile. “Nothing.”

“No—come on.”

“I just thought of something that occurred to me in the first week we were here.”

“A joke?”

“In a way.” Then I told him about my odd little dream about empire and the Romans.

“Yeah,” he laughed. “Not much centurion material around here, right?” He made a slight eye roll in Simpson’s direction.

I laughed. “Right.” Then: “Nor me either, for sure.”

“Nor me.” He laughed. “No chance.”

He turned back to the ones across from him at the table and began telling them about the farmer who had a constipated cow. I knew the joke, and watched, admiring his artfulness as he told it: the farmer being given a big suppository pill for the cow and told to insert it in the animal’s rectum, and then going back to the farm and walking around her five times and finally stopping and holding the pill up and addressing her: “I’m gonna walk around yew one more time, and if I can’t find this rectum thing of yours, I’m gonna shove this up your ass!”

The noise of the laughs in the too-bright light and pride in Bobby’s gift felt like a kind of respite. There were all these others around. We were out of the cold, and warm at last, and fed.

But then here Simpson was, oblivious to everything, worrying his one thought: He had no control over his life, and he could be killed, and it would mean nothing. And there was a fortune waiting for him at home. “Shit,” he said. “I don’t want to die even if it would mean something. My head hurts.”

“You probably gave yourself a concussion,” I said. I saw his lips tremble.

Sitting to his left was Weinberg. Squat, acne-scarred Weinberg, or Whiner, who was so unlikely looking as a soldier or an airman, with his round-framed glasses and double chin and pudgy features. He was hunched over, listening to something that I now noticed was being imparted, all along the row. He turned to Simpson and then looked at me and leaned across the table. “Somebody killed himself in 59th Squadron today.”

This was going up and down the rows.

Guy just off guard duty. Whole bottle of aspirin. Found him under his bed.

I saw all the color leave Simpson’s cheeks as I was turning to look down the table for Bobby. Someone was telling Bobby the news as I watched.

“Well,” Simpson said, in a defiant tone. “I’m not gonna do that, for Christ’s sake.” It was as if he were rejecting somebody’s suggestion.

I watched Bobby, who was now following the talk, much of it exaggerated and probably wrong.

More than a hundred aspirin, whole bottle, stomach bleeding, guy drowning in his own blood, blood everywhere, crawled under his bunk to die.

Gradually, we made our way back out into the cold. It had stopped raining, but the air was even colder than when we’d arrived. I was with Simpson and Weinberg; Bobby had gone off with a couple of others, who were still talking about it all. I’d wanted to go with them but got sidetracked in the crush. I would catch up with Bobby, or he would catch up with me in the next few minutes. I looked at Simpson, and saw the distress in his face, and felt proprietary toward him, and toward Weinberg, too, who was so clumsy and out of it. They were leaning into each other, talking about the suicide. Like me, they were scared boys of the Empire. I recalled how tense Weinberg had been on our rough flight to Chanute from Texas, where we’d undergone basic training. He was across the aisle from me, and when the plane took a sudden drop of what we later learned was a thousand feet, he screamed, “I’m a virgin!” at the top of his voice, with great umbrage, as if to alert God or Fate about that fact. And the merciless ribbing that followed, and which was ongoing, had left me feeling sorry for him in that way people who have been the object of mockery feel for someone else in the same circumstance. Now, watching him and Simpson in their white fear of suicide, as if suicide were a fate like falling out of the sky, I sought to change the subject.

“Hey,” I said. “There’s a guy in my barracks who says he played for The Turtles.”

Simpson looked at me. “No shit.”

“His brother drove here from Chicago and brought him his guitar. I heard him playing the new Beatles song this morning. ‘Day Tripper.’”

“Wasn’t the radio?” Weinberg said in a shaky voice.

“It was acoustic, man.”

“How’s a guy get enough aspirin to kill himself?” Simpson asked us, as if we hadn’t left the subject.

In truth, there had been talk of possible suicides from the beginning, through basic training in Texas and on into tech school; rumors of guys trying to cut their wrists, or taking a lethal dose of something, or threatening to jump from the roofs of barracks buildings. It seemed that everybody, including the T.I.s, had remarked at one time or another that infantry training involved mostly physical stress, while in the Air Force it was mostly mental. Our first day at Chanute, a T.I. had said: “If any of you pansy-assed draft-dodgers get to feeling like it’s too much and you decide you wanna check out of it all and off yourself, don’t make a mess in your barracks. Go out in the field and get your blood on the fuckin’ grass.”

The news from Squadron 59 had reached into us. Though nobody knew for certain that it was true.

“Wouldn’t it take a long time to swallow that many pills?” Weinberg asked now.

“I’m not even close to thinking about doing anything like that,” Simpson said. We went along the flight line in the wind and cold, and the several dozen others were around us, trailing along. I looked for Bobby.

Darkness in the Midwest is an entirely different matter than in Virginia, mostly because of the table-like flatness of the land I spoke of earlier: so much more of the sky is visible, you can see a storm coming from 10 miles away. You see many more stars on a clear cold winter’s night, and when there’s snow coming, as it was on this night, the moon shines on it all and makes it look like a prodigious advancing wall of blackness on a field of bright gray.

“Look at that,” Weinberg said. “Goddamn, I wish I’d never done this. I wish I’d’ve just let myself get drafted, or run to Canada.” His voice was tight with dread, and I thought he might actually begin to cry. He was shivering, but then we were all shivering.

We went on, toward the central square, which looked like a town square or plaza: stores, including the commissary and the pharmacy, a barber shop, a bank, the base library, the Airman’s Club, and the two theaters, named, unoriginally and colorlessly enough, Theater One and Theater Two. (Like the dead designations of the Nazis I’d been reading about in the William Shirer book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which, when we first arrived, had been so violently taken from me, along with other books—Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and T.R. Fehrenbach’s This Kind of War. Right from the start, it was communicated that books are the enemy: “Are yew some kina innalec-shee-al Comyoon-ist?”)

The moonlit night was closing down, even in the square, because of the approaching ceiling of clouds and snow. And the whole population of trainees seemed to be gathering anyway, some of them waiting for the theaters to open, some waiting for a place in the Airman’s Club, and some—more and more by the minute—queuing up at the row of a dozen phone booths across from the commissary. I looked at the lines forming, everyone huddling, shivering, moving to keep warm, waiting to hear a voice from home, so far away for the first time—as Bobby and I were—and it seemed that I could feel, in the freezing air itself, the loneliness and the wanting to be elsewhere.

The lines stretched all the way across the street. I stopped there, not sure how I wanted to spend the rest of the evening. I might go to one of the movies; I wanted to see what Bobby had in mind. But I couldn’t find him in the shifting throng. There wasn’t much to do, of course. We were all crammed together in this self-contained little city in Illinois. And the fact that remained in the troubling background was that our kind were dying in larger and larger numbers in a place whose names we couldn’t pronounce.

Nobody but Simpson had spoken about it directly. Now it seemed that the talk all around me was solely about Squadron 59 and suicide. Poor Weinberg gave forth a little gagging noise, wondering aloud if some drill instructors were worse than others, and maybe that was a reason. Maybe the kid, whoever he was, had just been troubled in some other way that had nothing to do with the Air Force and war. Simpson slapped his hands together to work some heat into them. “Well, that is definitely not an option for me, no matter what, even though I’m certainly and definitely out of my mind. I’m telling you. I really am. I’m out of my fucking mind. That’s a true fact.”

I didn’t want to think about it anymore. This was the weekend, a day and a half of what would be like freedom, some kind of freedom.

Suddenly, though, looking at the mass of darker sky looming over us, I had an unbidden sense of the enormity of the government, the way Simpson had spoken of it—as indeed a massive living thing out in the winter dark, skulking toward us. Simpson coughed, holding his fist to his mouth, and the sound of it, the physical bodily thing itself, a human cough, made me feel the real horror of it—that there was no life in the government at all; it was a thing, all right, but essentially lifeless, as if made of gears and wires and parts, completely blind and indifferent to us. I had a few seconds of sickening agitation, feeling my little life in the workings of a gigantic apparatus.

I paused, drew the cold air in, looking at all these others in their confused, purposeless commotion. And turning in a small circle, I scanned the faces, looking for Bobby. Abruptly, they were all essential to me, even as I felt hemmed in by them. The first flakes of snow had begun to waft down out of the now starless dark.

To Weinberg and Simpson, I said, “What do you guys want to do?”

“I want to go home,” Weinberg said, almost crying. “I wish I could go home.” He wandered off in the direction of the commissary, where he would buy bread and canned meat for his time alone in the barracks. That way, he wouldn’t have to go out again into the cold. Simpson followed him, muttering about his madness that wasn’t serving its purpose.

Weinberg would be killed instantly only two months later, in a pipe-bomb explosion on the streets of Saigon. I don’t know whatever happened to Simpson. He got transferred to another squadron, and I never saw him again.

That night I let them both go and turned again in the crowd, and Bobby came toward me from the dark, saying my name. Someone had killed himself in another squadron. We were all brothers; I had felt that, I realized now, as something so obvious that it didn’t need mentioning. But here, now, was my brother. And I was worried about him in an awful forlorn way as if I had already lost him. The possibility of that loss struck so deeply into my soul that it stopped my breath. I had the fullest, most awful awareness of where we were in that moment, not so much away from home, though that was at the base of it, but standing alone together in the wide, terrible, dangerous world of manhood, full of killing and violence and requirements that would demand (compel?) a toughness I simply did not have. I thought of how it would be to lose him, who knew me and knew where I was tender and where I hurt, and knew what I was afraid of, and understood all of it because he was so much the same. He came toward me and said something about hating the cold, and a trace of the same tremor was in his voice that I had heard in Weinberg’s. For a hard minute, it was as if he was Weinberg and I was nowhere near, nor anyone to help him or speak to him with the love and understanding of a brother.

And I knew I would never forget that moment, or us in it, as long as I might live.

I don’t even remember what we did later that night, whether we went to one of the movies, or hung out at the commissary, or walked over to the Airman’s Club to drink the 25-cent beer and watch television or talk, or simply wandered back to the barracks to read, or watch someone play guitar, or sleep. I don’t remember anything else about that weekend, and so of course it is lost forever. I remember my twin brother walking toward me out of the cold dark, his face obscured by the hood he wore, and his flight cap pulled down, and the lamppost shadowing his eyes. I remember that as he came out of the crowd of others, and spoke, I experienced an ache like grief and, at the same time, an inexpressible relief at his presence, attended by fear at what the world might do to us, at what the future would do. I wanted time to stop forever.

---

 

That was 58 years ago. Bobby’s been gone since October 9, 2018. Every time I’ve heard a good joke or learned something interesting or seen something wonderful or even something awful—maybe especially something awful in these years—I’ve had the thought that I must tell him about it. Every time, in every instance, he stands in my mind. And every time, I hear myself say, low, “Aw, Bobby …”

And the terrible not-voice—not that voice—the silence, that silence, opens again, the empty place simply widening all the time, never really lessening but only continuing to expand awfully, like some inner Sahara, the far border of which I realize, over and over again, grows ever more distant and so continually, mercilessly itself, limitless, impossible to reach. We had all the years of each knowing the other was in the world; we had the laughs and the worries and the stories, and the shared enthusiasms and the sorrows and shocks, along with the riches of celebration, and I know that; I understand all that. And I know, too, that this that is now my lot is the “blight man was born for,” as the poet said. Nevertheless, mourning keeps its awful appointments without fail.

Oh, my lost brother. How I miss your heart and light.

 

Richard Bausch’s work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Gentleman’s Quarterly, Harper’s, The Missouri Review, The New Yorker, Narrative, New Letters, Playboy, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. It has been widely anthologized, including in New Stories From the South, The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, The Granta Book of the American Short Story, and The Vintage Book of the Contemporary American Short Story. He is the author of 13 novels and nine collections of short stories and has won two National Magazine Awards (one for The Atlantic and one for The New Yorker), a Guggenheim fellowship, the Lila-Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for his novel PEACE, and most recently the 2013 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence and the prestigious REA Award for Influence on the Form of Short Fiction. He has been with the Writing Program faculty at Chapman College since 2012.