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"Whatever I am, I'm not a mental masturbator," I tossed over my shoulder as I swayed on to the front of the bus, opening my beer.
The anger burned tight and hard in my stomach, pure and hot as it was before a fight. Morning would have fought me but would I have him? Telling myself that it was in the name of friendship but, as always, thinking myself a coward for backing away from the fight for whatever good reasons. If you ever worry about being a coward, you can never convince yourself that good reasons aren't rationalizations to save i
The bus passed through an area of jungle, dark, limitless foliage which marked our passage with a few stirred leaves like the splash of a castaway's bottled message on some distant sea. Only a few villages huddled against the flicker of the highway in the vast wilderness, breaking the solid wall of trees.
I knew this country. Both the American and Japanese invasions had followed this route from the beaches on the Lingayen Gulf. The dense mass of green had long since consumed any sign of the invasions with its mad twirling vines. Even on the beach only the code name, Blue Beach, and an occasional rusted piece of unidentified metal hinted of the past violence. So time and the dumb growth healed the scars with the slightest of efforts, but that day, that burning day, the ghosts forever uncured spoke to me, summoned me to their bleeding sides. Did I hear a monkey's cry, frail in the rushing wind? Or the endless scream of a man trapped under mortars exploding in the trees above – a shriek which echoed through the cave of time? The bus crashed over a bridge, and something flashed above the brown water. A bottle curving toward the creek? or a hand sucked down for the last time, the millionth last time, fingers arched not in a plea but in defiance still? I knew, I knew. The past, history, memory, had always waited for me like a specter. My memory never knew the chains of time. I had walked the peaceful grounds of Pittsburg's Landing while ragged men fell at every step. I wandered under the shaded sun on Elkhorn Tavern as ca
I wanted to shout it to an indifferent, cowardly world which had, in the name of Utopia, forgotten Valhalla. Or perhaps I only wanted to say it once to myself to be sure I still believed. But I remained silent in the clatter of the bus, thinking myself a fool, a dreamer whose visions were the nightmares of mankind; a fighter not for peace but for eternal war. But I could not stop: I had seen things I could not forget, and remembered things I had never seen. For me the two Siberian armies still stumbled across the snow as they encircled the Germans outside of Stalingrad. There had been no sound track on that film clip, but I had heard them cheer. Flat-faced Siberians ten thousand miles from home, fighting for Russians they didn't like against Germans they didn't know, because it was right for a man to die well, to stand and not run, to fight and perhaps die. But victory is not the only face of war. I also remembered the sad German faces – starving for weeks and freezing for longer – numb with capture, waiting to march further than they had meant to with 107,800 going, and waiting still longer for only six thousand to march back. But the losers did not really look that different from the victors as they marched away to more freezing and fighting and stinking and enduring. I saw and remembered, and God forgive me, thought it noblest of all.
But that was then, riding toward the sea, when I was ashamed of being a warrior.
I dozed fitfully into the city of Dagupan, thankful not to dream, but the bus stopped in the city so we could buy more beer and ice and fresh bread from a little bakery Morning knew. I had no need to leave the bus, so I waited in the heat, watching the town, the corrugated iron roofed, wooden buildings decked with soft drink signs; the people scuffing about in Jesus boots or wooden clogs, seemingly never entering the buildings. Almost all of the buildings were unpainted, but the wood – perhaps because of its own sturdy nature or the heavy, washing rains – refused to look untended. The skin of the people seemed to be the result of some i
The others came back from their errands, and we drove the five or six miles to the beach. The bus stopped in front of a large pavilion marked by a neat, freshly painted "JOHN'S," surrounded by the graceful bows of coconut palms, and sitting on a slight rise above the beach and the estuary. Morning greeted the fat Filipino, obviously John, with a true lover-of-real-places familiarity. John, who I'm sure misread Hemingway too, returned the salutations like a true good fellow. John was a fat man who looked very uncomfortable being obese, as if remembering thi
The Trick rented the largest of the nipa huts on the beach and I, childishly, took a smaller hut near it. I wanted to stay away from Morning. The bus drove the couple hundred yards to the hut, but most of the guys walked. I stayed behind to have one of the boiled crabs Morning had talked so much about.
The pavilion overlooked a tidal slough fed through an ankle-deep cut to the estuary. Across the tepid water ten nipa huts dotted the scrub grass at the edge of the beach. The largest hut was the last one on the right, and mine next to it, separated from the water by one hundred yards of the loveliest beach in the world. Its shining white arms stretched open in an embrace of the flat, shimmering sea from the mountains distant and hazy on the right, then left across the estuary to that wavering point where sea, sky and sand fused into invisibility. The pale hot colors, the faintest whisper of a breeze on my face – surely it must be a miracle, I thought. Voices came, faint and silly in the heat, playground sounds lilting from some past.
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