The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [275]
When they finally got back to their bivouac, if they ever did, he could turn in his commission. That was the thing he could do, that would be honest, true to himself. Hearn rubbed his armpit again, sensing a reluctance. He didn't want to give up his commission, and that of course was part of the mechanism. You sweated through OCS, joked about the bars, were always contemptuous of them, and in time they grew to have an existence of their own, colored more than half your attitudes. After enough time went by it was like amputating an arm.
He knew what would happen. He would be an enlisted man, a private, and the other enlisted men in whatever unit he would be assigned to would find out sooner or later that he had been an officer, and they would hate him for it, resent him, resent even the fact that he had resigned a commission, for it would mock their own ambitions conscious and unconscious. If he did this, it would be with open eyes; there would be nothing cleaner at the end of it, certainly nothing more pleasant. It would be lousy and painful, and probably the only discovery would be that he could fit into a fear ladder as well as anyone else.
But there it was. He had been running away from fear, from vulnerability, from the admission that he was a man also and could be humbled. There was a saying, "It is better to be the hunted than the hunter," and that had a meaning for him now, a value.
Mockingly, he could hear what Cummings would say to that. "'A nice sentiment, Robert, one of the nice lies for today, just like the lie about a rich man not going to heaven." And Cummings would laugh and say, "You know, Robert, it's only the rich who do go to heaven."
Well, the hell with Cummings.. He had said that enough times in resentment, grudgingly, perhaps helplessly, but Cummings didn't know all the answers. If you granted him that man was a sonofabitch, then everything he said after that followed perfectly. The logic was inexorable.
But the history wasn't. All right, all the great dreams had blunted and turned practical and corrupt, and the good things had often been done through bad motives, but still it had not all been bad, there had also been victories where there should have been defeats. The world, by all the logics, should have turned Fascist and it hadn't yet.
For a moment there were a few sounds in the valley beneath him, and he picked up his rifle and stared into the shadows of the grass. It became quiet again. For some reason he was left depressed.
It was a skinny enough hope, and all the pressures, all the machines, were squeezing men a little more; with every weapon the odds became a little more out of whack. Morality against bombs. Even the techniques of revolution were changed, were accomplished with armies against armies now, or not at all.
If the world turned Fascist, if Cummings had his century, there was a little thing he could do. There was always terrorism. But a neat terrorism with nothing sloppy about it, no machine guns, no grenades, no bombs, nothing messy, no indiscriminate killing. Merely the knife and the garrote, a few trained men, and a list of fifty bastards to be knocked off, and then another fifty.
A plan for concerted action, comrades. He grinned sourly. There would always be another fifty, that wasn't the idea. It had no use. It was just something to keep you occupied, keep you happy. Tonight we strike at Generalissimo Cummings.
Aaah, horseshit.
There were no answers you could find, but perhaps there were epochs in history which had no answers. Rely on the blunder factor. Sit back and wait for the Fascists to louse it up.
Only that wasn't enough, you couldn't do that. For whatever reason, you had to keep resisting. You had to do things like giving up a commission.
Hearn and Quixote. Bourgeois liberals.
Still, when he got back he would do that little thing. If he looked for the reasons they were probably lousy, but it was even lousier to lead men for obviously bad motives. It meant leaving the platoon to Croft, but if he stayed he would become another Croft.
When things got really bad, maybe the political differences on the Left would be shelved.