Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut Read Free Book Online

game.
     
     
    SAM WAKEFIELD ASKED me if I had ever considered the advantages of a career in the military. This was a man who had been wounded in World War II, the 1 war I would have liked to fight in, and then in Korea. He would eventually resign from the Army with the Vietnam War still going on, and then become President of Tarkington College, and then blow his brains out.
    I said I had already been accepted by the University of Michigan and had no interest in soldiering. He wasn’t having any luck at all. The sort of kid who had reached a state-level Science Fair honestly wanted to go to Cal Tech or MIT, or someplace a lot friendlier to freestyle thinking than West Point. So he was desperate. He was going around the country recruiting the dregs of Science Fairs. He didn’t ask me about my exhibit. He didn’t ask about my grades. He wanted my body, no matter what it was.
    And then Father came along, looking for me. The next thing I knew, Father and Sam Wakefield were laughing and shaking hands.
    Father was happier than I had seen him in years. He said to me, “The folks back home will think that’s better than any prize at a Science Fair.”
    “What’s better?” I said.
    “You have just won an appointment to the United States Military Academy,” he said. “I’ve got a son I can be proud of now.”
    Seventeen years later, in 1975, I was a Lieutenant Colonel on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, keeping everybody but Americans off helicopters that were ferrying badly rattled people out to ships offshore. We had lost a war!
     
    LOSERS!
     
     
    I WASN’T THE worst young scientist Sam Wakefield persuaded to come to West Point. One classmate of mine, from a little high school in Wyoming, had shown early promise by making an electric chair for rats, with little straps and a little black hood and all.
    That was Jack Patton. He was no relation to “Old Blood and Guts” Patton, the famous General in World War II. He became my brother-in-law. I married his sister Margaret. She came with her folks from Wyoming to see him graduate, and I fell in love with her. We sure could dance.
    Jack Patton was killed by a sniper in Hué—pronounced “whay.” He was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Combat Engineers. I wasn’t there, but they say he got it right between the eyes. Talk about marksmanship! Whoever shot him was a real winner.
    The sniper didn’t stay a winner very long, though, I heard. Hardly anybody does. Some of our people figured out where he was. I heard he couldn’t have been more than 15 years old. He was a boy, not a man, but if he was going to play men’s games he was going to have to pay men’s penalties. After they killed him, I heard, they put his little testicles and penis in his mouth as a warning to anybody else who might choose to be a sniper.
    Law and order. Justice swift and justice sure.
    Let me hasten to say that no unit under my command was encouraged to engage in the mutilation of bodies of enemies, nor would I have winked at it if I had heard about it. One platoon in a battalion I led, on its own initiative, took to leaving aces of spades on the bodies of enemies, as sort of calling cards, I guess. This wasn’t mutilation, strictly speaking, but still I put a stop to it.
    What a footsoldier can do to a body with his pipsqueak technology is nothing, of course, when compared with the ordinary, unavoidable, perfectly routine effects of aerial bombing and artillery. One time I saw the severed head of a bearded old man resting on the guts of an eviscerated water buffalo, covered with flies in a bomb crater by a paddy in Cambodia. The plane whose bomb made the crater was so high when it dropped it that it couldn’t even be seen from the ground. But what its bomb did, I would have to say, sure beat the ace of spades for a calling card.
     
     
    I DON’T THINK Jack Patton would have wanted the sniper who killed him mutilated, but you never know. When he was alive he was like a dead man in 1