Bodily resistance to the war machine – or “draft dodgers, jammy dodgers and giving the piss”

The war machine eh? It springs to life, opens up one eager eye.

It takes in farmboys and factory fodder and turns them into killers, who come home in a casket or deadened in other ways (often, not always). And as soon as the meatcogs are surplus to requirements, then see-ya-wouldn’t-wanna-be-ya and you can be homeless and so damn what.

This is coming from something I just read at the vet’s. Not that kind of vet, obvs, but the animal vet – our eldest is gonna have his back teeth out. I was reading William Wharton‘s memoir, Shrapnel. Wharton wrote Birdy (I’ve yet to read) and also a largely biographical novel called A Midnight Clear, about being a young bit of cannonfodder in the Ardennes in late 1944 (it’s a bloody brilliant novel). And there is a chapter in the memoir, early on, about a guy who has been drafted and has other plans than being shot at and shooting. So he… starts setting an alarm clock just before reveille, waking and pissing all over his sheets and mattress. For weeks. Eventually, well…

“I did it. I’m out. I’ve got a medical discharge, honourable. In three days I’ll be home. I’ll just have enough time to enrol in school on a late registration. I’ve got “enuresis”. The US Army can’t use me. Isn’t that too bad.”

(Wharton, 2012: 22)

It put me in mind not just of Corporal Klinger (played so well in M*A*S*H by Jamie Farr) and his quest for a Section 8, but also – obviously – Catch-22. But there’s another book that fits the bill almost exactly. It’s a novel by James Michener – The Drifters.

The central characters are in North Africa (Marrakesh, iirc) and meet an enormous – morbidly obese – young African-American (called a Negro in the book, which was published in 1971 or so). He explains that he was a great athlete, could run the 100yds in 11 seconds flat. As soon as he realised the war in Vietnam was going to likely involve him he… well, he couldn’t get to Canada, and he had no juice to get a deferment or claim conscientious objector. So… he started to eat. And eat. And eat. He was planning, as soon as the danger had passed, to shed the weight. He’d only be able to do the 100yds in maybe 11.2, but he figured that was okay.

Haven’t read that book since the only time I did, in 1988. Weird how brains work, innit?