Those whose condition confined them to bed weren’t forgotten. Acting alternately as ombudsman and angel, Forte made periodic trips to record their grievances and fight them out with the VA bureaucracy, and apply the soothing balm of ready cash when the veterans’ problems were financial. By the time Dr. Phillips had intercepted him, in fact, he had just put in half a day on rounds of the bedridden, dispensing the kind of first-aid the medical profession can’t give.
“What’s this about the twenty-three men who are- how did you put it-dying?” Gwillam Forte asked when they reached Dr. Phillips’s tiny book-stuffed cubicle.
Phillips cleared a space on his desk and filled it with Manila files from a green filing cabinet. They made a stack nearly a foot high. Dr. Phillips placed his hands on them, and regarded Gwillam Forte gravely across the desk. For a moment he said nothing, for though no obstetrician, he was a devotee of the pregnant pause.
“Mr. Forte,” he said finally, “these are the files of twenty-three men who are going to die before their time. The wounds and illnesses that brought them here have long since been stabilized. All are ambulatory, in fair-to-good health considering their infirmities, and yet all have entered a decline that is usually irreversible.”
“Why?”
“In layman’s language, they believe they have nothing to live for.”
Forte nodded. He knew the feeling.
Dr. Phillips opened the top file.
Charley Protock, forty-five, a basket case left over from the Vietnam War. He had been confined to bed for fifteen years, then to a motorized wheelchair, before twenty-first-century technology provided him with prostheses that put him back on his feet, and gave him hands for tasks he had long ago forgotten how to perform.
Barry Burton, seventy-one, an ex-Seabee, had what was left of a small intestine after a Japanese machine-gunner had stitched his belly with nineteen .25-caliber bullets. Thin as a pencil, he survived on soft foods, and walked with a permanent stoop.
Gene Morton, sixty-five, was a two-faced man. The first had been seared away by a Chinese flamethrower at Chosin Reservoir, while the second had been reconstructed from skin of his thighs and buttocks over a period of years. Judging by his pictures, his first had been handsome.
T. D. Roebuck, sixty-nine, Morton’s best buddy, was a quiet sort whose face was wreathed in a perpetual half-smile. A former hospital corpsman, his mind had become unhinged during an eighteen-hour bombardment on Iwo Jima in which all but three of his platoon had been killed. Except for a few hours a week, he was perfectly normal; for those few, he was a raging bull.
“Ski” Modeljewski, forty-seven, bore scars of cigarette burns and bamboo barbs over his entire body, but the wounds that never healed were deep within. There he harbored a pathological hatred for the politicians who had surrendered to those who had tortured him for five years, especially the architect of that craven surrender who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for Christ’s sake . . .
Only in the details of their personal tragedies did the dossiers of the eighteen veterans differ.
“As you know from your own experience, Mr. Forte, some men so afflicted snap out of their depression in time, and do their best to rebuild normal lives. Others don’t make it, and slide into ever deeper melancholy. Some of the older ones here-World War II vets mainly-have been hospitalized so long that their perspectives of the outside world have worn out and disappeared. They’re perilously close to becoming vegetables. I’ve seen this kind slip quietly away. ‘Debilities of old age exacerbated by war wounds,’ we write on the death certificate, but it really isn’t that.”
“Then what is it?”
“Challenge,” said Dr. Phillips. “They have none. This hospital is like a prison in that security here is total. Here they’ll be cared for the rest of their lives. But man is not built to live that way, Mr. Forte. Challenge is a part of nature. It is the constant battle to meet those challenges that gives men strength, self-respect, character. In their youth, these men were strong, brave, useful. Their country needed them. It does no longer, and has found it easier to forget than repay them with the devotion that earned them their wounds. War crippled their bodies; peacetime neglect has crippled their spirits. In cases like these, I sometimes wonder if homeopathy isn’t the answer.”
“That bunch of ass-grabbing characters?”
“No, no-homeopathy, not homosexuality. It’s a method of treating a disease by using small amounts of a drug that, in healthy persons, would produce symptoms similar to those of the disease being treated.”
“You mean these men need a little war?” Forte was shocked.
“Precisely. The best years of their lives-the war years-are behind them. They were terrible, difficult, harrowing years, but they were vital and exciting. The men felt alive. If they could only somehow relive them . . . But obviously that’s impossible. For one thing, there’s no war. . . .”
True, Gwillam Forte reflected, nor was there likely to be one for a long time to come. To be sure, there had been a time during the middle 1980s when warfare threatened to become the permanent condition of mankind. But then the sun shone through, and in 1987 the guns fell silent throughout the world for the first time since the Japanese invaded Manchuria in September 1931. For eight years peace had presided over the affairs of man, and all signs indicated that it would endure.
In 1980, Forte remembered, there had been only night at the end of the tunnel. The Soviet Union and its surrogates had gobbled up Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, the Ogaden, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan in a few years without any interference from the free world. The Russians were busily at work in El Salvador, Iran, Lebanon, and Thailand, and less conspicuously in a dozen other countries. At one time, American confrontation with the Soviet Union might have stemmed the tide, but in Vietnam the Americans failed to honor their heritage and so encouraged the aggressors. Then President Carter and a nation distracted from self-survival by guilt feelings over Vietnam opposed Russian might not with the force of arms but with sermons on human rights. Unilateral American disarmament in the face of a Russian arms build-up opened a window of American vulnerability that would peak between 1982 and 1986.
President Reagan tried to slam the window shut, but it was already too late: by late 1983 the bear was clambering over the sill. In November of that year, Russia dropped all pretense of peaceful intentions. Inviting NATO chiefs to Moscow, the Russians gave them a grand tour of defenses the West had suspected but never confirmed: vast underground cities beneath Moscow and Leningrad, with schools, hospitals, bulging granaries, factories, oil depots, and living accommodations for millions; antiballistic missile defenses that could destroy incoming missiles while they were still in the stratosphere; advance-warning measures that in six hours could disperse much of the Soviet population to hardened positions capable of resisting nuclear attack. Those precautions, along with the Soviet’s vastly superior ICBM capability, made clear to the West that while Russia could annihilate the rest of the world, the Soviet Union itself was relatively invulnerable. The moral of the demonstration was clear: oppose Russia, and be destroyed.
With supreme confidence that would shackle the world into impotence, Russia embarked upon a program of world-wide hegemony, annexing-generally with a minimum of bloodshed-a few countries at a time. By 1985, Iran, the Arab states, Israel, Turkey, most of black Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador were under Soviet domination. The United States, meanwhile, stood to arms-too strong to be attacked by Russia without risking a blanket of nuclear fallout covering the entire Earth, too weak to interpose its arms in the defense of nations that couldn’t, and usually wouldn’t, defend themselves. By 1986, fifty-three countries of Asia, Africa, and South America laid their weary heads on the communist bloc. In 1987, England joined the rest of Europe in the communist camp when left-winger Tony Buncombe was appointed Prime Minister. It seemed only a matter of time-and a very short time at that-before the entire world would be enslaved.
But then a seeming miracle occurred. As if the Soviet war machine had run out of gas, the conquests suddenly ceased. The pundits explained that the Russians had become seriously overextended, and needed all their armed forces to contain the still-restive conquered nations. It may have been so, for indeed the world map of September 1987, when the advance of the Cuban, East German, and Ethiopian surrogates of Russia abruptly halted, was reassuring to the eye of the optimist. In terms of land and population, rather less than half the world was under Russian control. Spared were seven poor countries-China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Egypt and Indonesia-and five of the world’s richest-the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, and Japan. And not only had the Russian guns fallen silent; anticapitalistic propaganda dried up, subversion and sabotage ceased, KGB spying and assassination became memories.