Yeshiva University - Masmid Yearbook (New York, NY)

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M A S M operate on me. A fine time to leave a guy alone — when they ' re gonna operate on him. My stomach feels all bunched up. Scared! Scared! The same feeling you get when those planes come tearing down so close you can almost see the slant-eyes and watch the little spurts of mud from the machine gun bullets. You watch them come up on you so fast you can ' t believe it; praying you don ' t get yours this time. Then they ' re gone. You take one breath and those little spurts are coming at you again. How do they expect you to fight planes when you don ' t even have enough ammunition to fight cm enemy squad on patrol. It ' s enough to drive a guy nuts. That ' s what it did too. . . . . . . Day after day, week after week; dodg- ing through the jungle; flopping flat on your face when those planes show up. And all ihe time those guys sneaking around try- ing to plug a fellow. It gets so you feel like standing up and yelling for them to come on. It get ' s so you can ' t stand it anymore. You just got to let it out, other- wise you wind up banging your head against the trees. That ' s the way I felt that time, like I told Mike. . . . Mike, I can ' t stand it no more. Keep your head down Johnny, or you ' ll wind up with a slug in it. I don ' t core. Those planes are getting on my nerves. Pretty soon I ' ll go nuts. Easy Johnny, I ' d give my right arm to meet up with some of those. . . . Mike, look! Over there on th e right. On the other side of the clearing. Japs! I ' m going after them, Mike! Johnny, don ' t go crazy. Stay put. No soap, Mike. I ' m going. So long! Ma.jters iet down! Nuts to you sargel Halfway across before they even knew I was coming. When one of them spotted me my last grenade took care of about six of them before he got three grunts out of his mouth. Charging across, firing from the hip. Made no difference if I hit any or not. I was fighting them. Spun halfway round by a bullet in the shoulder, but that didn ' t stop me. Made me feel better. This was the real stuff. No more dodging for me. Then they were all around me — me swing- ing the gun like a club, laughing. Laugh- ing crazy-like, and that furmy feeling in- side of me sort of melting into a kind of bubbling joy. Little faces, without the toothpaste smiles, moving in on all sides and being swept aside by a swinging gun butt — my gun butt. Then they were moving in behind me. I whirled around, but be- fore I was a quarter of the way around my shoulder almost cracked wide open and I knew how those yellow lice felt when my gun butt was flying around. Before I hit the ground with my knees I shoved my gun into the middle of a Jap uniform. Then I sow the guy on my right. It wasn ' t the guy — it was the bayonet he was driving towards me. My right arm went up before I even realized what the bayonet meant. The point stopped about half a foot from me. It had gone clean through my arm, leaving. . . . Relax and keep your head down. It ' ll be over in a minute. On the operating table! How did I get in here? Must of been thinking about things. . . . That stuff they ' re putting into me, Must be the anesthetic. Feels furmy too. There, now they got me lying down again. Better this way . . . much, much better. Just easy and floating like, nothing bothers you anymore. Just lie back in the Twenty-three

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M A S M I D Give up? Hell nc! There ' s that funny feeling inside of you. Just keeps driving you along. Do you know what you ' re fighting for? Some happy little moron al- ways coming up with that question. Sure I know. It ' s that funny feeling inside of me. Sure it ' s what they call vague and gen- eral . They say it doesn ' t mean anything. Maybe to them it doesn ' t, because they don ' t feel it. They never felt it. But it ain ' t vague and general to me. Get out where you meet guys that are trying to take away what that feeling means, then you ' ll know what I ' m talking about. Sure it ' s all mixed up. It ' s the good times you had when you were a kid, and kicking about the cheap politicians running the works, and the fellows you hang around with, and the foreman who bawls you out, and the kick you get out of going on a binge once in a while. . . . . . . And it ' s more than that. Ever since I ' m a kid, 1 got a feeling that things are wrong. Not like they should be. The world is good and nearly all the people you meet ore nice guys, and yet things ain ' t right. Pop keeps looking for a job and can ' t find it. And he ' s a good man, too. Maybe not the best, but as good as the next guy, and every day he gets worse and worse be- cause he can ' t get work. Mom laughs and tries to make believe that things are going to be all right. But inside she ' s crying, not laughing. A kid feels that. Funny about kids. They don ' t know about things and yet they feel so many things. And when you get older and start to get the scene run around you begin to understand how pop felt and what mom felt like, inside. You get mad, crazy mad. You feel like punching out and breaking down whatever is stopping you. But you can ' t start punch- ing because there ' s nothing there, and you don ' t exactly know what it is anyhow. So you just keep on getting madder. Then along comes a guy like Hitler, and the war, and you begin to see things. Maybe it still isn ' t exactly clear what you want, but at least you know what it ain ' t. Every- body you know feels the same way, and you figure maybe if we all get together and stop this thing we don ' t want, we ' ll be able to build up what we do want. That ' s what I ' m fighting for. So mom won ' t cry when nobody ' s looking and pop won ' t have to slink home like a beaten dog. And I won ' t feel that everything ' s against me. And it ' s not only pop and mom and me. It ' s every pop and every mom and every me. It ' s so that every kid who feels things ain ' t right can grow up in a world where things are right. Where everybody gets an even break and a fair deal. Where people don ' t have to sit down and worry about what ' s going to happen to them when they ' re sick and old. Where the world is run for us little guys and not against us. . . . Hell, it ' s life; my life, the way I like it and the way I want it to be. That ' s what that funny feeling inside of me means, mis- ter. That ' s what I ' m fighting for. And that ' s what keeps you moving when you ' re sick, and tired, and all washed up. That ' s what doesn ' t let you lie down in the jungle and let everything slide. Because that ' s what those little yellow bastards are trying to take away from you and that ' s why you won ' t let them. . . . Shoving me around again. Into the elevator, out of the ele- vator. Why don ' t they make up their minds. . . . Oh, oh, look who ' s here. . . . H ' ya doc. Hello. And how ' s my patient feeling ? I knew it. I knew he ' d say it. . . . Now you just lie here quietly for a while and we ' ll be ready for you in a minute. Alone! Where is this place? Why ' d they bring me up here. . . . Operating room! That must be it. They ' re going to Twenty-two

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M A S M i D mud. So you got a bayonet through on arm. . . . What ' s the difference. Doesn ' t hurt too much anyhow. Just a little heavy. Nothing hurts anymore . . . just something leaning on you . . . doesn ' t feel so bad either. So there are laps all around you. So they want to kill you. . . . They want to kill me. . . . What ' s the difference. Make things a lot easier. No more trouble, no more marching, pain, rain, mud, planes . . . no more nothing. Where are those little guys. Boy I gave them something though, something they won ' t forget for a long. . . . Where are they? What are they waiting for? Gotta look and see. They ' re floating around up there, just half-men, no feet. They ' re floating away, like on a fog. There ' s Mike and the sarge. . . . They come after me and got the Japs on the run. . . . Nice guys. . . . But why don ' t they leave me alone. What ore they bending over me for . . . pulling on my arm. . . . Ugh! that hurts . ■ ■ why don ' t they leave me nice and quiet and quiet and easy just falling back and down and down and the fog all ' around so nice and peaceful and hazy and quiet and qui . . . He ' s asleep, doctor. Fine 1 That ' ll make things a lot easier. Just a little more and we ' ll be all finished. Yes, doctor. He ' s lucky to still be alive. The attendant wheeled the table out of the elevator and down the long white cor- ridor, past the nurse entering the ward. H ' ya Marge. Hello. Tough on the guy, ain ' t it! Yeah, I guess it is, she replied, look- ing slowly down at the pinned up right sleeve of his pajama top. Joe Masters had kept his promise. He had given his right arm. Twenty-four