My friend Bobby Nisynski and I were the same size at age
ten, neither the biggest or smallest kids on the block. Bobby always
jumped right into the fray and elbowed his way to the front. I admired
his aggression, but knew it wasn't in my nature. Instead, I'd follow him
with cheers.
I always hung back in any war game, allowing it to reach
its usual conclusion, a fist fight over who was in charge. In that sense,
it was exactly like real war.
I remember having a terrible chest cold in the fall of
fourth grade. The doctor ordered me to stay in bed for three miserable
days. Lying near an open window on a warm October Saturday, I smelled the
fall leaves baking in the sun while I listened to the kids playing in the
field. Bobby's shouts and laughter stood out among the other
voices. I missed being with my friend. On that day I could not go
where Bobby went. Years later I realized I could never go where Bobby
went. He was a fighter. I was not.
The more aggressive boys were first to grab all the good
roles ... sergeants and Captains and even Colonels. I never
remember anyone wanting to be a PFC. The boys preferred to carry fake
guns and shot anything that moved. They'd pretend to run out of bullets
as an excuse to hit friend and foe alike with their weapons. My favorite
activities were thinking and talking, so I wasn't very good on a kids'
battlefield. I might have made an excellent military tactician, if anyone
had asked for a battle plan. Or a terrific make-believe JAG, had one of
the pint-sized Captains requested a military lawyer. Or a United Nations
Special Representative,
since I was known to speak up whenever I discovered anything amiss on the
battlefield.
"You can't win this skirmish," I announced to an
older kid who shouted made-up Japanese words while he chased Bobby around and
tried to beat him up. Bobby wore his late uncle's World War II helmet and
carried a garden shovel with the handle pointed forward. It was supposed
to be a machine gun.
"Why not?" spat back the 12 year old, who said
he was Colonel Satchmo Hiyakawa of the Imperial Japanese Army
."Well, first of all," I said, " 'Satchmo'
is not a real Japanese name, and second, you're beating up John Wayne and he
can't lose a battle."
"I'm John Wayne," Bobby shouted from under his
helmet. "I'm John Wayne!"
"Well, excuse me all to hell and back," said
Satchmo. He grabbed the shovel from Bobby, swung it up in the air and
brought it down hard on the boy's helmet.
We took Captain John Wayne Nisynski to his mother, blood
streaming down from somewhere up in his helmet, accompanied by a copious flow
of tears and bad language. She laid her boy out on the kitchen
table, pulled the battle-worn helmet off and discovered a wound that wasn't too
serious.
“Your father will kill you for wearing that helmet,” she
told him while she wiped the blood from it with a dish towel. “You
shouldn’t have taken it.” Had she heard the tremendous clang when the
shovel hit, she would have thought otherwise.
I was impressed with her use of the kitchen table as an
operating table. My mother would have worried about ruining the place
mats.
While Mrs. Nisynski worked on her son's head, now neatly
resting in a copper-bottom fry pan to contain the blood, we boys passed verbal
status messages along to the mob of kids beginning to congregate on the back
stairs. The entire neighborhood always showed up for blood.
Behind me, little Jimmy Talerico piped up.
"Mrs. Nysynski, is Bobby gonna live?"
"Till his father gets home," she said,
laughing. "After that there's no guarantee."
I told no one, but the violence unsettled me, and not just
because it fell upon my friend. I'd never witnessed someone harm another
with a weapon. Using a hard object to inflict damage was so much more
brutal than just getting angry and slapping your brother. I found it difficult
to accept we were capable of such an awful act. Fifteen years later
Satchmo would express the same feeling to the judge after he killed his wife.
When we grew up, I attended the local college and
Bobbie worked at the Chrysler plant until another war started. At twenty
years old he became the neighborhood champion when he went off to combat,
drafted, but nonetheless a hero. Friends shouted good bye and waved as he
left on the train early that bright and crisp autumn morning. Cheers
followed in his wake from everyone but his mother. On a cold and wet
afternoon the following spring, we stood silent in grief when he came
home from the killing ground in a casket.
Invited back to the house for coffee after the funeral
Mass, I fumbled my sympathies to Mrs. Nysynski. She sat sniffling and
wiping her eyes at the kitchen table where she had bandaged her son's head a
decade before.
I wanted to be comforting. I wanted to say he had
been a brave soldier, but I couldn’t make myself utter words that would honor
such a senseless slaughter of my friend and all the other youths who were being
killed. Not when I stayed home. I could manage only to say, “I’m
sorry.” I stared at her hands while I spoke, because I was afraid
her eyes would tell me she wished it had been me.
I wanted with all my heart to have been a UN Special
Representative on the battle field, somehow able to prevent the Viet Cong from
ripping open Bobby’s chest with forty-three rounds from a Chinese made sub
machine gun. But I was just a college sophomore who had never been
out of the state and was thankful I’d never been to war. When someone
else came in the kitchen to see how Mrs. Nisynski was faring, I sneaked
away. I walked through the short hallway and out on the second floor back
porch. Beneath me, closer than I remembered, the field Bobby and I played
in sat empty and wet in the rain. At the far end of the field the railroad
tracks glistened through the fog like two bright arrows pointing nowhere.
“You’re better off staying
here,” Bobby told me the night before he left when we’d found our way to the
bottom of a few pitchers of beer. “You’d just get yourself killed over
there.”
