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perishing with need of my favors. Almost completely an illusion, to be sure, but one which I burningly entertained; the contrast between this vision and the imminent reality—freezing on some bleak Korean tundra with the stench of cordite in my nostrils, and a heart congealed with terror—seemed to comprise an irony beyond all fathoming. But there was nothing to be done. Like a sleepwalker, I prepared to return to war. I got my hair cut and retrieved from storage my green winter uniform, which (though the jacket fit a bit tight around the middle) was intact, except for the cap, half-devoured by moths, and the cordovan shoes that were mildewed past repair.
    Even the day of my departure for service had a special quality of inauspiciousness which I have never forgotten. A week or so before, President Truman had prudently removed General Douglas MacArthur from his post as commander of United Nations and American forces in the Far East—an action which, it may be remembered, drove tens of millions of Americans into a spasm of bellicose rage. By chance, the afternoon I was to leave by train for the South was the same afternoon that MacArthur had chosen to make his trium phal parade through New York City. I was in my uniformagain for the first time. For some reason I recall that day with abnormal clarity: the beatific light of April, pigeons wheeling against a sky incomparably blue, trees in full bud along the Upper East Side streets, vast crowds massing along Fifth Avenue, and in wordless singsong over all—with rhythmic rise and fall like the distant swarming of millions of small insects—the avid buzz of patriotic hysteria. I had never heard that sinister, many-throated voice quite so loud nor so unmistakably before; it seemed an offense to the lovely day, and at least in part to escape it I ducked into the dark bar of the Sherry-Netherland, where with the girl who was seeing me off I got systematically, preposterously drunk. Even so, a weird lucidity possesses my memory of that afternoon: my girl Laurel, small, blond, elegantly shaped, respectably married (to a doctor), with whom I had worked out a warm alliance not lacking in tenderness but for the most part studiously carnal, sat snuggled next to me in the cool dark, biting her lips as she wondered about leaves, furloughs, weekends. The bar was milling with people, most of them talking too loud, and nearby I heard one man say to another: “The market’s going to be in bad trouble if they deescalate this war.” I had not until that moment heard the verb “escalate,” much less “de-escalate”—post-Hiroshima neologisms—and the word itself struck me as being somehow even more sordid than the sentiment which had just impelled its use.
    But I had neared the point where I was past caring. Steadied by my mourning Laurel, I wobbled outside into the blinding light of Fifth Avenue. Front pages of the Journal-American sprouted everywhere— GOD BLESS GEN. MACARTHUR! the banner headlines read in feverish crimson—and it wasnot long before we saw the general himself: in an open Cadillac, flanked by shoals of motorcycle outriders, the ornate headpiece half an inch atilt as he saluted the mob with his corncob pipe, he fleetingly grimaced, gazing straight at me, and behind the raspberry-tinted sunglasses his eyes appeared as glassily opaque and mysterious as those of an old, sated lion pensively digesting a wildebeest or, more exactly, like those of a man whose thoughts had turned inward upon some Caesarean dream magnificent beyond compare. His glory worked like acid on my own sense of vulnerability. I was gripped by a feeling of doom and lonesomeness, and I think I stifled the urge to clout somebody when I heard a nearby voice say: “Hang that bastard Harry Truman!” In the taxi going to Penn Station I ignored the driver, who glanced at my uniform admiringly and called me a hero, and I paused only long enough to give Laurel a hot despairing kiss before plunging onto the