Journal: Donald A. Johnson
One of the students wrote an essay about being in the Army, and we discussed it in class today. I said that I didn’t think I would go and fight for the United States of America, not now, not today, if another “police action” like Korea broke out in the Mideast or in Vietnam, where we have some troops. They were fairly shocked by that. I said I didn’t think I would spill my blood for the Stars and Stripes, even though I spent my childhood lusting to do just that.
I used to be pissed, in fact, that I missed World War II. It started when I was three, so nobody could accuse me of shirking. Three-year-olds do not make great infantrymen; changing their diapers interferes with combat readiness.
It seems that for as long as I remember, I have been going to war movies. When I was a kid, I always came home convinced that war was the greatest game of them all, better even than Lash LaRue or Finding the Holy Grail. I saw Spencer Tracy spend thirty seconds over Tokyo and John Wayne take Iwo Jima and Alan Ladd outwit the Jerries behind enemy lines in France.
Our neighborhood was an easy place to turn into a war zone. Mr. Williams’s neat woodpile was a perfect B-2,9.1 flew it regularly over Tokyo with Thunder as my bombardier. I barked orders at him, and he just looked back at me with his stupid stare. How they let him into the Army Air Corps I’ll never know. Mr. Williams used to peer out the window at me, wondering what I was doing. He would say to his wife, “What on earth is that Johnson boy doing in my woodpile all the time, with that dog of his? That is the strangest colored boy I have ever seen, I swear it is.”
Sometimes I was John Wayne, capturing Japs. I made Darlene be a Jap, and I tied her hands behind her and marched her up and down the alley behind our house and called her “Dirty Jap.” Sometimes she thought it was fun, but when she got tired of it and I made her keep marching, she’d escape and run in the house to my mother, crying, and my mother would order me not to make Darlene a Jap anymore. So I made her a Nazi, which was, after all, following the letter of my mother’s command.
(I have this terrible fear that I have warped Darlene forever, that on her wedding night she will ask her new husband to tie her up and whisper “Dirty Jap” in her ear and he will wonder how come he got the colored girl with the weirdest sexual fantasies in all of America.)
It never occurred to me that the Japs I saw in the comic strips — little yellow men with buck teeth — were the same kind of racial stereotype as the shuffling, grinning Negro. I absolutely believed that Japan was crammed with buck-toothed little yellow people who liked nothing better than to while away an afternoon by torturing American pilots. I knew I would be very brave if they tortured me. I’d laugh in the face of the little yellow Jap who tried to make me talk. Once I made Darlene tie me up and pretend to be a Jap general. When I told her she could hit me, her eyes lit up, and she gave me a real whack. Thunder growled at her, the only loyal thing he ever did. Darlene got mad at Thunder and whacked him too, and he howled and ran under the porch. Neither of us wanted to play that game again. But I made Darlene and Thunder play Bataan Death March, in which I made them tramp all over the neighborhood while I yelled at them and prodded them with the butt of my toy rifle. I yelled “American Dogs!” at them in my best Japanese accent, which was not an insult to Thunder, I guess. Darlene got bored with this pretty fast and wanted to go play with her dolls. I told her I would bayonet her and her dollies if she tried to get away. She ran howling to my mother, who called me into the house.
“Did you tell this child you were going to stick her with a bayonet?”
“She was on the Bataan Death March. That’s what happens.”
“What Death March?”
“Everybody knows about the Bataan Death March.”
“You just march yourself right up to your room, Mr. Donald Abednego Johnson, and stay there until I say so.” When she used my full name, I knew I was in deep shit.
Most of all, though, I used to play Dying in Combat. It was the best way to die, very dramatic. You got shot, and you gave a grunt, and you fell to the ground, and everything got very quiet and violins played in the background. Your best buddy cradled your head in his arms, and you gave a brave smile, and you said something like, “Every time you see the flag waving in the breeze, think of me. Every time there’s a home run at Yankee Stadium, or a sunset, or a Fourth of July parade, I’ll be there, buddy. Now go out there and give ‘em hell!”
And you’d close your eyes and die, and the music would play real loud. Sometimes, at the end of the movie, they’d show the guys who died, marching off into the clouds with cocky grins thrown over their shoulders, carrying full battle gear as they headed to the Pearly Gates, clouds swirling about their ankles. Death was only a minor inconvenience before you marched off into soldier heaven with all your buddies.
I used to practice dying, a lot. I’d clutch my stomach, and I’d roll over two or three times, and I’d make my speech, looking up at the sky. Sometimes Thunder would come over and stand on my face, which ruined the dramatic effect. I’d shove him away, and he’d just stare at me. It is sort of hard to make a stirring death speech when staring into the snout of a stupid dog. Especially when he drooled on my chin, which Alan Ladd never had to put up with.
In the movies, all the American soldiers were whites, but sometimes there were newsreels of the Negro divisions that were fighting overseas. Everybody in my neighborhood was especially proud that Negroes were fighting, and shedding their blood the same as white Americans. When men fought and died for the same cause, surely they’d see that we were Americans too. After the war, when President Truman desegregated the armed forces, and then Jackie Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball, we thought everything was going to be different. But Jim Crow was as strong as ever.
I tried to explain to my white classmates why I didn’t want to go and fight now, for a country that was still keeping my people at the back of the bus. Why should I want to go out and shoot people who had never lynched a Negro or killed a Negro child or passed any laws that kept Negroes as second-class human beings. I would die in Alabama or Mississippi if I had to, but not in some foreign war. I am an American, but I believe we have to fix what’s wrong in our own country before we can police the world. My father says I shouldn’t say such things, because white people will think we are afraid to fight. If all the graves with the little white crosses on them from World War II didn’t convince them, then they will never be convinced. I’m tired of caring about what white people think. When Jim Crow is finally buried, when Kennedy’s civil rights bill is passed, then I’ll enlist. I’ll be the first one in line. And if they shoot me in some foreign land, while I gasp out my last breath as I stare up at the sky, at least I won’t have some stupid dog drooling on my chin.