Free Departure by Howard Fast

level:
    â€œYou don’t question what you do. You do it because you have to—and you’re paid for it. You want me to make you understand why I do what I do—could I make you hear a million voices? I’m paid in my own coin!”—holding out an empty hand.
    Again, not so long ago, I went to call on the old man Greenspan, still alive, more shriveled, more used up, but still working, and after we had spoken about other things, he asked me:
    â€œWhy couldn’t Sidney be satisfied to live quiet?”
    Seeing the old man with his rheumy eyes, his bent back, his poor swollen feet, I was brought back to the time when I first knew Sidney, and I realized that what he had always wanted was to live quiet, as the old man said, to step into the old, generous stream of life, and to taste it deeply and comfortingly for the time that is given to any man; I had it for a moment, the full answer, and then I lost it.
    VI
    After Pearl Harbor, Sidney managed to enlist through a fraud. It doesn’t hurt to say that. Young as he was, he was no good physically, but he knew an army doctor down at Monmouth, and he got in. But because of the inescapable condition of his eyes, and because of headaches—they called them migraine, but they were the result of fascist efficiency—he was placed in the medics and shipped to a camp in Georgia. For a year and a half he remained in that Georgia camp, and three times he tried to be transferred to the infantry. There were long periods when none of us but Janie heard from him; we went in all directions as the war spread over the face of the earth. I had one letter from him in that time, in which he said:
    â€¦ It’s not like Spain. Some officers here found out I was in the Brigade—I never could or wanted to keep my mouth shut—and they gave me no peace, day or night. It’s you red bastard this, and you red bastard that, and what did they pay you to go to Spain? I’m trying to get into a combat outfit. In a war, the only safe place, from a mental point of view, is at the front.…
    He went over to England as a combat medic, and from England into North Africa. In North Africa, he ran into Johnny Graham, from the Brigade, who was with the 1st Rangers. Johnny told me about it afterwards; it was one of those crazy coincidences, which happen so often in life. Johnny fell over with a bad splinter in his thigh, and he was lying in the sand and plucking at it, and plucking at it, and swearing because the amount of blood frightened him and unnerved him, when this small medic crawled up and said, “Let me try,” and got the splinter out and put the sulfa on, and was bandaging it when Johnny saw his face and recognized him. That calmed Johnny, and I can understand how he was able to relax, and take the cigarette that was offered to him, and say, “Hullo, Sidney.”
    â€œI’m in the medics,” Sidney said. “Isn’t that a hell of a note. I’m in the medics.”
    â€œI’m glad you’re in the medics,” Johnny said. Just that; then some stretcher-bearers came up, and they took him away. But Johnny afterwards remembered that to be there, Sidney must have come through the Straits, and seen those bare, brown hills that make the southern lip of Spain—because to men like Sidney, there’s no end, but always a time when you come back to where you began.
    On and off, in the months which followed, someone who knew Sidney would run into him, first in Sicily, and then in Italy; and then, from that and from those who had never known him before, there grew up a legend about him. There had been no legend from the work he did in Spain and in the States, but now in Italy there was emerging a quality of calm and certainty for men who had no certainty, many of whom didn’t know where they were going or what they were fighting for, who only knew that in sunny Italy it rained like hell, and when you got over one mountain,