soldiers’ hearts such discoveries bred cynicism, but in my grandfather’s there arose a more or less permanent state of aggravation.
Given the proximity of Fort Belvoir to Washington, D.C., it was only a matter of time before his exasperation generalized beyond the perimeter fence to encompass the seat of government itself. In spite of Pearl Harbor and the invasion panics it inspired, the capital had yet to lose its complacency toward enemies who were continents and oceans away. Anti-aircraft batteries were spotty. Elderly Curtiss biplanes patrolled sputtering overhead. A handful of Coast Guard tubs policed the rivers and bridges.
Walking the streets one afternoon on a one-day pass, my grandfather nursed his anger and amused himself by planning the conquest of Washington. For verisimilitude he enacted his role of reichsmarschall in his grandfather’s Pressburger German, debating strategy with the added relish its glottals afforded. He ordered that crack commando units be trained to crew U-boats. He landed three hundred men on the Patuxent at the spot where the British had begun their invasion of 1814. His submarine jaegers blew up the Potomac bridges and electrical power stations, seized radio towers, cut telegraph and telephone cables. They entrenched the orderly street grid with grenade craters and razor wire, piled up chicanes across the approaches to the city. Thirty men sufficed to take the Capitol, a dozen to seize the White House. By the evening of the second day of his invasion, my grandfather stood in jackboots and peaked schirmmütze at the elbow of FDR, proffering his pen for the formal surrender.
He returned to Fort Belvoir that evening alarmed by the clarity and elegance of his plan. Before retiring for the night he formulated its essentials in a typed three-page memorandum to his CO, which was afterward mislaid, ignored, or possibly forgiven. In the darkness of the dormitory room he shared with an MIT-educated civil engineer named Orland Buck, he laid out the scheme again.
By pure chance, this Buck happened to be one of the few officer candidates not readily fitted onto my grandfather’s three-part schema of humanity. Orland Buck was a Maine Brahmin whose father and grandfather both had died fighting to build heroic bridges, in Argentina and the Philippines. A history of raising hell in genteel institutions and the weight of his patrimony inclined Buck to the arts of demolition, and he zeroed in on that element of my grandfather’s plan.
“One bridge would do,” he decided. “Make it the Francis Scott Key and you would get their attention, all right.”
Weeks passed without any acknowledgment of my grandfather’s memorandum. Orland Buck and my grandfather spent their leave hours ostentatiously casing the Francis Scott Key Bridge with its arches in elegant cavalcade. Buck took documentary pictures of my grandfather taking pictures, unmolested, of the bridge’s piers and abutments. Despite their efforts, no one questioned or even appeared to remark on the young men’s fascination with the bridge, built by the Corps in the twenties, engineered by an associate of Buck’s father.
In demolition training sessions, the Corps daily broadened their expertise, and at night Buck and my grandfather studied official copies of the bridge’s construction plans in the base library.
“It will teach them a lesson,” Buck said, lying on his bunk in the darkness. A radio, tuned low, brought news of Rommel’s capture of Tobruk. “It will serve the bastards right.”
My grandfather wondered how long ago, without his having noticed, his bunkmate had passed from the conditional to the future in talking about their plan. He didn’t believe for a moment that Buck wanted to teach anyone a lesson or had the slightest interest in seeing justice done. Buck was not a sorehead, a perfectionist, or a nurser of grievances. He was in it for fun and only saying what he thought my grandfather wanted to hear.
“Don’t get carried away,” my grandfather told him.
“Who, me?”
In a strongbox at the back of an old Mack truck that stood rusting without engine or wheels under a tarp in the motor pool, Buck and my grandfather had stashed ten bombs of their own manufacture. The bombs’ design was plausibly straightforward and effective: empty wooden ammo boxes stuffed with guncotton, which Buck and my grandfather had spirited away in amounts small enough to go unnoticed during demolitions training. A small amount of primer and Cordtex had been obtained in the same way, just enough for my grandfather to make his point harmlessly. Twisted to the end of each coil of Cordtex was a note typed by my grandfather that read nur zu demonstrationszwecken.*
“I don’t like it when people get carried away,” my grandfather said.
“Oh, no, neither do I,” Buck said shamelessly.
On the night appointed for the exploit they strapped on tool belts, retrieved their store of demonstration bombs from the strongbox, zipped the bombs into four duffel bags, and went AWOL with an ease that bore out my grandfather’s contempt for the way things were done at Fort Belvoir. They hiked through tall weeds and trash pine, across a service road, and into some woods that had been part of the original Belvoir plantation. They stumbled cursing in the dark of the forest until they came to the tracks of the RF&P, where they hopped a freight and rode an empty flatbed into Alexandria.
They jumped off just before the train entered the rail yard, in a neighborhood of low brick houses. From the Potomac Yard came a smell of diesel, an ozone scorch of pantograph sparkings. Those smells and the houses with their puzzled expressions stirred old yearnings and rancors in my grandfather’s heart. He wondered, as in the past and for years to come, if this might be the night on which his life, his true life, began at last.
They found an old Model A pickup parked in an alley. The rear window glass of its cab had been replaced by a sheet of pegboard. My grandfather stove in the pegboard with a jab of his left elbow and wriggled through. He had never hot-wired a car before, but the principle was trivial and the Ford unresisting. It took him under a minute to turn the engine over. He unlocked the door and slid across to the passenger side. Orland Buck got in behind the wheel and pawed it for a second or two.
“You bastard,” Orland Buck said happily. “God damn you.”
“Drive.”
A body slammed against the truck on Buck’s side. Buck’s window was filled with the eyes and red jaw of a dog. A man shouted from a house that backed onto the alley. Orland Buck laughed. He fought against the clutch and the gearshift. They lurched out of the alley under escort from the outraged dog before Buck hit the gas and they left the animal in their dust. The truck was not going to afford them very much in the way of stealth. As they turned onto the Jeff Davis Highway, it sounded like they were dragging a sack full of clocks behind them.
Orland Buck took himself in hand after that. He drove with care in the darkness, meeting the speed limit. They drove past the new airport, past the wasteland where they were putting up the new War Department building, past the cemetery where Buck’s father and grandfather lay under their white crosses. They dragged their load of clock parts across the roadbed of their intended victim and turned left on the District side. Upriver a little way from Georgetown, near the old terminus of the C&O canal, Buck put the truck into neutral and cut the engine. They rolled into the gravel lot of Fletcher’s Boathouse. Before getting out of the truck, they blackened their faces with burnt cork and pulled dark watch caps over their heads. Orland Buck was in heaven. My grandfather was obliged to admit that he was also enjoying himself so far.
“Now, did you ever paddle a canoe?” said Buck, a veteran of many Down East camps.
“I’ve seen it done,” my grandfather said, thinking in particular of a silent version of The Last of the Mohicans he had taken in at the Lyric in Germantown. “If Bela Lugosi can do it, I can do it.”
The hasp on the
