The Nuclear Age by Tim O’Brien Page A

Saigon.
    Goofy, perhaps, but the goofiness had an edge to it.
    So what does one do?
    Hold the line and hope. My dreams were honorable. There was the golden dome on the state capitol; there was the world-as-it-should-be.
    When I look back on that period, it’s clear that my motives were not strictly political. At best, I think, it was a kind of precognitive politics. Granted, the war was part of it, I had ideals and convictions, but for me the imperative went deeper. Sirens and pigeons. A midnight light show. It occurred to me, even at the time, that our political lives could not be separated from the matrix of life in general. Joseph Stalin: the son of a poor cobbler in Tiflis. George Washington: a young neurotic who could not bring himself to tell a modest lie. Why does one man vote Republican, another Socialist, another not at all? Pure intellect? A cool adjudication between means and ends? Or more likely, does it have to do with a thick tangle of factors—Ollie Winkler’s garbled chromosomes, my own childhood, a blend of memory and circumstance and dream?
    I wasn’t a fortune-teller.
    Vision, nothing more. Dim previews of coming attractions. The rest was trial and error.
    In the first week of February, we set up a formal organization on campus. The Committee, we called it. We took out an ad in the
Pevee Weekly
, calling for volunteers, and three days later, on a Saturday afternoon, we convened our first meeting in a small conference room in the basement of Old Main.
    I presided, Ollie sat to my immediate left. At two o’clock, when I called the meeting to order, it was clear that we had a severe manpower problem. The only other body in the room belonged to a large, tent-shaped coed who brooded in total silence at the far end of the table.
    “This is Tina,” Ollie said, “I’ll vouch for her.”
    The girl gazed fixedly at her own stomach; she seemed fascinated by it, a little overwhelmed.
    Tina Roebuck: two hundred pounds of stolid mediocrity. A home-ec major. A chronic overeater. She was not obese, exactly, just well spread out. Generous hips and sturdy thighs and big utilitarian breasts. Like a Russian hammer-thrower, I decided—the poor girl obviously could not tell day from night without a sundial.
    I smiled and shuffled some papers.
    “Floor’s open,” I said, and shrugged. “I think we can dispense with parliamentary procedure.”
    Then I settled back.
    Ollie Winkler did most of the talking. For ten minutes the discussion revolved around petty organizational matters. Ollie slipped his boots off, resting a foot on the edge of the table. “What we got here,” he was saying, “is a troika situation, like in the USS of R, three horses pulling the same big sled. Which means we best divvy up the power, keep the reins straight so to speak, that way we don’t get tangled up or nothing … Like with—”
    I stood up and opened a window. The room had a stale, dirty-sock smell.
    “Like with electricity,” Ollie said. “Power lines, I mean. One person can’t hog the amps and volts. Power, that’s where it’s at, we got to spread it around equal. The troika idea. Equal horsepower.” He paused to let this concept take shape, then massaged his toes and went on to talk about the virtues of shared leadership, how we had to be a democracy.
    I slapped the table.
    “Democracy’s fine,” I said. “Put your goddamn
boots
on.”
    Ollie blinked.
    “A case in point,” he said.
    There was laughter at the end of the table. Tina Roebuck reached into her purse and pulled out a giant-sized Mars bar and placed it on the table directly in front of her.
    She folded her hands and stared at it.
    “Democracy,” Ollie sighed, “a lost art.”
    “Next item,” I said.
    Ollie hesitated. “Well, hey. Can’t we at least assign jobs, sort of? Like sergeant at arms. Where’s the fun if you don’t get special jobs?”
    “Sergeant at arms,” I said. “You’re elected.”
    “We didn’t
vote
.”
    “One-zip, a