‘I’m not so sure he’s a crackpot,’ the chaplain observed.
‘That’s right, take his part,’ said Corporal Whitcomb in an injured tone, and stamped out.
The chaplain could not believe that Corporal Whitcomb was offended again and had really walked out.
As soon as he did realize it, Corporal Whitcomb walked back in.
‘You always side with other people,’ Corporal Whitcomb accused.
‘You don’t back up your men.
That’s one of the things that’s wrong with you.’
‘I didn’t intend to side with him,’ the chaplain apologized.
‘I was just making a statement.’
‘What did Colonel Cathcart want?’
‘It wasn’t anything important.
He just wanted to discuss the possibility of saying prayers in the briefing room before each mission.’
‘All right, don’t tell me,’ Corporal Whitcomb snapped and walked out again.
The chaplain felt terrible.
No matter how considerate he tried to be, it seemed he always managed to hurt Corporal Whitcomb’s feelings.
He gazed down remorsefully and saw that the orderly forced upon him by Colonel Korn to keep his tent clean and attend to his belongings had neglected to shine his shoes again.
Corporal Whitcomb came back in.
‘You never trust me with information,’ he whined truculently.
‘You don’t have confidence in your men.
That’s another one of the things that’s wrong with you.’
‘Yes, I do,’ the chaplain assured him guiltily.
‘I have lots of confidence in you.’
‘Then how about those letters?’
‘No, not now,’ the chaplain pleaded, cringing.
‘Not the letters.
Please don’t bring that up again.
I’ll let you know if I have a change of mind.’
Corporal Whitcomb looked furious.
‘Is that so?
Well, it’s all right for you to just sit there and shake your head while I do all the work.
Didn’t you see the guy outside with all those pictures painted on his bathrobe?’
‘Is he here to see me?’
‘No,’ Corporal Whitcomb said, and walked out.
It was hot and humid inside the tent, and the chaplain felt himself turning damp.
He listened like an unwilling eavesdropper to the muffled, indistinguishable drone of the lowered voices outside.
As he sat inertly at the rickety bridge table that served as a desk, his lips were closed, his eyes were blank, and his face, with its pale ochre hue and ancient, confined clusters of minute acne pits, had the color and texture of an uncracked almond shell.
He racked his memory for some clue to the origin of Corporal Whitcomb’s bitterness toward him.
In some way he was unable to fathom, he was convinced he had done him some unforgivable wrong.
It seemed incredible that such lasting ire as Corporal Whitcomb’s could have stemmed from his rejection of Bingo or the form letters home to the families of the men killed in combat.
The chaplain was despondent with an acceptance of his own ineptitude.
He had intended for some weeks to have a heart-to-heart talk with Corporal Whitcomb in order to find out what was bothering him, but was already ashamed of what he might find out.
Outside the tent, Corporal Whitcomb snickered. The other man chuckled.
For a few precarious seconds, the chaplain tingled with a weird, occult sensation of having experienced the identical situation before in some prior time or existence.
He endeavored to trap and nourish the impression in order to predict, and perhaps even control, what incident would occur next, but the afatus melted away unproductively, as he had known beforehand it would.
Déjà vu. The subtle, recurring confusion between illusion and reality that was characteristic of paramnesia fascinated the chaplain, and he knew a number of things about it.
He knew, for example, that it was called paramnesia, and he was interested as well in such corollary optical phenomena as jamais vu, never seen, and presque vu, almost seen.
There were terrifying, sudden moments when objects, concepts and even people that the chaplain had lived with almost all his life inexplicably took on an unfamiliar and irregular aspect that he had never seen before and which made them totally strange: jamais vu.
And there were other moments when he almost saw absolute truth in brilliant flashes of clarity that almost came to him: presque vu.
The episode of the naked man in the tree at Snowden’s funeral mystified him thoroughly.
It was not déjà vu, for at the time he had experienced no sensation of ever having seen a naked man in a tree at Snowden’s funeral before.