The Buddy System

They went just about everywhere together and they seemed to share just about everything except women. None of the rest of us in the barracks knew just what they found to talk about during all those hours, but it was plain that they found something. You would see them sitting together in the mess hall, talking between forkloads of stringy beef and soft potatoes. They arranged to be manifested together on parachute jumps and you would see them coming off the drop zone, talking it over on the way to the assembly point. They bunked together and on Friday afternoons, they would shower and dress in the cheap drip-dry civvies they had bought from Robert Hall or J. C. Penney's and leave the reservation together to get drunk and brawl and look for women. It was not exactly what they wanted most from the world, but it was the available thing at the time. Monday mornings, we'd see them again, red-eyed and sometimes bruised and cut. Their faces would be gray from fatigue and epic drinking. They would sip the brutal mess-hall coffee and talk, or, if the hangovers were bad enough, simply sit and sip and hope, like the rest of us, that the training schedule would let them off easy.

"You know," an old 12-year corporal said one day, "I believe if Hawkins sneezed, Gifford would blow his nose."

"Maybe they're queer for each other," somebody said.

"Nah," the corporal said. "Queers got to always be touching each other and giggling and having little arguments. Them two are just running buddies. Be hard to take all this shit without someone to talk to. Those two just overdo it."

Somehow they fixed it so their orders came down at the same time and they managed to get into the same Special Forces team in Vietnam. They were training Montagnards and running some successful operations up by Dak To. That was fairly early in the game, before the arrival of the First Cav, when it was still a small war.

They stuck close, just as they had in the States. When they couldn't go out together on an operation, the one who was back at camp would spend most of the day around the communications bunker, listening for news. They went to Bangkok together on R&R and, the way they told it, didn't sleep for five days, and that was the only thing they didn't do, including a few pipes of opium.

Then Gifford came down with a hard case of malaria and, while he was in the hospital, Hawkins stepped on a pungi stake. The wound infected quickly and he was evacuated to Okinawa. While he was gone, Gifford came back to camp, thin and edgy from the sickness. Not having his buddy around made it worse. He had been an easy man to work with, but now he was a problem. Especially when there was some kind of shitwork to be done--sandbags to fill, barbed wire to string, a chopper to load. The sergeant major told Gifford that he'd "better get an attitude check and pull your head out of your ass."

He changed again when Hawkins came back, still limping a little, from Okinawa. They both did what they had to and did it happily, though everything was going slowly to hell around them: They'd had the semiannual South Vietnamese coup and Saigon was putting the blocks to the whole Special Forces program; the Montagnards were getting screwed by the bandits in the Vietnamese army; and the V.C., last but certainly not least, was putting pressure on the camp. There were mortar rounds at night and sometimes a probe of the wire. Each morning, a few of the Claymores would be turned around so the killing surface faced the camp. Everyone knew that there were V.C. infiltrators all over the place. It was a bad time. Maximum hair. One of the men on the team said, "Might as well go on and paint myself red and white, 'cause I just know those mothers are using me for an aiming stake."

Through all of it, Gifford and Hawkins stuck close. "Like stink and shit," someone said.

After their year of it, they went back to the States and got early-out discharges at Oakland. Then they went out and got drunk in San Francisco. They marveled at the hippies and the "peace creeps," shook hands, agreed to write and got on separate airplanes. Although they saw each other from time to time, they went different routes and it was never as close as it had been. But if you wanted to be grand about it, you could say that they'd saved each other's lives.

•

That kind of friendship between men is a pretty ordinary thing, especially in situations that are anything but ordinary. We have all sorts of models: Hawkeye and Trapper of M*A*S*H keeping each other sane in a situation that would otherwise drive them mad. Any pair of partners in any Joseph Wambaugh novel--policemen who cruise a beat and spend more time together than most husbands and wives, who begin after a while to act like a married couple, anticipating each other's needs, engaging in small, ritualized arguments, making tender little gestures. Everyone remembers Butch and Sundance, and Army buddies may have been done forever by James Jones (a generation of men can still get choked up thinking about Prewitt playing taps for his dead friend Maggio). Examples fill Shakespeare and the Bible and the myths of Greece, leaving no doubt that men have tended over history to form intensely close friendships, especially in situations of great stress.

Yet there was an era, not so very many years ago, when a man who spent too much time in the company of other men was whispered about. "Latent homosexual" was about the worst thing you could say about a man back then, though there was something about the whole idea that seemed wrong. But it wasn't thoughtful analysis that the people who used the phrase were after; it was the pejorative. They were looking for the biggest, ugliest stick around. So if you favored fishing with the boys, then, of course, there was no doubt about it, old fellow, you were--sorry to say it--a latent homosexual.

All that changed with the swiftness of fashion. And in time, though it was still not quite right to go off for weekends with the guys, people couldn't use homosexuality as a general-purpose smear without exposing themselves as unliberated, bigoted, unhip. So, instead of changing the way they thought, those who didn't like the idea of male companions came up with another label: macho. As a pejorative, it had the wonderful quality of coming from another language and not being vulnerable to precise translation. Therefore, it could mean anything.

No matter. Hanging out with the boys had gotten a bad name and explaining exactly why it was bad had become unimportant. Just as everybody was once down on homosexuality, everybody got down now on machismo. It was roundly denounced by all the arbiters of correct behavior, from Ann Landers to Phil Donahue--all those people who have made us so confused and miserable.

But what is finally wrong with having buddies and spending time with them? Or perhaps a stronger way to ask the question is, What better way for a man to be spending his time than to be spending it with the boys?

The implied answer is, of course, spending it with the girls--the women, that is--in significant, meaningful, caring, growing, adult and equal relationships. Of course. Which sounds good when Joyce Brothers says it on the radio or Judith Coburn writes it in Mademoiselle, but which in real life simply doesn't happen.

If a meaningful relationship is the same thing as love, and I think it is, then the worst thing you can do for it is give it your undivided attention. You need to give that "mr." a little room to breathe, spend some time with other people. And it is better, by far, to make those people other men, not women. Much is made these days of the inability of most men to have women friends, but the explanation is simple and biological; you can be fully liberated and still find out about it. Offices and short-stay hotels are full of people who started out as just good friends and wound up as something else.

But knowing that the thing between men and women is tricky and that it can go bad, what have we done in our collective approach to it? We have done everything we could to make it even harder and to make it carry more water than it can possibly hold. The thing between men and women is part of what makes life worth living, no mistake about it. But it can't do the whole job alone. Nothing can. Still, we carry on as if what we need to make everyone happier is more--more advice and counseling, more manuals on love, more psychologists and self-help authors and just plain mouths whose business it is to tell us how to make our meaningful relationships ever more meaningful. And all the while, of course, the divorce rate goes up, and more and more people seek help. The whole situation might suggest to anyone willing to lift his eyes for just a minute that what we are looking at is cause and effect.

The old-fashioned advice that seems to be called for here is, "Don't put all your eggs in one basket." It is a lonely world and we resist the feeling of being too much alone. So what is the problem if men choose to have companions and to spend time with them shooting pool or shooting ducks?

One of the objections--and you hear it everywhere--is that when men spend time together, they spend it on such adolescent things. Woody Allen indulges his adolescent fantasies and calls it art; the rest of us aren't so lucky. But there is something worth considering: Buddies do not ordinarily go off for a weekend of fighting inflation or reducing East-West tensions. They are more interested in things like hunting and fishing, golf and handball, drinking and women. Those are not activities that make the stars tremble. They are ordinary pursuits that can be gone after seriously or not. Which is not the same thing as saying they are unimportant, a distinction that you must make two or three times a day in parts of America.

You don't even need a buddy to do most of the things that buddies do together, though one-man handball does get old. But buddies make most of those things better. I fish and hunt with a friend, and what that amounts to is that one of us picks the other one up before dawn and we drink coffee and talk in the cab of the truck on our way to the river or the woods. We talk about what might work that day and what worked for old so-and-so yesterday. When we get to where we are going, we split up. He will fish 300 or 400 yards downstream from me and we will not speak a word. Or we will work the opposite sides of a ridge, moving slowly, one man ahead of the other, each hoping to push game across the ridge to the hunter he cannot see. At the end of the morning or the day, we will meet back at the truck, and on the way home, we will have a drink and talk it over. We could do it alone, but the ride wouldn't be as much fun.

What is true of hunting and fishing is even truer of going out for some drinks. It is a well-known fact that drinking alone is dangerous. Drinking with someone can be dangerous, too, but it doesn't have to be. And if you feel like drinking and running your mouth--announcing just where God, the President, Tom Landry and your boss went wrong--then it is best to do it in front of a buddy. There is a kind of unwritten law between good drinking companions about the inviolability of drunken confidences. You do not have to be on your guard with a drinking buddy, and if you get overserved and can't remember some things in the morning, then he isn't going to be in a hurry to remind you.

You may act an absolute ass when you are out consuming that loudmouth soup and, in fact, one of the other objections people have to men who like to go off with the boys is that they act so damned silly, like such boys. And those people have a point. You count on a buddy for a lot of things. In some cases, you might even count on him to save your life. But you also count on him, from time to time, simply to make you laugh.

There was a time when a friend and I were sharing an old farmhouse while we finished school on the VA. T.J. was the sort of man who, people said, would do anything for a laugh. One morning, when I was just coming awake, I heard him creeping up the stairs to my room, giggling and trying to muffle it. He owned a huge great Dane and I could hear the dog making these moaning noises as it came up the stairs behind him. I was supposed to be asleep, but there was no way. So I lay there between the sheets, trying to imagine just what in the hell was going on. Jesus, I thought, whatever it is, it can't be good. I'd better get out of bed. But I was tired and I waited a few seconds too long.

T.J. stopped at the head of the stairs and stuck his head into my room. It was a careful, searching gesture that exposed nothing but his face, which was lit up with a grin that could have come off Jack Nicholson.

"Morning," he said.

"Good morning. What's up?"

"Beautiful day, isn't it?"

"Oh, come on. What are you hiding behind your back?"

He put a hurt expression on his face. "You ought to be more trusting. You're too suspicious of everything. What could I have behind my back?"

"Whatever it is, it's driving that dog mad."

By this time, the dog was growling and pawing the floor and T.J. could not put the moment off any longer.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "Well, I did bring (continued on page 160)Buddy System(continued from page 154) you some breakfast."

He held a struggling hen over his head to keep the dog from taking it (and part of his arm) in one snap of those huge jaws. Then he made two funny, hopping steps across the room to my bed, the dog right behind him, and with one motion stuffed the chicken under the sheets with me. The dog came in just behind the chicken, and the three of us flailed around in the tangled sheets for several long and wild seconds. The dog planted two huge paws firmly on my chest to get some purchase as he burrowed after that chicken. His claws made deep red tracks in the skin and I shouted. The chicken flapped and squawked. The dog growled and burrowed deeper. Then feathers began to drift out from under the sheets and fill the room. I survived, the chicken didn't. For T.J., it was the high point of the year.

A writer I know, whose political profiles and analysis once won awards and made him famous and who now gets rich writing Broadway plays, had a friend who was a lawyer. They were both from Texas. The writer moved to Washington and New York. The lawyer stayed in Texas. When the lawyer announced that he was going to start working out to get back in shape, the writer sent him 400 pounds of weights, C.O.D. When the lawyer moved to a beautiful new home with several acres of seeded lawn, the writer, who was back home for a visit, went by in the middle of the night and left a present. It was a goat, with Happy Birthday painted on its side, which he tied to a tree with a rope long enough to allow the animal to graze the entire lawn.

Then there were two pilots I knew, great buddies who sometimes flew on each other's wing. They took off one day and, almost as soon as they got their wheels up, one of them had a fire. He came around for an emergency landing, talking to the tower all the way.

"Tower, this is Bobsled One. Losing altitude and hydraulic pressure."

"Roger, Bobsled One, equipment is on the runway."

"Bobsled One, this is Bobsled Two."

"This is Bobsled One."

"I'm right under you and I don't see the fire. Hang in there."

"Roger."

Everything looked good for an emergency landing until, on top of everything else, the crippled plane had a flame-out. The pilot was at that tricky point where he had to decide which was less risky--to go ahead and try to land or to punch out. He decided to stay with the plane.

"Tower. I'm losing altitude."

"Roger. Will you eject?"

"Negative. I'm going to try for the runway."

"Roger."

"Bobsled One, this is Bobsled Two."

"Go ahead, Bobsled Two."

"Roger. Say, can I have your car?"

•

Either you believe that sort of thing has a place in the world or you don't. Some think it makes an otherwise tedious world ... what? Amusing? Joyful? Comprehensible, even? On the other hand, some might call it just juvenile clowning that has no place in a world where there is so much to be done. No goofing off there, you. This is serious. It's life.

One other reason that male friendships are finally suspect is the fact that we believe in the notion of the loner. It has been fed to us almost ceaselessly. Literature is full of loners, of course, but where the idea really blooms is in the movies--Serpico, Brubaker, Shane. Movies do so much with loners, I think, because most name actors won't share the camera, or can't. Al Pacino has to play a loner. So did Clint Eastwood until he found the monkey.

Loners make undeniably great cinematic material. But the director who comes closest to having the right news about loners is Paul Schrader. In life, the loner is not necessarily noble or tragic. He is neither Sisyphus nor Prometheus, not even John Wayne or James Dean. He is Arthur Bremmer, Lee Harvey Oswald or the little shit who shot Reagan to impress a starlet who played in a Schrader movie about a loner's attempt to shoot a President.

It is not only the loners on the underbelly of society who are unappealing, though. Consider Nixon--good material for drama but a disastrous President who kept his own counsel. Better an Eisenhower who liked to drink whiskey, play cards and cuss with his buddies, just like when he was in the Army. Or John Kennedy, so fondly remembered by the men close to him, who was probably a better companion than anything else in his life.

So real-life loners make good saints and assassins, but what about you--a man who merely likes, from time to time, to get away with other men? You have made some friends over the years and when you get together, it is not to recite Coleridge or raise your consciousness. It is to take time off from all of the other things. Imagine yourself living in New York, working at a job that has all the satisfactions--high pay, glamor, power. You eat out at Manuche's and Madrigal, go to openings at the Museum of Modern Art. You have a big, quiet apartment, you don't ride subways and you take your vacations abroad. You are living the good life and you feel entitled. You've worked hard, after all.

Somewhere along the way, you meet the woman. She is more or less your equal in status. She works as hard as you do, makes good money, knows her way around and takes no crap from any man. All of the things that can happen between men and women happen intensely and soon you are "deeply involved." In arguments, she takes a line and does not give an inch. It is one of the things you like about her. You know where you stand.

You have been together for a year or so, let's say, when a call comes from a friend you knew in another time. He has put together a little fishing trip in the Keys. He has a place to stay, the use of a boat and he is tapped into one of the best skiff guides in Key West. Come on down, he says, the tarpon are moving. And your woman objects. She resents being excluded and she thinks the whole thing is terribly immature and macho. If you go, she might have to seriously rethink things. What do you do?

Well ... I don't know. And neither do any of the people writing about these things these days. Sometimes you give up a friend to please a lover and sometimes you don't--depends on the relative importance you attach to each. Joyce Brothers can't decide that for you. If you consult experts before making that kind of move, there is a high probability that you will either make the wrong decision or make the right decision for all the wrong reasons. And it is dead certain that if you don't come to grief this time, then you will the next time or the time after that.

You shouldn't have to make exclusive attachments, you say. And that's true enough. But it happens all the time. Your lover will become jealous of your friend and your friend--or your lover--will have to go. Your friend will probably be more understanding about it than your lover. There is no knowing why that should be so. It just is. And when it goes bad--as bad as it can go (continued on page 260)Buddy System(continued from page 160) between you and your lover--that is a good time for a friend.

•

There used to be a long, polished bar in New York's Saint Regis Hotel--one of those structures that reminded you of just how great New York once was. Of course, the bar was torn down to make way for something more modern, but before that, it was a fine place to meet in the afternoon for drinks. A photographer I knew went there every Thursday afternoon to meet a friend, a man he'd known for years who had made a success of himself in the market. They drank martinis at a time when everyone in Manhattan was drinking white wine or bottled water with a twist. (If you wandered into a midtown bar fresh from a John O'Hara story, you would have wondered what in the hell had happened. Had the juniper-berry crop failed?)

The photographer and the broker were both going through the kind of divorce where nothing but good fortune and perhaps the mercy of God keeps someone from getting killed. There were moving vans in the night, signatures forged on securities and bank accounts, private detectives and even some physical stuff. Mental cruelty doesn't begin to describe it.

Both men were living in hotels and looking for apartments. There were plenty of women to help them through the transition. Still, they met every Thursday, regularly, through it all.

"Well," the broker would say, "how goes it?"

"Not bad. Working hard."

"Oh?"

"I have to. My lawyer has four kids. Two in college and two in prep school. You know what that costs these days?"

"Don't feel bad. My lawyer has a fifty-foot ketch. Keeps it at a yacht club in South Hampton."

They did not talk any more about the divorces than that. What would have been the point? The situation was like a painful cyst, and picking at it did not help. So they drank cold gin and talked about going out to Meadowlands to watch the sorry-ass Giants or maybe trying to get up North in January to ski the powder. They talked about things that pleased them and they enjoyed each other's company, which is one of the oldest and most reliable comforts of all.

Of course, in the world according to Donahue, they were doing it wrong. They were behaving in the old, worn-out, insensitive fashion. It would have been better for them if they had met someplace with a group of other men who were going through the same thing and talked and cried and hugged. And paid, at the end of the session, for the privilege.

That is the crude faith of the day, and it is preached forthrightly and by suggestion everywhere we turn. If we are to find happiness, then it will be through our "relationships" and our careers--Dr. Freud's old prescription of love and work--which sounds fine if you occupy the kind of rarefied heights that he did. But for most of us, love and work is a two-legged stool. Love is one of the stresses we live with. Work is another. And a man needs some relief. Not everybody does meaningful work. Most of us, in fact, have just plain jobs and don't find the meaning of our lives in our work.

But, for the moment, concede the point: Say that you do work that really is meaningful. You practice law, edit the Times or manage IBM. Which also means that you work in one of those closed systems where one man's profit is another's loss. The promotion you get is the one that someone else doesn't. It makes for more efficiency, but it doesn't make anyone feel less alone. There is a line of Joseph Heller's that describes it perfectly: "In the office in which I work, there are five people of whom I am afraid."

Most of us work in offices like that. It is part of having a career. Anyone who can find all he needs from life in a career will surely do it. The rest of us need more. And the truth is that you are not nearly as important to your work as it is to you. The indispensable man is usually replaced by the time they have covered him up and remarked on how it always seems to be the young ones who have the coronaries. It is something that we knew as long ago as Ecclesiastes ("Vanity of vanities ...") and as recently as the Sixties, when young men with Harvard degrees refused to get on the corporate escalator and decided to be carpenters instead. These days, there is a scramble to get back on the escalator and find oil, market computer games, file lawsuits.

The current worship of work, with its legions of grim-faced men and women armored in worsted and armed with The Wall Street Journal, recalls the Romans working so hard to build empires and raise eternal cities, and learning, in the meantime, to treat one another like beasts, and worse. Better the Greeks, with their sense of play and companionship, their delight in the material of nature and a fine day. The Greeks knew how to work and how to fight wars; they also knew that you did those things as well as you could in order to survive but that the point of surviving was not doing those things--or one might as well be an Egyptian.

So we work because it cannot be avoided, and what we cannot avoid we should optimize (to use the vernacular). But we cannot let work stand for the whole thing. Make a mistress of your work and you will find out about unrequited love. Let the stresses of work keep you from having companions and you will be missing the best antidote to stress that there is.

It is in the most stressful situations that a man needs companions. I talked about this once to a former pro-football player--a defensive lineman who played seven years with the Oakland Raiders and who has a Super Bowl ring and a bad knee to prove it. Now he coaches football at the high school where he was a star some 15 years ago. The school was all black when he was a student there; now it is about half black and half white.

"Your friends are real important to you when you play up there," he said as he eased himself into a chair. He is big enough that he has to be careful with furniture. "You don't see many loners, especially not on a club that's winning. You depend on each other and that makes you close, even if you come from different backgrounds or you're painted different colors. You become close to the guys who play next to you and behind you, especially. It's not the same on a losing team."

How close does it get? I asked. Does it go beyond training camp and going out together after practice?

"You get real close. If guys have families, then maybe their wives and kids will start doing things together. Otis Sistrunk was a good friend of mine. He was the best man at my wedding. Art Thomas was probably my best friend up there. He still brings his family to visit and we go out to see him."

I asked him just how important all that was when you played ball.

"It's important for two reasons," he said. "First, it's important for the individual because that's a very high-pressure situation and you need to relax. Your buddies help you relax and get your mind off things. It's also important for the team. Any time you've got a lot of guys working together for a common goal, they're going to start being friends if they're doing it right. If they're not, then you're going to see guys going off alone after practice--you know, everyone going his own way. When you see that, you don't usually see a winner. I like to see my guys buddying up. It's a good sign. We've got a lot to overcome here--the black and white thing, the feeling a lot of these kids have that maybe hard work just isn't worth it. I never felt that way, but I didn't have what these kids have. We're getting ready to start spring practice today and it's going to be hot. Most of these kids have cars and they'd rather just get in them and go to the beach. When they start working hard together and leaving the cars in the parking lot and letting the other kids go to the beach, that's a good sign. Maybe they'll do that so they won't let a friend down."

Not far from where the coach was sitting in a chair that looked too small, thinking about making his boys feel that thing for one another that you feel when you are on one of the good teams, another man I know was working on his sailboat, enjoying his retirement. He had also told me some things about companions and what they can mean when what you feel is pressure and what you have to do to survive is prevail. He had been a POW for some six years, more than a year of it in solitary confinement. The loneliness had become so acute that he was hallucinating, talking to people he remembered from home. That was the worst part, he told me, worse than any of the beatings or the other physical abuse.

And even when he was not isolated from the other prisoners, he could only talk to the man in the next cell by tapping out messages on the wall between them. They tapped out orders and intelligence and other information, like weather conditions, for instance. It was part of a military network by which the prisoners were able to resist their captors and keep up their own morale. The tap code was crucial to them.

You could also tap just to pass time. My friend and his neighbor in the next cell played thousands of hands of cards by tapping. They did math problems and gave each other tours of the places they had grown up. It was amazing, my friend told me, how close you could come to somebody you had never seen. The only evidence you had that he even existed was a tapping noise on a wall, but that was enough to establish that he was real. Sooner or later, if you shared a wall long enough, you would ask a man what he looked like. That was a hard thing to tap out, a description of yourself. There were prisoners who risked punishment to get a look at the man next door when he was escorted down the corridor for a shower or interrogation. They just had to know.

He couldn't speak for everyone else, my friend said, but he believed that it was the support of his companions that had brought him through. He suspected that most of the others would say the same thing. One important function of the tap network was to keep in touch with those men who were weakening and beginning to despair. Send them messages of encouragement, try to bring them back, let them know they were not alone. Tap. Tap. Tap.

After it was all over and he had been home a couple of years, he ran into one of his fellow prisoners at a bar one night. They talked about other things for a while. There had been a world of adjustments to make, divorces to go through, a kind of short and painful celebrity. Then it was back to living in the ordinary world of checkbooks and insurance premiums. After a few drinks, the other man looked off for a moment and then said, "You know, I can't help myself, but sometimes I miss it."

•

Paul recommended faith, hope and charity to the early Christians, but it was insufficient for modern man, who has been trying to get along on love and work. Perhaps he should add companionship, and maybe, eventually, he will. There are signs, like the first blooms on a field of flowers, that things only recently too ordinary for words are once again becoming too good to be missed. Women are leading the way. (Remember when most of them said they were never going to have children?) As all sorts of old-fashioned and obsolescent virtues are coming back into fashion, perhaps we will rediscover buddies, too. We will all be alone soon enough.

"'This is Bobsled One. Losing altitude and pressure.' 'Roger, Bobsled One. Say, can I have your car?'"

"Love is one of the stresses we live with. Work is another. And a man needs some relief."