And of course I was jealous of them, those dashing young spies, and that helped me take the work seriously. I absorbed the lessons of that manual. Anything—anything—could be an instrument of sabotage, and anything could be sabotaged. Doing your typing job poorly was a form of simple sabotage. Being stupid—we intended to teach people to be stupid, to behave like idiots, as a form of subversion. A difficult proposition during wartime, when a factory worker whose deepest sense of pride—the only pride he has left now that the Nazis have plundered everything else he had—is invested in the quality of his product. A bolt or a tank tread or whatever it might be. Consider who one of these potential civilian saboteurs was. He was too old to fight in his country’s army, or he was a cripple. For whatever reason, he’s unable to go to the front with his neighbors and defend his homeland. He’s left back home with the women and children. And his wages had been cut and cut, everything had been rationed, the food on his table was made of sawdust, his cigarettes tasted like kerosene, his alcohol was long gone. What little manhood he had at the beginning of the war had shriveled. German soldiers groped his wife and daughters. Was he angry? You bet. Was he angry enough to sacrifice the last of his pride, though?
That’s the question the operative had to pose. The worker is in conflict with himself, and must be convinced to work slower, to make mistakes, to use his tools incorrectly, to dull their edges, to break them, to waste oil, to forget procedure, and to pretend to be confused and weak. He must be made willing to sacrifice his intellect and spirit for the cause. And what a cause! A cause which ends not with an explosion and a curtain of flame, but a secret, impotent, dim fizzle. It’s quite a hurdle to clear. Yesterday, this factory worker was the best at his job—or at least competent. But now he must will himself to become even worse than the most contemptibly stupid son of a bitch in the entire factory. Other workers will all say, What the hell happened to old Tomasz, he used to be so efficient, and look at him now. And what can old Tomasz say? If he’s committed to his role in fighting Hitler, he can only shrug the idiot’s shrug. Unless, that is, he can convert his friends. And then you have something like the beginning of a revolution. That was the idea, at least.
Minuscule acts of subversion. Harass and demoralize. Millions of people, each one slashing a single Nazi tire. Delivering Nazi mail to the wrong address. An entire country slowly tipping over, felled by a plague of incompetence.
The manual went to press in January ’44. I moved back to the Polish section to work on propaganda but I wasn’t there long, maybe two weeks, before the field section started calling people in for interviews. I was called in first by the head of Morale Operations. I walked in and he said, Take a seat, Saltwater. Manual three, page fifteen, subheading E.
He had this way of speaking that made you feel the words were emanating from his chest, as though he wasn’t even moving his mouth. I was afraid that if I answered incorrectly, I wouldn’t be allowed to work on the next manual, so I closed my eyes and concentrated. Of course, I have no idea what’s on that page he’s asking about. I know the manual by heart, but I don’t have a photographic memory, so I think, Well, that’s somewhere in the Specific Suggestions section, and I worked it out from there, following the logic of the manual. Tools, lubrication, cooling systems, gas and oil, electric motors. A, B, C, D, E. So there I had it. Electric motors, I said.
I saw from his face I’d gotten it right and I felt a thrill, like a schoolboy who’d pleased his teacher. He wasn’t quizzing me to evaluate my fitness for more editorial work, of course. They were up against the wall. I have wondered: If I’d gotten the answer wrong, what might he have done? Probably would have sent me anyway. They’d lost so many field agents in Poland, they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel by the time they got to me. I wasn’t even an officer, but they hopped me right up to second lieutenant.
So I was off to Prince William Forest for A-4, Special Operations basic, without any clue why I was being put into an operational division. I knew there’d been losses—we all did—and I knew that my language expertise qualified me for a certain type of work, but I was no spy. They told me nothing. Go to SO, they said, then Fort Benning for jump school, then report back to D.C.
So that’s what I did. I’m taught to conduct myself with stealth and lethality, how to fight in close quarters, how to infiltrate and extricate, lay charges. In order to graduate basic I had to sneak into a hydroelectric plant in Maryland, make my way to the turbines, and leave a calling card inside a fuse box just outside the control room.
