I didn’t sleep well, which wasn’t unusual, no one slept well, but no one complained. Everyone had troubling thoughts, nightmares, what have you.
I’d been thoroughly debriefed in Washington, too, of course. I confirmed the intelligence Tad had radioed in, and I told them what I could about the Berthawerke, about the conditions there, but, again, the War Department—you have to understand that winning the war was all that mattered. The war effort was about defeating the Axis, not about rescuing prisoners. It wasn’t that they didn’t have information from inside concentration camps, written accounts of mass executions, bodies dumped in mass graves. British intelligence knew from early on. They had been intercepting diplomatic mail for years. There were stories coming out of the Polish Embassy, for instance, about the ghettos. The U.S. government knew. But it wasn’t until after the war, at Nuremberg, that a complete account of what had been happening at the camps became public. Who knew what, and when did they know it—this is all of tremendous importance, but in 1944 the government wasn’t looking for new reasons to win the war. Do you know how many civilians died during the invasion of Normandy? Thirty thousand. Thirty thousand French civilians, all killed by American bombers. Two hundred thousand Allied troops dead. The context in which the camps existed at that time—to the left, millions of troops dead, to the right, millions of civilians. Mr. Roosevelt, the Germans are rounding up Jews and gassing them! And Roosevelt says, Defeat the Nazis. If you want to make it stop, beat the goddamned Nazis. Let’s make a date to discuss the morality of our decisions after we’ve forestalled our own annihilation!
Did I mention that my debriefing was thorough? What did I see. What did I hear. When did this happen, when did that. When did shipments arrive. What did I know about the production rate on such and so week. How many successful sabotage attempts, and in what factories, and carried out by whom?
At no time did I bring up Janusz Stern. I had no doubt that Tad would give an account of the man’s death in his debriefing, and the story would have made its way to OSS through the Polish underground, anyway, so if I deserved retribution, it would find me. But it never came—from an official standpoint, Janusz Stern was only one more body on a pile so high it was blotting out the sun. My involvement was incidental. There would be no consequences for admitting my role in his death, yet I had decided I would never speak a word of it to anyone. I’d decided this before he’d breathed his last breath, while he was lying there on the concrete floor of that factory, the kapo standing above him, his truncheon slick with blood. That man wasn’t Janusz Stern’s murderer. I was. I was a coward who’d killed him with carelessness, and bravado, and a thousand childish decisions I’d made going back to the day I agreed to join OSS, an outfit I joined because it made me feel that I’d been chosen, that I was special—from that very first day I was a murderer. And even before then, I’d been sharpening my bayonet.
My debrief was one hundred and twenty-two typed pages. The name Janusz Stern appeared nowhere. I was told, as we all were, that everything I’d done, everything I’d seen, was secret. You were expected to take that information to your grave. No one spoke about the missions until they were declassified.
Forty, fifty, sixty years we kept our mouths shut, and where do you put that, where do you store those memories of what you’ve seen and done? Well, you’re trained to keep secrets, and that’s what you do. But let me tell you, it causes a fundamental rift within a person who is motivated to seek truth, of course, to lie by omission for that long.
Water will find its level.
At first, I couldn’t sleep. I don’t mean this colloquially—I wasn’t having trouble sleeping. I stopped sleeping completely. By the middle of the second week back in D.C. I’d come undone. It was obvious to everyone at command that I wasn’t fit for duty. I was a babbling mess. Hallucinating. At night I sweated through the sheets, flopping around like a fish, staring at the dark. In the morning, drag myself in to work, sit down, nod off at the desk, bolt awake. Over and over, all day long. I took medicine. I drank. Nothing worked. I was seeing eyes in the shrubbery. I was being followed by the Gestapo. My food was being poisoned. The girl behind the reception desk was a double agent. This was shameful to the whole outfit, you understand. Field officers were supposed to be hard as nails. They were selected for their mental stability. That was a fundamental requirement. I was a complete failure on all fronts—not only was I falling apart, I was dragging down morale in the office. So they got me out of there posthaste, packaged me off to Fairfax for evaluation. The doctors didn’t even let me go back to D.C. for a change of clothes. Diagnosed with operational fatigue and sent directly to Santa Cruz with an escort.
At least I finally got to sleep. They shot me full of barbiturates and put me in a private room at the Casa Del Rey, which had been converted into a naval hospital. A deep, empty sleep without dreams. I woke up and I felt like myself again. I talked to psychologists, but of course we couldn’t get at the problem. They’d give you a shot of sodium amytal in those days to dredge up the root of the neurotic behavior. Or the psychologist would hypnotize you and take you back to the battlefield. But they couldn’t use those methods with me. My work was classified. So
