Vernon had taken the Eddy Test in electronics that spring and received notice of passing in May. That allowed him, upon induction, to choose the Navy. His military strategy was to maximize the likelihood of his survival, and the Army looked like cannon fodder on the ground and clay pigeons in the air. He’d prefer to take his chances being a sitting duck. The Navy needed thousands of radio and radar technicians, but the technology was so new that few people had been trained in it. The course of instruction was long. After six weeks of boot camp at Great Lakes, there were four weeks of pre-radio school in Chicago, twelve of primary materiel school in Gulfport, and twenty-eight of secondary back in Chicago at Navy Pier. Vernon did the math. In fifty weeks the war just might be over. He accepted that it had to be fought, he understood society required him to be part of it. He would not shoot himself in the foot or—fuck you, Don and Mike!—deliberately stick his fingers in a high-voltage socket, but he assumed he was like most other people in preferring, on the whole, that somebody else die.
As for his two years in the military, if you’d asked him pretty much at any point during it, he would have sworn he hated it. Obeying people who were by and large dumber than he was came hard. But his memories in later years have had a certain warmth. Maybe, as with physical pain, one remembers only the intensity of unpleasantness, and maybe intensity in retrospect just looks like being fully alive.
At Navy Pier, Vernon and his classmates slept in triple-tiered bunks in a warehouse as large as an airplane hangar, with seagulls in the rafters that shat on the men in the top bunks. They would line up after breakfast and be marched in formation to class, marched back to lunch, marched back to class, marched to dinner. He had always been heavy, like his father, but now he slimmed down. A street photographer snapped a candid shot of him one Saturday night on a Chicago sidewalk, and he’s kept it for fifty years tucked into the glass door of his secretary at home. He’s in uniform, complete with Dixie cup hat, his ears sticking out like Andy Griffith, counting change in his palm. A person looking at the photo might think this lanky lantern-jawed sailor is heading off to a bar or a cat house. In fact, he was on his way to a sheet music store. He was a small-town boy, high school president of the Baptist Student Union, glad to be away from his mother. It was enough that Chicago was big and bustling, he didn’t need it to be sinful, too.
In later years, when Susan or Mark asked for a song at bedtime, he would either give them “Asleep in the Deep” or the ditty he’d learned at the Pier to the tune of Mess Call:
Soupee, soupee, soupee,
without any bean!
Bacon, bacon, bacon,
without any lean!
Coffee, coffee, coffee,
without any cream!
He hated every minute of it, but he kept his watch cap, his Dixie cup, his duffel bag; he kept his Bluejacket’s Manual and his Radar Fundamentals. In the Navy hospital, he read Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, traded jokes, played gin rummy, practiced the faro shuffle. His fingers healed and the Navy made him hurry up and wait. By that point it was clear the Japs weren’t going to give up until every square foot of their country was a smoking ruin. The fact that they wouldn’t face reality, that instead of surrendering now, they were going to make hundreds of thousands of people die, including his one and only self, and then surrender, made it pretty easy to hate their guts. His reassignment came through on August 5, so the banner headline across the front page of the Chicago Tribune on August 7 might as well have read Physics Miracle Saves J. V. Fuller.
Retired and ill, listening to Beethoven in his study, looking back, he wonders if his gratitude at being thus gratuitously handed his future explains his choice of career and, later, his stint at RAND. After the Navy discharged him in July of ’46, he heeded the urgings of his father and enrolled at Wake Forest College, near home, where he could be for a while longer the tender chick his clucking mother wanted. (He supposed that, as a woman who’d lost her son in the nation’s service every night for two years, she deserved it.) He majored in physics, then did graduate work in nuclear physics back in Chicago. Several members of the U of C faculty, like Fermi, had been part of the Manhattan Project, and they talked of Los Alamos like the Garden of Eden. Sure, at the end, they’d had to drop a couple of apple cores on a couple of Japanese cities, but bliss it was in that atomic dawn to be alive, and to be scaling the Tree of Knowledge was very heaven.
After the war, the Air Force, wanting an institution similar to Los Alamos to continue working for it, dreamed up RAND—a safe little collegial place where scientists and analysts could have fun designing Armageddon weapons and strategies. Anyone working in nuclear physics at the University of Chicago in the 1950s heard a lot about that shining establishment by the sea. To some of the graduate students—the hawkish on the one hand, the naive and sentimental on the other—RAND looked like the Lord’s work. Vernon wasn’t hawkish, but he was still a small-town Southern Baptist who’d been saved by the Bomb. In the summer of 1956, diploma in hand and wife and daughter in tow—he’d gotten married five years previously—he signed on with RAND and moved to Santa Monica.
• • •
They rented a bungalow on Dimmick Avenue, about a mile from the RAND offices. Vernon walked the twenty minutes to
