I went inside, got the fanciest box I could find, lined it with the very softest fabric I could find, and buried the bird, digging a deep hole and saying all the prayers I could remember. I vowed to heaven that I would never, ever, ever again shoot at a bird, or anything else, if I could just be forgiven for having committed this terrible crime. After that I wasn’t so blithe about shooting my b and arrow or my BB gun at anything that moved. Sometimes I’d fake it with my buddies. We’d be stalking something with BB guns and when we got close enough I’d shoot, but I always aimed to miss.
When my father went off to war in August 1942, his last act was to make me the man of the house. I was seven years old.
Pop stood in front of me and gave a little talk about how he had to leave because he was going off to serve our country. Because he was leaving, he said, I was now going to have a big job. It was up to me to look after the girls, my older sisters Ruth Ann and Sally. Then he went into the house while I waited with Mom. When he came back out, he laid his army saber in my hands.
My father’s saber was a sacred thing in our family. We called it his West Point sword, because he’d gotten it the year he graduated, in 1917. He was always quick to tell you that West Point had shaped his entire life. “Duty, Honor, Country,” the West Point motto, was his creed, and it became mine. From the first day I could remember, my parents had told me I was going to West Point.
[America knew his father’s name because the senior Schwarzkopf had been head of the New Jersey State Police during the Lindbergh kidnapping. Upon leaving the police, he became the voice of “Gang Busters, “a crime series that was one of America’s most popular radio shows. After his father reported back to the military, he was ordered to Teheran to be an adviser to the Imperial Imnian Gendarmerie and help it protect U.S supplies on their way to America’s Soviet allies from attacks by mountain tribes.]
My father taught me honor, but I learned tolerance from my mom. “You have to understand that you’re one of the luckiest people in the world,” she once told me. “You were born white, you were born Protestant, and you were born American. That means you’ll be spared prejudices that a lot of other people have to put up with. But always remember: you had nothing to do with the fact that you were born that way. It gives you no right to look down on anybody who wasn’t … you must never look down on anybody.
Putting aside her nursing career had made sense to my mother as long as she was sharing a life with my father. But once he went away, everything she loved about their life disappeared, and she was left with the burdens. After she moved us from Lawrenceville, N.J., to Princeton it became apparent that Mom was drinking heavily. Within six months it had become the central fact of our lives. (One of the toughest personal decisions I had to make in writing this book was whether to discuss my mother’s drinking. During my boyhood her illness was our family’s unspoken secret, and I carried it with me for twenty-five years before I could mention it even to friends.)
Mom had a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality. When she was sober, she was the sweetest, most sensitive, loving, and intelligent person you could ever meet. But when she was drunk she was a holy terror.
I used to dread coming home at night. Mom did her drinking before dinner. Then we’d sit at the table and a terrible meanness would come out. My defense was to isolate myself as much as I could: get in there, have dinner, and disappear upstairs to my room.
In 1945 Pop was unexpectedly called back for consultations in Washington and came up to New Jersey. I learned later that he was stunned at the condition in which he found Mom, but he never showed it. He and I didn’t discuss her drinking at all, but what he did for me was much more effective. In September, I entered sixth grade at Bordentown Milita Academy.
The following June, 1946, after school let out, he wrote to my mother, saying, now that the war was over, he wanted me to live with him in Iran. All I could say was, “When do I leave?”
On my twelfth birthday, I kissed Mom good-bye. I mark that day as the start of my military career, because, from then on, I lived in an Army world.
Right away I loved Teheran. Pop loved to share the adventure of the Middle East. One night in late September he said, “We’re going out.” We got in the car and Pop explained we’d been invited to have dinner with a chief of a Baluchi tribe, who was visiting Teheran. The Baluchi were nomads from the eastern part of the country who considered themselves autonomous, but this chief was loyal to the shah. When they came to town, Pop explained, the Baluchi didn’t check into a hotel. They literally brought their town with them. We drove to the outskirts of the city, and at dusk we came to the edge of a mesa where we could see the dark brown tents of the Baluchi encampment spread out below.
We descended into the camp on a narrow dirt road and pulled up in front of the main tent. About twenty tribesmen in long robes and armed with rifles and knives talked to Pop and his interpreter while I waited nearby. After fifteen minutes we were ushered into a central tent, where the floor was covered with tribal rugs in bright geometric patterns of white, blue, and varying shades of red, and there were rough-woven cushions to lean on. The servants brought in sheep that had been spit roasted whole, and laid them on top of long platters of rice. I literally had an entire sheep in front of me.
Once the plates were filled, servants started plucking out the sheeps’ eyeballs. The Baluchi considered eyeballs a delicacy and there was a feeling of great ceremony as they were given out. Pop, the honored guest, received the first, and I watched as he scooped it up with some rice in his right hand, popped it in his mouth, and solemnly chewed. The chief got one, and two or three of his top men. Then they started discussing me, saying, “The general’s son is here! Shouldn’t we give the general’s son the sheep’s eye?” It seemed half joking and I desperately hoped they weren’t serious.
But they gave me a sheep’s eyeball. With all the roasting and basting it didn’t look like a staring eye-more like a brown fig. But it was still an eyeball as far as I was concerned. I said to my father, “I’m not going to eat that.” He said out of the corner of his mouth, “You will eat it!” As a stranger to the tribe, I’d been given a spoon to use with my meal. Holding my breath, I spooned the eyeball up and swallowed it whole, and everyone applauded.
