He paused while the Gran Maestro poured the Roederer Brut ’42.
“From Corps,” he translated, unlovingly, cuerpo d’Armata, “they tell you what you must do, and then you decide how to do it. You dictate the orders or, most often, you give them by telephone. You ream out people you respect, to make them do what you know is fairly impossible, but is ordered. Also, you have to think hard, stay awake late and get up early.”
“And you won’t write about this? Not even to please me?”
“No,” said the Colonel. “Boys who were sensitive and cracked and kept all their valid first impressions of their day of battle, or their three days, or even their four, write books. They are good books but can be dull if you have been there. Then others write to profit quickly from the war they never fought in. The ones who ran back to tell the news. The news is hardly exact. But they ran quickly with it. Professional writers who had jobs that prevented them from fighting wrote of combat that they could not understand, as though they had been there. I do not know what category of sin that comes under.
“Also a nylon-smooth Captain of the Navy who could not command a cat-boat wrote about the intimate side of the truly Big Picture. Everybody will write their book sooner or later. We might even draw a good one. But I don’t write, Daughter.”
He motioned for the Gran Maestro to fill the glasses.
“Gran Maestro,” he said. “Do you like to fight?”
