by Tim O'Brien
Four
Nights
Incoming,” the lieutenant shouted.
We dove for a foxhole. I was first in, the earth taking care of my belly; the lieutenant and some others piled in on top of me.
Grenades burst around the perimeter, a few rifle shots.
“Wow, like a sandwich,” I said. “Just stay where you are.”
“Yep, we’re nothing but sandbags for O’Brien,” Mad Mark said, peering up to watch the explosions go off.
It didn’t last long.
A blond-headed soldier ran over when the shooting ended. “Jesus, I got me a hunk of grenade shrapnel in my fuckin hand,” he said. He sucked the wound. It didn’t seem bad.
Mad Mark inspected the cut under a flashlight. “Will it kill you before morning?”
“Nope, I guess not. Have to get a tetanus shot, I suppose. Christ, those tetanus shots hurt don’t they?”
As it turned out, the fire fight had not been a fire fight. The blond soldier and a few others had been bored. Bored all day. Bored that night. So they’d synchronized watches, set a time, agreed to toss hand grenades outside our perimeter at 2200 sharp, and when 2200 came, they did it, staging the battle. They shouted and squealed and fired their weapons and threw hand grenades and had a good time, making noise, scaring hell out of everyone. Something to talk about in the morning.
“Great little spat,” they said the next day, slyly.
“Great?” I couldn’t believe it.
“Ah, you know. Little action livens up everything, right? Gets the ol’ blood boiling.”
“You crazy?”
“Mad as a hatter.”
“You like getting shot, for God’s sake? You like Charlie trying to chuck grenades into your foxhole? You like that stuff?”
“Some got it, some don’t. Me, I’m mad as a hatter.”
“Don’t let him shit you,” Chip said. “That whole thing last night was a fake. They planned it, beginning to end.”
“Except for old Turnip Head getting a piece of his own grenade,” Bates said. “They didn’t plan that.” Bates walked along beside me, the platoon straggled out across a wide rice paddy. “Turnip Head threw his grenade and it hit a tree and bounced right back at him. Lucky he didn’t blow his head off.”
Chip shook his head. He was a short, skinny soldier from Orlando, Florida, a black guy. “Me, I don’t take chances like that. You’re right, they’re nutty,” he said.
We walked along. Forward with the left leg, plant the foot, lock the knee, arch the ankle. Push the leg into the paddy, stiffen the spine. Let the war rest there atop the left leg: the rucksack, the radio, the hand grenades, the magazines of golden ammo, the rifle, the steel helmet, the jingling dogtags, the body’s own fat and water and meat, the whole contingent of warring artifacts and flesh. Let it all perch there, rocking on top of the left leg, fastened and tied and anchored by latches and zippers and snaps and nylon cord.
Packhorse for the soul. The left leg does it all. Scolded and trained. The left leg stretches with magnificent energy, long muscle. Lumbers ahead. It’s the strongest leg, the pivot. The right leg comes along, too, but only a companion. The right leg unfolds, swings out, and the right foot touches the ground for a moment, just quickly enough to keep pace with the left, then it weakens and raises on the soil a pattern of desolation.
Arms move about, taking up the rhythm.
Eyes sweep the rice paddy. Don’t walk there, too soft. Not there, dangerous, mines. Step there and there and there, not there, step there and there and there, careful, careful, watch. Green ahead. Green lights, go. Eyes roll in the sockets. Protect the legs, no chances, watch for the fuckin’ snipers, watch for ambushes and punji pits. Eyes roll about, looking for mines and pieces of stray cloth and bombs and threads and things. Never blink the eyes, tape them open.
The stomach is on simmer, low flame. Fire down inside, down in the pit, just above the balls.
“Watch where you sit, now,” the squad leader said. We stopped for shade. “Eat up quick, we’re stopping for five minutes, no more.”
“Five minutes? Where’s the whips and chains?” Bates picked a piece of ground to sit on.
“Look,” the squad leader sighed. “Don’t get smart ass. I take orders, you know. Sooner we get to the night position, sooner we get resupplied, sooner we get to sleep, sooner we get this day over with. Sooner everything.” The squad leader cleaned his face with a rag, rubbed his neck with it.
Barney joined us. “Why we stopping now?”
“Good,” the squad leader said. “Someone here understands it’s better to keep moving.”
Bates laughed, an aristocrat. “I don’t know about Buddy Barney, but actually, I was dreaming on the march. I was right in the middle of one. Daughter of this famous politician and me. Had her undressed on a beach down in the Bahamas. Jesus.” He gestured vaguely, trying to make us see, sweeping away the heat with his hand. “Had her undressed, see? Her feet were just in the water, these luscious waves lapping up all around her toes and through the cracks between them, and she had this beach towel under her. The only thing she was wearing was sunglasses.”
“You really think about politicians’ daughters out here?” Barney asked.
“Lovely,” Bates said. He closed his eyes.
We ate our noon C rations, then walked up a trail until the end of day.
We dug foxholes and laid our ponchos out.
Dark came. The mountains to the west dissolved—bright red, then pink, then gold, then gray, then gone—and Quang Ngai, the land, seemed to fold into itself. There were creases in the dusk: reflections, mysteries, ghosts. The land moved. Hedges and boulders and chunks of earth—they moved. Things shimmied and fluttered. Distortions? Or a special sort of insight, nighttime clarity? Grouped around our holes, we would focus on the dark. Squint, peer, concentrate. We would seek out shapes in the dark. Impose solidity. We would squeeze our eyes shut. What we could not see, we imagined. Then—only then—we would see the enemy. We would see Charlie in our heads: oiled up, ghostly, blending with the countryside, part of the land. We would listen. What was that sound coming from just beyond the range of vision? A hum? Chanting? We would blink and rub our eyes and wonder about the magic of this place. Levitation, rumblings in the night, shadows, hidden graves.
Now, with the dark solid, Bates and Barney and Chip and I kept the watch from a foxhole along the north perimeter.
The talk was hushed.
“Yeah,” Barney was saying, “it’s called a starlight scope. I been humping the mother for a week now. Must weigh a ton.”
Barney pulled the scope from its black carrying case and handed it across to Chip.
“See there?” Barney said. “A ton, right?”
Chip held the machine, testing its weight. The scope was maybe two feet long, shaped like a blunt telescope, painted black. It looked like something out of science fiction.
“Damned if I know how it works,” Barney said. “Fucking kaleidoscope or something.”
“A stargazing gizmo,” Chip said. He held the scope up to his eye. “Star light, star bright.”
Bates laughed. “You got to take off the lens cap, man.”
“Who needs it? I see fine. Real fine. First star I see tonight, wish I may—”
Bates grasped the scope, removed the lens cap, and began fiddling with the dials.
“Wish I may, wish I might,” Chip chanted, “have the wish I wish tonight.”
“Shit,” Bates said.
The machine’s insides were top secret, but the principle seemed simple enough: Use the night’s orphan light—stars, moonglow, reflections, faraway fires—to turn night into day. The scope contained a heavy battery that somehow juiced up the starlight, intensifying it, magically exposing the night’s secrets.
Bates finished tinkering with the scope and handed it back to Chip.
“That better?”
“Wow.”
“What’s out there?”
“A peep show,�
� Chip murmured. “Sweet, sweet stuff. Dancing soul sisters.” He giggled and stared through the scope. “Star light, star bright.”
“Don’t hog it, man.”
“Dreamland!”
“Come on, what do you see?”
“All the secrets. I see ’em all out there.”
“Hey—”
“Fairy-tale land,” Chip whispered. He was quiet for a time. He held the machine tight to his eye, scanning the night, clucking softly. “I see. Yeah, now I see.”
“Evil.”
“No, it’s sweet, real nice.” Chip giggled. “I see a circus. No shit, there’s a circus out there. Charlie’s all dressed up in clown suits. Oh, yeah, a real circus.”
And we took turns using the starlight scope. First Bates, then Barney, then me. It was peculiar. The night was there for us to see. A strange, soft deadness. Nothing moved. That was one of the odd things—through the scope, nothing moved. The colors were green. Bright, translucent green like the instrument panel in a jet plane at night.
“It’s not right,” Bates murmured. “Seeing at night—there’s something evil about it.”
“Star light, star bright.”
“And where’s Charlie? Where’s the fucking Grim Reaper?”
“First star I see tonight. Wish I may, wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.”
Chip went off to sleep. Soon Barney joined him, and together Bates and I used the scope.
I watched the green dancing night.
“I wish for peace,” Bates said.
A green fire. The countryside burned green at night, and I saw it. I saw the clouds move. I saw the vast, deep sleep of the paddies. I saw how the land was just the land.
I laughed, and Bates laughed, and soon the lieutenant came over and told us to quiet down.
We put the scope back in its case.
“Who needs it?” Bates said.
For a time we just sat there. We watched the dark grow on itself, and we let our imaginations do the rest.
Then I crawled into my poncho, lay back, and said good night.
Bates cradled his rifle. He peered out at the dark.
“Night,” he said.
Five
Under the Mountain
To understand what happens among the mine fields of My Lai, you must know something about what happens in America. You must understand Fort Lewis, Washington. You must understand a thing called basic training. A college graduate in May of 1968, I was at Fort Lewis in mid-August. One hundred of us came. We watched one another’s hair fall, we learned the word “sir,” we learned to react to “To duh rear, HARCHI!” Above us the sixty-mile-distant mountain stood to the sky, white and cold. The mountain was Rainier; it stood for freedom.
I made a friend, Erik, and together he and I stumbled through the first months of army life.
I was not looking for friendship at Fort Lewis. The people were boors. Trainees and drill sergeants and officers, no difference in kind. In that jungle of robots there could be no hope of finding friendship; no one could understand the brutality of the place. I did not want a friend, that was how it stood in the end. If the savages had captured me, they would not drag me into compatibility with their kind. Laughing and talking of hometowns and drag races and twin-cammed racing engines—all this was for the others. I did not like them, and there was no reason to like them. For the other trainees, it came too easy. They did more than adjust well; they thrived on basic training, thinking they were becoming men, joking at the bullyism, getting the drill sergeants to joke along with them. I held my own, not a whisper more. I hated the trainees even more than the captors. But I hated them all. Passionate, sad, desperate hate. I learned to march, but I learned alone. I gaped at the neat package of stupidity and arrogance at Fort Lewis. I was superior. I made no apologies for believing it. Without sympathy or compassion, I instructed my intellect and eyes: Ignore the horde. I kept vigil against intrusion into my private life. I shunned the herd.
I mouthed the words, shaping my lips and tongue just so, perfect deception. But no noise came out. The failure to bellow “Yes, Drill Sergeant!” was a fist in the bastard’s face. A point for the soul. Standing in formation after chow, I learned to smoke. It was a private pleasure. I concentrated on my lungs and taste buds and hands and thoughts.
I maintained silence.
I thought about a girl. After thinking, she became a woman, only months too late. I spent time comparing her hair to the color of sand just at dusk. That sort of thing. I counted the number of soldiers I would trade for her. I memorized. I memorized details of her smell. I memorized her letters, whole letters. Memorizing was a way to remember and a way to forget, a way to remain a stranger, only a visitor at Fort Lewis. I memorized a poem she sent me. It was a poem by Auden, and marching for shots and haircuts and clothing issue, I recited the poem, forging Auden’s words with thoughts I pretended to be hers. I lied about her, pretending that she wrote the poem herself, for me. I compared her to characters out of books by Hemingway and Maugham. In her letters she claimed I created her out of the mind. The mind, she said, can make wonderful changes in the real stuff. So I hid from the drill sergeants, turned my back on the barracks, and wrote back to her.
I thought a little about Canada. I thought about refusing to carry a rifle.
I grew tired of independence.
One evening I asked Erik what he was reading. His shoes were shined, and he had his footlocker straight, and with half an hour before lights out, he was on his back looking at a book. Erik. Skinny, a deep voice, dressed in olive drab, calm. He said it was The Mint. “T.E. Lawrence. You know—Lawrence of Arabia. He went through crap like this. Basic training. It’s a sort of how-to-do-it book.” He said he was just paging through it, that he’d read the whole thing before, and he gave it to me. With The Mint I became a soldier, knew I was a soldier. I succumbed. Without a backward glance at privacy, I gave in to soldiering. I took on a friend, betraying in a sense my wonderful suffering.
Erik talked about poetry and philosophy and travel. But he talked about soldiering, too. We formed a coalition. It was mostly a coalition against the army, but we aimed also at the other trainees. The idea, loosely, was to preserve ourselves. It was a two-man war of survival, and we fought like guerrillas, jabbing in the lance, drawing a trickle of army blood, running like rabbits. We hid in the masses. Right under their bloodshot eyes. We exposed them, even if they were blind and deaf to it. We’d let them die of anemia, a little blood at a time. It was a war of resistance; the objective was to save our souls. Sometimes it meant hiding the remnants of conscience and consciousness behind battle cries, pretended servility, bare, clench-fisted obedience. Our private conversations were the cornerstone of the resistance, perhaps because talking about basic training in careful, honest words was by itself an insult to army education. Simply to think and talk and try to understand was evidence that we were not cattle or machines.
Erik pretended sometimes that he lacked the fundamental courage of the men of poetry and philosophy whom he read during the first nights at Fort Lewis.
“I was in Denmark when they drafted me. I did not want to come back. I wanted to become a European and write some books. There was even a chance for romance over there. But I come from a small town, my parents know everyone, and I couldn’t hurt and embarrass them. And, of course, I was afraid.”
Perhaps it was fear and perhaps it was good sense. Anyway, Erik and I rarely brought our war into the offensive stage, and when we were so stupid as to try, we were massacred like mice. One morning Erik cornered the company drill sergeant, a man named Blyton, and demanded an appointment, a private talk. Blyton hustled Erik through a door.
Erik informed him of his opposition to the Vietnam war. Erik explained that he believed the war was without just reason, that life ought not to be forfeited unless certain and fundamental principles are at stake, and not unless those principles stand in certain danger.
Erik did not talk to me about the episode for a week
or more. And when he did talk, he only said that Blyton laughed at him and then yelled and called him a coward.
“He said I was a pansy. It’s hard to argue, I suppose. I’m not just intellectually opposed to violence, I’m absolutely frightened by it. It’s impossible to separate in my mind the gut fear from pure reason. I’m really afraid that all the hard, sober arguments I have against this war are nothing but an intellectual adjustment to my horror at the thought of bleeding to death in some rice paddy.”
Blyton did not forget Erik, and we had to take the guerrilla war to the mountain for a while. We were good boys, good soldiers. We assumed a tranquil mediocrity. We returned to our detached, personal struggle.
We found a private place to talk, out behind the barracks. There was a log there. It was twice the thickness of an ordinary telephone pole and perhaps a fourth its length, and on an afternoon in September Erik and I were sitting on that log, polishing boots, cleaning our M-14s and talking poetry. It was a fine log, and useful. We used it for a podium and as a soapbox. It was a confessional and a shoeshine stand. It was scarred. A hundred waves of men had passed through the training company before us; no reason to doubt that a hundred waves would follow.
On that September afternoon Erik smeared black polish onto the log, marking it with our presence, and absently he rubbed at the stain, talking about poems. He explained (and he’ll forgive my imprecise memory as I quote him now): “Frost, by just about any standard, is the finest of a good bunch of American poets. People who deprecate American poetry need to return to Robert Frost. Then, as I rank them—let’s see—Marianne Moore and Robinson. And if you count Pound as an American, he has written the truest of poems. For all his mistakes, despite his wartime words on the radio, that man sees through ideology like you and I look through glass. If you don’t believe, just listen.”
Erik became Ezra Pound. Seriously, slowly, he recited a portion of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”
These fought in any case,
and some believing,
