If I Die in a Combat Zone

by Tim O'Brien

  At dusk, the captain and his lieutenants conferred, finally deciding to take some prisoners for the night. “Where there’s an AK-47, there’s Charlie,” the captain said. “Chances are he’s here right now, living in the ville. And chances are he’s got friends.”

  The lieutenants went into a hut and pulled out three old men. It was just at dusk, the sun gone. The lieutenants wrapped rope around the prisoners’ wrists, then tied more rope around their ankles. They stood the three old men against three saplings and tied the men fast to the trees. “Better gag them,” one of the lieutenants said. So they stuffed wet rags into their months. When all this was done, it was night.

  “Okay, that’s good,” the captain said. “Charlie won’t attack tonight. We’ve got Poppa-san.”

  The night was clear. We ate C rations and drank some beer. Then the guard started, the ritual come alive from our pagan past—Thucydides and Polybius and Julius Caesar, tales of encampment, tales of night terror—the long silent stare into an opaque shell of shadows and dark. Three men to a foxhole: two asleep and one awake. No smoking: The enemy will see the light and blow your lungs out. Stay alert: Courts-martial for those dozing on guard. All the rules passed down from ancient warfare, the lessons of dead men.

  Twice that night I was on radio-watch, once at midnight and again near morning. I sat by the radio and watched the three men strapped to their saplings. They sagged, trying to sleep. One of them, the oldest, was completely limp, bending the little tree sharply to the ground, supported against it by a rope around his belly and another around his wrists. He looked like pictures of Ho Chi Minh. A fine pointed beard, a long face, wide and broadly set eyes covered with drooping lids.

  Bates, one of my good friends in the company, came over to sit with me. “It’s appalling, isn’t it? Making these old duffers dangle there all night.”

  “At least no one beat on them,” I said. “I sort of expected it when the Kid found the AK-47.”

  “Still, what good will it do?” Bates said. “The old guys aren’t going to talk. They talk to us, tell us where the rifle came from, and ol’ Charlie will get to them. They don’t talk and our interrogation teams rough them up. Wait till tomorrow, that’s what will happen. I’d like to cut them loose. Right now.”

  “Maybe nothing will happen. If we aren’t hit tonight, maybe we’ll just let the old men go free.”

  Bates grunted. “This is war, my friend. You don’t find a weapon and just walk away.”

  He went to sleep, leaving me with the radio and the three old men. They were only a few feet away, hanging to their saplings like the men at Golgotha. I went to the oldest of them and pulled his gag out and let him drink from my canteen. He didn’t look at me. When he was through with his drinking, he opened his mouth wide for me and I tucked the rag inside. Then he opened his eyes and nodded and I patted him on the shoulder. The other two were sleeping, and I let them sleep.

  In the morning one of the lieutenants beat on the old men. Alpha’s Vietnamese scout shouted at them, whipping them in the legs with a long stick, whipping them across their thin, bony shins, screaming at them, trying to get them to say where the rifle came from, whipping the old men and making long cuts into their ankles. One of the old men, not the oldest, whimpered; none of them talked.

  Then we released them and went on our way.

  Sixteen

  Wise Endurance

  Captain Johansen watched the soldiers raise their bottles of beer to their mouths, drinking to the end of the day, another sunrise and finally another red line at the edge of the sky where the sun was disappearing. Johansen was separated from his soldiers by a deadfall canyon of character and temperament. They were there and he was here. He was quite alone, resting against his poncho and pack, his face at rest, his eyes relaxed against the coming of dark. He had no companions. He was about a week away from leaving command of Alpha Company, and a fine eight-hour job was ready for him in the rear.

  Captain Johansen had watched the men for an hour. They had dug foxholes, shallow slices out of the hard clay; then they’d squirted mosquito repellent over themselves, spread their sleeping gear near their holes, and now they were drinking beer. The soldiers were happy. No enemy, no blood for over a week, nothing but night, then day.

  “I’d rather be brave,” he suddenly said to me. “I’d rather be brave than almost anything. How does that strike you?”

  “It’s nothing to laugh at, sir.”

  “What about yourself?”

  “Sometimes I look back at those days around My Lai, sir, and I wish I would have acted better, more bravely. I did my best, though. But I’ll think about it.”

  A month before, on a blistering day, Johansen had charged a Viet Cong soldier. He’d killed him at chest-to-chest range, more or less, first throwing a grenade, then running flat out across a paddy, up to the Viet Cong’s ditch, then shooting him to death. With the steady, blood-headed intensity of Sir Lancelot, Captain Johansen was brave. It was strange that he thought about it at all.

  But I thought about it. Arizona, the dead kid I always remember first, died on the same day that Johansen’s Viet Cong died. Arizona bulled out across a flat piece of land, just like the captain, and I only remember his long limp body in the grass. It’s the charge, the light brigade with only one man, that is the first thing to think about when thinking about courage. People who do it are remembered as brave, win or lose. They are heroes forever. It seems like courage, the charge.

  When I was a kid in eighth grade and not at all concerned about being brave except as a way to seem to other people, usually a pretty girl, I was pushed out of line while we were waiting for the school bus. The kid who did it was big. He had a flat-top haircut and freckles and a grin that meant he could massacre me if it came to that. Being big with words, I told him to go piss on the principal’s desk, and he started shoving, the stiff-finger-on-the-chest technique, backing me up with little spurts of the wrist. Honor was clearly at stake. I was in the right and he was the kind of human being I detest most, a perfect bully. So I shoved back, and there was a little scuffle, then the bus came. Before I got off—rather, just as I was stepping out in front of my house—he hollered out for everyone to hear that there would be a fight the next Monday. It was Friday. I had three nights to ponder the prospect. There was no doubt about the outcome. There wasn’t a chance. On Monday I went to the bus, being inconspicuous but not too inconspicuous; getting beat was a trifle better than hiding. I hoped he’d forgotten. Finally he fought me, and we danced around on the ice in front of the bicycle rack. I bobbed like hell, and the enemy fell twice, not that I ever hit him, and by all accounts it ended in a draw.

  But at a place east of My Lai, within smell of the South China Sea, bullets seemed aimed straight at you.

  Isolated, a stretch of meadow, the sound going into the air, through the air, right at your head, you writhe like a man suddenly waking in the middle of a heart transplant, the old heart out, the new one poised somewhere unseen in the enemy’s hands. The pain, even with the ether or sodium chloride, explodes in the empty cavity, and the terror is in waiting for the cavity to be filled, for life to start pumping and throbbing again.

  You whimper, low or screeching, and it doesn’t start anywhere. The throat does the pleading for you, taking the heart’s place, the soul gone. Numbness. Dumbness. No thoughts.

  I was not at My Lai when the massacre occurred. I was in the paddies and sleeping in the clay, with Johansen and Arizona and Alpha Company, a year and more later. But if a man can squirm in a meadow, he can shoot children. Neither are examples of courage.

  “You’re a sensitive guy,” Johansen said. “Go get me a beer from one of those soldiers, will you?” I fetched a beer and sat with the captain. “You don’t have to carry the radio for me, you know. It’s a good shot, the antenna sticking up. You’ve done a good job, don’t get me wrong, I knew you’d do a good job first time I saw you. But it’s easy to get shot walking with me. Officers are favorite targets. The r
adio antenna’s a good target, you know. VC knows damn well there’s an officer around, so they shoot at it. And … well, you’re a sensitive guy, like I said. Some guys are just numb to death.”

  “I’d just as soon go on,” I said.

  Johansen told me not to forget to call situation reports back to headquarters. He went off and checked the positions.

  Courage is nothing to laugh at, not if it is proper courage and exercised by men who know what they do is proper. Proper courage is wise courage. It’s acting wisely, acting wisely when fear would have a man act otherwise. It is the endurance of the soul in spite of fear—wisely. Plato, I recalled, wrote something like that. In the dialogue called Laches:

  SOCRATES: And now, Laches, do you try and tell me in like manner, What is that common quality which is called courage, and which includes all the various uses of the term when applied both to pleasure and pain, and in all the cases to which I was just referring?

  LACHES: I should say that courage is a sort of endurance of the soul, if I am to speak of the universal nature which pervades them all.

  SOCRATES: But that is what we must do if we are to answer our own question. And yet I cannot say that every kind of endurance is, in my opinion, to be deemed courage. Hear my reason. I am sure, Laches, that you would consider courage to be a very noble quality.

  LACHES: Most noble, certainly.

  SOCRATES: And you would say that a wise endurance is also good and noble?

  LACHES: Very noble.

  SOCRATES: But what would you say of a foolish endurance? Is not that, on the other hand, to be regarded as evil and hurtful?

  LACHES: True.…

  SOCRATES: Then, according to you, only the wise endurance is courage?

  LACHES: It seems so.

  What, then, under the dispassionate moon of Vietnam, in the birdless, insectless silence—what, then, is wise endurance? Despising bullyism as I did, thinking the war wrong from the beginning—even in tenth grade, writing a term paper on a war I never believed I would have to fight—I had endured. I’d stayed on through basic training, watching the fat kid named Kline shivering in fear, thrusting my blade into the rubber tires at the bayonet range, scoring expert with the M-16. I’d endured through advanced infantry training, with the rest of the draftees. I’d planned to run away, to slip across the border in the dead of night. I’d planned for two months, drawing maps and researching at the Fort Lewis library, learning all the terrible details about plane fares to Sweden, muffling my voice over the telephone, making a lie to my parents to get them to send my passport and health record. I’d almost not endured.

  But was the endurance, the final midnight walk over the tarred runway at Fort Lewis and up into the plane, was it wise? There is the phrase: courage of conviction. Doubtless, I thought, conviction can be right or wrong. But I had reasons to oppose the war in Vietnam. The reasons could be murmured like the Psalms on a cold-moon Vietnam night: Kill and fight only for certain causes; certain causes somehow involve self-evident truths; Hitler’s blitzkrieg, the attack on Pearl Harbor, these were somehow self-evident grounds for using force, just as bullyism will, in the end, call for force; but the war in Vietnam drifted in and out of human lives, taking them or sparing them like a headless, berserk taxi hack, without evident cause, a war fought for uncertain reasons.

  The conviction seemed right. And, if right, was my apparent courage in enduring merely a well-disguised cowardice? When my father wrote that at least his son was discovering how much he could take and still go on, was he ignoring his son’s failure to utter a dramatic and certain and courageous no to the war? Was his son a fool? A sheep being stripped of wool that is his by right?

  One day Alpha Company was strung out in a long line, walking from one village near Pinkville to another. Some boys were herding cows in a free-fire zone. They were not supposed to be there: legal targets for our machine guns and M-16s. We fired at them, cows and boys together, the whole company, or nearly all of it, like target practice at Fort Lewis. The boys escaped, but one cow stood its ground. Bullets struck its flanks, exploding globs of flesh, boring into its belly. The cow stood parallel to the soldiers, a wonderful profile. It looked away, in a single direction, and it did not move. I did not shoot, but I did endure, without protest, except to ask the man in front of me why he was shooting and smiling.

  Alpha Company had a bad time near the My Lais. Mines were the worst, every size and kind of mine. Toe poppers, Bouncing Betties, booby-trapped artillery and mortar rounds and hand grenades. Slocum, Smith, Easton, Dunn, Chip, Tom—all those soldiers walked on and on and on, enduring the terror, waiting, and the mines finally got them. Were they wise to keep walking? The alternative, looking back and listening to the radio and seeing Captain Johansen finish his rounds and return to his poncho, the alternative, I thought, was to sit on a single splotch of earth and silently wait for the war to end.

  “Will you be glad to get to the rear, sir?”

  “Sure,” he said, grinning and with a shrug. “I’ll miss the company. But I don’t suppose I’ll miss the war much.”

  “I don’t know how you can be so dispassionate. God, I’d be hiding in my foxhole, a mile into the ground, just waiting for a chopper to take me out of here.”

  Captain Johansen rolled up in a poncho; he lay on his side and seemed to go to sleep.

  Whatever it is, soldiering in a war is something that makes a fellow think about courage, makes a man wonder what it is and if he has it. Some say Ernest Hemingway was obsessed by the need to show bravery in battle. It started, they say, somewhere in World War I and ended when he passed his final test in Idaho. If the man was obsessed with the notion of courage, that was a fault. But, reading Hemingway’s war journalism and his war stories, you get the sense that he was simply concerned about bravery, hence about cowardice, and that seems a virtue, a sublime and profound concern that few men have. For courage, according to Plato, is one of the four parts of virtue. It is there with temperance, justice, and wisdom, and all parts are necessary to make the sublime human being. In fact, Plato says, men without courage are men without temperance, justice, or wisdom, just as without wisdom men are not truly courageous. Men must know what they do is courageous, they must know it is right, and that kind of knowledge is wisdom and nothing else. Which is why I know few brave men. Either they are stupid and do not know what is right. Or they know what is right and cannot bring themselves to do it. Or they know what is right and do it, but do not feel and understand the fear that must be overcome. It takes a special man.

  Courage is more than the charge.

  More than dying or suffering the loss of a love in silence or being gallant.

  It is temperament and, more, wisdom. Was the cow, standing immobile and passive, more courageous than the Vietnamese boys who ran like rabbits from Alpha Company’s barrage? Hardly. Cows are very stupid.

  Most soldiers in Alpha Company did not think about human courage. There were malingerers in Alpha Company. Men who cared little about bravery. “Shit, man, the trick of being in the Nam is gettin’ out of the Nam. And I don’t mean gettin’ out in a plastic body bag. I mean gettin’ out alive, so my girl can grab me so I’ll know it.” The malingerers manufactured some of the best, most persuasive ailments ever, some good enough to fool a skeptical high school nurse.

  When we walked through the sultry villes and sluggish, sullen land called Pinkville, the mass of men in Alpha Company talked little about dying. To talk about it was bad luck, the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. Death was taboo. The word for getting killed was “wasted.” When you hit a Bouncing Betty and it blows you to bits, you get wasted. Fear was taboo. It could be mentioned, of course, but it had to be accompanied with a shrug and a grin and obvious resignation. All this took the meaning out of courage. We could not gaze straight at fear and dying, not, at least, while out in the field, and so there was no way to face the question.

  “You don’t talk about being a hero, with a star pinned on your shirt and feeling all
puffed up.” The soldier couldn’t understand when I asked him about the day he ran from his foxhole, through enemy fire, to wrap useless cloth around a dying soldier’s chest. “I reacted, I guess. I just did it.”

  “Did it seem the right thing to do?”

  “No,” Doc said. “Not right, not wrong either.”

  “Did you think you might be shot?”

  “Yes. I guess I did. Maybe not. When someone hollers for the medic, if you’re a medic you run toward the shout. That’s it, I guess.”

  “But isn’t there the feeling you might die?”

  Doc had his legs crossed and was leaning over a can of C rations. He seemed intent on them. “No. I won’t die over here.” He laughed. “Maybe I’ll never die. I just wondered why I didn’t feel anything hit me. Something should have hit me, there was so much firing. I sort of ran over, waiting for a kind of blast or punch in the back. My back always feels most exposed.”

  Before the war, my favorite heroes had been make-believe men. Alan Ladd of Shane, Captain Vere, Humphrey Bogart as the proprietor of Café d’Americain, Frederic Henry. Especially Frederic Henry. Henry was able to leave war, being good and brave enough at it, for real love, and although he missed the men of war, he did not miss the fear and killing. And Henry, like all my heroes, was not obsessed by courage; he knew it was only one part of virtue, that love and justice were other parts.

  To a man, my heroes before going to Vietnam were hard and realistic. To a man, they were removed from other men, able to climb above and gaze down at other men. Bogie in his office, looking down at roulette wheels and travelers. Vere, elevated; the Star, searching justice. Shane, loving the boy, detesting violence, looking down and saying good-bye aboard that stocky horse.