Dad's Maybe Book

by Tim O'Brien

  Is violence practical? It’s obvious, isn’t it? Behold the tranquility and democracy and neighborliness and justice and religious tolerance and civility and concord and quiet streets of the Middle East. Impressive, yes? All this was accomplished after only a decade and a half of people killing people. Fifty years ago, this was called “light at the end of the tunnel.”

  If you become a father one day, Timmy and Tad, and if you support a war, encourage your son and daughter to shoulder a weapon and take their chances in battle. Better yet, insist. Don’t tuck them away at Iowa State.

  If you support a war, Tad, stop bitching about your tax bill. You asked for it. You begged for it. Last night at the Rotary Club, your rhetoric got expensive.

  And Timmy: if you support a war in the present day and age, it would not hurt to know the actual differences between Shia and Sunni Muslims. It would not hurt to locate Iraq on a map.

  If you despise those who publicly object to wars, you despise Abraham Lincoln, who publicly and firmly objected to the Mexican-American War.

  Think this over, Timmy, and then give me your best answer: If it is morally okay for your country to torture its prisoners of war, is it therefore morally okay for your country’s enemies to do the same to our captured troops?

  And you, Tad: If it is morally okay to target and assassinate leaders of al-Qaeda and ISIS, is it therefore morally okay for al-Qaeda and ISIS to target and assassinate our own leaders?

  Also, if it is morally okay to put on public display the corpses of Saddam Hussein’s sons, is it therefore morally okay for our enemies to put on public display the corpses of America’s sons and daughters?

  Is not war the large-scale equivalent of one man saying to another man: “I am so civilized, and you are so barbaric—I am so virtuous, and you are so evil—I am so God-loving, and you are so devilish—I am so rational, and you are so irrational—I am so right, and you are so wrong—that I am going to kill you”?

  In the case of Vietnam, 3 million people died, and last month at a ritzy private high school, I was asked by a perplexed young student, soberly and earnestly, “Who won?”

  Three million dead people, and I have been quizzed, over and over and over, in colleges, in big-city auditoriums: “What was it all about?”

  Three million dead people, and how many of us think about Vietnam at all?

  And who wakes up each day and thinks, “Thank God for the Vietnam War”? Does anyone? And if we don’t wake up thanking God for the Vietnam War, why all the dead people?

  And who really caresabout the war dead other than those who loved them?

  Who wails over the 20,000 dead in the Ragamuffin War?

  Who grieves for—or who celebrates—the estimated 30 million dead during the Mongol conquests?

  Who gives a passing thought to the 25 million dead during the Qing conquest of the Ming Empire?

  Who has even heard of the Taiping Rebellion and its estimated 20 million dead?

  For that matter, who knows a single objective fact about the Dungan Revolt (around 8 million dead), the Reconquista (5 million dead), the An Lushan Rebellion (13 million to 36 million dead), the Huguenot Wars (about 2.8 million dead), the Moorish Wars (about 3 million dead), the Yellow Turban Rebellion (about 4.5 million dead), the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (800,000 dead), the Second Sudanese Civil War (1 million to 2 million dead), the Panthay Rebellion (890,000 to 1 million dead), the Paraguayan War (300,000 to 1.2 million dead), the Cimbrian War (410,000 to 850,000 dead), or the Kitos War (440,000 dead)?

  If we know nothing about these and other wars, how can we care? And if we, the inheritors, cannot care, what is the lasting moral outcome of an estimated 488 million wartime deaths over the recorded history of our planet?

  Outrage, Timmy and Tad, is ferocious caring. But caring comes hard for all of us. We go icy inside. We accept the murderous daily headlines. Out of fatigue, perhaps, we abandon our own humanity. We offer a quick “Thank you for your service” and then hustle back to the Packers game or to Grand Theft Auto.

  My hope for you, Timmy and Tad, is a life of outrage.

  We will resume our lesson tomorrow, perhaps discussing a single episode from a single war—maybe the Bataan Death March, maybe the battles of Lexington and Concord. Afterward, we will continue to contemplate the topic of outrage for what remains of my life with you.

  34

  Home School

  Today, Tad and Timmy, we will consider a tiny slice of your country’s history, a single night followed by a single long day. We will do so in considerable detail. I do not apologize for this, because history is detail, not swift synopsis, and because when it comes to people killing other people, the devil lives within and feasts upon the dirty details. Also, when the Fourth of July rolls around, I want you to know a little something about what it is you are celebrating and at what cost your celebration was made possible. People died so you could watch the parades go by, so you could run through the dark with your sparklers sparkling, and so you could ooh and aah at the night sky opening up with color. Finally, history is not only a record of other human lives, but it is also a record of your own lives, Timmy and Tad, because you were conceived in history and dwell in history and will one day return to history. Please focus. It’s a good story. And there will be a bit of homework once we have concluded.

  Here we go—

  * * *

  Around nine o’clock on the cool, starry night of April 18, 1775, some 700 British grenadiers and light-infantry troops were roused from their encampments on Boston Common, Boston Neck, and the warehouse barracks near Long Wharf. Groggy and half asleep, many of the men with no sleep at all, twenty-one companies of redcoats found themselves tramping through the town’s narrow streets to an assembly point on a small beach at the foot of the common.

  Mutterings and complaints filled the chilly dark. Why so much secrecy? Why the late hour? Why couldn’t the king’s army ever do things in a plain, straightforward way?

  At about ten o’clock, under a nearly full moon, the men began boarding twenty longboats that had been brought to shore from war vessels anchored nearby. A detachment of British sailors lashed the boats together and began rowing the troops across the Charles River basin to a swampy landing area at Lechmere Point in East Cambridge. The crossing was a bungle from the start. Insufficient boats were on hand, which required a tedious shuttle operation, each boat making the mile-long passage and then returning to the Boston shore to pick up more troops.

  Among the soldiers, as always, there was surely grumbling. The military’s centuries-old clusterfuck had taken hold. Units that had been separated during the landings now had to be located and reassembled. Provisions had to be loaded aboard longboats, ferried to the Cambridge shore, and handed out to the men.

  Altogether, the crossing ate up nearly three hours. By one o’clock in the morning, after all their troubles, the British regulars had traveled barely a cannon shot’s distance from their encampments back in Boston.

  And then, typically enough, things went from bad to miserable. Moving out into the dark, the column followed a dirt road that occasionally dipped down into marshes and tidal inlets. Already cold and weary, the troops found themselves wading through icy, thigh-deep waters, struggling under sixty pounds of gear—muskets and ammunition and haversacks and bayonets and woolen coats and cooking utensils and water bottles and rations.

  It was approaching two in the morning. The twenty-mile march to Concord had just started.

  * * *

  Some things never change.

  Close my eyes and I’m there again: an evening in early May of 1969.

  The foxholes had been dug, the trip flares and claymores were out, and we were watching the last sparks of twilight do magic over the mountains to the west. It had been a difficult day. The usual bullshit—rice paddies and sullen villages—and all we wanted now was a decent night’s sleep.

  Except this was a funhouse called Vietnam.

  At full dark, around 2100 hours, Alpha
Company received orders to saddle up for a search-and-destroy operation in a string of villages along the South China Sea, about nine or ten kilometers from our night encampment. We were already zeroed out on sleep. Now we would be getting less than none at all.

  Quietly, in the spongy dark, we went through the familiar rituals. Checking weapons. Strapping on the rucksacks and ammo and canteens and flares and grenades and helmets and mess kits and radios and numerous other odds and ends.

  The weight was enormous. And, of course, there was the war, too, which had its own mass and density. I had been in-country only a couple of months, but Vietnam was already a stone in my stomach. I hated the place. I hated myself for being there. Beyond that, as a purely practical problem, we were caught up in a confusing and deadly civil struggle. No front, no rear, no clear battle lines, no clear military purpose, no way to distinguish friend from foe. The enemy was everywhere and nowhere, vanishing into tunnels and popping up behind us and then sliding away again. We didn’t know the language. We didn’t know the culture. We didn’t know where we were at any given time or why we were there.

  Now, saddled up for a night march, Alpha Company began plodding east into the Vietnam dark, at times following a narrow clay trail, other times sloshing through thick, knee-deep rice paddies. Nearly three hours passed. I remember sticky wet heat, mosquitoes everywhere, a leaden numbness in my feet and thighs. Humping, we called it, which meant the endless march, soldiering with our legs. This was the infantry, now and always, the legions of Caesar and the columns of Napoleon, one step and then another and then another.

  At one point, on the far side of midnight, we skirted a small sleeping village. Orders were passed down to keep quiet—the place was bad news, the VC owned it. I remember one of my buddies glancing over his shoulder at me, making a funny face, as if to say, “What’s not bad news?”

  It took a half hour or more to maneuver around the tiny ville. I remember a dog barking, a gauzy yellow moon, and how oppressive the night was.

  For a long, empty time, we kept slogging on. I was terrified, of course, but in another sense, nothing felt real. Fatigue dulled the senses. A strange fogginess seemed to swirl through my thoughts, except my thoughts were not really thoughts, just scraps of thought. Moving slowly, trying for silence, we trudged on toward the South China Sea, a company of donkeys, stiff and mechanical and dumb.

  * * *

  The expedition of 700 British troops passed quietly through parts of what is now Somerville, waded across Willis Creek toward Union Square, and then turned almost straight north toward Cambridge. At Massachusetts Avenue the column swiveled right and followed the road in a northwesterly direction into present-day Arlington. The town (then called Menotomy) had long been asleep. Here and there a few candles burned in houses along the road.

  It was now close to three-thirty in the morning. Counting the river passage and several long waits, the weary troops had been on the move for more than six hours. Most had been without sleep for nearly a full day. Still, they kept grinding forward, loaded down with drums and flags and leather boots and ammunition pouches and ten-pound firelocks.

  By now rumors of their destination had trickled from man to man: a prosperous little farming town called Concord. The unit’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, had been issued orders to proceed “with the utmost expedition and secrecy to Concord, where you will seize and destroy all artillery, ammunition, provisions, tents, small arms, and all military stores whatever.” Oddly, though, Smith’s orders did not include stipulations regarding the possibility of armed resistance, despite signs that hostilities might break out at any moment. Earlier sorties into the countryside had led to confrontations with angry colonists, each side posturing and baiting the other, and for weeks there had been compelling evidence that the Provincial Congress was preparing for outright war.

  Almost certainly, then, Colonel Smith had at least discussed the possibility of resistance with his superior in Boston, General Thomas Gage, the man responsible for conceiving the plan of action for April 19. Gage himself had predicted the details of an armed rebel response. “Should hostilities unhappily commence,” he wrote, “the first opposition would be irregular, impetuous, and incessant from the numerous Bodys that would swarm to the place of action, and all actuated by an enthusiasm wild and ungovernable.”

  The 700 British regulars had to be wound tight as they tramped through the dark toward Concord. Up ahead, a few warning shots rang out. Later, outside Menotomy, a British patrol trotted up on horseback to report that some 500 armed colonists had assembled on the green at Lexington. A dispatch rider named Paul Revere had been captured. Prudently, Colonel Smith sent back a message to Boston requesting reinforcements from General Gage—a message that would later save his force from annihilation.

  In fact, only seventy-five to eighty colonists were waiting at Lexington, but the exaggerated report did not reassure the oncoming British troops. For months, they had been garrisoned in Boston under conditions of growing unrest and hostility. The port had been shut down to commerce; rebel leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock had gone into hiding; the self-declared Provincial Congress had formed a Committee of Safety with the power to “alarm” and “muster” local militia. More ominous yet, the rebel Congress had recently authorized the creation of a regular army, organized into formal regiments and battalions.

  The ordinary soldier is not stupid. He may be illiterate, but he knows danger when he sees it.

  Foot-weary and back-weary, the twenty-one companies of British regulars had every reason to feel edgy as the first ripples of sunrise spilled out to the east. The men were largely untested in battle. Some had been on the North American continent only three months, others six or seven months. They did not know the terrain, or the back roads, or the stone walls, or the paths across pastureland, or the likely sites of ambush. They had no artillery support and no means of resupply. They carried only thirty-six rounds of ammunition apiece. Worse yet, the 700-man column was composed of units that had never operated together. Companies had been drawn willy-nilly from various regiments, a patchwork led by officers with unfamiliar habits and routines.

  Around five in the morning, with dawn spreading out fast, the column approached the outskirts of Lexington. Six light-infantry companies were sent ahead under the command of Major John Pitcairn.

  On the town’s green some seventy-five or eighty colonial militiamen waited.

  At that point, as the British advanced, a kind of gravity took command—exhaustion and frayed nerves. As always, time collapsed and history squeezed itself into an instant.

  * * *

  In 1970, six months after returning from Vietnam, I arrived in Cambridge to begin graduate studies at Harvard University. In many ways, the war was still with me. Any sudden noise would fill my belly with acid. Other times, without much reason, I’d feel the need for a nice deep foxhole, a place where I could curl up and close my eyes and wait for forgetfulness.

  Talking about the war just wasn’t possible. I could speak, yes, but I couldn’t say anything. I did not know where to start or where to stop or which story to tell. And who wanted to hear about it anyway?

  At some point during those first weeks in Cambridge, I happened upon a map tracing the British route from Boston to Concord almost two hundred years earlier. The sheer distance startled me: some forty miles there and back. I remember showing the map to a friend, trying to explain how dreadful that long march must have been, just the labor alone, and how mere mileage did not take into account all the detours and countermarches and flanking movements, nor the cold swamps at Lechmere Point, nor the fear, nor the feel of a ten-pound firelock in your hands, nor the weight on your back and shoulders and spine, nor the spiritual burdens, nor the drudgery, nor the spookiness of a march through Indian country, nor the inarticulate drone of your mortality.

  My friend gave me a pleasant nod, but he didn’t seem to feel what I was feeling. It was asking too much.

  In a
backdoor way, no doubt, I was trying to say something about my own war, and about the ordeal of foot soldiers in any war. Even without much detailed knowledge, I identified with those British troops. The parallels seemed obvious. A civil war. Faulty intelligence. An enemy without uniforms. A distrustful, often hostile rural population. A powerful world-class army blundering through unfamiliar terrain. A myth of invincibility. Immense resources of wealth and firepower that somehow never added up to a happy ending. A sense of bewilderment and dislocation. Cultural haughtiness. Overconfidence gone sour. Smugness replaced by terror. A tough, homespun, ragtag enemy that for years had been grossly underestimated. Growing frustration and rage at guerrilla tactics—the constant sniping, the deadly little ambushes.

  Down inside, in some deeply human way, I had more in common with those long-dead redcoats than with the living men and women all around me. I felt like a member of a mysterious old brotherhood—all that shared knowledge and shared terror. I could hear British boots on the road. I could hear my own boots. The circumstances were not identical, of course, but identical was not the point. The point was how much I had in common with 700 men tramping through the dark two hundred years ago. We were walking targets. We were conspicuous in our fine uniforms. We kept humping. We endured it all. And so somewhere in my stomach, or in my dreams, Vietnam and Battle Road intersected and began to merge into a single ghostly blur across history.