by Tim O'Brien
At a spot called Fiske Hill, still another rebel ambush ended with eight more British dead.
Low on ammunition, virtually surrounded by a mostly invisible enemy, the expedition was now in danger of annihilation. Discipline had collapsed. Troops began to break and run. A British ensign, John DeBerniere, would later write: “We at first kept our order and returned their fire as hot as we received it, but when we arrived within a mile of Lexington, our ammunition began to fail, and the light companies were so fatigued with flanking that they were scarce able to act, and a great number of wounded scarce able to get forward . . . A number of officers were also wounded, so that we began to run rather than retreat in order. We attempted to stop the men and form them two deep, but to no purpose, the confusion increased rather than lessened.”
Eventually, DeBerniere wrote, British officers were forced to threaten their own troops. “The officers got to the front and presented their bayonets, and told the men if they advanced they should die.”
By then, 25 British soldiers had died, dozens more were wounded, and organized resistance had almost entirely ceased. Worse, if worse can be imagined, 2,000 militiamen had converged on Lexington, with other fresh provincial units waiting along the road ahead. The unthinkable seemed minutes away—perhaps surrender, perhaps slaughter.
* * *
It’s odd how the mind subdues and sometimes erases horror. Now, after almost fifty years, not much remains of those terrible days in May 1969. My company commander bending over a dead soldier (or was he wounded?), wiping the man’s face with a towel. A lieutenant with a bundled corpse over his shoulder like a great sack of birdfeed. My own hands. A patch of rice paddy bubbling with machine-gun fire. The rest is a smudge of trails and tangled foliage and trees and red clay soil and land mines and snipers and death. I know what happened in a factual sort of way—the way other people know they attended kindergarten and learned to ride a bicycle—but it’s intellectual knowing, abstract knowing, not memory knowing. I do recall, though not vividly, that Alpha Company moved like sleepwalkers through chains of sullen, near-deserted villages, always shadowed by an invisible enemy. I know we took turns running across a bridge while under fire, but I don’t remember doingit, just the relief of making it across the finish line. I remember calling in numerous dust-offs, probably a dozen or more, but I don’t remember my voice or my words or where I was or who needed each dust-off or how I was able to speak at all. I can’t see much. I can’t feel much. Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does, attacking infection, poisoning those malignancies that would otherwise destroy us.
Still, it’s odd.
My own war doesn’t quite belong to me.
In a peculiar way, at this very instant, the ordeal of those British troops more than two centuries ago has an animate, living clarity that seems more authentic than my own experience. Maybe that’s what history is for. Maybe that’s why people started writing things down two thousand years ago. To remind us. To give us back our lives.
* * *
In Hollywood, a troop of cavalry would have galloped to the rescue. In Lexington, it was the appearance of almost a thousand fresh British troops under the command of Brigadier General Lord Hugh Percy.
Accompanied by two cannon, Percy’s brigade had marched out of Boston after receipt of Colonel Smith’s plea for reinforcements. It was a coincidence of history, almost a miracle, that Percy’s command arrived very near—or precisely at—the moment of collapse. An officer with Smith’s expedition would later write that without reinforcements “not one of us would have got into Boston again.”
Under Percy’s skilled direction, using cannon fire to keep the rebels at bay, the combined British force regrouped and began moving out of Lexington at about three in the afternoon. At that point, members of Smith’s expedition had been without sleep and on the move for eighteen hours, and as a consequence, even with fresh troops, the retreat was slow, laborious, and lethal. British lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie reported afterward that large numbers of armed colonists “were continually coming from all parts guided by the [gun]fire, and before the column had advanced a mile on the road, we were fired at from all quarters, but particularly from the houses on the roadside, and the adjacent stone walls. Several of the troops were killed and wounded in this way.”
In fact, Mackenzie understated things. The fighting soon became some of the most vicious of the day, with flanking companies racing through fields and backyards to dislodge rebel sharpshooters. Over the next four miles, the British suffered another sixteen casualties.
Everywhere, in the fields and woods and all along the road, provincial resistance remained disciplined and deadly. These were more than “embattled farmers,” and Lord Percy later went out of his way to debunk the condescending stereotype:
Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob, will find himself much mistaken. They have men amongst them who know very well what they are about, having been employed as Rangers [against] the Indians & Canadians . . . Nor are several of their men void of a spirit of enthusiasm, as we experienced yesterday, for many of them concealed themselves in houses, & advanced within 10 yards to fire at me & other officers, tho’ they were morally certain of being put to death themselves in an instant . . . For my part, I never believed, I confess, that they would have attacked the King’s troops, or have had the perseverance I found in them yesterday.
Respect for the enemy, however, was rare that afternoon. The militia’s tactics infuriated British officers and enlisted men. Colonel Francis Smith, whose command had faced annihilation, seemed almost petulant in his anger: “Notwithstanding the enemy’s numbers, they did not make one gallant attempt during so long an action, though our men were so very much fatigued, but kept under cover.”
The exhausted redcoats began taking revenge. One British witness called it “a fury of madness.”
Lieutenant Mackenzie would later write that many “houses were plundered by the soldiers, notwithstanding the efforts of the officers to prevent it.” And plunder was the least of it. Outrage exploded into murder. Mackenzie wrote that his men “were so enraged at suffering from an unseen enemy that they forced open many of the houses . . . and put to death all those found in them.” Another British account declared that redcoat units “committed every wanton wickedness that a brutal revenge could stimulate.” Four days after the battle, an officer issued a blistering indictment of his own troops: “On the road, in our route home, we found every house full of people, and the fences lined as before. Every house from which they fired was immediately forced, and EVERY SOUL IN THEM PUT TO DEATH. Horrible carnage! O Englishmen, to what depth of brutal degeneracy are ye fallen!”
Late in the afternoon of April 19, in the small village of Menotomy, the day’s savagery reached a point of almost incredible wildness. Thirty-five new rebel companies lay waiting for the British column, with armed militiamen arriving from Watertown, Malden, Norfolk, Dedham, Roxbury, Brookline, Weston, Danvers, Lynn, Beverly, Needham, Medford, and Menotomy itself. Altogether, some 4,000 provincial troops had taken up positions in the village and along the road ahead. Lieutenant John Barker, a member of Smith’s original expedition, reported that the redcoats were “obliged to force almost every house in the road . . . All that were found in the houses were put to death.” In one case, at the home of Jason Russell in Menotomy, British flanking units attacked a group of militiamen from the rear, trapping them inside, eventually killing eleven men—seven from Danvers alone. Jason Russell lay dead in his doorway, mutilated with almost a dozen bayonet wounds. Worse yet, colonists would later charge that British troops had begun executing prisoners of war. One captured militiaman named Dennison Wallis reported that, although he had escaped, three or four others “were butchered with savage barbarity.”
Plainly, war crimes were committed. A few days after the battle, General Thomas Gage acknowledged gross misconduct, issuing orders that the troops under his command immediately cease such behavior “
upon pain of death.”
To an extent, at least, British atrocities were born of astonishment that mere farmers and shopkeepers had the temerity to pick up their weapons and fight back. Professional hubris, mixed with a generous dose of cultural hubris, lay like a hard, deep foundation beneath the terrible events of that afternoon. Also, convenient forgetfulness was in play. After all, it was the British, not the colonists, who had done the first killing at Lexington. And it was the British, not the colonists, who had first marched, 700-strong, on Concord.
Clearly, though, the causes went deeper. It is easy to underestimate, and easy to ignore, the effects of raw fatigue: How exhaustion impairs intellectual and moral judgment. How eighteen hours of sleeplessness can erode the barrier between decency and brutality. How physical exertion can dull the conscience just as it does the body—eighteen hours of marching and running and jumping and bayoneting and humping sixty-pound packs and firing ten-pound weapons and carrying the wounded and then running again and jumping again and marching again. A man’s legs, if pressed hard enough, will tremble and fail, and so too, eventually, will the mechanisms that govern restraint. British witnesses, including Colonel Smith and Ensign DeBerniere, called explicit attention to fatigue as an ingredient in the day’s concoction of criminal butchery, and I will add my own testimony to theirs: exhaustion can turn the conscience to stone.
* * *
April 1775 slides into May 1969.
Time puts on a new uniform, revs up the firepower, and calls itself progress.
We were angry.
We were scared.
We threw cartons of milk at old men. We pistol-whipped prisoners and detainees. We tied people to saplings and beat on their shins with sticks. We shot chickens and pigs and water buffalo. We peed in village wells. We called in gunships and artillery, took cover, and watched villages fry. We—or too many of us—cut off noses and ears. We—or too many of us—called the enemy animals, and worse, and more or less believed it. Although to my knowledge Alpha Company never intentionally slaughtered the innocent, not face to face, we certainly and repetitively caused the innocent to die with our radios and code books, calling in jets loaded with napalm and bombs of many types and sizes. We certainly and repetitively sprayed automatic fire into hedgerows and villages without thought of the innocent who might receive our wrath. For us—or for too many of us—there were no innocent. “If it squawks and walks,” a friend said to me, “it’s a gook.”
Now, among the memories I bear is that of a village elder—a monk, I believe—carrying the body of a shot-dead little girl into Alpha’s night perimeter. She had been killed by H&I fire, which was a nightly ritual, all of us firing out into the dark at nothing and at everything, firing blindly, hoping to “harass and interdict” an unseen phantom enemy.
A year before I arrived in Quang Ngai Province, in a village that Alpha Company knew well, a village called My Lai 4, our American predecessors had gunned down and otherwise put to death hundreds of unarmed civilians, including babies, including teenagers, including old and middle-aged and young women, including grandfathers and aunts and uncles. The soldiers who committed these crimes justified their actions very much as the British had done in 1775, often with precisely the same language—“hidden enemy,” “devils,” “savages”—and any historian who would claim that history is purely singular, that human behavior cannot be repetitive over the centuries, that the present cannot inform us of the past, or the past of the present, is an idiot or a demagogue. The events of 1775 and 1969 are not identical. But those events are similar in important causative, experiential, historical, and moral ways. A zoologist might cry out that a giraffe is not a zebra, but, cry out as he might, both are mammals, and both have flesh, and both can be eaten in a pinch. A zoologist who claims otherwise is not a starving zoologist.
So, yes, 1775 isn’t 1969, and Battle Road isn’t Vietnam. But for me, and for others who have seen war, the din of Bedlam and moral nullity echoes across the centuries.
* * *
Through the late afternoon, with darkness approaching, the British column made its way across the Menotomy River and down the long road toward Cambridge. Even with Percy’s reinforcements, ammunition was running low, and here and there bloody skirmishes broke out along the flanks. At a road junction outside Cambridge, with fresh militia units to his front, Percy ordered his beleaguered troops to turn left toward Charlestown. To Percy’s rear, a force of 3,000 militiamen kept up steady pressure, which slowed the retreat, while at the same time, to the east, other provincial units were arriving from as far north as Essex County. It was not until nearly seven in the evening that the column finally rounded Prospect Hill. Despite orders from Percy, and despite approaching nightfall and the threat of entrapment, British soldiers continued to force houses along the road, stopping to loot and plunder. Lieutenant John Barker wrote that his men “were so wild and irregular that there was no keeping them in any order . . . the plundering was shameful.”
Around eight in the evening, in deep twilight, the column straggled across the neck of land that connected the mainland to Charlestown. Defensive positions were established on Bunker Hill.
Moving slowly through the dark, British officers began the grim task of tallying up their casualties. Ensign Jeremy Lister, himself wounded in the arm, described a scene of almost hellish desolation: “A sergeant of the company came to me and informed me he had but 11 men and could not find any other officer of the company.” The final British casualty count, which was not complete until days later, came to an astonishing 16 percent: 73 dead, 174 wounded, and 26 missing. The great bulk of those casualties were suffered by Smith’s original 700-man expeditionary force, whose casualty rate probably exceeded 30 percent.
* * *
As one measure of the terrible violence on April 19, 1775, the butcher’s bill that day was similar to that inflicted on US forces in May 1969 at a place called Hamburger Hill in Vietnam, where 72 GIs died and 372 were wounded. However, the casualties at Hamburger Hill were incurred over ten days; the British absorbed their losses in under twenty-four hours. Moreover, British casualties fell one shot at a time, with muzzle-loaded musketry fire, while at Hamburger Hill the killing was done with modern automatic weapons, modern grenades, and modern mortars.
For the dead, of course, none of this matters.
And even for the living, both Vietnam and Battle Road have largely faded from collective memory, dissolving into a few sterile facts to be trotted out on Patriots’ Day and the Fourth of July. The horrors go unfelt. The death gurgles go unheard. Often, instead of sorrow, and instead of outrage at what one human being will do to another, the events of April 19, 1775, are now celebrated with a strange blend of cheery delight and solemn reverence, which in my recollection are not the emotions of terrified and dying men.
Names of the Alpha Company dead are preserved in marble.
Names of the British dead are not so well preserved.
Either way, a name in stone is not a man, and even if it were, stone finally crumbles and slides to the sea. In the end, what soldiers must share with all others is the anonymous oblivion of Black Hawk’s warriors, Kitchener’s brigades, the defenders of Troy, and the aging men of Alpha Company.
* * *
Homework
Tonight, Timmy and Tad, beginning at 9 p.m. sharp, you will embark with your mother on an eight-mile march from our front door to the outskirts of Manchaca, Texas, and then home again.
On account of your youth, your mother will not be issuing weapons or ammunition.
She will not ask you to kill anyone or otherwise behave inappropriately.
Your mother will insist, however, that each of you carry thirty pounds of sugar in your backpacks, plus plenty of water and canned fruit.
Along the way, you will do some running and jumping and rigorous calisthenics. Wear comfortable shoes, both of you, and be sure to pack rubber boots in case of creek crossings.
No dawdling, Tad.
No griping,
Timmy.
I will be waiting to greet you and your mom at the conclusion of the hike.
The idea, obviously, is to absorb a little history by living it, not just by reading about it. Your eight-mile march will amount to only a fifth of the distance covered by British troops on the night of April 18 and the following day of April 19, 1775, and of course you will not be fighting for your life most of the way home. But perhaps you will gain a modest appreciation for what soldiers must endure, not only the physical hardships but also the tyranny of unwelcome orders like these I am giving you now.
After a good night’s sleep, you will begin composing a short (say, five-page) essay based on your evening’s march. Grammar will count. Spelling will count. Address the following question: Is war glamorous?
35
Easier Homework
About two years ago, I asked Timmy to read “A Very Short Story” by Ernest Hemingway. A half hour later, Timmy came into my office and said, “Okay, I finished. What do you want me to tell you?”
“Just your opinion,” I said.
Timmy was young then, easily embarrassed, and for a while he squirmed. “Well, the story was pretty blunt,” he said.
“Blunt how?”
“You know. At the end. When the guy gets gonorrhea in a taxicab.”
“Is blunt bad?”
“Not usually,” said Timmy. “Except when your dad tells you to read about sex diseases.”
36
Timmy’s Bedroom Door
In a couple of months, Timmy will turn fifteen. Other parents have been warning me for years that big changes accompany adolescence, but until a few months ago I had arrogantly concluded that those warnings were false alarms. Not so. My snuggly little “Row, Row” boy is closing doors on me. Lots of doors—literally. Bathroom doors, bedroom doors, closet doors. The word “door” has become the equivalent of the words “buzz off.” In particular, the door to his bedroom now gives me the willies, and I’ll sometimes look at it as if seeing it for the first time, the very door I had so carefully painted more than a decade ago, a huge and handsome door with metallic gold trim and a sparkly champagne glaze that makes it shimmer as light strikes it from shifting angles. I had once been ridiculously and insanely proud of that gorgeous door—so proud of my handiwork, so proud of how the door’s surface rippled like a coat of cat fur as it opened and closed—but now, standing before it, listening, wondering, partly curious and partly terrified and partly lonely, that fortified bedroom door makes me want to buy a keg of dynamite and blow it forever off its hinges.
