Dad's Maybe Book

by Tim O'Brien

  Similarly, at the conclusion of For Whom the Bell Tolls, in what strikes me as a convoluted bit of nitpicking, Robert Jordan decides against killing himself in favor of allowing the approaching enemy to do the dirty work for him. Moreover, as the fascist troops close in on Jordan, and as the novel reaches its deadly climax, coincidence once again yanks me out of the story. I’m thinking not about the pending extinction of Robert Jordan but rather about the improbable contrivance of the novel’s final paragraphs. How unlikely, I think, that Lieutenant Paco Berrendo—the one and only enemy soldier we’ve come to know over hundreds of pages—suddenly dashes into the story to become the one and only human being whom Jordan will slay as his final earthly act. How tidy. How symmetrical. How heart-tuggingly convenient. Berrendo appears on the battlefield at exactly the right melodramatic instant; he has “ridden hard” so as to show up for his own death. Hemingway orchestrates this baffling development by abruptly veering away from Jordan’s point of view, inserting an “explanation” for Berrendo’s rendezvous with eternity, and then just as abruptly the author veers back to Jordan’s perspective.

  The scene is not just contrived. It’s heavy-handed. It’s a Gary Cooper movie.

  On top of that, the novel’s concluding scene seems to me weirdly Victorian in its celebration of self-sacrificial military values (honor, duty, discipline)—more like “The Charge of the Light Brigade” than “Dulce et Decorum Est.” My Vietnam-infected blood begins to boil. I yell at my iPad. As Jordan prepares to die, and as his last worldly act is to take aim at a fellow human being, I get the feeling that I am supposed to applaud, that I am supposed to draw down on the enemy and then take my time peeing.

  * * *

  September 15, 2016, 5:10 a.m. Big trouble. I’ve been at work for more than two hours, trying to express a thought that does not wish to be expressed. My nerves and the delete key are worn to stubs. Part of the problem involves the folly of writing itself, the lunatic illusion that a writer is somehow the master of what appears on the page. Language won’t take me where I want to go; it takes me where it wants to go. Stupidly, I’ve been forcing things, struggling to make words march to the command of intention, which for decades has been my chief failing as a writer. Intention may guide a writer, but it must not insist.

  A couple of hours ago, when I embarked on what seemed a simple little passage, I had hoped to explore a recurring sensation that almost always comes over me in the early-morning hours: the pitiless voice of my own mortality bubbling up from somewhere in my belly, jabbering away as I wash dishes and polish the kitchen counters. It’s as if my internal organs have foreknowledge of what is soon coming down the pike, as if my heart and bowels are taking advantage of the wee-hour silence to remind me of what is so easily ignored in the clatter of daylight: everybody dies.

  “Why do old men wake so early?” Hemingway asks. “Is it to have one longer day?”

  Maybe so.

  Or maybe old men wake early to practice dying.

  Day before yesterday I was informed by email that a “moderate amount of calcium” had been detected in my hard artery, suggesting “moderate heart disease.” The same briskly worded message noted a 4 mm “ground-glass nodule” in the right upper lobe of my lungs. No surprise, really. I smoke. I take Lipitor. I’m fucking old. The odd thing about it—the only odd thing, I suppose—was that the news had been delivered many, many months earlier by way of those three-in-the-morning belly whisperings, by some chemical communiqué between the hard artery—whatever that is—and the coils of the brain. The body is one organism, is it not? Therefore, why should not our morning reveries be influenced by gall bladders and kidneys and hardened arteries? I see nothing mystical about this. I would be shocked if it were otherwise.

  In any event, the bad news was not all that bad. I had expected worse. I had deserved worse. I mention this medical development not to solicit pity, and not out of (much) self-pity, but rather because of a peculiar incident that occurred only minutes after the unpleasant diagnosis popped up on my computer screen. I had stopped writing for the day. I had fixed myself a drink, settled into a chair, and opened up a novel I’d been reading over the past couple of days. The novel was Arch of Triumph by Erich Maria Remarque. I had turned to page 850 of my iTunes edition and within seconds slammed into this scrap of language: “From there he disappeared through a ground-glass door . . .”

  My uncharitable comments about coincidence returned to me with vindictive, eat-your-own-words retribution.

  Papa cackled.

  It’s possible, I suppose, that at some point in my life I had encountered the adjective “ground-glass” in another work of fiction, or in another context entirely, but I cannot cite an example. Only minutes earlier I’d been searching Google for “ground-glass nodule,” a term that was new to me, wondering how bits of glass had ended up in my lungs. How many books on this planet contain the adjective “ground-glass”? How many times have I or you or anyone else uttered that adjective in conversation? Additionally, there is the coincidence of coincidence itself. A few pages back, in my consideration of “The Killers,” I might easily have ignored the entire notion of coincidence, or I might at least have sought more compassion. Call it retribution, call it distributive justice, but we get what we give.

  Justice or otherwise, retribution or otherwise, it remains the case that my early-morning thoughts have taken on a distinct summing-up quality. As in The Tempest, “And every third thought shall be my grave,” I worry about Timmy and Tad without a father. I worry about the futile, helpless pain they will endure. In the stillness and quiet of 3 a.m., I perform a sloppy, hit-and-miss review of my own aspirations and failures. The successes have been few. The failures have been numerous and decisive. Almost always, individual human beings are involved in these predawn appraisals—people I have loved, for the most part. Faces come and go. Time scrambles itself. Scenes from fifty years ago are replayed and then altered in imagination and then altered again. I say no instead of yes. I become an electrician, something sensible, and leave the writing to stouter hearts. I burn my draft notice and head for Winnipeg. I cross uncrossed bridges. I jump off cliffs where I once stood paralyzed. Alone in my underwear, hosting a bizarre daybreak cocktail party attended by the beloved and the dead, I repair things with my father, ask forgiveness of the betrayed, renew lapsed friendships, revisit Quang Ngai, rewrite failed sentences, find courage where there was none, request clarification as to what exactly transpired on July 7, 1969, reinvent chronologies, attend to finalities, attend to now or never, attend to loose ends and split ends and ends that never end, attend to all that old men attend to when they wake early—rehearsal of act three, preparation for game day.

  * * *

  It’s 3:12 a.m., October 1, 2016. I have turned seventy. Daylight will bring slices of cake and cheerful goodwill. It will be like celebrating a hernia.

  40

  Timmy’s Gamble

  On one other long-gone day, back when Timmy was a fifth-grader, I sat at his desk for half an hour, trying to help him improve his writing skills, and somehow we came to an impasse involving the arcane topic of italics. Timmy seemed to be overusing them. I objected. I told him italics could seem gimmicky. I suggested that he choose words that would do the italicizing for him. I went on and on about how italics instruct the reader to notice certain words more than others, or in a different way than others. In the end, I recommended moderation, italicizing words sparsely and only when other possibilities failed.

  “All right,” Timmy said, “I get it, but you were using italics just now. When you were talking to me.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but I wouldn’t write it that way.”

  “I bet you would,” Timmy said.

  41

  Dulce et Decorum Est

  In the small rural town of Ors, France, our family is visiting the battlefield upon which the poet Wilfred Owen died, precisely one week before the armistice ending World War One. It is a hot day in July. There is no traffic. Ther
e are no tourists. There are no people at all. Nothing stirs, nothing moves. The waters of the Sambre Canal look like a sheet of tar winding past old houses and meadows and a few sluggish cattle.

  For what seems a very long time, we walk along a narrow tractor path flanked by barbed wire on both sides, eventually coming upon a small, fenced-in cemetery. The place is deserted. Timmy and Tad are quiet. They know this is important to me.

  For twenty minutes, I study the names and regiments etched into one hundred or so headstones that mark the graves of British soldiers who, along with Wilfred Owen, died on November 4, 1918. Owen himself is buried elsewhere in Ors, in a larger and less secluded cemetery, but somehow the pastoral silence and languor and isolation of this place seem to thunder with the wastage that fills the lines of Owen’s poetry. Here, with cattle as company, in a few tidy rows, in the heat of July, are the men and boys who perished in the last terrible week of a terrible war that would soon breed another terrible war.

  I ask Timmy to read aloud from Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.”

  He does so, flatly and without flourish.

  He is four years younger than the youngest of the dead beneath us. He reads like a man.

  42

  Pride (IV)

  My 15th Street Friend

  by Timmy O’Brien

  * * *

  Sixth Grade

  I saw you on 15th Street,

  Holding out your hat, asking for a treat,

  Because you needed something to eat.

  * * *

  I told my mom to stop the car.

  She was too stressed and pushed too far,

  But I still wanted to give you my granola bar.

  * * *

  You had served the nation by fighting a war,

  I could tell by the cap you wore,

  It said “Vietnam Veteran” (written in white)

  I prayed that your future would someday be bright.

  * * *

  I felt really sad and mad,

  As we drove away,

  Because no one was helping you

  Find your way.

  * * *

  Hadn’t you obeyed your orders,

  And gone across the ocean to fight,

  And tried to do what they said was right?

  * * *

  If that’s how veterans get treated,

  Then I don’t know what our nation is doing,

  I bet you wished that you could be suing,

  The people who drafted you far from home,

  And tore your life apart, bone by bone.

  I saw you crying as you watched us drive by,

  And it made me feel like I could also cry.

  I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

  * * *

  Next day before school I packed you a sack.

  Inside were a yo-yo, a book, and a nice, healthy snack.

  * * *

  It’s sad that I never saw you again,

  But I search the streets every day.

  “You’re a hero,” I would say,

  “And I know that you saved at least one life,

  And now it’s terrible that you’re so full of strife.”

  * * *

  Then I wrote you a letter because I cared

  That you were crying and seemed so scared.

  I wrote that you were my 15th Street friend

  And that I wanted your long, sad war to end.

  43

  War Buddies

  Except for my family and a couple of close friends, I am most at home and most wholly happy in the company of former members of my unit in Vietnam. I see these men only rarely; I don’t know them well and never did; many are like ghosts, or like ghosts of ghosts, whose faces are familiar but weirdly indefinite. I recall only a few complete names. A good number of them I remember only by nicknames. Many, perhaps most, are entirely nameless.

  Still, on those rare occasions when I bump into my former comrades, I feel a sense of belonging that otherwise escapes me in life. There is nothing we must prove. Abstraction and generalization vanish. What we have, when we are together, is that particular paddy dike, that firefight, that corpse, that tree line, that deserted village, that one and only killer afternoon in July of 1969. We refresh one another’s memories with scraps of detail; we laugh at things most people don’t laugh at; we occasionally debate matters of sequence and chronology—who died first, who died next. There is no boasting. No one uses the word “glory.” If anything, the tone of conversation has a rueful, excessively modest, almost puzzled quality, as though none of us can truly believe that what happened happened, or that what happened actually happened to us. There is a shocking gentleness to these guys, something close to shyness, and it seems improbable that nearly a half century ago they were the fist of American power in Vietnam. My buddies were grunts, 11-Bravo, and they did the daily, nasty, grinding, lethal work of war. They slept in the rain; they fought the firefights; they spent their nights lying in ambush and their days trudging through minefields out on the Batangan Peninsula; they were not cooks or clerks or mechanics or supply specialists; they were infantry; they lived in the war, and the war lived in them, and fifty years ago they did your killing and your dying for you. These quiet old coots, these war buddies of mine, seem generally untroubled by all they had once witnessed and endured. As far as I can tell, they entertain few second thoughts about the righteousness of their war and few doubts about whether all the dead people should be dead. Now and then, mostly through the back door, politics will slide into the give-and-take of reminiscence—“that lefty New York Times rag”—and in those instances, for a moment or two, I’ll feel the solid world buckling beneath me, but then somebody else will say, “Hey, this ain’t the John friggin’ Birch Society,” and another guy will say, “Yeah, and you’re pissing off O’Brien,” and then the first guy will shrug and grin at me and say, “Sorry, man, I forgot you was a communist.”

  With only a couple of exceptions, my buddies avoid mention of my books. Privately, I’m almost certain, they disapprove of my outrage at the war, and I’m even more certain that they take vigorous exception to my literary portrayal of the American soldier as less than purely virtuous. (One member of my platoon named his son after a lieutenant whose behavior I considered plainly criminal.) In an unspoken, matter-of-fact way, the former members of Alpha Company view themselves as the good guys, the angels of liberty and decency. They display scarce sympathy for their old enemy. Over the years, in fact, I’ve heard only one or two of them express a word of distress, much less remorse, about an estimated three million dead Vietnamese. Reflexively, but without real enmity, they still speak of their former enemy as gooks and dinks and slants and slopes, and yet most of my buddies would claim—indignantly and forcefully—that no racist intent lurks behind such language: it’s grunt talk, pure shorthand, just another way of distinguishing the cowboys from the Indians.

  I have serious trouble with this, and yet, for all our differences, there remains the paradoxical fact that I do love these men. I dream about them. I feel their presence when they are not present. Cop and Willy and Reno and Kid and Howard and Vince and Wayne and Red and Joe and Greg and Roger and Chip and Tom and Squirrel and Ben and Buddy Barney and Buddy Wolf and Myron and Everett and Doc and Art and Frenchie—these are the names that endure in my moth-eaten memory, and right now, as I try to complete this sentence, their faces are once again youthful, and together we’re again humping through the Vietnam dark, heading for some murderous destiny, the moon overhead, a dog barking, our boots making sucking sounds in the foul paddy slush.

  The closeness I feel toward the men of Alpha Company can be represented only dimly with language. The feel of blood-fraternity requires a kind of willful dreaming, a summoning of the actual here-and-now shuffle of troops on the move; the long nights of pulling guard along the shoreline of the South China Sea; the smells of poverty and mold and smoke and tropical decay as you enter a bad-ass village at dawn, and how those smells combine into a sin
gle brain-deep tapeworm that stays with you forever, even in your sleep, but how, when you try to talk about it, all the adjectives in the dictionary can’t make you smell anything and can’t do anything to your pulse or blood pressure or bowels. When I’m with my buddies, no one struggles to explain these things. We know soldiering the way a lover knows love. Without ever saying so, we understand that the word “Pinkville” does not mean “pink village” or anything remotely rosy or cheerful. It means we might die today. It means, man, this is one nasty piece of a nasty war.

  * * *

  Back in 1968 and 1969, when Vietnam collided with my life, I yearned for revenge against the cheerleaders and celebrators of war. Somehow, I imagined, I would strike back with sentences, make the monsters squirm in shame. This was a ludicrous and naïve fantasy. Sentences don’t do shit. We just keep killing and killing, always for godly reasons—just as the enemy kills for its own godly reasons—and then we all stagger up Main Street with our walkers and war stories and watery old-man nostalgia. Three million dead. What if it were seventy million? Four hundred million? Every human on earth? There is no known limit to what we will tolerate. There is precious little shame. And so now, on this Thanksgiving Day in 2016, I remain torn between my affection for the men of Alpha Company and my dismay at their mostly self-congratulatory, mostly uncritical, mostly America-right-or-wrong values. It’s like being married to Oliver North. True, plenty of Vietnam veterans opposed the war, and plenty spoke out against it, and yet studies show that the social and political attitudes of Vietnam veterans generally mirror those of nonveterans of the same age—traditionalist, conservative, pro-military, and hawkish. These findings are predictable. Even back when they were young, the men in Alpha Company seemed more or less to fit the standard profile, and now, decades later, it’s no surprise that their opinions have hardened along the lines of the aging male population as a whole. The real surprise, at least for me, is that the historical judgments of my old war buddies are served up without the linguistic spices of Vietnam, without a touch of the weird, without sarcasm or astonishment, without rock ’n’ roll dissonance, without wit, without ginger, and without the old FTA skepticism that was once scribbled on helmets and jeeps and M-16s from Danang to the Delta. The tone of their voices—the music beneath their politics—sounds to me more like Sinatra than the Animals, more like “My Kind of Town” than “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.”