Dad's Maybe Book

by Tim O'Brien

  * * *

  Recently a member of my old unit emailed me a 1968 Thanksgiving message to the troops from General Creighton Abrams, once the commander of American forces in Vietnam. “We should never forget,” wrote Abrams all those years ago, “that in Vietnam our actions are defending free men everywhere. We pray that peace will come to all the world and that all of us can return to our loved ones in the not too distant future.”

  Forget the Mad Hatter weirdness of praying for peace while spending every waking second hell-bent on slaughtering people.

  Forget the Orwellian doublethink and the “smelly little orthodoxies.”

  Forget that “free men everywhere” were freely standing in peace vigils.

  Forget that free men were freely burning draft cards.

  Forget that nearly three-quarters of the dwellings in Quang Ngai Province had been obliterated by Thanksgiving Day of 1968 and that at least some free men were having trouble digesting this.

  Forget, as the general did, the untidy complications of French colonialism, Vietnamese nationalism, the Geneva Accords, Buddhist monks aflame in the streets of Saigon. Forget that only months earlier, outside the Chicago Hilton, free men had been using clubs to beat on the heads of other free men. Forget that all across America, in the halls of Congress and at family dinner tables, free men everywhere were disputing the general’s felicitous proposition that in Vietnam our actions were “defending free men everywhere.”

  What unnerved me was not the pass-the-napalm Thanksgiving Day piety of Creighton Abrams. Any grunt takes such crap for granted; it’s what a general is. Rather, I was startled that my old war buddies, nearly all kind and decent guys, seemed to receive this platitudinous nonsense without any trace of the bitter, hooting irony they had shown as grunts back during the war itself. Was it amnesia? Had some gigantic eraser wiped away the daily, second-by-second realities of our war? When a guy died, for instance, did any of us shake our heads and say, “Well, he’s dead, for sure, but he defended free men everywhere”? Did any of us talk that way? Did any of us think that way? Am I wrong in remembering that instead we said things like, “There it is, man—don’t mean nothin’—the poor guy’s wasted.”

  * * *

  In various ways, to various degrees, virtually everything I’ve written over the past several pages will seriously irritate a large number of Vietnam veterans. A substantial majority, I’d guess. And beyond any doubt it will irritate one particular Vietnam veteran, a man who declared in a 2016 letter to the Austin American-Statesman: “For me, the war was never about right or wrong but duty and honoring my uniform.”

  Three million dead people.

  Never about right or wrong.

  Granted, it’s dangerous to generalize, but over the decades I’ve encountered thousands of Vietnam veterans with strikingly similar attitudes. The bulk of my fellow veterans, like the author of that letter, seems to believe that in the last analysis it doesn’t matter much whether their war was a righteous one. Their country told them to fight. They did. Inflated body counts and free-fire zones and secret bombings and dead children and burning villages and Ngo Dinh Diem and Bao Dai and the Pentagon Papers and the recorded Oval Office lies of Nixon and Johnson—all this is irrelevant. It’s not a question of disagreement. It’s a question of relevance. What seems to matter to my former war buddies is not politics or history—certainly not disputes over what occurred on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964—but rather something almost wholly personal: personal sacrifice, personal honor, personal duty, personal suffering, personal patriotism, personal courage, and personal pride. Most Vietnam veterans, I think, will concede that their war was far from morally ideal or clear-cut. It wasn’t World War Two. But even so—in fact, especially so—they saluted and sucked it up and endured the nightmare. Good war or bad war, they did their best. And now many of them are bitter. As they move into old age, most of my former buddies see themselves as unappreciated scapegoats, victims of an unpopular war, and as a consequence they have retreated from discursive politics, shying away from contested judgments about the war’s rectitude, taking refuge in personal (and therefore incontestable) values of honor, duty, sacrifice, pride, and service to country.

  In a way this is understandable. I feel the bitterness myself. I feel the resentment. I yell at my TV set when I hear World War Two veterans described as “the greatest generation,” as if the blood spilled on Okinawa was of higher quality per pint than the blood spilled in Vietnam. “The greatest generation”—it doesn’t merely sound like an insult. It is an insult. No wonder so many of my buddies have retreated into a private interior space, a space insulated from challenges to the war’s rectitude, a space in which they can hold fast to their beleaguered sense of virtue.

  Still, although I sympathize with this insularity, I fear that a dangerous egocentrism—a kind of selfishness, a kind of narcissism—has blinded many Vietnam veterans to what the war did to other people. They don’t seem to care much. They don’t seem to think about it much. Among my fellow veterans I almost never hear expressions of pity for the orphans and widows and grieving mothers of Vietnam; in fact, I rarely hear the word “Vietnamese” at all. It’s as if the country had never been populated by the very people we had come to rescue from the legions of evil. What about the sacrifices of the Vietnamese? What about their honor? What about their victimization? What about their three million dead? What about their burned-to-the-ground houses? What about their PTSD problems? What about their missing legs? What about their Gold Star Mothers? What about their 300,000 husbands and sons and brothers who have been listed as missing in action for almost half a century?

  I’m appalled.

  It is one thing to take personal pride in military service. It is another thing to do so without somehow acknowledging the consequences your service had on others—including millions of noncombatants. One man’s pride is another man’s sorrow. One man’s service to country is another man’s dead son. Rectitude is not a one-way street.

  * * *

  For all the differences between us, I can’t help but feel the instantaneous urge to sob when I encounter my old war buddies. An email will do it to me. I’ll choke up at old photographs. On several occasions—maybe a dozen or so times over the years—former members of Alpha Company have shown up when I speak at colleges around the country, and when I see their timeworn faces in the audience, the urge to cry stops being just an urge and becomes a fast heartbeat and stinging eyes and a voice that cracks and won’t behave itself. This is love, I guess. And love forgives a great deal.

  More than that, I admire so much about these men.

  Half a century ago, amid the horror, their courage and comportment had seemed to me close to miraculous. They stood up under fire. They made their legs move. They did what they believed to be necessary and even virtuous. They searched tunnels, walked point, gave aid to one another, and obeyed even the silliest and most lethal commands. No one faked illness; no one refused to advance under fire. Also, what made them special, at least to me, was how relentlessly ordinary they were—so matter-of-fact, so impassive, so young, so stolidly unexceptional as they endured things that seemed beyond enduring. In a way, my war buddies are like a mirrored reflection of all the anonymous grunts populating the age-old record of man killing man, including a reflection of the enemy we had once faced, an enemy who also made their legs move, who also did what they believed to be necessary and virtuous, who also obeyed the silliest and most lethal orders, and who also endured the unendurable.

  After my buddies and I shake hands and say goodbye, returning to our decaying lives, there is always a melancholy that stays with me for a day or two.

  The melancholy reaches into history.

  I’ll think about Willy and Cop and Kid and Buddy Wolf and Buddy Barney, and then I’ll think about Shakespeare’s band of brothers, we happy few. I’ll find myself deleting the word “happy.” I’ll wonder how happy the dead were to become the dead, or how happy the legless were to b
ecome the legless, and although Shakespeare’s music stirs the brotherhood inside me, it is also true that the toneless dead must be included among my war buddies. To them, as much as to the living, I am allegiant.

  44

  A Maybe Book (II)

  I’m an old man now, and when I put the period on this sentence I will be a minute or two older. How many more sentences can there be?

  Though this can be taken as self-pitying, it is not. True, I feel desperate this morning, and I feel sad, but the desperation and sadness are not for me but for Timmy and Tad. I want them to have a living father and not a dead one. For a couple of hours I’ve been repeatedly bending over to get blood to my brain and to stop my heart from racing. If I don’t bend, I will pass out. Something is wrong, obviously, and whatever is wrong has been wrong for several weeks. Tests have been inconclusive. Tomorrow I’ll be tested again. For now, I will just keep making sentences for my sons, none of which will replace an actual living father, but perhaps, with some luck, they might one day know that their father was thinking of them on a scary, subfreezing January morning.

  Three times in the past twenty minutes, I’ve had to lay my head on my desk, hoping to make my heart behave.

  When I look over the very few words I’ve written this morning, I think of how much more I have to say to Timmy and Tad, and I think about the urgency of saying it, and how, in that urgency, I have written things that only the most generous reader would not at times find sentimental. But what can I do? Delete what I care about? Delete the squeeze inside me? Ernest Hemingway once suggested writing the truest sentence you know, which is excellent advice, but what if your truest sentence is a sentimental one? Do you fancy it up? Do you sober it up? Do you chill it with literary ice? Do you insert distance where there is none? Do you lie? Do you write an untrue sentence and hope no one notices?

  I think about Faulkner’s Nobel speech: “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.” There is the sound of comfort in this sentence, and yet I cannot make myself believe what Faulkner believes. Prevailing is out of the question. It’s ridiculous.

  I do believe Faulkner when he declares, in The Sound and the Fury,that “victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

  The café will close its doors.

  And yet we live otherwise, don’t we?

  Faulkner deployed the word “illusion” a few sentences ago, and by and large, despite my bleak thoughts this morning, I dawdle here in the wee-hour café for a last drink or two, toasting my sleeping sons, wishing to leave a mark of love with these nouns and verbs. It’s illusion, I know. The nouns, too, will burn with the flaring of the sun. The verbs will twinkle out. And yet—precious illusion—when daylight comes, when my boys awaken, I will fill their bowls with Frosted Flakes, make sure their teeth get brushed, wash and dry the breakfast dishes, chuckle at ditzy politicians getting in their licks on NPR, and then, perhaps later, before I nap, I will try to push this maybe book forward another paragraph or two.

  If it is not an ailing heart, it will be ailing lungs, and if it is not ailing lungs, it will someday be an ailing something, as it will be for all of us, and what has been bothering me over the past few weeks, and what brings on the clock-ticking urgency, is the hundred or so little notes piled up on my desk, things I want to tell Timmy and Tad, things I want them to know.

  I write so slowly—how can I tell my kids all I want to tell them? Each of the scraps of paper on my desk seems to whisper, “Tell me, put me in, don’t forget me,” and yet this is only a maybe book, and I am only a maybe-writer, just as every writer was once a maybe-writer and just as every book was once a maybe book. Things intervene between maybe and is. Words fail, energy flags, imagination runs dry, influenza rages, lungs collapse, insanity intrudes, the second hand jerks to a stop, and what had been a maybe book sails off into the oblivion of a never book. So now, as a safeguard, I want to scribble down a few details about how this maybe book came to maybe be. Much earlier in these pages, I mentioned that the idea was Tad’s, who several years ago asked how my book was going. I told him I wasn’t sure it would ever be a book. I loathed writing. I was struggling. I’m always struggling.

  “Well,” Tad said, “then I guess you should call it your maybe book. Why not call it what it really is?”

  I thought this over and then jotted down the idea and added it to my pile of notes.

  Tad turned, began to walk away, but stopped and looked back at me. “You get paid for these books, don’t you?”

  “Only if they’re good,” I told him.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means sometimes everything ends up in a trash can. It’s one of the maybe-problems.”

  “But what if you get lucky?” Tad said. “What if the book’s okay? Then do they pay you?”

  “Usually,” I said.

  “Do they pay extra for the title?”

  Tad, who will one day own the Western Hemisphere, went off to prepare an IOU for my signature.

  Title or no title, I’ve been calling these pages my maybe book over the years since that short conversation, as has everyone else in our family, because embedded in Tad’s effortlessly minted neologism is both hopefulness and fatalism. Who knows? If I don’t lose heart, if I keep whacking away, maybe I will reach the end of this maybe book before the end reaches me. And of course I’m not alone. We are all writing our maybe books full of maybe-tomorrows, and each maybe-tomorrow brings another maybe-tomorrow, and then another, until the last line of the last page receives its period.

  45

  The Magic Show (II)

  Magicians, like storytellers, have been burned at the stake, nailed to the cross, beheaded, and otherwise eliminated for their blasphemous violations of prevailing orthodoxy. John the Baptist and Jesus are two miracle-working storytellers who reportedly paid the dearest price. More recently, in 2011, a Saudi Arabian performer of “black” magic was publicly and very bloodily beheaded. In the centuries between the time of Christ and 2011, storytellers and magicians, poets and witches, artists and fortunetellers, scientists and dabblers in the occult, have time and again collided with deadly orthodoxy, sometimes of a religious variety, sometimes political, and very often a flammable mix of the two. Heresy has a long and distinguished list of victims, among them Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and also among them Isaac Babel and Thomas More and the good mothers of Salem, Massachusetts.

  These days, magicians have little reason to fear the death penalty. (But stay away from Saudi Arabia and parts of rural Texas.) The writer, however, still risks a great deal, including life itself, in the pursuit of an interesting story, mainly because “interesting” and “orthodoxy” do not always travel in the same company. Even in the United States, with the protections of the First Amendment, a writer’s work may be banned by school boards, forbidden from the pulpit, and denounced in the halls of Congress. For the writer, this is death more obliterating than death.

  Speaking for myself, I have observed that book banners do not seem to be crying “Wow” as they read my stories.

  They take little delight in my magic shows.

  Cannily, they have figured out that a soldier’s desperate “Oh fuck” is corruptive of virgins; they have also figured out that exposure to wartime profanity undermines the mental health of wrestling fans. While they do not wish to ban the obscenity of war itself, and while they do not forbid their children from marching off to kill people (where they will learn some exceptionally inventive, fresh-off-the-press dirty words), they have concluded that the filthy truth is filthier than the filthy lie. The denouncers and forbidders want a mangled, gurgling, dying man to get a grip on his dignity, to bear in mind his Christian values, to stuff his intestines tidily out of sight, and to murmur to his grieving buddy, “Oh poop, I’ve been shot.”

  How this connects to magic may seem tenuous. But it connects.

  Like the mangled soldier, like the betrayed housewife, like the abandoned child, like the lonely piano teacher, like the bereft
widower, like the forsaken bride, like the humiliated accountant, like the forgotten saint, like the unappreciated mother, like the alcoholic father, like the fallen angel, like the toe-tapping politician in his toilet stall, like the paraplegic in his wheelchair, like the sinner on his hands and knees, like you and me—all of us, even those who despise magic, even book banners, even those who repair machine guns and deconstruct art, will almost certainly, at one terrible time or another, peer into the dark and yearn for a miracle.