by Tim O'Brien
* * *
A war writer, and more narrowly a Vietnam writer, and so it will always be. It’s my own fault. I could have said no; I should have said no. There is a sting, though, to the knowledge that the worst thing that ever happened to me will determine almost the entire content of my obituary.
For the record, and for my sons Timmy and Tad, I’ll point out that only a minuscule fraction of my interior or exterior life is in any way associated with Vietnam. Although I do daydream about the war occasionally, and although I sometimes night-dream about it, nonetheless, minute by minute, I make my way through the world as a contented civilian. I play Scrabble with my sons. I root for the Minnesota Vikings. I enjoy clam chowder on Christmas Eve, camp out comfortably at the blackjack table when I’m in Vegas, laugh at a good joke, practice sleight of hand in front of the bathroom mirror, try to hit a golf ball, oversee homework, travel too much, attend the boys’ basketball games, and generally take surprised pleasure at having made my way out of the blackness of 1969. I’m lucky. My name is not emblazoned on a wall in Washington, D.C. I have both legs and both arms. My mom did not open the door to an army chaplain.
Over the years, both Vietnam-the-war and Vietnam-the-memory have gone from solid to ineffable, from way too real to way too surreal, from up-to-your-eyeballs horror to a kind of hazy uncertainty as to whether any of it had ever occurred. Impossible, it seems. How did I keep my legs moving? How did I, or anyone, not go insane in the midst of all that terror and death? Or did I go insane? Or did everybody else go insane? Or do we all go insane at the very instant of birth, out of necessity, as our only means of continuing to move through a world that cannot be survived?
Lately, in my old age, I’ve been asking such questions not only about Vietnam but about pretty much everything. All seems vaporous. What has happened over the course of my life, it now appears, could not have happened.
* * *
Four months before he died, my father and I were seated in matching rocking chairs on a porch attached to his retirement home, sneaking cigarettes, pretty much at peace with each other, and at one point I asked him about his medals from World War Two: why had they vanished from his dresser drawer? My dad looked up at me and said, “What medals?”
“The medals under your socks,” I said. “They’re gone now.”
“Medals,” he murmured. “Was I in a war?”
I assured him he had been—Iwo Jima, Okinawa.
It took a while. My father was suffering from in-and-out senility, some days better than others, but after a minute or two he chuckled and said, “Oh, yeah. The navy, you mean. But that was Willie O’Brien. Now I’m Bill O’Brien.”
“Good point,” I said.
Ten or fifteen minutes later, after we had moved on to other topics, my father suddenly snorted and said, “The navy, those goddamn kamikazes. You sail off to war young and stupid, and then you sail home the oldest man on earth.”
A bit later he said, “Not that getting old is all that terrible. You don’t worry about the future when there isn’t any.”
* * *
Now, years after my father’s death, it occurs to me that the most searing events of our lives are those to which we have the least immediate access. “Was I in a war?” said my father, and that question, in various shapes and formulations, swirls in my own head right now, at 4:23 a.m. on January 31, 2017. The very reality of reality makes reality feel tight-skinned and unreal. For instance, a hand grenade sails out of the dense brush of fifty years ago—it’s real, it’s a real grenade—and I dive behind a paddy dike and squeeze my eyes shut and then open them again to catch a glimpse of that very real fizzling grenade from fifty years ago—a homemade grenade, a red cylindrical can a little bigger than the smallest can of Hunt’s tomato paste, and I spin sideways and turn my back to the grenade and squeal Dear Jesus—not aloud, I’m pretty sure (though now, an instant later, I’m not pretty sure, just sort of sure), and then there is blank time that was once filled with who knows what—squirrel talk, caught-fish talk, the terrified mind-chatter of a young boy from the Turkey Capital of the World—and then, after a lapse of ten or twenty centuries, the grenade detonates—not loud, I’m pretty sure (though not pretty sure, just sort of sure)—a popping sound, I’m pretty sure—and yet everything that is happening isn’t happening because it absolutely and positively can’t be happening—the bee-sting sensation in my left hand—a kid named Clauson holding his stomach—somebody shouting, but not shouting words, shouting lizard shouts—another bee sting—and all around me and above me there are the unzipping sounds of eternity passing by—these are bullets, I’m pretty sure—and then nearly fifty years later, at 5:08 a.m. on January 31, 2017, I light a cigarette and take a breath and stare at this paragraph and think, Christ, was I in a war?
In a recent email, one of my old war buddies, Bob Wolf, helped me realize that I’m not alone in this dreamscape of endless seemingness, endless uncertainty, and endless maybes.
“I lost my own history,” Buddy Wolf wrote. “I spent a year in the Republic of South Viet Nam, and I came away with a chest full of medals, but no memories. Oh, I remember names and faces and home towns of my friends, but I have no recollection of events. Perhaps this is why I am asking so many questions. I’m sending e-mails pleading for memories.”
* * *
In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway’s protagonist, Frederic Henry, has similar difficulty disentangling the fragile threads of reality. For all the detailed, precise, and firmly convincing realism with which Hemingway gives us the Italian retreat from Caporetto in 1917—a piece of sustained prose that has been justly praised over the decades—what most moves me in this celebrated passage is the dreamlike delicacy of disbelief and uncertainty that questions and challenges and ultimately subverts all that famous rock-hard realism. In the course of recounting his story, Frederic Henry performs a kind of division of the self, the pronoun “I” blurring into the pronoun “you” and then blurring back again into “I,” much as my father had moved from Willie O’Brien to Bill O’Brien as he sought a handhold on his own life. At one point during the chaotic retreat, Frederic Henry remarks, “You saw emptily,” which reminds me of the emptiness of my own vision as a homemade grenade sails out of the brush at 5:16 a.m. and as the lizard squeals Dear Jesus. Am I actually seeing what I am seeing? If not, then what exactly am I seeing? And without some central solidity of vision, aren’t we doomed to doubt the very reality of our own lives?
A little later in A Farewell to Arms, Henry’s sense of reality is further warped by, and further diminished by, the feeling that he has become “a masquerader,” a man now suddenly dressed in civilian clothes, a wartime absentee who sits in a Milan bar eating almonds and sipping a martini. Nearly five decades ago, having just returned from my own war, I too felt a shaky, counterfeit sensation as I put on a suit and tie for my do-nothing job in the Twin Cities. It was as if I were in disguise, partly a physical one, partly emotional. Nothing seemed real. Not the suit, not the tie, not me. Also, it’s worth noting that even during the war I often had the sensation of performing as an actor in a long and very realistic war movie. I put on the rubber mask of fatalism. I copped cool bits of dialogue from old movies and old comic strips—wistful lines, macho lines, funny lines, tough-guy lines. After a firefight, as I put myself back together, I more or less reinvented reality, adjusting and modifying all the unmediated terror with an overlay of Vietnam lingo and Vietnam mannerism and Vietnam posturing and Vietnam psychic camouflage. The masquerade became the war. The war became the masquerade.
And then, miraculously, the war came to an end. I went home. Like Frederic Henry, I stripped off my uniform, put on civilian clothes, and kept on acting.
“I had the feeling,” Henry muses, “of a boy who thinks of what is happening at a certain hour at the schoolhouse from which he has played truant.”
Later still in A Farewell to Arms, as the events of Caporetto begin to bleach from memory in the way all worldly events must ble
ach, Frederic Henry’s grasp on his war experience has become so tenuous that he can only say, “I’ll tell you about it if I ever get it straight in my head.” More tellingly yet, as events recede farther into the past, Henry says, “The war was a long way away. Maybe there wasn’t any war.”
At that point I’m back on the porch with my father, who blinks at me and says, “What war?”
* * *
And so, Timmy and Tad, that’s what your dad sometimes thinks about when he goes quiet and seems to be drifting away from you. Not war, exactly. In fact, not really war at all. I guess it’s old age. Each night, as I slip into my make-believe sleeping trench, I’m also slipping back to our “Row, Row” days, and to my own childhood, and to my vanished father, just drifting, merrily, merrily, and on those occasions, life is but a dream.
50
Getting Cut
For several years, the game of basketball has dominated our family’s dinner table conversations. Timmy, in particular, is an encyclopedia of all things basketballish, and his enthusiasm for the game can turn a bite of meatloaf into a fifteen-minute disquisition on the lifetime statistical performance of a retired Bulgarian point guard. Tad, too, is an enthusiast, though his athletic interests are considerably broader than Timmy’s, spread out among basketball, cross country, and tennis. Both boys dribble their way from bedroom to kitchen to living room; both spend hours playing Horse and practicing their three-pointers out in the backyard. Tad takes a carefree approach to this. Timmy does not. A determined earnestness—almost a grim earnestness—seems to drive the elder boy, each missed shot sending a surge of poisonous failure through his system. For Tad, air balls produce laughter. For Timmy, air balls produce apocalypse.
Back in grade school, Timmy had never been rated by his coaches as an elite player. He was good but never good enough: too slow, too unaggressive. Even so, through seventh and eighth grades, the boy worked on his skills with the patient, slogging deliberation of a gravedigger—joylessly, it sometimes seemed—and by the time he reached ninth grade, he had willed himself into becoming a competent player, stolid if not flashy, smart if not wholly intuitive, a good shooter if not yet a deadeye gunner. He also grew. His voice deepened. At five feet ten inches, he now looks down on me with the eyes of a grown man, intensely private, a keeper of secrets, a deflector of emotion, a stubborn believer in himself, and a fiercely independent adjudicator of his own desires. He values things I never valued. He is confident in ways I am not. Without saying so, he wants me to back off—to stop asking questions about his homework, to stop monitoring his computer time, to stop telling him when to go to bed each night, and to stop offering amateurish basketball tips. In a sense, I suppose, he wants me to stop being a father.
And so . . .
Two days ago, Timmy was cut from his high school’s basketball team. It hurt him, yes, but he stayed quiet. He didn’t moan. He didn’t complain. He blamed no one. He handled failure with a grace amounting to a controlled and elegant beauty.
“Are you okay?” I asked, many times, and in a flatly inexpressive voice, many times, he said, “I’m fine.”
Did he cry?
I don’t know.
Did he feel defeated? Did his faith in the power of perseverance collapse? Did he scream at the ceiling?
I don’t know. Maybe briefly.
“Are you okay?” I kept asking, every day, and every day he said, “Fine.”
He wasn’t fine.
His bedroom door stayed more firmly closed than ever. He was silent at meals. He did his homework, shot baskets alone in the backyard, and plodded ahead with mulish, stone-faced resignation. But he wasn’t fine. He still isn’t.
* * *
Six more days have passed. Timmy’s silence remains impenetrable. This morning, when I asked how he was doing, he said, “I probably wasn’t good enough. But I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Not even a little?”
“No,” he said.
“Okay,” I told him, “but I’m here to listen.”
“Thanks,” he said.
Timmy was right: he probably wasn’t good enough. Three or four ninth-graders in my son’s school are superb basketball players, two of them rated highly in the state of Texas, and of course any number of upperclassmen are older, taller, stronger, faster, and more experienced than Timmy. Still, these boys are my son’s friends—the kids with whom he eats lunch and does science projects and plays pickup games in the school gym—and part of what Timmy is enduring is a fourteen-year-old’s pain at having been separated by decree from the people he hangs out with at homecoming and between classes. And for Timmy, I’m guessing, the separation must feel permanent. His pals will receive systematic instruction; he will not. They will get game experience; he will not. They will get better and better with intense coaching and extensive playing time; Timmy will have to improve on his own or not improve at all.
There is a strange and unfamiliar conclusiveness to this. Would a kid be cut from algebra or biology or history or English or Latin or art? Would a school wash its hands and say, “Get help somewhere else”? Maybe so. Maybe the school would flunk him out. In that case, Timmy, at age fourteen, has flunked his basketball dream.
What is most difficult for me and for Meredith is that we can only imagine the thoughts that now pass through our silent son’s head. We whisper and speculate. We watch through a window as Timmy shoots and shoots and shoots until dark falls. We watch him do suicide sprints. We don’t know what to say to him. Do we tell stories about our own failures? Do we shut up? Do we pry? Do we try to squeeze words out of him? Do we pretend that things are fine when things are not fine? Do we encourage him to take up dominoes or arm wrestling?
We’re at wits’ end. We have no clue. A kid dreams what he dreams, and you can’t dream new dreams for him.
* * *
Another week and a half has gone by, and Timmy’s spirit seems a trifle lighter, not exactly buoyant, not jolly by any means, but more and more inclining in that direction. He smiles again—not often but sometimes. He speaks now and then—not much and never about basketball, but he does speak. By default, the rest of us have taken the path of least resistance, seeking sunny topics of conversation, and even Tad, who will say anything to anyone, has scrupulously avoided not only the word “basketball,” but also the word “game” and the word “bounce.” True, there is no more dribbling from room to room, but at least there is occasional laughter in the gloom.
* * *
A few nights back, I asked Timmy if he wanted to watch a Celtics-Cavaliers game. He shook his head and walked away, but a half hour later, he joined me on the couch, gave me a kiss, and said, “There’s nothing I can do except keep trying to get better. I won’t stop, Dad.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I love you,” he said.
To receive, unbidden, the words “I love you” from a fourteen-year-old boy makes getting cut seem a weirdly desirable outcome, a thing to be prized. Am I wrong, I wonder, to suppose that fathers everywhere crave what I crave, which is not basketball excellence, not aggressiveness, not speed, not skill, not physical virtuosity, but just a gentle kiss out of nowhere, a quiet “I love you” out of the tight-lipped teenage blue?
* * *
Except in fairy tales, failure is among the constants of human experience. Not every free throw drops. Not every kid is admitted to Stanford. Not every actor embraces Oscar. Not every love affair ends in wedding bells, and not every wedding bell peals through the years with lifelong happiness. As an example, when I was about Timmy’s age, I’d been required to deliver a ten-minute speech before a hundred or so members of the local PTA. My topic had to do with civil war in Angola, where guerrilla forces were challenging Portuguese colonial rule, and my speech was liberally laced with the newly discovered word “chaos.” That word, I later learned, was not pronounced chows. I used it five or six times. People stared at me. After a few minutes, muted laughter skidded around the room, succeeded by louder laughter. To my
mind, as a ninth-grader who had plucked the word out of a copy of Time magazine, these parents and teachers seemed cursed with an extremely odd sense of humor, for I could see nothing funny about all that lethal chows raging across southwestern Africa. When I finished, I sat down beside my father, who, without looking at me, whispered, “Chaos, not chows.”
Learning by mortification, I firmly believe, is learning for life. You do not forget.
Timmy, of course, is mortified at having been cut from his high school basketball team, just as a misleadingly spelled noun will forever mortify me. And for good reason. Mortification is failure exposed, failure gone public, failure that can gnaw on the spirit all the way to the grave and maybe beyond. While the upside of mortification is bone-deep learning, perhaps even bone-deep wisdom, the downside of mortification can be a future of excessive caution, excessive risk aversion, and psychological retreat. Plainly, Timmy had fled to a place inside himself, into isolation and silence. He no longer mentions his old basketball pals. He attends no high school games. He is mortified. He wants no pity, no consolation, no clichés, no pep talks, no encouraging slaps on the back, and certainly no advice from his father. I have plenty of my own humiliation stories to share with him, but Timmy and I both understand that stories will not undo failure or eradicate pain. Behind his bedroom door, I am almost certain, my son revisits his basketball tryouts, replaying blocked shots he never blocked, free throws that rattled around the rim but never fell, intercepted passes that he almost, but never quite, intercepted. Surely he indulges in this sort of if-only fantasy. Surely, too, there is recrimination, self-doubt, and—though this scares me—self-hatred.
