If I Die in a Combat Zone

So to bring the conversation to a focus and also to try out in real words my secret fears, I argued for running away.

I was persuaded then, and I remain persuaded now, that the war was wrong. And since it was wrong and since people were dying as a result of it, it was evil. Doubts, of course, hedged all this: I had neither the expertise nor the wisdom to synthesize answers; most of the facts were clouded, and there was no certainty as to the kind of government that would follow a North Vietnamese victory or, for that matter, an American victory, and the specifics of the conflict were hidden away – partly in men’s minds, partly in the archives of government, and partly in buried, irretrievable history. The war, I thought, was wrongly conceived and poorly justified. But perhaps I was mistaken, and who really knew, anyway?

Piled on top of this was the town, my family, my teachers, a whole history of the prairie. Like magnets, these things pulled in one direction or the other, almost physical forces weighting the problem, so that, in the end, it was less reason and more gravity that was the final influence.

My family was careful that summer. The decision was mine and it was not talked about. The town lay there, spread out in the corn and watching me, the mouths of old women and Country Club men poised in a kind of eternal readiness to find fault. It was not a town, not a Minneapolis or New York, where the son of a father can sometimes escape scrutiny. More, I owed the prairie something. For twenty-one years I’d lived under its laws, accepted its education, eaten its food, wasted and guzzled its water, slept well at night, driven across its highways, dirtied and breathed its air, wallowed in its luxuries. I’d played on its Little League teams. I remembered Plato’s Crito, when Socrates, facing certain death – execution, not war – had the chance to escape. But he reminded himself that he had seventy years in which he could have left the country, if he were not satisfied or felt the agreements he’d made with it were unfair. He had not chosen Sparta or Crete. And, I reminded myself, I hadn’t thought much about Canada until that summer.

The summer passed this way. Gold afternoons on the golf course, a comforting feeling that the matter of war would never touch me, nights in the pool hall or drug store, talking with townsfolk, turning the questions over and over, being a philosopher.

Near the end of that summer the time came to go to the war. The family indulged in a cautious sort of Last Supper together, and afterwards my father, who is brave, said it was time to report at the bus depot. I moped down to my bedroom and looked the place over, feeling quite stupid, thinking that my mother would come in there in a day or two and probably cry a little. I trudged back up to the kitchen and put my satchel down. Everyone gathered around, saying so long and good health and write and let us know if you want anything. My father took up the induction papers, checking on times and dates and all the last-minute things, and when I pecked my mother’s face and grabbed the satchel for comfort, he told me to put it down, that I wasn’t supposed to report until tomorrow.

After laughing about the mistake, after a flush of red colour and a flood of ribbing and a wave of relief had come and gone, I took a long drive around the lake, looking again at the place. Sunset Park, with its picnic table and little beach and a brown wood shelter and some families swimming. The Crippled Children’s School, Slater Park, more kids. A long string of split level houses, painted every colour.

The war and my person seemed like twins as I went around the town’s lake. Twins grafted together and forever together, as if a separation would kill them both.

The thought made me angry.

In the basement of my house I found some scraps of cardboard and paper. With devilish flair, I printed obscene words on them, declaring my intention to have no part of Vietnam. With a delightful viciousness, a secret will, I declared the war evil, the draft board evil, the town evil in its lethargic acceptance of it all. For many minutes, making up the signs, making up my mind, I was outside the town. I was outside the law, all my old ties to my loves and family broken by the old crayon in my hand. I imagined strutting up and down the sidewalks outside the depot, the bus waiting and the driver blaring his horn, the Daily Globe photographer trying to push me into line with the other draftees, the frantic telephone calls, my head buzzing at the deed.

On the cardboard, my strokes of bright red were big and ferocious looking. The language was clear and certain and burned with a hard, defiant, criminal, blasphemous sound. I tried reading it aloud.

Later in the evening I tore the signs into pieces and put the shreds in the garbage can outside, clanging the grey cover down and trapping the messages inside. I went back into the basement. I slipped the crayons into their box, the same stubs of colour I’d used a long time before to chalk in reds and greens on Roy Rogers’s cowboy boots.

I’d never been a demonstrator, except in the loose sense. True, I’d taken a stand in the school newspaper on the war, trying to show why it seemed wrong. But, mostly, I’d just listened.

‘No war is worth losing your life for,’ a college acquaintance used to argue. ‘The issue isn’t a moral one. It’s a matter of efficiency: what’s the most efficient way to stay alive when your nation is at war? That’s the issue.’

But others argued that no war is worth losing your country for, and when asked about the case when a country fights a wrong war, those people just shrugged.

Most of my college friends found easy paths away from the problem, all to their credit. Deferments for this and that. Letters from doctors or chaplains. It was hard to find people who had to think much about the problem. Counsel came from two main quarters, pacifists and veterans of foreign wars.

But neither camp had much to offer. It wasn’t a matter of peace, as the pacifists argued, but rather a matter of when and when not to join others in making war. And it wasn’t a matter of listening to an ex-lieutenant colonel talk about serving in a right war, when the question was whether to serve in what seemed a wrong one.

On 13 August, I went to the bus depot. A Worthington Daily Globe photographer took my picture standing by a rail fence with four other draftees.

Then the bus took us through corn fields, to little towns along the way – Lismore and Rushmore and Adrian – where other recruits came aboard. With some of the tough guys drinking beer and howling in the back seats, brandishing their empty cans and calling one another ‘scum’ and ‘trainee’ and ‘GI Joe’, with all this noise and hearty farewelling, we went to Sioux Falls. We spent the night in a YMCA. I went out alone for a beer, drank it in a corner booth, then I bought a book and read it in my room.

By noon the next day our hands were in the air, even the tough guys. We recited the proper words, some of us loudly and daringly and others in bewilderment. It was a brightly lighted room, wood panelled. A flag gave the place the right colours, there was some smoke in the air. We said the words, and we were soldiers.

I’d never been much of a fighter. I was afraid of bullies. Their ripe muscles made me angry: a frustrated anger. Still, I deferred to no one. Positively lorded myself over inferiors. And on top of that was the matter of conscience and conviction, uncertain and surface-deep but pure none the less: I was a confirmed liberal, not a pacifist; but I would have cast my ballot to end the Vietnam war immediately, I would have voted for Eugene McCarthy, hoping he would make peace. I was not soldier material, that was certain.

But I submitted. All the personal history, all the midnight conversations and books and beliefs and learning, were crumpled by abstention, extinguished by forfeiture, for lack of oxygen, by a sort of sleepwalking default. It was no decision, no chain of ideas or reasons, that steered me into the war.

It was an intellectual and physical stand-off, and I did not have the energy to see it to an end. I did not want to be a soldier, not even an observer to war. But neither did I want to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my own private world. It was not that I valued that order. But I feared its opposite, inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that had happened in my life, the end of it all.

And the stand-off is still there. I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows, from one who’s been there and come back, an old soldier looking back at a dying war.

That would be good. It would be fine to integrate it all to persuade my younger brother and perhaps some others to say no to wars and other battles.

Or it would be fine to confirm the odd beliefs about war: it’s horrible, but it’s a crucible of men and events and, in the end, it makes more of a man out of you.

But, still, none of these notions seems right. Men are killed, dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are afraid and often brave, drill sergeants are boors, some men think the war is proper and just and others don’t and most don’t care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?

Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyse them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

4 Nights (#ulink_7637db37-556b-5d6f-8ba4-6ef8393ac836)

‘Incoming,’ the lieutenant shouted.

We dived for a foxhole. I was first in, the ground taking care of my belly, then the lieutenant and some others were in, stacked on my back.

Grenades burst around the perimeter, a few rifle shots.

‘Wow, like a sandwich,’ I said. ‘Just stay where you are.’

‘Yep, we’re nothing but sandbags for O’Brien,’ Mad Mark said, peering up to watch the explosions go off.

‘Protect the College Joe,’ Barney said, nestled down by my feet.

It didn’t last long.

A blond-headed soldier ran over when the shooting ended. ‘Jesus, I got me a hunk of grenade shrapnel in my fuckin’ hand,’ he said. He sucked the wound. It didn’t seem bad.

Mad Mark inspected the cut under a flashlight. ‘Will it kill you before morning?’

‘Nope, I guess not. Have to get a tetanus shot, I suppose. Christ, those tetanus shots hurt don’t they? I don’t want a fuckin’ tetanus shot.’

As it turned out, the first fight had not been a fire fight. The blond soldier and a few others had been bored. Bored all day. Bored that night. So they’d synchronized watches, set a time, agreed to toss hand grenades outside our little perimeter at 2200 sharp, and when 2200 came, they did it, staging the battle. They shouted and squealed and fired their weapons and threw hand grenades and had a good time, making noise, scaring hell out of everyone. Something to talk about in the morning.

‘Great little spat,’ they said the next day, slyly.

‘Great?’ I couldn’t believe it.

‘Ah, you know. Little action livens up everything, right? Gets the ol’ blood boiling.’ ‘You crazy?’ ‘Mad as a hatter.’

‘You like getting shot, for God’s sake? You like Charlie trying to chuck grenades into your foxhole? You like that stuff?’

‘Some got it, some don’t. Me, I’m mad as a hatter.’

‘Don’t let him shit you,’ Chip said. ‘That whole thing last night was a fake. They planned it, beginning to end.’

‘Except for old Turnip Head getting a piece of his own grenade,’ Bates said. ‘They didn’t plan that.’ Bates walked along beside me, the platoon straggled out across a wide rice paddy. ‘Turnip Head threw his grenade and it hit a tree and bounced right back at him. Lucky he didn’t blow his head off.’

Chip shook his head, a short, skinny soldier from Orlando, Florida, a black guy. ‘Me, I don’t take chances like that. You’re right, they’re nutty,’ he said.

We walked along. Forward with the left leg, plant the foot, lock the knee, arch the ankle. Push the leg into the paddy, stiffen the spine. Let the war rest there atop the left leg: the rucksack, the radio, the hand grenades, the magazines of golden bullets, the rifle, the steel helmet, the jingling dogtags, the body’s own fat and water and meat, the whole contingent of warring artifacts and flesh. Let it all perch there, rocking on top of that left leg, fastened and tied and anchored by latches and zippers and snaps and nylon cord.

Packhorse for the soul. The left leg does it all. Scolded and trained. The left leg stretches with magnificent energy, long muscle. Lumbers ahead. It’s the strongest leg, the pivot. The right leg comes along, too, but only a companion. The right leg unfolds, swings out, and the right foot touches the ground for a moment, just quickly enough to keep pace with the left, then it weakens and raises on the soil a pattern of desolation.