If I Die in a Combat Zone

‘Nope.’ I pointed the scope at a thicket outside our perimeter. The bushes sparkled in strange, luminous colour. I pointed it at the stars. ‘I can see the clouds,’ I said. ‘They’re moving, you can see them moving, bright as day.’

‘Well, for God’s sake, you’re not supposed to stare at the damn stars with that thing,’ Bates said. ‘You’re supposed to look for Charlie.’

Mad Mark came over. ‘Hey, shut the hell up, you two.’ He left.

‘Here, I’ll take the first watch,’ Bates said. I gave him the starlight scope, but he put it aside and cradled his rifle in his arms and peered out at the dark. ‘Night,’ he said.

5 Under the Mountain (#ulink_0aca3f7e-a581-5435-b77d-90749d9b6c49)

To understand what happens to the GI among the mine fields of My Lai, you must know something about what happens in America. You must understand Fort Lewis, Washington. You must understand a thing called basic training. A college graduate in May 1968, I was at Fort Lewis in mid-August. One hundred of us came. We watched one another’s hair fall, we learned the word ‘sir’, we learned to react to ‘To duh rear, HARCH!’ Above us the sixty-mile-distant mountain stood to the sky, white and shivering cold. The mountain was named Rainier, and it stood for freedom.

I made a friend, Erik, and together he and I stumbled like galley slaves through the first months of army life.

I was not looking for friendship at Fort Lewis. The place was too much the apotheosis of all nightmares about army life; the people were boors, a whole horde of boors – trainees and drill sergeants and officers, no difference in kind. In that jungle of robots there could be no hope of finding friendship; no one could understand the brutality of the place. I did not want a friend, that was how it stood in the end. If the savages had captured me, they would not drag me into compatibility with their kind. Laughing and talking of hometowns and drag races and twin-cammed racing engines – all this was for the others. I did not like them, and there was no reason to like them. For the other trainees, it came too easy. They did more than adjust well; they thrived on basic training, thinking they were becoming men, joking at the bullyism, getting the drill sergeants to joke along with them. I held my own, not a whisper more. I hated my fellows, my bunk mates and cell mates. I hated the trainees even more than the captors. I learned to march, but I learned alone. I gaped at the neat package of stupidity and arrogance at Fort Lewis. I was superior. I made no apologies for believing it. Without sympathy or compassion, I instructed my intellect and eyes: ignore the horde. I kept vigil against intrusion into my private life. I maintained a distance suitable to the black and white distinction between me and the unconscious, genuflecting herd.

I mouthed the words, shaping my lips and tongue just so, perfect deception. But no noise came out. The failure to bellow ‘Yes, Drill Sergeant!’ was a fist in the bastard’s face. A point for the soul. Standing in formation after chow, I learned to smoke. It was a private pleasure. I needed my lungs and my personal taste buds and my own hands and thoughts. I seemed older, wiser, removed, more confident.

I maintained silence. I thought about a girl. After thinking, she became a woman, only months too late. I spent time comparing her hair to the colour of sand just at dusk. That sort of thing.

I counted the number of soldiers I would trade for her. I memorized. I memorized details of her smell, knowing that without the work the details would be lost.

I memorized her letters, whole letters. Memorizing was a way to remember and a way to forget, a way to remain a stranger, only a visitor at Fort Lewis. I memorized a poem she sent me. It was a poem by Auden, and marching for shots and haircuts and clothing issue, I recited the poem, forging Auden’s words with thoughts I pretended to be hers. I lied about her, pretending that she wrote the poem herself, for me. I compared her to characters out of books by Hemingway and Maugham. Without ever knowing her – she would have me make the qualification boldly – I imagined she was made of the hardness of Lady Brett, of the fickle and spiritual in Rosy, and of the earthiness of Adams’ girl in the mountains. In her letters she claimed I created her out of the mind. The mind, she said, can make wonderful changes in the real stuff. So I hid from the drill sergeants, turned my back on the barracks, and wrote back to her.

I thought a little about Canada, I thought about refusing to carry a rifle.

I grew tired of independence.

One evening I asked Erik what he was reading. His shoes were shined, and he had his footlocker straight, and with half an hour before lights out, he was on his back looking at a book. Erik. Skinny, a deep voice, dressed in olive drab, calm. He said it was The Mint. ‘T. E. Lawrence. You know – Lawrence of Arabia. He went through something like this. You know, something like basic training. It’s a sort of how-to-do-it book.’ He said he was just paging through it, that he’d read the whole thing before, and he gave it to me. With The Mint I became a soldier, knew I was a soldier. I succumbed. Without a backward glance at privacy, I gave in to soldiering. I took on a friend, betraying in a sense my wonderful suffering.

Erik talked about poetry and philosophy and travel. But he talked about soldiering, too. We formed a coalition. It was mostly a coalition against the army, but we aimed also at the other trainees. The idea, loosely, was to preserve ourselves. It was a two-man war of survival, and we fought like guerrillas, jabbing in the lance, drawing a trickle of army blood, running like rabbits. We hid in the masses. Right under their bloodshot eyes. We exposed them, even if they were blind and deaf to it. We’d let them die of anaemia, a little blood at a time. It was a war of resistance; the objective was to save our souls. Sometimes it meant hiding the remnants of conscience and consciousness behind battle cries, pretended servility, bare, clench-fisted obedience. Our private conversations were the cornerstone of the resistance, perhaps because talking about basic training in careful, honest words was by itself an insult to army education. Simply to think and talk and try to understand was evidence that we were not cattle or machines.

Erik pretended sometimes that he lacked the fundamental courage of the men of poetry and philosophy whom he read during the first nights in Fort Lewis.

‘I was in Denmark when they drafted me. I did not want to come back. I wanted to become a European and write some books. There was even a chance for romance over there. But I come from a small town, my parents know everyone, and I couldn’t hurt and embarrass them. And, of course, I was afraid.’

Perhaps it was cowardice and perhaps it was good sense. Anyway, Erik and I rarely brought our war into the offensive stage, and when we were so stupid as to try, we were massacred like mice. One morning Erik cornered the company drill sergeant, a man named Blyton, and demanded an appointment, a private talk. Blyton hustled Erik through a door.

Erik informed him of his opposition to the Vietnam war. Erik explained that he believed the war was without just reason, that life ought not to be forfeited unless certain and fundamental principles are at stake, and not unless those principles stand in certain danger.

Erik did not talk to me about the episode for a week or more. And when he did talk, he only said that Blyton laughed at him and then yelled and called him a coward.

‘He said I was a pansy. It’s hard to argue, I suppose. I’m not just intellectually opposed to violence, I’m absolutely frightened by it. It’s impossible to separate in my mind the gut fear from pure reason. I’m really afraid that all the hard, sober arguments I have against this war are nothing but an intellectual adjustment to my horror at the thought of bleeding to death in some rice paddy.’

Blyton did not forget Erik, and we had to take the guerrilla war to the mountain for a while. We were good boys, good soldiers. We assumed a perfect, tranquil mediocrity. We returned to our detached, personal struggle.

We found a private place to talk, out behind the barracks. There was a log there. It was twice the thickness of an ordinary telephone pole and perhaps a fourth of its length, and on an afternoon in September Erik and I were sitting on that log, polishing boots, cleaning out M-14s and talking poetry. It was a fine log, and useful. We used it for a podium and as a soapbox. It was a confessional and a shoeshine stand. It was scarred. A hundred waves of men had passed through the training company before us; no reason to doubt that a hundred waves would follow.

On that September afternoon Erik smeared black polish on the log, marking it with our presence, and absently he rubbed at the stain, talking about poems. He explained (and he’ll forgive my imprecise memory as I quote him now): ‘Frost, by just about any standard, is the finest of a good bunch of American poets. People who deprecate American poetry need to return to Robert Frost. Then, as I rank them – let’s see – Marianne Moore and Robinson. And if you count Pound as an American, he has written the truest of poems. For all his mistakes, despite his wartime words on the radio, that man sees through ideology like you and I look through glass. If you don’t believe, just listen.’

Erik became Ezra Pound. Seriously, slowly, he recited a portion of ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberly’

These fought in any case,

and some believing,

pro domo, in any case …

Some quick to arm,

some for adventure,

some from fear of weakness,

some from fear of censure,

some for love of slaughter, in imagination.

learning later …

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;

Died some, pro patria,

non ‘dulce’ non ‘et decor’ …

‘Pound is right,’ Erik said. ‘Look into your own history. Here we are. Mama has been kissed good-bye, we’ve grabbed our rifles, we’re ready for extinction. All this not because of conviction, not for ideology; rather it’s from fear of society’s censure, just as Pound claims. Rather from fear of weakness, afraid that to avoid war is to avoid manhood. We come to Fort Lewis afraid to admit we are not Achilles, that we are not brave, not heroes. Here we are, thrust to the opposite and absurd antipode of what we think is good. And tomorrow we’ll be out of bed at three o’clock in the pitch-black morning.’

‘Up, up, up!’ the squad leader shouts. He has been in the army for two weeks, same as the rest of us. But he is big and he is strong and he is in charge. He loves the new power. ‘Out of the sack! Out!’

‘Ya damn lifer!’ It is Harry the Montanan, head under a sheet, pointing a thick middle finger at the squad leader’s back. ‘Lifer! Ya hear me? Take yer damn army an’ shove it. Use it fer grade-Z fertilizer!’ Harry pauses. The squad leader hits the lights, glaring and cold and excruciating bright lights. Harry shoves his face into the pillow. ‘Two-bit goddamn lifer!’

The squad leader orders Harry to scrub the commodes. Harry threatens to use the squad leader’s head as a scrub brush.

The squad leader is chastened but still in charge. ‘Okay, who’s gonna wax the floor?’ He checks his duty roster, finds a name.

Mousy whines. ‘Well, for Pete’s sake, they got the buffer downstairs. What the hell ya want? Want me to polish the damn thing with a sock?’

‘Use yer brown nose,’ the Montanan drawls, head still tucked into a pillow.

White paddles over to the shower. You hear him singing about Idaho. He was married two days before induction.

Mornings are the worst time. It is the most hopeless, most despairing time. The darkness of Fort Lewis mornings is choked off by brazen lights, the shrieks of angry men and frightened, homesick boys. The bones and muscles and brain are not ready for three-o’clock mornings, not ready for duties and harsh voices. The petty urgencies of the mornings physically hurt. The same hopeless feeling that overwhelmed inmates of Treblinka; prisoners of other human beings, caught up in a political marsh, unmotivated to escape and still unwilling to acquiesce, no one to help, no words to speak silently in consolation. The complete, certain reality of the morning kills any words. In the mornings at Fort Lewis comes a powerful want for privacy. You pledge yourself to finding an island someday. Or a bolted, sealed, air-conditioned hotel room. No lights, no admittance, no friends, not even your girl, and not even Erik or your starving grandmother.

The men search out cheer. The North Dakotan bellows out that we may be going to the PX that night.

‘Yeah, maybe!’ Harry rolls on to the floor. ‘Second Platoon went last night. That makes it our turn, damn right. Christ, I’ll buy me a million wads o’ chewin’ tobacco. An’ a case o’ Coke. Y’all gotta help me smuggle the stuff in here, right? Hide it in the footlockers.’

We make up the bunks. Taut, creases at a forty-five-degree angle. Tempers flare, ebb into despair.