The Vintage Book of War Stories

by Sebastian Faulks

  Mitchell Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel – the spiritual texture – of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapours suck you in. You can’t tell where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.

  In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.

  Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn’t hit you until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you’ve forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife’s breathing. The war’s over. You close your eyes. You smile and think, Christ, what’s the point?

  This one wakes me up.

  In the mountains that day, I watched Lemon turn sideways. He laughed and said something to Rat Kiley. Then he took a peculiar half step, moving from shade into bright sunlight, and the booby-trapped 105 round blew him into a tree. The parts were just hanging there, so Dave Jensen and I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible, and stays with me. But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing ‘Lemon Tree’ as we threw down the parts.

  You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, ‘Is it true?’ and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.

  For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.

  Is it true?

  The answer matters.

  You’d feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen – and maybe it did, anything’s possible – even then you know it can’t be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, ‘The fuck you do that for?’ and the jumper says, ‘Story of my life, man,’ and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead.

  That’s a true story that never happened.

  Twenty years later, I can still see the sunlight on Lemon’s face. I can see him turning, looking back at Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that curious half step from shade into sunlight, his face suddenly brown and shining, and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must’ve thought it was the sunlight that was killing him. It was not the sunlight. It was a rigged 105 round. But if I could ever get the story right, how the sun seemed to gather around him and pick him up and lift him high into a tree, if I could somehow recreate the fatal whiteness of that light, the quick glare, the obvious cause and effect, then you would believe the last thing Curt Lemon believed, which for him must’ve been the final truth.

  Now and then, when I tell this story, someone will come up to me afterward and say she liked it. It’s always a woman. Usually it’s an older woman of kindly temperament and humane politics. She’ll explain that as a rule she hates war stories, she can’t understand why people want to wallow in all the blood and gore. But this one she liked. The poor baby buffalo, it made her sad. Sometimes, even, there are little tears. What I should do, she’ll say, is put it all behind me. Find new stories to tell.

  I won’t say it but I’ll think it.

  I’ll picture Rat Kiley’s face, his grief, and I’ll think, You dumb cooze.

  Because she wasn’t listening.

  It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story.

  But you can’t say that. All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth. No Mitchell Sanders, you tell her. No Lemon, no Rat Kiley. No trail junction. No baby buffalo. No vines or moss or white blossoms. Beginning to end, you tell her, it’s all made up. Every goddamn detail – the mountains and the river and especially that poor dumb baby buffalo. None of it happened. None of it. And even if it did happen, it didn’t happen in the mountains, it happened in this little village on the Batangan Peninsula, and it was raining like crazy, and one night a guy named Stink Harris woke up screaming with a leech on his tongue. You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it.

  And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It’s about sunlight. It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.

  Philip Caputo

  BE LIKE THE FOREST

  In Philip Caputo’s novella ‘In the Forest of the Laughing Elephant’ (1998), the soldiers who fight their way through the jungle are in pursuit of an unusual enemy: a tiger has killed an American soldier and disappeared with the body, and the platoon has been sent out to bring the corpse back to camp.

  The following extract suggests that sense of otherworldliness felt by the men who fought in the jungles of Vietnam.

  THEY HAD BEEN six, now they were five, and none of them could see the sun. Three of the men, standing on one side of a deep, fast river, were looking up at the forest canopy, thick as thatch but green and wet and higher overhead than any thatch roof could be. A hundred feet at least, maybe two. Above it hung a dense ceiling of monsoon clouds. Turning their heads quickly side to side, like bird-watchers trying to spot some rare and elusive parrot, the men looked for the sun, the guiding light. They had no idea where they were.

  Neither did the fourth man, who was on the other side of the river; but he was not trying to find the sun. Sitting naked at one end of the rope-and-plank bridge from which he’d jumped, attempting to rescue the radioman, he was wringing out his wet clothes. His rifle and his rucksack, lumpy with rations and coiled rope and other gear, lay on the grass where he’d tossed them before he’d leaped after his radioman, who had fallen from the bridge and went twirling and tumbling down the river like a broken branch.

  The fifth man squatted nearby. He was the smallest and dressed only in shorts, sandals, and a cork helmet that had once been green but was now faded almost to white. It was difficult to tell his age, because his skin, the colour of slightly overdone toast, was deeply creased on his face but as smooth and taut as a youth’s on his arms and torso. He himself did not know how old he was in years; he had no idea what a year was. He measured his life by the rises and falls of the sun, the phases of the moon, the rhythms of the two seasons, wet and dry. His name was Han, and he was a hill tribesman and a hunter, a very good one. A quiver bristling with arrows hung from his belt, a leather pouch filled with krait poison from his neck, and a crossbow lay in his lap. It had been his father’s – a beautiful weapon carved from mahogany, its stock bearing his father’s talisman: three rings cut with a tiger’s tooth and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The three rings held the tiger’s power. Han had killed more deer and birds with the crossbow than he could remember; with it and its arrows tipped in the venom of the krait, he had killed Tiger three times and Panther five. He rubbed the mother-of-pearl as he squatted, waiting for the tall trung-si to finish drying his clothes. Like him, Han was not looking for the sun; unlike him, he knew where he
was.

  The tall man stood and gave his trousers a last twist before putting them on. His black hair was cut very short – it looked as if a three-day growth of beard had migrated from his face to his skull – and the sooty wings of a luxuriant moustache swooped under his long, narrow nose. From the waist up, his body appeared to have been painted, so sharp were the lines between his browned arms, face, and neck and the white of his shoulders and chest. It was a sickly white, a pallor suggesting malaria or dengue, but Lincoln Coombes was far from sickly. The muscles in his abdomen were as ribbed as beach sand after a tide’s run out, while those in his arms were long and tightly braided. He’d killed several men in hand-to-hand combat; he’d strangled them or broken their necks or crushed their skulls with blows from a rifle butt.

  He tucked in his shirt, aligning the buttons with the buckle of his web belt, his movements slow and mechanical, as though he were just learning to dress himself. Don’t rush things, he said silently as he looked into the forest, where vines hung in the shadowy, twisting corridors between the trees like electrical conduit in some unfinished construction project. He was not gazing idly but in a way meditating upon the forest’s infinite patience, and trying to draw with each breath some of that patience into himself, for in that fecund world, time wasn’t measured by man’s petty instruments of gear and jewels, but by nature’s clocks. The forest did things at its own slow, inexorable pace; some of its great trees had been saplings when Columbus sailed from Spain. Don’t rush things; be like the forest.

  He had been. Until last night, he had learned to live outside time, like the tiger, like Han. Yes, his military calling required him to keep a watch and maintain certain schedules, but he had freed himself from caring what day or month or even year it was. This land of jungles old as the earth had been the ally of his liberation. Its temporal landscape was barren of prominent features, its weeks unmarked by Sabbaths; its numberless years had names like Pig, Snake, and Monkey, the names repeating themselves in an endless cycle, and its two seasons joined like the halves of a circle, each day of the Dry fusing into the next without seam or weld, the nights of the Wet flowing smoothly into one another. And the war. The war, too, had helped Coombes unshackle himself. Monday or Friday, January or June, it was all the same to him, because the war was all the same: a stalemate without advances or retreats, triumphs or defeats. It just went on, the events of one month or year near-perfect copies of those from the month or year before. By his own choice, he’d been in it for so long even he’d forgotten how long, or thought he had. The firefights and pitched battles had become laminated in his mind into one continuous battle, as the seasons and the hot days and wet nights had merged into a constant, dateless now. And there was this too, this above all: Coombes’ indifference to time had made him indifferent to death – the end of time for each human being – and that indifference had given him mastery over fear . . . until last night. Now he had but one aim – to return to that calm space where no clocks ticked, no calendars turned, and he was not afraid.

  Be patient; be like the forest, he said to himself once again. Impatience had caused Gauthier’s death. He’d hurried Gauthier across the rickety bridge, and now he was drowned and the radio drowned with him, although, Coombes realized, the radio’s loss was not the disaster it had seemed at first.

  Han thought the trung-si was, in his motionless silence, mourning the man taken by the river. It was bad luck to disturb someone mourning the dead, so Han said nothing about the pawprint. He had spotted it as soon as he’d crossed the bridge, and had been about to yell to the trung-si when the man with the talkingbox fell into the river. Since then, Han had been squatting beside the print, not moving an inch, as if he were afraid it would walk away if he let it out of his sight. He had seen only faint sign since leaving the soldier-camp, but this print was fresh and clear. Twice now he’d measured its depth with his thumb, its width with the span of his hand, and both times his heart rolled over from an excitement mingled with fear, but more from excitement than fear. A male, bigger than the one he and his father had killed long ago, when Han was no longer a boy but not yet a man, and that one was huge. Spread out, its coat had made a blanket four people could sleep under shoulder-to-shoulder.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Han caught the flare of a match. The trung-si was smoking a cigarette; his mourning must be over. Han hissed to gain his attention.

  He came over, rifle flat on one shoulder, his hand on the barrel. Han pointed to the pawprint.

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘This is the one,’ said Han, speaking in his tribal tongue, which the trung-si understood. ‘A big male, moving fast.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  The smoke from the trung-si’s cigarette hung like campsmoke in the hotwetquiet air.

  ‘He isn’t running. Walking, but fast.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  All the My said that all the time. The white My, the black My. A word from their tongue. Han had no idea what it meant, had never asked. Jesus. Jesus Christ.

  The trung-si bent down and, spreading his fingers wide, laid his hand in the print.

  ‘How can you tell it’s walking?’

  ‘If running, tracks would be more far apart.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘He’s carrying his kill. In his teeth. Look.’ Han pointed to the long, shallow drag marks in the mud. ‘Those are made by the kill’s feet. Tiger is carrying him in his teeth. I don’t know why. Tiger kills, Tiger eats close to where he kills, but now Tiger is carrying his kill to someplace far, walking, but fast.’

  ‘How big?’

  ‘Very big.’

  ‘I mean, how much weight do you think it has?’

  Han turned to him with truth in his small, earthbrown eyes. ‘In all my hunting, trung-si, I’ve never tracked one this big.’

  That wasn’t much help. Coombes already knew that the cat was very big, for he was the only one of the five to have seen it. What he needed now was its weight and length, its speed of travel, the number of its teeth and claws and stripes, every last little concrete fact that could be ascertained. Coombes always made it a point to know his enemy; the more he knew, the more likely he was to win, but in this case, knowledge had a value beyond the practical. He hoped that facts would help dispel the mythic power of the awesome phantom that now stalked his memory with eyes glowing like the eyes in a jack-o’-lantern, only they were yellow-green instead of orange. He could see them still, as he’d seen them the night before, burning with no expression in them except serenity. Yes, serene, and malignant in their serenity, looking at him as he might at an ant or a worm. He’d never seen anything so terrible, for he could not believe there was anything in creation capable of looking upon him as if he were an ant or a worm.

  A numbness began to spread through his legs. He stood to restore feeling in their nerves, strength to their sinews; he was afraid they would crumple the way they had last night, when the tiger, after staring at him impassively for a few seconds, padded off with Valesquez in its jaws, as effortlessly as a house cat with a mouse.

  He needed facts.

  ‘Han, how did it cross the river?’

  ‘It swam. Tiger can swim. Or it jumped. Tiger can jump very far.’

  ‘Nothing could swim that river, and it’s thirty metres across. He’s carrying a man weighing one hundred kilos.’

  Han was silent, irritated by all the talk about metres and kilos. The My always spoke about kilos and metres and the time on their watches. Kilos. Metres. Hours. Jesus.

  ‘Answer me, Han. What tiger could jump thirty metres with a big man in its jaws?’

  ‘This tiger, trung-si.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ asked Coombes with a sardonic laugh. ‘That it flew?’

  ‘If it is a Ghostiger, yes.’

  ‘What?’

  Han explained. Sometimes, when Tiger turned man-eater, it ate a man’s soul as well as his flesh. If the soul was angry, it possessed Tiger, giving it extraordinary powers. Powers to fl
y. To be in two places at once. Ghostiger sustained itself by devouring other souls.

  ‘And that’s what you think this is?’ Coombes asked, rolling his eyes.

  ‘I hope not. If it’s Ghostiger, then we must not kill it.’

  ‘We’re going to kill it, all right.’

  ‘Not if Ghost. The angry spirit will find a new Tiger to make its home in, and the new Ghostiger will kill the man who killed its brother. In revenge, it will devour his body and his soul, and the bodies and souls of his wife, his children, his children’s children. So Ghostiger must be left alone.’ Han traced the outline of the pawprint with his finger. ‘That is why I hope Tiger is not Ghost. If we leave it alone, you will not pay me.’