If I Die in a Combat Zone

by Tim O'Brien

  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 war. All this not because of conviction, not for ideology; rather it’s from fear of society’s censure, just as Pound claims. Fear of weakness. Fear 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 excruciatingly 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 you 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 must have overwhelmed inmates of Treblinka: unwilling to escape and yet unwilling to acquiesce, no one to help, no consolation. The reality of the morning kills 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 onto 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.

  “KLINE!” someone hollers. “Kline, you’re a goddamn moron! A goddamn, blubbering moron. You know that? Kline, you hear me? You’re a moron!”

  Kline stands by his bunk. His tiny head goes rigid. His hands fidget. His eyes shift to the floor, to the walls, to a footlocker. He whimpers. He quivers. Kline is fat. Bewildered and timid and sensitive. No one knows.

  “Kline, you got two left boots on your feet. You see that? Look down, just look down once, will ya? You see your feet? You got two left boots on again. You see? Look down, for Christ’s sake! Stop starin’ around like you got caught snitchin’ the lieutenant’s pussy. There, ya see? Two left boots.”

  Kline grins and sits on his bunk. The problem isn’t serious.

  We make the bunks, dust the windows, tie up laundry bags, the strings anchored just so. The barracks have a high ceiling, crisscrossed by rafters and two-by-fours with no function except to give work. They have to be cleaned. The seventeen year olds, most agile and awed, do the climbing and balancing. The squad leader directs them: a peer and a sellout. Sweep and mop and wax the floor. Polish doorknobs, rub the army’s Brasso into metal.

  The squad leader glances at his watch, frenzied. “Jeez, you guys, it’s four-thirty already. Let’s go, damn it.”

  We align footgear into neat rows, shave, polish our brass, buff-buff-buff that floor.

  Outside it is Monday morning, raining again. Fort Lewis.

  It is dark, and we are shadows double-timing to the parade ground for reveille. Someone pushes Kline into place at the end of a rank. “Good God, it’s freezin’.” Kline practices coming to attention. Christ, he tries.

  We shiver, stamping blood into our feet. Erik stands next to me. He is quiet, smoking, calm, ready.

  Smells twist through the rain. Someone in the back rank cusses; forgot to lock his footlocker. KP is the penalty. Someone asks for a smoke.

  “Fall in! Re-port!”

  Afterward Drill Sergeant Blyton struts his sleek, black, airborne body up and down the ranks. We hate Blyton. It is dark and it is gushing rain, and with our heads rammed straight ahead, Blyton is only a smudge of a Smokey-the-Bear hat, a set of gleaming teeth. He teases, threatens, humiliates. It is supposed to be an inspection. But it is much more than that, nearly life and death, and Blyton is the judge. It is supposed to be a part of the training. Discipline. Blyton is supposed to play a role, to make himself hated. But for Blyton it is much more. He is evil. He does not personify the tough drill sergeant; rather he is the army; he’s the devil. Erik mutters that we’ll get the bastard someday. Words will kill him.

  Blyton finds Kline. The poor boy, towering above the drill sergeant and shifting his eyes to the left and right, up and down, whimpers, Kline is terrified. He shifts from one foot to the other. Blyton peers at him, at his belt buckle, at his feet. At his two left boots.

  Blyton has Kline hang on to his left foot for an hour.

  During the days and during the nights, we march. And sing. There are a thousand songs.

  Around her hair

  She wore a yellow bonnet.

  She wore it in the springtime,

  In the merry month of May.

  And if

  You ask

  Her

  Why the hell she wore it:

  She wore it for her soldier

  Who was far, far away.

  You write beautifully, a girl says in her letters. You make it all so terrible and real for me.… I am going to Europe next summer, she writes, and I’ll see a lot of places for you. As ever …

  If I had a low IQ,

  I could be a Lifer, too!

  And if I didn’t have a brain,

  I would learn to love the rain.

  Am I right or wrong?

  Am I goin’ strong?

  Sound off!

  Sound off!

  One, two, three, four …

  Sound Off!

  We march to the night infiltration course. They use machine guns on us, firing overhead while Erik and Harry and White and Kline crawl alongside me, under barbed wire, red tracers everywhere, down into ditches, across the finish line. In the rain. Then in dead night we march back to the barracks.

  Viet-nam

  Viet-nam

  Every night while you’re sleepin’

  Charlie Cong comes a-creepin’

  All around.

  We march to the Quick-Kill rifle range. We learn to snap off our shots, quickly, rapidly, without aim. Without any thought at all. Quick-Kill.

  We march to the obstacle course, and Blyton shoves Kline through the maneuvers.

  We m
arch back to the barracks, and we are always singing.

  If I die in a combat zone,

  Box me up and ship me home.

  An’ if I die on the Russian front,

  Bury me with a Russian cunt.

  Sound Off!

  We march to the bayonet course, through green forests, through the ever-rain and through smells of loam and leaves and pine and every fine scent of nature, marching like wind-up toys under the free, white mountain, Rainier.

  Blyton teaches us and taunts us. Standing with his legs spread wide on an elevated platform, he gives us our lesson in the bayonet. Left elbow locked, left hand on wood just below weapon’s sights, right hand on small of stock, right forearm pressed tightly along the upper stock, lunge with left leg, slice up with the steel. Again and again we thrust into midair imagined bellies, sometimes toward throats. “Dinks are little shits,” Blyton yells out. “If you want their guts, you gotta go low. Crouch and dig.”

  “Soldiers! Tell me! What is the spirit of the bayonet?” He screams the question, rolling it like Sandburg’s poetry, thundering.

  Raise your rifle, blade affixed, raise it high over your head, wave it like a flag or trophy, wave it in love, and bellow till you’re hoarse: “Drill Sergeant, the spirit of the bayonet is to kill! To kill!”

  I know a girl, name is Jill,

  She won’t do it, but her sister will.

  Honey, oh, Baby-Doll.

  I know a girl, dressed in black,

  Makes her living on her back.

  Honey, oh, Baby-Doll.

  I know a girl, dressed in red,

  Makes her living in a bed.

  Honey, oh, Baby-Doll.

  There is no thing named love in the world. Women are dinks. Women are villains. They are creatures akin to Communists and yellow-skinned people and hippies. We march off to learn about hand-to-hand combat. Blyton grins and teases and hollers out his nursery rhyme: “If ya wanta live, ya gotta be ag-ile, mo-bile, and hos-tile.” We chant the words: ag-ile, mo-bile, hos-tile. We make it all rhyme. We march away, singing.

  I don’t know, but I been told,

  Eskimo pussy is mighty cold.

  Am I goin’ strong?

  Am I right or wrong?

  Sound Off!

  The company forms up for inspection. The battalion commander comes by in his dark glasses, and Blyton and the others are firm and mellow. We’ve been given instructions to say “No, sir” when the colonel asks if we have any problems or any complaints or any needs. When he asks if there’s enough food and if we get enough sleep, we’re supposed to say “Yes, sir.”

  They stuff us into the barracks at ten o’clock. The squad leader gears us up for nighttime cleaning. He promises to allow an extra half-hour of sleep in the morning, and we know he’s lying, but the floor gets waxed and our shoes get shined and the lockers get wiped.

  Blyton comes in and cusses and turns the light off and by eleven o’clock all the boors and bullies snort their way to sleep. It is a cattle pen. A giant rhythm takes up the barracks, a swelling and murmuring of hearts and lungs; the wooden planks seem to move, in and out. You fight to hold to the minutes. Sleep is an enemy. Sleep puts you with the rest of them, the great, public, hopeless zoo. You battle the body. Then you sleep.

  But in the heart of sleep, you are awakened.

  Fire watch.

  You sit on the darkened stairs between the two tiers of bunks, and you smoke. Fire watch is good duty. You lose sleep, but the silence and letter-writing time and privacy make up for it, and you are free for an hour.

  The rain is falling; you feel comfortable. You listen, smiling and smoking. Will you go to war? You think of Socrates; you see him beside you, stepping through basic training as your friend. He would be a joke in short hair and fatigues. He would not succumb. He would march through the days and nights in his white robes, with a white beard, and certainly Blyton would never break him. Socrates had fought for Athens: It could not have been a perfectly just war, but Socrates, it has been told, was a brave soldier. You wonder if he had been a reluctant hero. Had he been brave out of a spirit of righteousness? Or necessity? Or resignation? You wonder how he felt as a soldier on a night like this one, with the rain falling, with just this temperature and sound. Then you think of him as an old man, you remember his fate, you think of him peering through iron bars as his ship sailed in, the final cue, only extinction ahead; his country, for which he had been a hero, ending the most certain of good lives. Nothing recorded about his weeping. But Plato may have missed something. Certainly, he must have missed something. You think about other heroes. John Kennedy, Audie Murphy, Sergeant York, T. E. Lawrence. You write letters to blond girls from middle America, calm and poetic and filled with ironies and self-pity, then you smoke, then you rouse out Kline for the next watch.

  Erik and I were discussing these things on that September afternoon, sitting behind the barracks and separating ourselves from everyone and putting polish on our boots, when Blyton saw us alone. He screamed and told us to get our asses over to him pronto.

  “A couple of college pussies,” he said when we got there. “Out behind them barracks hiding from everyone and making some love, huh?” He looked at Erik, “You’re a pussy, huh? You afraid to be in the war, a goddamn pussy, a goddamn lezzie? You know what we do with pussies, huh? We fuck ’em. In the army we just fuck ’em and straighten ’em out. You two college pussies out there hidin’ and sneakin’ a little pussy. Maybe I’ll just stick you two puss in the same bunk tonight, let you get plenty of pussy so tomorrow you can’t piss.” Blyton grinned and shook his head and said “shit” and called another drill sergeant over and told him he had a couple of pussies and wanted to know what to do. “They was out there behind the barracks suckin’ in some pussy. What the hell we do with puss in the army? We fuck ’em, don’t we? Huh? College puss almost ain’t good enough for good fuckin’.”

  Erik said we were just polishing boots and cleaning our guns, and Blyton grabbed a rifle, stopped grinning, and had us chant, pointing at the rifle and at our bodies, “This is a rifle and this is a gun, this is for shooting and this is for fun.” Then he told us to report to him that night. “You two puss are gonna have a helluva time. You’re gonna get to pull guard together, all alone and in the dark, nobody watchin’. You two are gonna walk ’round and ’round the company area, holdin’ hands, and you can talk about politics and nooky all the goddamn night. Shit, I wish I had a goddamn camera.”

  We reported to Blyton at 2100 hours, and he gave us a flashlight and black guard helmets and told us to get the hell out of his sight, he couldn’t stand to look at pussy.

  Outside, we laughed. Erik said the bastard didn’t have the guts to order us to hold hands.

  We put on the black helmets, snapped on the flashlight, and began making the rounds of the company area. It was a good, dry night. Things were peaceful. For more than two hours, we walked and enjoyed the night. No barracks quarrels, no noise. A sense of privacy and peace. We talked about whatever came to mind—our families, the coming war, hopes for the future, books, people, girls—and it was a good time. We felt … what? Free. In control. Pardoned. We walked and walked, not talking when there was no desire to talk, talking when the words came, walking, pretending it was the deep woods, a midnight hike, just walking and feeling good.

  Much later, after perhaps fifty turns around the company area, we stumbled across a trainee making an unauthorized phone call. We debated about whether to turn the poor kid in. On the one hand, we sympathized; on the other hand, we were tired and it was late and our feet were hurting and we had a hunch that the kid’s punishment would be to relieve us for the night. We gave Blyton the man’s name. In twenty minutes the kid came out, asked for the flashlight, and told us to go to bed. We laughed. We congratulated ourselves. We felt smart. And later—much later—we wondered if maybe Blyton hadn’t won a big victory that night.

  Basic training nearly ended, we marched finally to a processing station. We heard our number
s called off, our new names. Some to go to transportation school—Erik. Some to repeat basic training—Kline. Some to become mechanics. Some to become clerks. And some to attend advanced infantry training, to become foot soldiers—Harry and the squad leader and I. Then we marched to graduation ceremonies, and then we marched back, singing.

  I wanna go to Vietnam

  Just to kill ol’ Charlie Cong.

  Am I right or wrong?

  Am I goin’ strong?

  Buses—olive drab, with white painted numbers and driven by bored-looking Spec 4s—came to take us away. Erik and I stood by a window in the barracks and watched Blyton talk with parents of the new soldiers. He was smiling.

  “We’ll get the bastard,” Erik said. We could’ve picked off the man with one shot from an M-14, no problem. He’d taught us well. We laughed and shook our fists at the window. Too easy to shoot him.

  “There’s not much I can say to you,” Erik said. “I had this awful suspicion they’d screw you, make you a grunt. Maybe you can break a leg during advanced training; pretend you’re insane.” Erik had decided at the beginning of basic to enlist for an extra year so as to escape infantry duty. I had gambled, thinking they would use me for more than a pair of legs, certain that someone would see the value of my ass behind a typewriter or a Xerox machine. We’d joked about the gamble for two months.

  He had won, I had lost.

  I shook Erik’s hand in the latrine and walked with him to his bus and shook his hand again.

  Six

  Escape

  In advanced infantry training, the soldier learns new ways to kill.

  Claymore mines, booby traps, the M-60 machine gun, the M-70 grenade launcher, the .45-caliber pistol, the M-16 automatic rifle.

  On the outside, AIT looks like basic training. Lots of push-ups, lots of shoe-shining and firing ranges and midnight marches. But AIT is not basic training. The difference is the certainty of going to war: pending doom that comes in with each day’s light and lingers all the day long.