by Tim O'Brien
To a man, my heroes were wise. Perhaps Vere was an exception. But when he allowed Billy Budd to die, he was at least seeking justice, tormented by a need for wisdom, even omniscience. But certainly Shane and Bogart and Henry had learned much and knew much, having gone through their special agonies.
And each was courageous. Bogie. How could a man leave Ingrid Bergman, send her away, even for the most noble of causes? Shane, facing his villain. Vere, sending a stuttering, blond, purely innocent youth to the gallows. And especially Frederic Henry. Talking with his love, Catherine Barkley:
“You’re brave.”
“No,” she said. “But I would like to be.”
“I’m not,” I said. “I know where I stand. I’ve been out long enough to know. I’m like a ball-player that bats two hundred and thirty and knows he’s no better.”
“What is a ball-player that bats two hundred and thirty? It’s awfully impressive.”
“It’s not. It means a mediocre hitter in base-ball.”
“But still a hitter,” she prodded me.
“I guess we’re both conceited,” I said. “But you are brave.”
Henry, and the rest of my heroes, had been out long enough to know; experienced and wise. Batting two hundred and thirty? Realistic, able to speak the truth. Conceited? Never. And, most strikingly, each of the heroes thought about courage, cared about being brave, at least enough to talk about it and wonder to others about it.
But in Vietnam, out in the villages of My Lai and My Khe, where the question of courage is critical, no one except Captain Johansen seemed to care. Not the malingerers, certainly. Not Arizona, the kid who was shot in the chest in his private charge. Not the Doc. So, when the time in my life came to replace fictional heroes with real ones, the candidates were sparse, and it was to be the captain or no one.
Looking at him, only a shadow rolled in a poncho, lying on his side asleep, I wondered what it was about him that made him a real hero.
He was blond. Heroes somehow are blond in the ideal. He had driven racing automobiles as a civilian and had a red slab of scarred flesh as his prize. He had medals. One was for killing the Viet Cong, a Silver Star. He was like Vere, Bogie, Shane, and Frederic Henry, companionless among herds of other men, men lesser than he, but still sad and haunted that he was not perfect. At least, so it appeared. Perhaps other men, some of the troopers he led who were not so brave, died when he did not and should have, by a hero’s standard.
Like my fictional prewar heroes, Captain Johansen’s courage was a model. And just as I could never match Alan Ladd’s prowess, nor Captain Vere’s intensity of conviction, nor Robert Jordan’s resolution to confront his own certain death (in Jordan’s place, I would have climbed back on my horse, bad leg and all, and galloped away till I bled to death in the saddle), I could not match my captain. Still, I found a living hero, and it was good to learn that human beings sometimes embody valor, that they do not always dissolve at the end of a book or movie reel.
I thought about courage off and on for the rest of my tour in Vietnam. When I compared subsequent company commanders to Johansen, it was clear that he alone cared enough about being brave to think about it and try to do it. Captain Smith admitted that he was a coward, using just that word. Captain Forsythe strutted and pretended, but he failed.
On the outside, things did not change much after Captain Johansen. We lost about the same number of men. We fought about the same number of battles, always small little skirmishes.
But losing him was like the Trojans losing Hector. He gave some amount of reason to fight. Certainly there were never any political reasons. The war, like Hector’s own war, was silly and stupid. Troy was besieged for the sake of a pretty woman. And Helen, for God’s sake, was a woman most of the grubby, warted Trojans could never have. Vietnam was under siege in pursuit of a pretty, tantalizing, promiscuous, particularly American brand of government and style. And most of Alpha Company would have preferred a likable whore to self-determination. So Captain Johansen helped to mitigate and melt the silliness, showing the grace and poise a man can have under the worst of circumstances, a wrong war. We clung to him.
Even forgetting the captain, looking at myself and the days I writhed insensible under bullets and the other days when I did okay, somehow shooting back or talking coherently into the radio or simply watching without embarrassment how the fighting went, some of the futility and stupidity disappeared. The idea is manliness, crudely idealized. You liken dead friends to the pure vision of the eternal dead soldier. You liken living friends to the mass of dusty troops who have swarmed the world forever. And you try to find a hero.
It is more difficult, however, to think of yourself in those ways. As the eternal Hector, dying gallantly. It is impossible. That’s the problem. Knowing yourself, you can’t make it real for yourself. It’s sad when you learn you’re not much of a hero.
Grace under pressure, Hemingway would say. That is how you recognize a brave man. But somehow grace under pressure is insufficient. It’s too easy to affect grace, and it’s too hard to see through it. I remembered the taut-faced GIs who gracefully buckled, copping out so smoothly, with such poise, that no one ever knew. The malingerers were adept: “I know we’re in a tight spot, sir. I wouldn’t go back to the rear, you know me. But—” then a straight-faced, solid, eye-to-eye lie. Grace under pressure means you can confront things gracefully or squeeze out of them gracefully. But to make those two things equal with the easy word “grace” is wrong. Grace under pressure is not courage.
Or the other cliché: A coward dies a thousand deaths but a brave man only once. That seems wrong, too. Is a man once and for always a coward? Once and for always a hero?
It is more likely that men act cowardly and, at other times, act with courage, each in different measure, each with varying consistency. The men who do well on the average, perhaps with one moment of glory, those men are brave.
And those who are neither cowards nor heroes, those men sweating beads of pearly fear, failing and whimpering and trying again—the mass of men in Alpha Company—even they may be redeemable. The easy aphorisms hold no hope for the middle man, the man who wants to try but has already died more than once, squirming under the bullets, going through the act of death and coming through embarrassingly alive. The bullets stop. As in slow motion, physical things gleam. Noise dissolves. You tentatively peek up, wondering if it is the end. Then you look at the other men, reading your own caved-in belly deep in their eyes. The fright dies the same way novocaine wears off in the dentist’s chair. You promise, almost moving your lips, to do better next time; that by itself is a kind of courage.
Seventeen
July
Captain Johansen was one of the nation’s pride. He was blond, meticulously fair, brave, tall, blue-eyed, and an officer. He left Alpha Company at the end of June.
Standing bareheaded up on a little hill, Johansen said we were a good outfit, he was proud of us, he was sad some of the men were dead or crippled. There was a brief change-of-command ceremony. We all stood at attention, feeling like orphans up for adoption. We watched Johansen salute and shake hands with our new commander, a short, fat ROTC officer.
The new captain looked like a grown-up Spanky of “Our Gang.”
Like seventy percent of the officers around, he was from the South, a Tennessean named Smith. He planted his legs and gave us a pep talk. He wanted a good, tough fighting unit. He wanted professionals, he said, just as the battalion motto called for in big gold letters. He tried to sound authoritative, but it did not work. No one trusts a green officer, and if he’s short and fat and thinks he’s a good soldier, he had better be Patton himself.
With Smith leading Alpha Company, we returned to the My Lai—My Khe area. It was a two-day operation, simply a sweep through a string of villages; we would make camp for the night, then sweep right back again the next day.
A troop of tracks—armored personel carriers, tanklike vehicles but without the cannon—accompanied us.
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Helicopters ferried us into a paddy to the north of one of the villages at My Khe. Smith’s face was red. He yelled at everyone, and nobody listened. He told us to spread out, watch the tree line.
“Damn it, Timmy boy, we’re gonna get killed here. Those guys better spread out. Jesus, they act like they been smokin’ a weed we grow back home.”
Then he smiled like a jolly fat man and said he always wanted to be a soldier. “My daddy used to say, Bobby, stay away from women and hard liquor. Join the army, my daddy said. Join the army and stay with it, and you’ll live to be a hundred. But, by cracker, those guys better keep their eyes open. Intel says this place is bad.”
We waited for the tracks. When they came, the Second Platoon took the lead through the village while the heavy stuff lumbered up a hill to give us cover with their fifty-caliber machine guns. The idea was to drive the enemy from the hamlet and into the open, where the tracks could gun them down.
The first hamlets were deserted. We went slowly. One of the men on point cleared a trail with a mine detector. But he’d never used one before, and no one believed the thing worked anyway. With twenty years’ shrapnel in the ground, the headphones are always clicking, mines or no mines. We poked around a little, trying not to touch anything, but you don’t find the Viet Cong that way. We just walked. That was the order, the plan, and we tried to do it silently and safely. The third hamlet was full of women and children. We herded them out into an adjacent paddy, and the tracks came off their hill, and we smoked and handed out C rations while Captain Smith and the track commander argued about what to do next. They decided to take the civilians along to our night position, and the logic was clear. Their husbands and fathers were the people we were looking for. We’d be safe with the women and kids sleeping with us. So we hauled up the old women, and the kids climbed aboard, and we churned out into the middle of a putrid, wet rice paddy. The tracks formed a circle. In silence, the civilians huddled in the middle of the perimeter, as if they’d done it before, and they went to sleep.
Captain Smith sat by the radio. “Pretty good strategy, huh, Timmy boy? ROTC’s pretty good trainin’, not so bad as they say. Hee, hee. Actually, to tell the truth now, it is pretty bad trainin’. Should’ve gone to the Point, I guess, but oh well, Daddy always said, start at the bottom. Hee, hee. An’ ROTC’s the bottom.” He paused a moment and changed his tone, going into the authoritative one. “Call headquarters. Tell ’em we got our night position. No ambushes. Code it up and tell ’em we’re moving out early tomorrow.”
We moved out at daybreak, leaving the civilians behind. Smith ordered us to check out bunkers and bomb shelters as we swept back through the villages. One of the grenades brought an old lady out of her bomb shelter. She was seventy years old and bleeding all over. The medics patched her as best they could. She was conscious. She watched them wrap bandages around her breasts. They jabbed her with morphine. Then we called a dust-off helicopter, and when it arrived the medics tried to help her up. She scrambled like a wet fish. She was nearly dead, but she crawled away on all fours, whimpering, trying to get back into her hole. The medics had to carry her. She hollered all the way. The bandages were dangling, blood was in her hair and eyes, she was screaming, but the bird roared and lifted and dipped its nose and flew away with her.
That was the end of the mission.
We climbed onto the tracks, hung our packs on hooks, removed our helmets, and dangled our legs over the sides. I felt good. I tied the radio to the side of the track and lay on my back to talk with the other platoons. We turned out of the villages and into the rice paddy. It was a marsh. The mud was up to a man’s thigh.
Rocket-propelled grenades came out of the village. They hit in front of the lead vehicles.
“Incoming! Jesus, get the hell off these tracks!” The fifty-caliber gunner was hollering at us. “Get off here, let me shoot!”
Small-arms fire came next, spraying the water.
We dived off the tracks. The machine-gunners seemed to start firing all at the same time.
We waded in the muck, almost impossible to move. We tried to reach up for our ammo and guns.
I tried to untie the radio, holding my rifle between my legs. The radio wouldn’t come. Silence, and then the enemy RPG fire resumed. Our own return fire stopped as everyone ducked and sweated. Men were shouting. Running.
The paddy was deep. It was dark brown and green, and we struggled in it. The tracks started to back up. It was, we learned later, the standard maneuver when they take RPG fire, they go into reverse, full speed.
They ran over us. There was no way to move, as in a nightmare when your legs are filled with concrete and not attached by nerves to your brain.
The tracks ran over Paige, taking away his foot. One of the lieutenants was hit, but he went to pull Paige out of the mud. Ortez was cushioned by the muck when a track went over him, but his leg was broken. He went stumbling past me, bloody and without his helmet or machine gun. He threw his canteen away, and his ammo belt. He stopped and turned and hopped away from a track, crying.
A track ran over a little guy named McElhaney. He couldn’t move because he carried a radio, and he was smothered and crushed dead.
The tracks kept rolling backward. The gunners poured fire into the village. More grenades came rifling out into the paddy.
It was the battle at Bull Run, all of us churning to escape the vehicles. We threw ammo and helmets and belts into the paddy. Gear was strewn everywhere. I left my radio dangling from the track and tried to catch the company. We finally stopped. We formed a skirmish line along a paddy dike.
The tracks stopped in front of us.
Smith walked over and said he wanted to call headquarters and get an air strike on the village. He wiped off his glasses and chuckled. I went to the track and took off the radio, and a company RTO came along to pull his out of the paddy. Then the jets came in for twenty minutes.
We watched them drop napalm.
Medics gave Paige morphine as he sat inside one of the tracks. He smoked and didn’t cry or smile, perfectly composed. He knew he was going back to the world; that was all that mattered. “Jesus, man, does it hurt? Christ, it must hurt like hell.” Some of Paige’s black friends were inside the track, talking to him and even laughing. “Man, you’re a lucky sonofabitch. War’s over.”
“Shit, man, just smoke that weed. You got yourself a million-dollar wound there. Home tomorrow, no problem.”
Smith poked his round head inside the track and told Paige to hold on, we had a dust-off on the way. When it came, I threw yellow smoke out into the paddy. The grenade fizzled smoke, then sank. Someone else tried red, the helicopter saw it, and we walked through a mudstorm, carrying Paige and Ortez and some others.
Then the tracks formed a straight line and moved out. We walked between and behind the monsters, looking for McElhaney. The mud came up to our knees, and the water was sometimes near the crotch, and we strutted like Fourth of July majorettes. But the steps were horrible to take. No one really wanted to be the man to find Mac. Captain Smith lagged behind. One of McElhaney’s friends came over to bum a cigarette and then walked with me. He talked about the old days, when he and I and Mac were the new guys in the company.
“I never thought you’d make it this far,” he told me. “An’ I guess I never thought Mac would make it either. Me, shit, I’m going into Chu Lai and re-up, next chance I get. Christ, I’ll give the army three years to get out of this shit. I ain’t bullshittin’, I’m gonna re-up, I don’t give a damn. Can’t take this shit anymore.”
Up front somebody found McElhaney under two feet of water.
Most of the blood was out of him. He was little to begin with.
He was white and wet, and the algae were on him. Some men gingerly rolled him into a poncho. We leaned against a track and smoked, not watching.
Captain Smith joined us. He joked, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t help with McElhaney, and he asked what we thought about all this.
“Sir,
I think we should just turn the tracks around and get away from these villages. That’s my advice, sir.”
“Well, Timmy boy, that’s why I’m an officer. We’ve got our orders.”
“Okay, sir. But if the ground commander thinks it’s best to …”
Captain Smith jerked a finger into the air and did a comic double-take, acting, and he smiled like a fool, acting. “Right, Timmy boy. I almost forgot that. Maybe I’ll talk to the track commander about yer idea. Thanks, Timmy boy!”
But the two officers argued and then decided to move into the hamlet. So Smith ordered the first platoon to move out of the paddy into a dry, wooded area, covering our left flank. Then he sent one squad from the Third Platoon onto the right flank—a broad, very large paddy dike, perhaps twenty feet wide.
The tracks started rolling, and the troops moved behind them very slowly. We picked up a machine gun and some rifles and ammo on the way. It was stuff we’d thrown away during the retreat. We went fifty meters.
Then someone in the squad on our right flank triggered a mine, a huge thing. I thought they were mortaring us. Smith was just in front of me, and he hollered “Incoming,” and we both dived into the slime and sank into it.
Voices calling for medics started in small, bewildered, questioning tones, softly, afraid to say the word. Then we were all bellowing. A medic stumbled across the exposed paddy, running with high, fullback strides. He sank onto his knees and tried to help the dead ones until he saw they were dead. Other medics slowly came over. They were tired of putting their fingers into blood.
The tracks stopped and everyone waded to paddy dikes to sit down and wait. One of my friends walked over and showed me a two-inch hole in his canteen where shrapnel had hit.
“Not bad, huh?” Barney said. He was a very young soldier, and he was more amazed than frightened. He grinned. “Pretty lucky, there it is. I’ll have some good stories to tell when the Ol’ freedom bird takes me home.”