If I Die in a Combat Zone

by Tim O'Brien

  Dulce et Decorum

  Tim:

  How does one respond to such a letter as that? July was always a hot month, sweaty kids running through the streets with sparklers, but where are they now, tell me? With you, I fear; some of them still shrilly laughing—crazy patriots.

  I suppose if we gain anything from this unsought experience it will be an appreciation for honesty—frankness on the part of our politicians, our friends, our loves, ourselves. No more liars in public places. (And the bed and the bar are, in their way, as public as the floor of Congress.)

  For honesty has become something wholly other than childhood innocence or adult aspiration. Rather, because there is no time, no cause or reason, for anything but truth, honesty has become fundamental to life itself. We must be honest or be silent.

  And especially for you, living in your terrible private world, mercilessly made public to death, I try to be honest. I am in Vietnam, but I am not in combat, and I’m sometimes conscious enough to be grateful for that. Having sought the answer to why we are both here and finding none, I now ask why you are out there, doing the battling, and not me. Again, no answer. Would I willingly risk those few moments again at Fort Lewis, when two decisions were made that fated two lives? Would I risk the chance to persuade you to enlist for an extra year to avoid the infantry for the possibility that you might have persuaded me not to? And would I now be there beside you, or instead of you? The whole thought of wishing for the chance over again is just as absurd as the actual act.

  How far into this must we go to find meaning? Here, I want desperately to help you. To give you a ticket to a place I know in Norway. And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, I can do but encourage you to be honest, as you have been.

  But here I am in Long Binh, this sprawling, tarred, barbed-wired sanctuary for well-bred brass and well-connected lifers. What they are doing to win or end the war, I don’t know. As for my own contribution to military history, I spent the first month in Asia as a legal clerk, helping the army to chastise its pot smokers and nonconforming, often futilely proud black soldiers.

  At night, I spend time on guard or waiting on standby alert. There’s no reality to it. Long Binh is not the war; it’s not really part of Vietnam, not with all the cement and Pepsi-Cola and RCA television sets. One night last week I watched a spectacular fire fight—gunships sending down red sheets of metal—then there was a long silence, a gap of blackness, before the sound of the gunships reached me, just a buzz. I imagined you out there. I’m only an observer, Tim, audience to a tragic Fourth of July celebration.

  Erik

  A new man, another southerner, took charge of Alpha Company in early August. He had been in command for only an hour when he marched the men into a minefield. Then the dust-off helicopters were there, taking away a dead man named Rodriguez and a cripple named Martinez. They were Spanish-American, bewildered companions. They’d spent time together snapping Kodak pictures of each other in gallant, machine-gun-toting poses.

  But when all that happened, I was in Chu Lai, looking for a new job. Captain Smith, probably feeling guilty for having copped out on a long-standing promise for a job sorting mail in the rear, had given me a three-day pass and a wry grin. He wished me luck. I hitchhiked around the sands of Chu Lai, showing off letters of recommendation from Captain Johansen and Alpha’s first sergeant, trying to talk someone into taking me on. But the army has plenty of mediocre typists. I couldn’t change a tire, and no one wants a tired grunt anyway. There were no offers, and I rejoined Alpha Company.

  If foot soldiers in Vietnam have a single obsession, it’s the gnawing, tantalizing hope of being assigned to a job in the rear. Anything to yank a man out of the field—loading helicopters or burning trash or washing the colonel’s laundry.

  Unlike the dreamy, faraway thoughts about returning alive to the world, the GI’s thinking about a rear job is not dominated by any distant, unreachable, unrealistic passion. It’s right there, within grasp. You watch the lucky ones wade into a rice paddy and toss their packs into a chopper. They grin and give you the peace sign. There is a self-pity, an envious loneliness, when they are gone.

  GIs use a thousand strategies to get into the rear. Some men simply shoot themselves in the feet or fingers, careful to mash only an inch or so of bone.

  Some men manufacture ailments, hoping to spend time in the rear, hoping to line up something.

  And one man maintained a running record of the dates when rear-echelon troopers were due to rotate back to the world. When one of those days came near, he’d send back a request for the man’s job.

  But the best route to a rear job, the only reliable way, is to burrow your nose gently up an officer’s ass. Preferably the company commander. If an officer takes a fancy to you—if he thinks you’re one of his own breed—then you’re a candidate for salvation. But you’ve got to spill over with clear-headedness; you’ve got to bleed with courage, morbid humor, unquestioning forbearance.

  For the soul brothers, that route is not easy. To begin with, the officer corps is dominated by white men; the corps of foot soldiers, common grunts, is disproportionately black. On top of that are all the old elements of racial tension—fears, hates, suspicions. And on top of that is the very pure fact that life is at stake. Not property or a decent job or social acceptance. It’s a matter of staying alive.

  With either the hunch or the reality that white officers favor white grunts in handing out the rear jobs, many blacks react as any sane man would. They sulk. They talk back, get angry, loaf, play sick, smoke dope. They group together and laugh and say shit to the system.

  And this feeds the problem. Pointing at malingering and insubordination by the blacks, the officers are free to pass out jobs to white men. Then the whole cycle goes for another round, getting worse.

  For Alpha Company, the phenomenon finally hit a point when the cycle was spinning so fast, with such centrifugality, that it blew apart.

  Alpha’s first sergeant was hated by the blacks. Rear assignments, they said, were going to ol’ whitey, and they intended to do something about it. “Damn first sergeant’s responsible,” they said. “He’s the Man, we’ll get him.”

  When we lost four men one day, the first sergeant saddled up and took a chopper out to join us until replacements came in. He was a tall, evenhanded man. He seemed to hate Vietnam as much as anyone. His National Guard unit had been activated, and he’d been torn away from his town and friends, same as the rest of us, by politics and circumstance. We were mortared the night he arrived. He crawled on his hands and knees with everyone else. To be fair, the first sergeant may not have been a leader, but he was quiet and helpful enough.

  In the morning we began searching villages, moving through two or three of them. We moved across a broad paddy. The company was formed in a long, widely spaced column. The first sergeant, probably to show us he had guts and could take charge, walked up front with the company commander and the RTOs, and we moved slowly.

  I was watching the first sergeant. He lurched backward, and dirt and a cloud of red smoke sprayed up around his thighs. He stood and gaped at the short explosion. He didn’t say anything. As if he were trying to back out of the shrapnel and noise, he took three steps. Then his legs disintegrated under him, and he fell heavily on his back.

  It exploded right under him. No one felt any particular loss when the helicopter landed and we packed him aboard.

  That evening we dug foxholes and cooked C rations over heat tabs. The night was hot, so instead of sleeping right away, I sat with a black friend and helped him pull his watch. He told me that one of the black guys had taken care of the first sergeant. It was an M-79 round, off a grenade launcher. Although the shot was meant only to scare the top sergeant, the blacks weren’t crying, he said. He put his arm around me and said that’s how to treat whitey when it comes down to it.

  In two weeks, a black first sergeant came to Alpha.

  Except for one or two of them, the men in Alpha Company were quietly
, flippantly desperate for a rear job. The desperation was there all the time. Walking along under the sun, pulling watch at night, waiting for resupply, writing love letters—we thought and talked about all the rear jobs waiting back there. We were not all cowards. But we were not committed, not resigned, to having to win a war.

  “Christ, you know I’ll take anything they give me,” Barney said. “I’ll shovel shit for ’em during the daytime and drink me some beer nighttime, no problem. They send me to Chu Lai, and I’ll stack bodies at the morgue. I’ll toss bodies and bloody shit around and just drink it in, they give me the job. There it is.”

  And Bates and I would pull radio watch together some nights. “When Chip and Tom got it—that damn mine—that did it for me. Nam was some kind of nervous game till they got blown up. I wasn’t even there then. Jesus, I was just listening over the radio. But, damn it, that did it. I knew those guys. I’ll take my job back there, anything.”

  So along with the rest of Alpha Company, I followed the new commander during August, hoping for a rear-echelon assignment and trying inconspicuously to avoid death, It seemed odd. We weren’t the old soldiers of World War II. No valor to squander for things like country or honor or military objectives. All the courage in August was the kind you dredge up when you awaken in the morning, knowing it will be a bad day. Horace’s old do-or-die aphorism—“Duke et decorum est pro patria mori”—was just an epitaph for the insane.

  Alpha spent most of August on top of a stubby, flat hill to the north of Pinkville. It was an old cornfield, a dusty and hot place without trees. We ran patrols during the days. At night we were mortared. It was a sort of ritual. The sun went down, we ate, smoked a little, played some word games, and at about 10 P.M. the mortar rounds came in.

  It was hard to keep a decent foxhole in that cornfield, the soil was so chalky. The sides simply caved in on you. In the end, we dug narrow sleeping trenches and just lay there, half-asleep and sometimes talking to one another, wondering when the barrages would stop.

  The whole thing was so well coordinated and timed that we learned to urinate in the first hour after sunset so as not to be standing when the explosions started. No one was hurt during the nightly sessions, but it was frustrating. Looking down into the paddies, we could see the red flashes of the mortar tubes, we could hear the ploop of the rounds shooting out.

  They would spray our hill with 82mm rounds for twenty seconds, then pack up and go home. We would call for gunships and send our own mortar fire on them, but it was always too late. It was better to turn in the trenches and go to sleep.

  Despite the ten-o’clock attacks and all the heat and dust on the little hill, the month of August was not bad. No one was killed. Few were seriously hurt. Sunstroke and blisters, nothing worse. It was God’s gift. We would lie there at night, listening to metal tearing through the hedgerows and shrubbery; in the morning we would find impact craters only yards from our sleeping holes.

  Resupply choppers brought in hot meals daily. We guzzled cases of iced beer and sodas. Morale was high—we were in a bad place, but no one was being mangled, and we were blessed. Nothing could go wrong. On one early-morning patrol, we chased two Viet Cong into a bunker. The company commander and a lieutenant threw in grenades and emptied magazines of M-16 ammo into the hole. They threw in more grenades and fired more bullets. The bunker seethed with smoke. The Viet Cong threw out a rifle. Some GIs went down and pulled them out. One—a young, riddled boy—was dead. The other was older, barely alive. Blood oozed from torn, rust-colored flesh where the shrapnel hit. He pleaded with the scout to save his life. Our medics tried to patch him, but it was clear he would die. We began cutting down a tree to allow space for a medevac chopper. Then the man died. We left him sprawled there; chickens were pecking at the dust around him when we went away.

  Back at our cornfield, the scout went through the older Viet Cong’s papers. “That VC—he VC district chief,” he said. “Big man. Mean bastard.”

  “No shit?” the company commander said. He grinned. “Hey, we got ourselves a VC district chief. Killed a VC honcho back there.”

  The company commander was elated. He called battalion headquarters and gave the news. We stayed up late that evening, talking over the kills, congratulating ourselves for being tough, stealthy, lethal soldiers. But, when it got late, we quieted down, and everyone admitted it was coincidence and fortune. And, of course, at 10 P.M. we were mortared.

  Near the end of August, helicopters carried Alpha Company to another hill, this one alongside the South China Sea. A refugee camp was being built there, and our job was to watch civilians clear the land and put up huts. Although the place was less than a mile from our cornfield, we were not mortared—only an occasional sniper—and it turned into a vacation. We sent out one patrol. A mine-sniffing dog went along. The dog stepped on a mine, and it blew his trainer’s foot away.

  It was there beside the ocean that I got my rear job. They wanted a typist in battalion headquarters; they wanted me. I dug a six-foot-deep foxhole that night, and I slept in it. In the morning Barney came to wake me and said I was a lucky son of a bitch. We went to the sea and swam, ducked some sniper bullets on the way, and I threw my gear into a helicopter, and it was done.

  Twenty

  Another War

  In the rear area, protected from the war by rows of bunkers and rolls of barbed wire, I rejoined the real United States Army.

  Thanksgiving: The first demarcation point, a roadside marking post. It drizzled, the start of the monsoon season. LZ Gator was turned into a gray hill of mud. The mess hall served up a surprisingly toothsome meal of turkey, dressing, two kinds of potatoes, cranberries, pies, mixed nuts. Like a family dinner. Men plodded in from the bunker line, gorged themselves, and stood by the stoves to dry off, then tramped on back to the wire. The FNGs, fresh from the Combat Center in Chu Lai, served the food and obeyed us like good FNGs must. “More, FNG, more!” A tentative smile, a look over at the mess sergeant, then the FNGs dipped in and gave us more.

  The daily life: I worked in S-1, battalion headquarters. According to someone’s administrative chart, S-1 was the brains of the battalion, the nerve center or some other such metaphor. But the description was inaccurate. We were bureaucracy, no more or less, albeit a miniature bureaucracy. We processed the FNGs when they came into the battalion. We processed dead people, too, taking casualty reports, keeping logs of how and when and where they died. We processed and processed. Mail. Requests for transfer. R & R applications, applications for leave. We dispensed awards—Purple Hearts, one and the same for a dead man or a man with a scraped fingernail; Bronze Stars for valor, mostly for officers who knew how to lobby. And we gave out penalties, processing courts-martial and reprimands and other such business.

  Dull. But the boredom and routine were painless, something like jumping out of a frying pan and into a sort of steam bath, not a fire. I thought about Martin Ross, the gung-ho marine who wrote with such fervor about his Korean War days, about his preference for the front lines over the rear areas. Though I could understand his distaste for monotony it struck me as a major triumph of heroism to give up monotony for its horrible opposite. So I made the best of it, churning out the paperwork like a man who loves his job, making myself indispensable.

  Christmas Eve: an office party, Kodak cameras snapping posed pictures to drool over when we get old, a grand feeling of friendship. The adjutant, a young and likable captain, led us in the drinking. The re-up NCO told dirty jokes and war stories, and we laughed at them all. The mail clerk was there. And the casualties clerk, the legal clerk, the awards clerk, the administrative NCO.

  Out on the bunker line the men shot up flares and threw hand grenades into the wire, celebrating the occasion, whatever it was. At midnight sharp, the sky over LZ Gator erupted. Star clusters, flares, illumination rounds from the firebase’s mortar tubes. We all went outside to watch. Afterward the re-up NCO and a grizzly master sergeant decided to teach me how to shoot craps, and at 4:30 on Christ
mas morning they went away muttering about beginner’s luck, the old story. I spent the money on a new tape recorder-radio set.

  Christmas Day: duplication of Thanksgiving—drizzling rain, another good meal. We ate while the chaplain played Christmas music over a set of loudspeakers attached to the chapel. Bing Crosby’s “Silent Night,” the Johnny Mann Singers’ “Oh, Come All Ye Faithful.” It was a working day, by administrative fiat. But in battalion headquarters we arranged the day in shifts, one man in the office at all times, a bottle of excellent PX Scotch as a companion.

  At midday, the captain sent two of us into Chu Lai, only an eight-mile ride, to pick up enough booze to last through the night. We found the liquor, caught a glimpse of Bob Hope trying to be funny in the rain; then we drove back to the fire base. Around ten o’clock that night everyone straggled into the headquarters building, nothing else to do, and we drank away Christmas, talking about how bad it would be if Charlie decided to attack that night, a good chuckle.

  Now and then, to help slice the monotony into endurable segments, floor shows came to LZ Gator. Korean girls, Australian girls, Japanese girls, Philippine girls, all doing the songs and routines and teases that must be taught to them in some giant convention hall in Las Vegas. It was all the same, but variety didn’t mean much. Each show started with one of those unrecognizable acid-rock songs, faded off into “I Want to Go Home—Oh, How I Want to Go Home,” then a medley of oldies-and-still-goodies, none of them very good. Then some humor, then—thank God, at last—the stripper.

  The black soldiers would arrive an hour before show time, cameras poised for a shot of flesh, taking the front-row seats. The white guys didn’t like that much. A few whites tried arriving even earlier, but, for the next floor show, the black soldiers were ready and waiting two full hours before curtains-up. The colonel, a married man, slipped into the floor show about halfway through, as if coming just to see how things were going, just checking up. But he was not late for the finale.