by Tim O'Brien
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108. Boston Herald, September 14, 1988.
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109. Fred Widmer, in Bilton and Sim, Four Hours in My Lai, p. 80.
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110. Arvonne Fraser, in Abigail McCarthy, Private Faces/Public Places (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), p. 202.
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111. Lester David, The Lonely Lady of San Clemente (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1978), pp. 73-74.
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112. Ibid, pp. 202-204.
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113. Karen, "Shame," p. 42.
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114. David, The Lonely Lady of San Clemente, p. 180
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115. Justin Kaplan, "The Naked Self and Other Problems," in Marc Pachter, ed. Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art (Washington, D.C. New Republic Books, 1979), p. 37.
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116. Karl S. Guthke, B. Traven: The Life Behind the Legends (Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987), pp. 8-9.
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117. Why do we care about Lizzie Borden, or Judge Crater, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Little Big Horn? Mystery! Because of all that cannot be known. And what if we did know? What if it were proved—absolutely and purely—that Lizzie Borden took an ax? That Oswald acted alone? That Judge Crater fell into Sicilian hands? Nothing more would beckon, nothing would tantalize. The thing about Custer is this: no survivors. Hence, eternal doubt, which both frustrates and fascinates. It's a standoff. The human desire for certainty collides with our love of enigma. And so I lose sleep over mute facts and frayed ends and missing witnesses. God knows I've tried. Reams of data, miles of magnetic tape, but none of it satisfies even my own primitive appetite for answers. So I toss and turn. I eat pints of ice cream at two in the morning. Would it help to announce the problem early on? To plead for understanding? To argue that solutions only demean the grandeur of human ignorance? To point out that absolute knowledge is absolute closure? To issue a reminder that death itself dissolves into uncertainty, and that out of such uncertainty arise great temples and tales of salvation? I prowl and smoke cigarettes. I review my notes. The truth is at once simple and baffling: John Wade was a pro. He did his magic, then walked Everything else is conjecture. No answers, yet mystery itself carries me on.
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118. Jay Robert Nash, Among the Missing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 189.
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119. Ambrose Bierce, letter, in Nash, Among the Missing, pp. 80-81. The flamboyant writer disappeared in Mexico without a trace. His last letter was dated December 26, 1913.
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120. Sigmund Freud, as cited in Alfred Kazin, "The Self as History: Reflections on Autobiography," in Pachter, ed., Telling Lives: The Biographer's Art, p. 74.
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121. Ambrose Bierce, letter to Mrs. J. C. McCrackin, in C. Hartley Grattan, Bitter Bierce: A Mystery of American Letters (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1929), pp. 75-76.
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122. Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Wakefield," in Twice-Told Tales (reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1889), p. 162.
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123. John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 426.
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124. Missing my life—she's right. But there is also the craving to know what cannot be known. Our own children, our fathers, our wives and husbands: Do we truly know them? How much is camouflage? How much is guessed at? How many lies get told, and when, and about what? How often do we say, or think, God, I never knew her? How often do we lie awake speculating—seeking some hidden truth? Oh, yes, it gnaws at me. I have my own secrets, my own trapdoors. I know something about deceit. Far too much. How it corrodes and corrupts. In her gentle way, I suppose, Ruth Rasmussen was trying to tell me something both hard and simple. We find truth inside, or not at all.
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125. Nash, Among the Missing, p. 71.
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126. Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, translated by Robert Fagles (New York: Viking Penguin, 1982; reprint, Penguin Classics, 1984), p. 381.
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127. Swatting flies—yes. Maybe. But still, it's odd how the mind erases horror. All the evidence suggests that John Wade was able to perform a masterly forgetting trick for nearly two decades, somehow coping, pushing it all away, and from my own experience I can understand how he kept things buried, how he could never face or even recall the butchery at Thuan Yen. For me, after a quarter century, nothing much remains of that ugly war. A handful of splotchy images. My company commander bending over a dead soldier, wiping the man's face with a towel. A lieutenant with a bundled corpse over his shoulder like a great sack of bird feed. My own hands. A buddy's bewildered eyes. A kid named Chip Merricks soaring into a tree. A patch of rice paddy bubbling with machine-gun fire. Everything else is a smudge of hedgerows and trails and land mines and snipers and death. We moved like sleepwalkers through the empty villages, shadowed by an enemy we could never find, calling in medevac choppers and loading up the casualties and then moving out again toward the next deadly little ville. And behind us we left a wake of fire and smoke. We called in gunships and air strikes. We brutalized. We wasted. We pistol-whipped. We trashed wells. We kicked and punched. We burned all that would burn. Yes, and these too were atrocities—the dirty secrets that live forever inside all of us. I have my own PFC Weatherby. My own old man with a hoe. And yet a quality of abstraction makes reality unreal. All these years later, like John Wade, I cannot remember much, I cannot feel much. Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does, attacking infection, enveloping and destroying those malignancies that would otherwise consume us. Still, it's odd. On occasion, especially when I'm alone, I find myself wondering if these old tattered memories weren't lifted from someone else's life, or from a piece of fiction I once read or once heard about. My own war does not belong to me In a peculiar way even at this very instant, the ordeal of John Wade_the long decades of silence and lies and secrecy_all this has a vivid, living clarity that seems far more authentic than my own faraway experience Maybe that's what this book is for. To remind me. To give me back my vanished life.
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128. Even this is conjecture, but what else is there? See Crossan, footnote 123.
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129. See Chapter 10.
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130. See Parrish, footnote 22: "It has been said that a miracle is the result of causes with which we are unacquainted."
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131. Finally it's a matter of taste, or aesthetics, and the boil is one possibility that I must reject as both graceless and disgusting. Besides, there's the weight of evidence. He was crazy about her.
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132. Because, on the other hand, there's no accounting for taste. It's a judgment call. Maybe you hear her screaming. Maybe you see steam rising from the sockets of her eyes.
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133. My heart tells me to stop right here, to offer some quiet benediction and call it the end. But truth won't allow it. Because there is no end, happy or otherwise. Nothing is fixed, nothing is solved. The facts, such as they are, finally spin off into the void of things missing, the inconclusiveness of conclusion. Mystery finally claims us. Who are we? Where do we go? The ambiguity may be dissatisfying, even irritating, but this is a love story. There is no tidiness. Blame it on the human heart. One way or ano
ther, it seems, we all perform vanishing tricks, effacing history, locking up our lives and slipping day by day into the graying shadows. Our whereabouts are uncertain. All secrets lead to the dark, and beyond the dark there is only maybe.
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