What It Is Like to Go to War

by Karl Marlantes

  Many of us coming up the hill saw Niemi sprint into the open. Knowing now that he was still alive and that he and the chopper crew were dead for sure if we didn’t break through to them, we all simply rushed forward to reach them before the NVA killed them. No one gave an order. We, the group, just rushed forward all at once. We couldn’t be stopped. Just individuals among us were stopped. Many forever. But we couldn’t be. This too is a form of transcendence. I was we, no longer me.

  Lance Corporal Steel, nineteen, who’d been acting platoon commander until I reorganized things and was now acting platoon sergeant, got there first. The crewmen were so grateful and happy they gave their pistols away. I got the pilot’s .38 Smith and Wesson.

  Niemi got a Navy Cross.

  I got a Navy Cross.

  The helicopter pilot got a front-page story in Stars and Stripes with the headline, “Copter ‘Crashes’ Enemy Party, Takes Hill.”75

  The kid who borrowed my rifle didn’t get anything.

  9

  HOME

  Returning from the initiatory space of the battlefield to the normal world is every bit as mysterious a journey as entering the Temple of Mars. The world you left behind has changed and you have changed. You know parts of yourself that you, and those you’ve lived with all your life, never knew before. You’ve been evil, and you’ve been good, and you’ve been beyond evil and good. You’ve split your mind from your heart, and you’ve split your heart with grief and your mind with fear. Ultimately, you’ve been in touch with the infinite, and now you are trying to reconcile yourself to the mundane. The warrior of the future will need to know how to enter and exit both worlds, if not with ease, then at least without permanently disintegrating his or her personality.

  I was walking in uniform down M Street in our nation’s capital. I had been back perhaps a month. A group of young people, my age, began to follow me down the street on the opposite side, jeering, calling me names, chanting in unison. They were flying the flags of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong.

  I stood and looked at them across the chasm of that street, not knowing what to say or do. I tried to think of something that would allow me to make friends with them. I didn’t want to fight them too. I was sick of fighting. I wanted to come back home, to be understood, to be welcomed.

  I still see those flags, waving back and forth, insults in the cold wind, well-dressed people hurrying by, their heads down, eyes avoiding me, as the group continued to taunt and jeer me.

  I couldn’t get a date with any girl born north of the Mason-Dixon Line. There were signs at restaurants and bars saying “No military!” Two of my fellow lieutenants were murdered, gunned down from a passing car in their dress whites outside a hamburger joint on M Street. All this in our nation’s capital.

  Two months before I was discharged I boarded a train for New York at Union Station. Again I was in uniform, even though we’d had explicit instructions to avoid problems by not wearing our uniforms when around civilians. This put us in a bit of a bind. You could get half price on train and air fares, going standby, but only if you were in uniform, and we weren’t exactly paid like junior executives.

  I passed a nice-looking woman who looked up at me and quickly looked away. I sighed inwardly as I continued down the narrow aisle, too shy to sit in the empty seat next to her. I found a seat at the far end of the car and settled down to read but wished I were talking with her instead.

  About five minutes later I saw her get up and come down the aisle. She was looking right at me, lips pressed tight. She stood in front of me and spit on me.

  She walked back to her seat. I was trembling with shame and embarrassment. People hid behind newspapers. Some looked intently out dark windows that could only reflect their faces and the lighted interior of the car.

  I wiped the spit off as best I could and pretended to go back to reading, trying to control the shaking. The woman moved to another car. Small victory. I eventually moved to a different car in the opposite direction, embarrassed to stay where people had seen what had happened.

  The frequency of spitting incidents is a raging controversy. I think the number was very small. None of my friends experienced it. The image of being spit on, however, became a metaphor for what happened to returning Vietnam veterans. I think that this is what fuels the belief that spitting was a more common occurence than it was, in reality.

  My first day back home my mother and father were at the airport, and so was, to my surprise, Maree Ann, a girl I’d dated when I was in high school. With Maree Ann were her four-year-old daughter, Lizzy, and Maree Ann’s aunt, a friend of my mother’s. My small hometown is only a hundred miles from the city and my close relatives still live in the area. Many had followed jobs to the city itself. My mother had called all of them to tell them I was coming home and when I’d arrive. Could they please come to the airport to welcome me back? There was only this little anxious group: Mom, trying unsuccessfully to hold back tears; Dad, more successful than she but close to losing it; Maree Ann; little Lizzy; and Maree Ann’s aunt.

  It would have been nice if some of my extended family had come to the airport. But I told Mom I didn’t much mind. I’m not a public person. We’d see them later.

  There was nothing later. To me, and to my parents, I’d been gone an eternity; to everyone else, a flash. This is no one’s fault. Life is busy and full.

  Still, I wish it were otherwise. Maybe if there had been some sort of hokey family potluck dinner. A toast by Uncle George, who was wounded in Italy (funny how we say wounded in Italy instead of wounded in the leg); or my dad, who hauled gasoline to Patton’s tanks in France and was at the Battle of the Bulge; or Uncle Kim, who fought the Japanese in the Pacific. Maybe some teary speech by one of my aunts saying how glad she was that I’d come back safe, or even my old communist grandmother could have gotten up and said how it was all because of those Wall Street millionaires but now that her lumpen proletariat grandson was back home she was happy again. And maybe, well, was it too much to at least expect a thank you from the people who voted to send us over there?

  This was mistake number one—lack of extended family involvement. The psychology of the young warrior is, I think, almost entirely related to hearth and kin. You can subvert that into patriotism and nationalism if you’re clever and work at it long enough, but I’d been detoxified.76 A homecoming of yellow ribbons and throwing out the first ball at the local game would have made me feel like puking.

  So we stood around, nervous, happy, after stiff public hugs, waiting for my seabag to come through the baggage hole. I hadn’t seen Maree Ann since I left high school, but one day on a blasted hilltop in Vietnam a package arrived from her and her aunt. The first of many. In the diary I kept throughout my tour I copied a scrawled “L” and some indistinguishable following marks from where Lizzy had carefully written her name on Maree Ann’s Christmas package.

  Maree Ann was a fourteen-year-old freshman when I last knew her, the age when girls spell their name with two e’s instead of y and dot their i’s with little round circles. She was smart and funny, a great rider and rodeo princess who loved animals and belonged to 4-H. I was the big senior class president and probable valedictorian and an all-league football player. She asked me to the Sadie Hawkins Day dance. Well, I was surprised. I went.

  Back then I was always looking to get out of town, looking to the future, and not seeing her in it. She, just starting high school, was bound in the present, too smart with a too finely tuned mind and sense of humor to be content with remaining where fate had landed her, a high school girl from an alcoholic and broken home in a cultural vacuum.

  Shortly after I was graduated she got pregnant by some guy from out of town. He left her, or she left him, or each had left the other. How it is, outsiders never know. I think her aunt in the city took her in while she had Lizzy. She somehow managed to finish high school there.

  I told them about my flight all the way across the Pacific Ocean, about seeing my older brother at Stanford
, what it was like in California. They told me about old friends of mine and the garden. Then my sea- bag came out on the baggage conveyer. I shouldered it and we started for the door. Then Maree Ann asked me if I wanted to come home with her.

  Well, I was surprised.

  I could see that some things about Maree Ann hadn’t changed. I looked at my mother and father. I looked at Maree Ann. Maree Ann is a good-looking woman. I went home with Maree Ann. This was mistake number two and entirely my own. I started feeling bad about leaving my folks, and a few other things, just after I reached Maree Ann’s single room and kitchenette, which she rented in an old house in one of the city’s poorer, but still respectable, neighborhoods.

  The homecoming soldier may want to make love to any woman who moves, but any young man who hasn’t seen a woman for even a few days wants to do the same. I was no exception, but I now know this was a part of me that needed some help and guidance. Other things having to do with returning warriors, not lonely young men with sex on their minds, needed to be put in place first. They weren’t. No one knew any better. This was mistake number three, which had already been committed two weeks earlier on Okinawa.

  We talked, we drank some tea, and I watched and listened while Maree Ann put Lizzy to bed, reading her a story. It felt so warm and comfortable there, the old lighting soft on the fir tongue-and-groove walls with their patina of years. I was so grateful she’d come to the airport to see me. We talked some more. We were tender with each other in many ways. But when she put on her nightgown and got into bed I couldn’t go through with it.

  I’d contracted NSU77 from one of the prostitutes who lined Gate Number Two Street outside Kadena Air Base on Okinawa. This was the result of a lot of alcohol to satisfy the shy one and a seventy-two-hour nonstop answer to the needs of that other part of me I just mentioned. This piece of information I never passed on to my parents to explain why my arrival home was delayed ten days. I claimed military inefficiency. The fact was that the Navy doctor wouldn’t endorse my orders until the NSU had cleared up.

  Although I wasn’t dripping anymore, I still wasn’t completely sure the penicillin had totally wiped out the problem. I couldn’t imagine transmitting NSU to Maree Ann. But there was more to it than just that.

  The fact was I felt unclean, insecure, strange, and awkward. I didn’t feel right—with anyone. This feeling of being “wrong” somehow had dogged me since the minute I boarded the chartered 707 for California. The NSU was my own doing, or at least my own bad luck and my lack of someone to take me aside and say, “Look, what you think you need isn’t what you need. All that’s egging you on is the misplaced idea that being masturbated by a paid pair of labia is somehow manlier or more satisfying than doing it yourself. They’re exploiting your loneliness. You’re exploiting their poverty. You’re both just using each other and it is going to make everyone feel bad. And, oh, by the way, you can catch a venereal disease.”

  Perhaps the awkward wrong feeling started with the stewardesses on the airplane treating us as if we were tourists. The thing no one recognized, including the stewardesses and even most of us, was that just two or three days earlier many of us had been in combat, scared to death we were going to die and watching the deaths of others just like us. Now we were being served peanuts and Cokes by stewardesses, most of them unaware except on a vague subconscious level of what was happening to us. It was the same jolting juxtaposition of the infinite and the mundane that hit me on my R&R to Australia. It wasn’t the stewardesses’ fault. They were just doing their job, handing out smiles and Cokes. We loved it. But we should have come home by sea. We should have had time to talk with our buddies about what we all had shared. We joined our units alone, and we came home alone, and this was a key difference between us and veterans of other wars, including today’s.

  Perhaps the awkward wrong feeling started when my brother mumbled something to try to make me feel better as we drove past the war protesters at Travis Air Force Base just outside San Francisco, where he picked me up. They were pounding his car with their signs and snarling at us through the closed car window. Or maybe it got started when he showed me around the Stanford campus—being looked at by girls in long clean hair and boys in long not-so-clean hair, all dressed somewhere between Newport Beach and Haight Ashbury, me in no hair, with jungle-rot scars on my face and hands, dressed in clothes that smelled like mothballs and looked like something handed down from the Kingston Trio.

  No one shouted obscenities, or even said anything, maybe out of deference to my brother. No one needed to. You know the feeling, as if you’ve made a mistake coming to the party but no one is going to tell you to your face.

  At one point I waited at the Stanford bookstore for my brother to get out of class. I had to squeeze by a girl in one of the aisles. I said excuse me, politely. She looked at me with contempt and wouldn’t move aside. I tried to slip past her and accidentally knocked a book from the shelf. I hated my clumsiness and flushed face as she watched me stoop to pick it up. I remember wishing she knew I’d won a Navy Cross and was trying to reach the poetry section. She was joined by two long-haired boys who further barred the aisle. Trembling with anger and humiliation, this Marine chose to advance in the other direction.

  No matter where I went, I felt something was not right about me. I still felt it at Maree Ann’s. I knew that to make love to her would be wrong for me and, if wrong for me, then wrong for her. I was again bound away, this time with orders to Headquarters Marine Corps in Washington, D.C. I simply wasn’t interested in a relationship with a woman with a four-year-old daughter, no matter how good-looking or how tender the woman was. She must have known that, and it added a terrible poignancy. I think I told her about the NSU but don’t know for sure. I’m quite sure I was incapable in those days of explaining how I felt to anyone.

  I didn’t want to reject her—far from it. But I didn’t want to mislead. There was too much past between us, too much linkage, and perhaps yearning and loneliness. To be sixteen with a baby and no husband, on your own, then seventeen, and then eighteen, must be one of the loneliest situations life can hand us. And here comes the hero back from the war and he doesn’t want to make love and maybe tells her he’s got NSU, even though he’s also afraid of telling her that he’s afraid of the emotional consequences. My God, how we waste our lives hurting each other.

  Maree Ann didn’t know what to do any more than I did, but she showed up. She was the only other person, besides my parents, who’d kept the linkage with my past, with my little town, my tribe, as it were.

  It was clear that the others of the tribe, “my fellow Americans,” as the politicians say, had worse than abandoned me. Imagine the damage to young Aborigine boys returning from their frightening and mind-altering initiation only to have the villagers pelt them with garbage.

  I needed desperately to be accepted back in. I think I ended up assuming unconsciously that I must have done something wrong to have received all this rejection. To be sure, I had been engaged in dirty business. Somebody, usually the man, empties the garbage and turns the compost. But when he’s done, he comes back in the house, he washes his hands, and someone says thank you. War is society’s dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults. What I needed upon returning, but didn’t know it, was a bath.

  What I needed was for Maree Ann to sit down with me in a tub of water and run her hands over my body and squeeze out the wrong feelings and confusion, soothe the pain, inside and out, and rub the skin back to life. I needed her to Dutch-rub my skull with soap until the tears came, and I needed her to dry the tears, and laugh with me, and cry with me, and bring my body back from the dead.

  That body had suffered. It was covered with scars from jungle rot. It had had dysentery, diarrhea, and possibly a mild case of malaria. It had gone without fresh food for months at a time. It had lived on the knife edge of fear, constantly jerked from an aching need for sleep with all the cruel refinement of the best secret police torturer. I
t had pumped adrenaline until it had become addicted to it. There were scars where hot metal had gone in, searing and surprising in its pain, and scars where a corpsman had dug most of it out. There were bits of metal still in it, some pushing against the skin, itching to get out. The eyeballs were scarred where tiny bits of hand grenade had embedded themselves. The inner ears rang with a constant high-pitched whine that ceased only in sleep, when the nightmares started.

  That body was shut down against pain as far as I could get it shut. Shut down to where it would not feel a thing, while my mind was still seven thousand miles away, unattached, floating, watching.

  I needed a woman to get me back on the earth, get me down in the water, get me down under the water, get my body to feel again, to slough off old skin, old scars, old scabs, to come again into her world, the world that I’d left, and which sometimes I think I’ve never returned to. But I kissed her and went home.

  When my mother shook me awake late the next morning, she tells me I reached out and tried to choke her. I don’t remember this. At least I didn’t try and choke Maree Ann.

  I do remember the careful way my bedroom had been restored with my old letter jacket, pictures, trophies. This care I remember and this a mother can do to welcome someone home—make it feel like a home, not just a house.