The Things They Carried
By Tim O’Brien
The Things They Carried
First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named
Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were
not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded
in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a
day's march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen,
unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the
last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips
into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste
the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than
anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters
were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter of love. She was a virgin, he
was almost sure. She was an English major at Mount Sebastian, and she
wrote beautifully about her professors and roommates and midterm
exams, about her respect for Chaucer and her great affection for Virginia
Woolf. She often quoted lines of poetry; she never mentioned the war,
except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. The letters weighed 10
ounces. They were signed Love, Martha, but Lieutenant Cross
understood that Love was only a way of signing and did not mean what
he sometimes pretended it meant. At dusk, he would carefully return the
letters to his rucksack. Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move
among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would
return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity. Among
the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives,
heat tabs, wristwatches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum,
candy, cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches,
sewing kits, Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three
canteens of water. Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20
pounds, depending upon a man's habits or rate of metabolism. Henry
Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations; he was especially
fond of canned peaches in heavy syrup over pound cake. Dave Jensen,
who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and
several hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney, Australia.
Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried tranquilizers until he was shot in
the head outside the village of Than Khe in mid-April. By necessity, and
because it was SOP, they all carried steel helmets that weighed 5 pounds
including the liner and camouflage cover. They carried the standard
fatigue jackets and trousers. Very few carried underwear. On their feet
they carried jungle boots—2.1 pounds—and Dave Jensen carried three
pairs of socks and a can of Dr. Scholl's foot powder as a precaution
against trench foot. Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried 6 or 7
ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell
Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat
Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated
New Testament that had been presented to him by his father, who taught
Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. As a hedge against bad
times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's distrust of the
white man, his grandfather's old hunting hatchet. Necessity dictated.
Because the land was mined and booby-trapped, it was SOP for each
man to carry a steel-centered, nylon-covered flak jacket, which weighed
6.7 pounds, but which on hot days seemed much heavier. Because you
could die so quickly, each man carried at least one large compress
bandage, usually in the helmet band for easy access. Because the nights
were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green
plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or
makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost 2
pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted
Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry
him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him
away.
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
They were called legs or grunts.
To carry something was to hump it, as when Lieutenant Jimmy Cross
humped his love for Martha up the hills and through the swamps. In its
intransitive form, to hump meant to walk, or to march, but it implied
burdens far beyond the intransitive.
Almost everyone humped photographs. In his wallet, Lieutenant Cross
carried two photographs of Martha. The first was a Kodacolor snapshot
signed Love, though he knew better. She stood against a brick wall. Her
eyes were gray and neutral, her lips slightly open as she stared straighton at the camera. At night, sometimes, Lieutenant Cross wondered who
had taken the picture, because he knew she had boyfriends, because he
loved her so much, and because he could see the shadow of the picturetaker spreading out against the brick wall. The second photograph had
been clipped from the 1968 Mount Sebastian yearbook. It was an action
shot—women's volleyball—and Martha was bent horizontal to the floor,
reaching, the palms of her hands in sharp focus, the tongue taut, the
expression frank and competitive. There was no visible sweat. She wore
white gym shorts. Her legs, he thought, were almost certainly the legs of
a virgin, dry and without hair, the left knee cocked and carrying her
entire weight, which was just over 100 pounds. Lieutenant Cross
remembered touching that left knee. A dark theater, he remembered,
and the movie was Bonnie and Clyde, and Martha wore a tweed skirt,
and during the final scene, when he touched her knee, she turned and
looked at him in a sad, sober way that made him pull his hand back, but
he would always remember the feel of the tweed skirt and the knee
beneath it and the sound of the gunfire that killed Bonnie and Clyde, how
embarrassing it was, how slow and oppressive. He remembered kissing
her good night at the dorm door. Right then, he thought, he should've
done something brave. He should've carried her up the stairs to her room
and tied her to the bed and touched that left knee all night long. He
should've risked it. Whenever he looked at the photographs, he thought
of new things he should've done.
What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field
specialty.
As a first lieutenant and platoon leader, Jimmy Cross carried a
compass, maps, code books, binoculars, and a .45-caliber pistol that
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
weighed 2.9 pounds fully loaded. He carried a strobe light and the
responsibility for the lives of his men.
As an RTO, Mitchell Sanders carried the PRC-25 radio, a killer, 26
pounds with its battery.
As a medic, Rat Kiley carried a canvas satchel filled with morphine and
plasma and malaria tablets and surgical tape and comic books and all the
things a medic must carry, including M&M's for especially bad wounds,
for a total weight of nearly 20 pounds.
As a big man, therefore a machine gunner, Henry Dobbins carried the
M-60, which weighed 23 pounds unloaded, but which was almost always
loaded. In addition, Dobbins carried between 10 and 15 pounds of
ammunition draped in belts across his chest and shoulders.
As PFCs or Spec 4s, most of them were common grunts and carried
the standard M-16 gas-operated assault rifle. The weapon weighed 7.5
pounds unloaded, 8.2 pounds with its full 20-round magazine.
Depending on numerous factors, such as topography and psychology, the
riflemen carried anywhere from 12 to 20 magazines, usually in cloth
bandoliers, adding on another 8.4 pounds at minimum, 14 pounds at
maximum. When it was available, they also carried M-16 maintenance
gear—rods and steel brushes and swabs and tubes of LSA oil—all of
which weighed about a pound. Among the grunts, some carried the M-79
grenade launcher, 5.9 pounds unloaded, a reasonably light weapon
except for the ammunition, which was heavy. A single round weighed 10
ounces. The typical load was 25 rounds. But Ted Lavender, who was
scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe,
and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of
ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water and
toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus the unweighed fear.
He was dead weight. There was no twitching or flopping. Kiowa, who saw
it happen, said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or
something—just boom, then down—not like the movies where the dead
guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle—not
like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck fell. Boom. Down.
Nothing else. It was a bright morning in mid-April. Lieutenant Cross felt
the pain. He blamed himself. They stripped off Lavender's canteens and
ammo, all the heavy things, and Rat Kiley said the obvious, the guy's
dead, and Mitchell Sanders used his radio to report one U.S. KIA and to
request a chopper. Then they wrapped Lavender in his poncho. They
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
carried him out to a dry paddy, established security, and sat smoking the
dead man's dope until the chopper came. Lieutenant Cross kept to
himself. He pictured Martha's smooth young face, thinking he loved her
more than anything, more than his men, and now Ted Lavender was
dead because he loved her so much and could not stop thinking about
her. When the dustoff arrived, they carried Lavender aboard. Afterward
they burned Than Khe. They marched until dusk, then dug their holes,
and that night Kiowa kept explaining how you had to be there, how fast it
was, how the poor guy just dropped like so much concrete. Boom-down,
he said. Like cement.
In addition to the three standard weapons—the M-60, M-16, and M79—they carried whatever presented itself, or whatever seemed
appropriate as a means of killing or staying alive. They carried catch-ascatch-can. At various times, in various situations, they carried M-14s and
CAR-15s and Swedish Ks and grease guns and captured AK-47s and ChiComs and RPGs and Simonov carbines and black market Uzis and .38caliber Smith & Wesson handguns and 66 mm LAWs and shotguns and
silencers and blackjacks and bayonets and C-4 plastic explosives. Lee
Strunk carried a slingshot; a weapon of last resort, he called it. Mitchell
Sanders carried brass knuckles. Kiowa carried his grandfather's
feathered hatchet. Every third or fourth man carried a Claymore
antipersonnel mine—3.5 pounds with its firing device. They all carried
fragmentation grenades—14 ounces each. They all carried at least one M18 colored smoke grenade—24 ounces. Some carried CS or tear gas
grenades. Some carried white phosphorus grenades. They carried all they
could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power
of the things they carried.
In the first week of April, before Lavender died, Lieutenant Jimmy
Cross received a good-luck charm from Martha. It was a simple pebble,
an ounce at most. Smooth to the touch, it was a milky white color with
flecks of orange and violet, oval-shaped, like a miniature egg. In the
accompanying letter, Martha wrote that she had found the pebble on the
Jersey shoreline, precisely where the land touched water at high tide,
where things came together but also separated. It was this separate-buttogether quality, she wrote, that had inspired her to pick up the pebble
and to carry it in her breast pocket for several days, where it seemed
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
weightless, and then to send it through the mail, by air, as a token of her
truest feelings for him. Lieutenant Cross found this romantic. But he
wondered what her truest feelings were, exactly, and what she meant by
separate-but-together. He wondered how the tides and waves had come
into play on that afternoon along the Jersey shoreline when Martha saw
the pebble and bent down to rescue it from geology. He imagined bare
feet. Martha was a poet, with the poet's sensibilities, and her feet would
be brown and bare, the toenails unpainted, the eyes chilly and somber
like the ocean in March, and though it was painful, he wondered who had
been with her that afternoon. He imagined a pair of shadows moving
along the strip of sand where things came together but also separated. It
was phantom jealousy, he knew, but he couldn't help himself. He loved
her so much. On the march, through the hot days of early April, he
carried the pebble in his mouth, turning it with his tongue, tasting sea
salt and moisture. His mind wandered. He had difficulty keeping his
attention on the war. On occasion he would yell at his men to spread out
the column, to keep their eyes open, but then he would slip away into
daydreams, just pretending, walking barefoot along the Jersey shore,
with Martha, carrying nothing. He would feel himself rising. Sun and
waves and gentle winds, all love and lightness.
What they carried varied by mission.
When a mission took them to the mountains, they carried mosquito
netting, machetes, canvas tarps, and extra bug juice.
If a mission seemed especially hazardous, or if it involved a place they
knew to be bad, they carried everything they could. In certain heavily
mined AOs, where the land was dense with Toe Poppers and Bouncing
Betties, they took turns humping a 28-pound mine detector. With its
headphones and big sensing plate, the equipment was a stress on the
lower back and shoulders, awkward to handle, often useless because of
the shrapnel in the earth, but they carried it anyway, partly for safety,
partly for the illusion of safety.
On ambush, or other night missions, they carried peculiar little odds
and ends. Kiowa always took along his New Testament and a pair of
moccasins for silence. Dave Jensen carried night-sight vitamins high in
carotene. Lee Strunk carried his slingshot; ammo, he claimed, would
never be a problem. Rat Kiley carried brandy and M&M's candy. Until he
was shot, Ted Lavender carried the starlight scope, which weighed 6.3
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
pounds with its aluminum carrying case. Henry Dobbins carried his
girlfriend's pantyhose wrapped around his neck as a comforter. They all
carried ghosts. When dark came, they would move out single file across
the meadows and paddies to their ambush coordinates, where they
would quietly set up the Claymores and lie down and spend the night
waiting.
Other missions were more complicated and required special
equipment. In mid-April, it was their mission to search out and destroy
the elaborate tunnel complexes in the Than Khe area south of Chu Lai.
To blow the tunnels, they carried one-pound blocks of pentrite high
explosives, four blocks to a man, 68 pounds in all. They carried wiring,
detonators, and battery-powered clackers. Dave Jensen carried earplugs.
Most often, before blowing the tunnels, they were ordered by higher
command to search them, which was considered bad news, but by and
large they just shrugged and carried out orders. Because he was a big
man, Henry Dobbins was excused from tunnel duty. The others would
draw numbers. Before Lavender died there were 17 men in the platoon,
and whoever drew the number 17 would strip off his gear and crawl in
headfirst with a flashlight and Lieutenant Cross's .45-caliber pistol. The
rest of them would fan out as security. They would sit down or kneel, not
facing the hole, listening to the ground beneath them, imagining
cobwebs and ghosts, whatever was down there—the tunnel walls
squeezing in—how the flashlight seemed impossibly heavy in the hand
and how it was tunnel vision in the very strictest sense, compression in
all ways, even time, and how you had to wiggle in—ass and elbows—a
swallowed-up feeling—and how you found yourself worrying about odd
things: Will your flashlight go dead? Do rats carry rabies? If you
screamed, how far would the sound carry? Would your buddies hear it?
Would they have the courage to drag you out? In some respects, though
not many, the waiting was worse than the tunnel itself. Imagination was
a killer.
On April 16, when Lee Strunk drew the number 17, he laughed and
muttered something and went down quickly. The morning was hot and
very still. Not good, Kiowa said. He looked at the tunnel opening, then
out across a dry paddy toward the village of Than Khe. Nothing moved.
No clouds or birds or people. As they waited, the men smoked and drank
Kool-Aid, not talking much, feeling sympathy for Lee Strunk but also
feeling the luck of the draw. You win some, you lose some, said Mitchell
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
Sanders, and sometimes you settle for a rain check. It was a tired line
and no one laughed.
Henry Dobbins ate a tropical chocolate bar. Ted Lavender popped a
tranquilizer and went off to pee.
After five minutes, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross moved to the tunnel,
leaned down, and examined the darkness. Trouble, he thought—a cave-in
maybe. And then suddenly, without willing it, he was thinking about
Martha. The stresses and fractures, the quick collapse, the two of them
buried alive under all that weight. Dense, crushing love. Kneeling,
watching the hole, he tried to concentrate on Lee Strunk and the war, all
the dangers, but his love was too much for him, he felt paralyzed, he
wanted to sleep inside her lungs and breathe her blood and be
smothered. He wanted her to be a virgin and not a virgin, all at once. He
wanted to know her. Intimate secrets: Why poetry? Why so sad? Why
that grayness in her eyes? Why so alone? Not lonely, just alone—riding
her bike across campus or sitting off by herself in the cafeteria—even
dancing, she danced alone—and it was the aloneness that filled him with
love. He remembered telling her that one evening. How she nodded and
looked away. And how, later, when he kissed her, she received the kiss
without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes,
just flat and uninvolved.
Lieutenant Cross gazed at the tunnel. But he was not there. He was
buried with Martha under the white sand at the Jersey shore. They were
pressed together, and the pebble in his mouth was her tongue. He was
smiling. Vaguely, he was aware of how quiet the day was, the sullen
paddies, yet he could not bring himself to worry about matters of
security. He was beyond that. He was just a kid at war, in love. He was
twenty-four years old. He couldn't help it.
A few moments later Lee Strunk crawled out of the tunnel. He came
up grinning, filthy but alive. Lieutenant Cross nodded and closed his eyes
while the others clapped Strunk on the back and made jokes about rising
from the dead.
Worms, Rat Kiley said. Right out of the grave. Fuckin' zombie.
The men laughed. They all felt great relief.
Spook city, said Mitchell Sanders.
Lee Strunk made a funny ghost sound, a kind of moaning, yet very
happy, and right then, when Strunk made that high happy moaning
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
sound, when he went Ahhooooo, right then Ted Lavender was shot in the
head on his way back from peeing. He lay with his mouth open. The teeth
were broken. There was a swollen black bruise under his left eye.
The cheekbone was gone. Oh shit, Rat Kiley said, the guy's dead. The
guy's dead, he kept saying, which seemed profound—the guy's dead. I
mean really.
The things they carried were determined to some extent by
superstition. Lieutenant Cross carried his good-luck pebble. Dave Jensen
carried a rabbit's foot. Norman Bowker, otherwise a very gentle person,
carried a thumb that had been presented to him as a gift by Mitchell
Sanders. The thumb was dark brown, rubbery to the touch, and weighed
4 ounces at most. It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or
sixteen. They'd found him at the bottom of an irrigation ditch, badly
burned, flies in his mouth and eyes. The boy wore black shorts and
sandals. At the time of his death he had been carrying a pouch of rice, a
rifle, and three magazines of ammunition.
You want my opinion, Mitchell Sanders said, there's a definite moral
here.
He put his hand on the dead boy's wrist. He was quiet for a time, as if
counting a pulse, then he patted the stomach, almost affectionately, and
used Kiowa's hunting hatchet to remove the thumb.
Henry Dobbins asked what the moral was.
Moral?
You know. Moral.
Sanders wrapped the thumb in toilet paper and handed it across to
Norman Bowker. There was no blood. Smiling, he kicked the boy's head,
watched the flies scatter, and said, It's like with that old TV show—
Paladin. Have gun, will travel.
Henry Dobbins thought about it.
Yeah, well, he finally said. I don't see no moral.
There it Is, man.
Fuck off.
They carried USO stationery and pencils and pens. They carried
Sterno, safety pins, trip flares, signal flares, spools of wire, razor blades,
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
chewing tobacco, liberated joss sticks and statuettes of the smiling
Buddha, candles, grease pencils, The Stars and Stripes, fingernail
clippers, Psy Ops leaflets, bush hats, bolos, and much more. Twice a
week, when the resupply choppers came in, they carried hot chow in
green mermite cans and large canvas bags filled with iced beer and soda
pop. They carried plastic water containers, each with a 2-gallon capacity.
Mitchell Sanders carried a set of starched tiger fatigues for special
occasions. Henry Dobbins carried Black Flag insecticide. Dave Jensen
carried empty sandbags that could be filled at night for added protection.
Lee Strunk carried tanning lotion. Some things they carried in common.
Taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77 scrambler radio, which
weighed 30 pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory.
They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each
other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess
sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank,
Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of
Conduct. They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery.
They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various
rots and molds. They carried the land itself—Vietnam, the place, the
soil—a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues
and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it,
the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they
carried gravity. They moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire,
at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless
march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost. They
marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly,
leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple
grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the
paddies and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping, one
step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because
it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of
posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind
of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope
and human sensibility. Their principles were in their feet. Their
calculations were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission.
They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring,
kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels,
sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving
on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
same. They carried their own lives. The pressures were enormous. In the
heat of early afternoon, they would remove their helmets and flak
jackets, walking bare, which was dangerous but which helped ease the
strain. They would often discard things along the route of march. Purely
for comfort, they would throw away rations, blow their Claymores and
grenades, no matter, because by nightfall the resupply choppers would
arrive with more of the same, then a day or two later still more, fresh
watermelons and crates of ammunition and sunglasses and woolen
sweaters—the resources were stunning—sparklers for the Fourth of July,
colored eggs for Easter—it was the great American war chest—the fruits
of science, the smokestacks, the canneries, the arsenals at Hartford, the
Minnesota forests, the machine shops, the vast fields of corn and wheat—
they carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and
shoulders—and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and
unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would
never be at a loss for things to carry.
After the chopper took Lavender away, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross led
his men into the village of Than Khe. They burned everything. They shot
chickens and dogs, they trashed the village well, they called in artillery
and watched the wreckage, then they marched for several hours through
the hot afternoon, and then at dusk, while Kiowa explained how
Lavender died, Lieutenant Cross found himself trembling.
He tried not to cry. With his entrenching tool, which weighed 5
pounds, he began digging a hole in the earth.
He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his
men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was
something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest
of the war.
All he could do was dig. He used his entrenching tool like an ax,
slashing, feeling both love and hate, and then later, when it was full dark,
he sat at the bottom of his foxhole and wept. It went on for a long while.
In part, he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for Martha,
and for himself, because she belonged to another world, which was not
quite real, and because she was a junior at Mount Sebastian College in
New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved, and because he realized
she did not love him and never would.
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
Like cement, Kiowa whispered in the dark. I swear to God—boom,
down. Not a word.
I've heard this, said Norman Bowker.
A pisser, you know? Still zipping himself up. Zapped while zipping.
All right, fine. That's enough.
Yeah, but you had to see it, the guy just—
I heard, man. Cement. So why not shut the fuck up?
Kiowa shook his head sadly and glanced over at the hole where
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross sat watching the night. The air was thick and
wet. A warm dense fog had settled over the paddies and there was the
stillness that precedes rain.
After a time Kiowa sighed.
One thing for sure, he said. The lieutenant's in some deep hurt. I mean
that crying jag—the way he was carrying on—it wasn't fake or anything, it
was real heavy-duty hurt. The man cares.
Sure, Norman Bowker said.
Say what you want, the man does care.
We all got problems.
Not Lavender.
No, I guess not, Bowker said. Do me a favor, though.
Shut up?
That's a smart Indian. Shut up.
Shrugging, Kiowa pulled off his boots. He wanted to say more, just to
lighten up his sleep, but instead he opened his New Testament and
arranged it beneath his head as a pillow. The fog made things seem
hollow and unattached. He tried not to think about Ted Lavender, but
then he was thinking how fast it was, no drama, down and dead, and how
it was hard to feel anything except surprise. It seemed unchristian. He
wished he could find some great sadness, or even anger, but the emotion
wasn't there and he couldn't make it happen. Mostly he felt pleased to be
alive. He liked the smell of the New Testament under his cheek, the
leather and ink and paper and glue, whatever the chemicals were. He
liked hearing the sounds of night. Even his fatigue, it felt fine, the stiff
muscles and the prickly awareness of his own body, a floating feeling. He
enjoyed not being dead. Lying there, Kiowa admired Lieutenant Jimmy
Cross's capacity for grief. He wanted to share the man's pain, he wanted
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
to care as Jimmy Cross cared. And yet when he closed his eyes, all he
could think was Boom-down, and all he could feel was the pleasure of
having his boots off and the fog curling in around him and the damp soil
and the Bible smells and the plush comfort of night.
After a moment Norman Bowker sat up in the dark.
What the hell, he said. You want to talk, talk. Tell it to me.
Forget it.
No, man, go on. One thing I hate, it's a silent Indian.
For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity.
Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed
or wanted to squeal but couldn't, when they twitched and made moaning
sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around
on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and
begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to
themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to
die. In different ways, it happened to all of them. Afterward, when the
firing ended, they would blink and peek up. They would touch their
bodies, feeling shame, then quickly hiding it. They would force
themselves to stand. As if in slow motion, frame by frame, the world
would take on the old logic—absolute silence, then the wind, then
sunlight, then voices. It was the burden of being alive. Awkwardly, the
men would reassemble themselves, first in private, then in groups,
becoming soldiers again. They would repair the leaks in their eyes. They
would check for casualties, call in dustoffs, light cigarettes, try to smile,
clear their throats and spit and begin cleaning their weapons. After a
time someone would shake his head and say, No lie, I almost shit my
pants, and someone else would laugh, which meant it was bad, yes, but
the guy had obviously not shit his pants, it wasn't that bad, and in any
case nobody would ever do such a thing and then go ahead and talk
about it. They would squint into the dense, oppressive sunlight. For a few
moments, perhaps, they would fall silent, lighting a joint and tracking its
passage from man to man, inhaling, holding in the humiliation. Scary
stuff, one of them might say. But then someone else would grin or flick
his eyebrows and say, Roger-dodger, almost cut me a new asshole,
almost.
There were numerous such poses. Some carried themselves with a sort
of wistful resignation, others with pride or stiff soldierly discipline or
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
good humor or macho zeal. They were afraid of dying but they were even
more afraid to show it.
They found jokes to tell.
They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness. Greased
they'd say. Offed, lit up, zapped while zipping. It wasn't cruelty, just
stage presence. They were actors. When someone died, it wasn't quite
dying, because in a curious way it seemed scripted, and because they had
their lines mostly memorized, irony mixed with tragedy, and because
they called it by other names, as if to encyst and destroy the reality of
death itself. They kicked corpses. They cut off thumbs. They talked grunt
lingo. They told stories about Ted Lavender's supply of tranquilizers,
how the poor guy didn't feel a thing, how incredibly tranquil he was.
There's a moral here, said Mitchell Sanders.
They were waiting for Lavender's chopper, smoking the dead man's
dope.
The moral's pretty obvious, Sanders said, and winked. Stay away from
drugs. No joke, they'll ruin your day every time.
Cute, said Henry Dobbins.
Mind blower, get it? Talk about wiggy. Nothing left, just blood and
brains.
They made themselves laugh.
There it is, they'd say. Over and over—there it is, my friend, there it
is—as if the repetition itself were an act of poise, a balance between crazy
and almost crazy, knowing without going, there it is, which meant be
cool, let it ride, because Oh yeah, man, you can't change what can't be
changed, there it is, there it absolutely and positively and fucking well is.
They were tough.
They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief,
terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had
their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They
carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of
cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in
many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be
put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried
their reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the
fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed
not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place,
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of
dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment. They crawled
into tunnels and walked point and advanced under fire. Each morning,
despite the unknowns, they made their legs move. They endured. They
kept humping. They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was
simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to
the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge
until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that
would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter
of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was
not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.
By and large they carried these things inside, maintaining the masks of
composure. They sneered at sick call. They spoke bitterly about guys who
had found release by shooting off their own toes or fingers. Pussies,
they'd say. Candy-asses. It was fierce, mocking talk, with only a trace of
envy or awe, but even so the image played itself out behind their eyes.
They imagined the muzzle against flesh. So easy: squeeze the trigger
and blow away a toe. They imagined it. They imagined the quick, sweet
pain, then the evacuation to Japan, then a hospital with warm beds and
cute geisha nurses.
And they dreamed of freedom birds.
At night, on guard, staring into the dark, they were carried away by
jumbo jets. They felt the rush of takeoff. Gone! they yelled. And then
velocity—wings and engines—a smiling stewardess—but it was more than
a plane, it was a real bird, a big sleek silver bird with feathers and talons
and high screeching. They were flying. The weights fell off; there was
nothing to bear. They laughed and held on tight, feeling the cold slap of
wind and altitude, soaring, thinking It's over, I'm gone!—they were
naked, they were light and free—it was all lightness, bright and fast and
buoyant, light as light, a helium buzz in the brain, a giddy bubbling in the
lungs as they were taken up over the clouds and the war, beyond duty,
beyond gravity and mortification and global entanglements—Sin loi! they
yelled. I'm sorry, motherfuckers, but I'm out of it, I'm goofed, I'm on a
space cruise, I'm gone!—and it was a restful, unencumbered sensation,
just riding the light waves, sailing that big silver freedom bird over the
mountains and oceans, over America, over the farms and great sleeping
cities and cemeteries and highways and the golden arches of McDonald's,
it was flight, a kind of fleeing, a kind of falling, falling higher and higher,
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
spinning off the edge of the earth and beyond the sun and through the
vast, silent vacuum where there were no burdens and where everything
weighed exactly nothing—Gone! they screamed. I'm sorry but I'm
gone!—and so at night, not quite dreaming, they gave themselves over to
lightness, they were carried, they were purely borne.
On the morning after Ted Lavender died, First Lieutenant Jimmy
Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha's letters.
Then he burned the two photographs. There was a steady rain falling,
which made it difficult, but he used heat tabs and Sterno to build a small
fire, screening it with his body, holding the photographs over the tight
blue flame with the tips of his fingers.
He realized it was only a gesture. Stupid, he thought. Sentimental, too,
but mostly just stupid.
Lavender was dead. You couldn't burn the blame.
Besides, the letters were in his head. And even now, without
photographs, Lieutenant Cross could see Martha playing volleyball in her
white gym shorts and yellow T-shirt. He could see her moving in the
rain.
When the fire died out, Lieutenant Cross pulled his poncho over his
shoulders and ate breakfast from a can.
There was no great mystery, he decided.
In those burned letters Martha had never mentioned the war, except
to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. She wasn't involved. She signed the
letters Love, but it wasn't love, and all the fine lines and technicalities did
not matter. Virginity was no longer an issue. He hated her. Yes, he did.
He hated her. Love, too, but it was a hard, hating kind of love.
The morning came up wet and blurry. Everything seemed part of
everything else, the fog and Martha and the deepening rain.
He was a soldier, after all.
Half smiling, Lieutenant Jimmy Cross took out his maps. He shook his
head hard, as if to clear it, then bent forward and began planning the
day's march. In ten minutes, or maybe twenty, he would rouse the men
and they would pack up and head west, where the maps showed the
country to be green and inviting. They would do what they had always
done. The rain might add some weight, but otherwise it would be one
more day layered upon all the other days.
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
He was realistic about it. There was that new hardness in his stomach.
He loved her but he hated her.
No more fantasies, he told himself.
Henceforth, when he thought about Martha, it would be only to think
that she belonged elsewhere. He would shut down the daydreams. This
was not Mount Sebastian, it was another world, where there were no
pretty poems or midterm exams, a place where men died because of
carelessness and gross stupidity. Kiowa was right. Boom-down, and you
were dead, never partly dead.
Briefly, in the rain, Lieutenant Cross saw Martha's gray eyes gazing
back at him. He understood.
It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things
men did or felt they had to do.
He almost nodded at her, but didn't.
Instead he went back to his maps. He was now determined to perform
his duties firmly and without negligence. It wouldn't help Lavender, he
knew that, but from this point on he would comport himself as an officer.
He would dispose of his good-luck pebble. Swallow it, maybe, or use Lee
Strunk's slingshot, or just drop it along the trail. On the march he would
impose strict field discipline. He would be careful to send out flank
security, to prevent straggling or bunching up, to keep his troops moving
at the proper pace and at the proper interval. He would insist on clean
weapons. He would confiscate the remainder of Lavender's dope. Later
in the day, perhaps, he would call the men together and speak to them
plainly. He would accept the blame for what had happened to Ted
Lavender. He would be a man about it. He would look them in the eyes,
keeping his chin level, and he would issue the new SOPs in a calm,
impersonal tone of voice, a lieutenant's voice, leaving no room for
argument or discussion. Commencing immediately, he'd tell them, they
would no longer abandon equipment along the route of march. They
would police up their acts. They would get their shit together, and keep it
together, and maintain it neatly and in good working order.
He would not tolerate laxity. He would show strength, distancing
himself.
Among the men there would be grumbling, of course, and maybe
worse, because their days would seem longer and their loads heavier, but
Lieutenant Jimmy Cross reminded himself that his obligation was not to
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
be loved but to lead. He would dispense with love; it was not now a
factor. And if anyone quarreled or complained, he would simply tighten
his lips and arrange his shoulders in the correct command posture. He
might give a curt little nod. Or he might not. He might just shrug and
say, Carry on, then they would saddle up and form into a column and
move out toward the villages west of Than Khe.
Love
Many years after the war Jimmy Cross came to visit me at my home in
Massachusetts, and for a full day we drank coffee and smoked cigarettes
and talked about everything we had seen and done so long ago, all the
things we still carried through our lives. Spread out across the kitchen
table were maybe a hundred old photographs. There were pictures of Rat
Kiley and Kiowa and Mitchell Sanders, all of us, the faces incredibly soft
and young. At one point, I remember, we paused over a snapshot of Ted
Lavender, and after a while Jimmy rubbed his eyes and said he'd never
forgiven himself for Lavender's death. It was something that would never
go away, he said quietly, and I nodded and told him I felt the same about
certain things. Then for a long time neither of us could think of much to
say. The thing to do, we decided, was to forget the coffee and switch to
gin, which improved the mood, and not much later we were laughing
about some of the craziness that used to go on. The way Henry Dobbins
carried his girlfriend's pantyhose around his neck like a comforter.
Kiowa's moccasins and hunting hatchet. Rat Kiley's comic books. By
midnight we were both a little high, and I decided there was no harm in
asking about Martha. I'm not sure how I phrased it—just a general
question—but Jimmy Cross looked up in surprise. "You writer types," he
said, "you've got long memories." Then he smiled and excused himself
and went up to the guest room and came back with a small framed
photograph. It was the volleyball shot: Martha bent horizontal to the
floor, reaching, the palms of her hands in sharp focus.
"Remember this?" he said.
I nodded and told him I was surprised. I thought he'd burned it.
Jimmy kept smiling. For a while he stared down at the photograph, his
eyes very bright, then he shrugged and said, "Well, I did—I burned it.
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
After Lavender died, I couldn't . . . This is a new one. Martha gave it to
me herself."
They'd run into each other, he said, at a college reunion in 1979.
Nothing had changed. He still loved her. For eight or nine hours, he said,
they spent most of their time together. There was a banquet, and then a
dance, and then afterward they took a walk across the campus and talked
about their lives. Martha was a Lutheran missionary now. A trained
nurse, although nursing wasn't the point, and she had done service in
Ethiopia and Guatemala and Mexico. She had never married, she said,
and probably never would. She didn't know why. But as she said this, her
eyes seemed to slide sideways, and it occurred to him that there were
things about her he would never know. Her eyes were gray and neutral.
Later, when he took her hand, there was no pressure in return, and later
still, when he told her he still loved her, she kept walking and didn't
answer and then after several minutes looked at her wristwatch and said
it was getting late. He walked her back to the dormitory. For a few
moments he considered asking her to his room, but instead he laughed
and told her how back in college he'd almost done something very brave.
It was after seeing Bonnie and Clyde, he said, and on this same spot he'd
almost picked her up and carried her to his room and tied her to the bed
and put his hand on her knee and just held it there all night long. It came
close, he told her—he'd almost done it. Martha shut her eyes. She crossed
her arms at her chest, as if suddenly cold, rocking slightly, then after a
time she looked at him and said she was glad he hadn't tried it. She
didn't understand how men could do those things. What things? he
asked, and Martha said, The things men do. Then he nodded. It began to
form. Oh, he said, those things. At breakfast the next morning she told
him she was sorry. She explained that there was nothing she could do
about it, and he said he understood, and then she laughed and gave him
the picture and told him not to burn this one up.
Jimmy shook his head. "It doesn't matter," he finally said. "I love her."
For the rest of his visit I steered the conversation away from Martha.
At the end, though, as we were walking out to his car, I told him that I'd
like to write a story about some of this. Jimmy thought it over and then
gave me a little smile. "Why not?" he said. "Maybe she'll read it and come
begging. There's always hope, right?"
"Right," I said.
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
He got into his car and rolled down the window. "Make me out to be a
good guy, okay? Brave and handsome, all that stuff. Best platoon leader
ever." He hesitated for a second. "And do me a favor. Don't mention
anything about—"
"No," I said, "I won't."
Spin
The war wasn't all terror and violence.
Sometimes things could almost get sweet. For instance, I remember a
little boy with a plastic leg. I remember how he hopped over to Azar and
asked for a chocolate bar—"GI number one," the kid said—and Azar
laughed and handed over the chocolate. When the boy hopped away,
Azar clucked his tongue and said, "War's a bitch." He shook his head
sadly. "One leg, for Chrissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo."
I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old
banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to pry off the body lice, working
slowly, carefully depositing the lice in a blue USO envelope. His eyes
were tired. It had been a long two weeks in the bush. After an hour or so
he sealed up the envelope, wrote FREE in the upper right-hand corner,
and addressed it to his draft board in Ohio.
On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy
spin on it, you could make it dance.
I remember Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins playing checkers
every evening before dark. It was a ritual for them. They would dig a
foxhole and get the board out and play long, silent games as the sky went
from pink to purple. The rest of us would sometimes stop by to watch.
There was something restful about it, something orderly and reassuring.
There were red checkers and black checkers. The playing field was laid
out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where
you stood. You knew the score. The pieces were out on the board, the
enemy was visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into larger
strategies. There was a winner and a loser. There were rules.
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over
for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this typewriter
and stare through my words and watch Kiowa sinking into the deep
muck of a shit field, or Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree, and as
I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of
rehappening. Kiowa yells at me. Curt Lemon steps from the shade into
bright sunlight, his face brown and shining, and then he soars into a tree.
The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension,
replaying itself over and over.
But the war wasn't all that way.
Like when Ted Lavender went too heavy on the tranquilizers. "How's
the war today?" somebody would say, and Ted Lavender would give a
soft, spacey smile and say, "Mellow, man. We got ourselves a nice mellow
war today."
And like the time we enlisted an old poppa-san to guide us through the
mine fields out on the Batangan Peninsula. The old guy walked with a
limp, slow and stooped over, but he knew where the safe spots were and
where you had to be careful and where even if you were careful you could
end up like popcorn. He had a tightrope walker's feel for the land
beneath him—its surface tension, the give and take of things. Each
morning we'd form up in a long column, the old poppa-san out front, and
for the whole day we'd troop along after him, tracing his footsteps,
playing an exact and ruthless game of follow the leader. Rat Kiley made
up a rhyme that caught on, and we'd all be chanting it together: Step out
of line, hit a mine; follow the dink, you're in the pink. All around us, the
place was littered with Bouncing Betties and Toe Poppers and boobytrapped artillery rounds, but in those five days on the Batangan
Peninsula nobody got hurt. We all learned to love the old man.
It was a sad scene when the choppers came to take us away. Jimmy
Cross gave the old poppa-san a hug. Mitchell Sanders and Lee Strunk
loaded him up with boxes of C rations.
There were actually tears in the old guy's eyes. "Follow dink," he said
to each of us, "you go pink."
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
If you weren't humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony.
Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and the
endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die in any
number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was
a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom
that caused stomach disorders. You'd be sitting at the top of a high hill,
the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot
and utterly vacant, and you'd feel the boredom dripping inside you like a
leaky faucet, except it wasn't water, it was a sort of acid, and with each
little droplet you'd feel the stuff eating away at important organs. You'd
try to relax. You'd uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you'd
think, this isn't so bad. And right then you'd hear gunfire behind you and
your nuts would fly up into your throat and you'd be squealing pig
squeals. That kind of boredom.
I feel guilty sometimes. Forty-three years old and I'm still writing war
stories. My daughter Kathleen tells me it's an obsession, that I should
write about a little girl who finds a million dollars and spends it all on a
Shetland pony. In a way, I guess, she's right: I should forget it. But the
thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material
where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and
present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it
goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the
traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a
writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things
down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.
Not bloody stories, necessarily. Happy stories, too, and even a few
peace stories.
Here's a quick peace story:
A guy goes AWOL. Shacks up in Danang with a Red Cross nurse. It's a
great time—the nurse loves him to death—the guy gets whatever he
wants whenever he wants it. The war's over, he thinks. Just nookie and
new angles. But then one day he rejoins his unit in the bush. Can't wait to
get back into action. Finally one of his buddies asks what happened with
the nurse, why so hot for combat, and the guy says, "All that peace, man,
it felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back."
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
I remember Mitchell Sanders smiling as he told me that story. Most of
it he made up, I'm sure, but even so it gave me a quick truth-goose.
Because it's all relative. You're pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a
paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few
seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few
puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your
eyeballs—the whole world gets rearranged—and even though you're
pinned down by a war you never felt more at peace.
What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have
no beginning and no end:
Norman Bowker lying on his back one night, watching the stars, then
whispering to me, "I'll tell you something, O'Brien. If I could have one
wish, anything, I'd wish for my dad to write me a letter and say it's okay
if I don't win any medals. That's all my old man talks about, nothing else.
How he can't wait to see my goddamn medals."
Or Kiowa teaching a rain dance to Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen, the
three of them whooping and leaping around barefoot while a bunch of
villagers looked on with a mixture of fascination and giggly horror.
Afterward, Rat said, "So where's the rain?" and Kiowa said, "The earth is
slow, but the buffalo is patient," and Rat thought about it and said,
"Yeah, but where's the rain?"
Or Ted Lavender adopting an orphan puppy—feeding it from a plastic
spoon and carrying it in his rucksack until the day Azar strapped it to a
Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device.
The average age in our platoon, I'd guess, was nineteen or twenty, and
as a consequence things often took on a curiously playful atmosphere,
like a sporting event at some exotic reform school. The competition could
be lethal, yet there was a childlike exuberance to it all, lots of pranks and
horseplay. Like when Azar blew away Ted Lavender's puppy. "What's
everybody so upset about?" Azar said. "I mean, Christ, I'm just a boy."
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
I remember these things, too.
The damp, fungal scent of an empty body bag.
A quarter moon rising over the nighttime paddies.
Henry Dobbins sitting in the twilight, sewing on his new bucksergeant stripes, quietly singing, "A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow
basket."
A field of elephant grass weighted with wind, bowing under the stir of
a helicopter's blades, the grass dark and servile, bending low, but then
rising straight again when the chopper went away.
A red clay trail outside the village of My Khe.
A hand grenade.
A slim, dead, dainty young man of about twenty.
Kiowa saying, "No choice, Tim. What else could you do?"
Kiowa saying, "Right?"
Kiowa saying, "Talk to me."
Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet
the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead
to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are
for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the
night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to
where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when
there is nothing to remember except the story.
On the Rainy River
This is one story I've never told before. Not to anyone. Not to my
parents, not to my brother or sister, not even to my wife. To go into it,
I've always thought, would only cause embarrassment for all of us, a
sudden need to be elsewhere, which is the natural response to a
confession. Even now, I'll admit, the story makes me squirm. For more
than twenty years I've had to live with it, feeling the shame, trying to
push it away, and so by this act of remembrance, by putting the facts
down on paper, I'm hoping to relieve at least some of the pressure on my
dreams. Still, it's a hard story to tell. All of us, I suppose, like to believe
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth,
bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit.
Certainly that was my conviction back in the summer of 1968. Tim
O'Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever became high
enough—if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough—I
would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been
accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think,
comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal
and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our
moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be
drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those
bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the
repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.
In June of 1968, a month after graduating from Macalester College, I
was drafted to fight a war I hated. I was twenty-one years old. Young,
yes, and politically naive, but even so the American war in Vietnam
seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain
reasons. I saw no unity of purpose, no consensus on matters of
philosophy or history or law. The very facts were shrouded in
uncertainty: Was it a civil war? A war of national liberation or simple
aggression? Who started it, and when, and why? What really happened
to the USS Maddox on that dark night in the Gulf of Tonkin? Was Ho Chi
Minh a Communist stooge, or a nationalist savior, or both, or neither?
What about the Geneva Accords? What about SEATO and the Cold War?
What about dominoes? America was divided on these and a thousand
other issues, and the debate had spilled out across the floor of the United
States Senate and into the streets, and smart men in pinstripes could not
agree on even the most fundamental matters of public policy. The only
certainty that summer was moral confusion. It was my view then, and
still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of
course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes
to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative
of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't
make them undead.
In any case those were my convictions, and back in college I had taken
a modest stand against the war. Nothing radical, no hothead stuff, just
ringing a few doorbells for Gene McCarthy, composing a few tedious,
uninspired editorials for the campus newspaper. Oddly, though, it was
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
almost entirely an intellectual activity. I brought some energy to it, of
course, but it was the energy that accompanies almost any abstract
endeavor; I felt no personal danger; I felt no sense of an impending crisis
in my life. Stupidly, with a kind of smug removal that I can't begin to
fathom, I assumed that the problems of killing and dying did not fall
within my special province.
The draft notice arrived on June 17, 1968. It was a humid afternoon, I
remember, cloudy and very quiet, and I'd just come in from a round of
golf. My mother and father were having lunch out in the kitchen. I
remember opening up the letter, scanning the first few lines, feeling the
blood go thick behind my eyes. I remember a sound in my head. It wasn't
thinking, just a silent howl. A million things all at once—I was too good
for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn't
happen. I was above it. I had the world dicked—Phi Beta Kappa and
summa cum laude and president of the student body and a full-ride
scholarship for grad studies at Harvard. A mistake, maybe—a foul-up in
the paperwork. I was no soldier. I hated Boy Scouts. I hated camping out.
I hated dirt and tents and mosquitoes. The sight of blood made me
queasy, and I couldn't tolerate authority, and I didn't know a rifle from a
slingshot. I was a liberal, for Christ sake: If they needed fresh bodies,
why not draft some back-to-the-stone-age hawk? Or some dumb jingo in
his hard hat and Bomb Hanoi button, or one of LBJ's pretty daughters,
or Westmoreland's whole handsome family—nephews and nieces and
baby grandson. There should be a law, I thought. If you support a war, if
you think it's worth the price, that's fine, but you have to put your own
precious fluids on the line. You have to head for the front and hook up
with an infantry unit and help spill the blood. And you have to bring
along your wife, or your kids, or your lover. A law, I thought.
I remember the rage in my stomach. Later it burned down to a
smoldering self-pity, then to numbness. At dinner that night my father
asked what my plans were. "Nothing," I said. "Wait."
I spent the summer of 1968 working in an Armour meatpacking plant
in my hometown of Worthington, Minnesota. The plant specialized in
pork products, and for eight hours a day I stood on a quarter-mile
assembly line—more properly, a disassembly line—removing blood clots
from the necks of dead pigs. My job title, I believe, was Declotter. After
slaughter, the hogs were decapitated, split down the length of the belly,
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
pried open, eviscerated, and strung up by the hind hocks on a high
conveyer belt. Then gravity took over. By the time a carcass reached my
spot on the line, the fluids had mostly drained out, everything except for
thick clots of blood in the neck and upper chest cavity. To remove the
stuff, I used a kind of water gun. The machine was heavy, maybe eighty
pounds, and was suspended from the ceiling by a heavy rubber cord.
There was some bounce to it, an elastic up-and-down give, and the trick
was to maneuver the gun with your whole body, not lifting with the arms,
just letting the rubber cord do the work for you. At one end was a trigger;
at the muzzle end was a small nozzle and a steel roller brush. As a carcass
passed by, you'd lean forward and swing the gun up against the clots and
squeeze the trigger, all in one motion, and the brush would whirl and
water would come shooting out and you'd hear a quick splattering sound
as the clots dissolved into a fine red mist. It was not pleasant work.
Goggles were a necessity, and a rubber apron, but even so it was like
standing for eight hours a day under a lukewarm blood-shower. At night
I'd go home smelling of pig. It wouldn't go away. Even after a hot bath,
scrubbing hard, the stink was always there—like old bacon, or sausage, a
dense greasy pig-stink that soaked deep into my skin and hair. Among
other things, I remember, it was tough getting dates that summer. I felt
isolated; I spent a lot of time alone. And there was also that draft notice
tucked away in my wallet.
In the evenings I'd sometimes borrow my father's car and drive
aimlessly around town, feeling sorry for myself, thinking about the war
and the pig factory and how my life seemed to be collapsing toward
slaughter. I felt paralyzed. All around me the options seemed to be
narrowing, as if I were hurtling down a huge black funnel, the whole
world squeezing in tight. There was no happy way out. The government
had ended most graduate school deferments; the waiting lists for the
National Guard and Reserves were impossibly long; my health was solid;
I didn't qualify for CO status—no religious grounds, no history as a
pacifist. Moreover, I could not claim to be opposed to war as a matter of
general principle. There were occasions, I believed, when a nation was
justified in using military force to achieve its ends, to stop a Hitler or
some comparable evil, and I told myself that in such circumstances I
would've willingly marched off to the battle. The problem, though, was
that a draft board did not let you choose your war.
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
Beyond all this, or at the very center, was the raw fact of terror. I did
not want to die. Not ever. But certainly not then, not there, not in a
wrong war. Driving up Main Street, past the courthouse and the Ben
Franklin store, I sometimes felt the fear spreading inside me like weeds.
I imagined myself dead. I imagined myself doing things I could not do—
charging an enemy position, taking aim at another human being.
At some point in mid-July I began thinking seriously about Canada.
The border lay a few hundred miles north, an eight-hour drive. Both my
conscience and my instincts were telling me to make a break for it, just
take off and run like hell and never stop. In the beginning the idea
seemed purely abstract, the word Canada printing itself out in my head;
but after a time I could see particular shapes and images, the sorry
details of my own future—a hotel room in Winnipeg, a battered old
suitcase, my father's eyes as I tried to explain myself over the telephone.
I could almost hear his voice, and my mother's. Run, I'd think. Then I'd
think, Impossible. Then a second later I'd think, Run.
It was a kind of schizophrenia. A moral split. I couldn't make up my
mind. I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile. I was afraid of walking
away from my own life, my friends and my family, my whole history,
everything that mattered to me. I feared losing the respect of my parents.
I feared the law. I feared ridicule and censure. My hometown was a
conservative little spot on the prairie, a place where tradition counted,
and it was easy to imagine people sitting around a table down at the old
Gobbler Cafe on Main Street, coffee cups poised, the conversation slowly
zeroing in on the young O'Brien kid, how the damned sissy had taken off
for Canada. At night, when I couldn't sleep, I'd sometimes carry on fierce
arguments with those people. I'd be screaming at them, telling them how
much I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all,
their simple-minded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-itor-leave-it platitudes, how they were sending me off to fight a war they
didn't understand and didn't want to understand. I held them
responsible. By God, yes, I did. All of them—I held them personally and
individually responsible—the polyestered Kiwanis boys, the merchants
and farmers, the pious churchgoers, the chatty housewives, the PTA and
the Lions club and the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the fine upstanding
gentry out at the country club. They didn't know Bao Dai from the man
in the moon. They didn't know history. They didn't know the first thing
about Diem's tyranny, or the nature of Vietnamese nationalism, or the
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
long colonialism of the French—this was all too damned complicated, it
required some reading—but no matter, it was a war to stop the
Communists, plain and simple, which was how they liked things, and you
were a treasonous pussy if you had second thoughts about killing or
dying for plain and simple reasons.
I was bitter, sure. But it was so much more than that.
The emotions went from outrage to terror to bewilderment to guilt to
sorrow and then back again to outrage. I felt a sickness inside me. Real
disease.
Most of this I've told before, or at least hinted at, but what I have never
told is the full truth. How I cracked. How at work one morning, standing
on the pig line, I felt something break open in my chest. I don't know
what it was. I'll never know. But it was real, I know that much, it was a
physical rupture—a cracking-leaking-popping feeling. I remember
dropping my water gun. Quickly, almost without thought, I took off my
apron and walked out of the plant and drove home. It was midmorning, I
remember, and the house was empty. Down in my chest there was still
that leaking sensation, something very warm and precious spilling out,
and I was covered with blood and hog-stink, and for a long while I just
concentrated on holding myself together. I remember taking a hot
shower. I remember packing a suitcase and carrying it out to the kitchen,
standing very still for a few minutes, looking carefully at the familiar
objects all around me. The old chrome toaster, the telephone, the pink
and white Formica on the kitchen counters. The room was full of bright
sunshine. Everything sparkled. My house, I thought. My life. I'm not sure
how long I stood there, but later I scribbled out a short note to my
parents.
What it said, exactly, I don't recall now. Something vague. Taking off,
will call, love Tim.
I drove north.
It's a blur now, as it was then, and all I remember is a sense of high
velocity and the feel of the steering wheel in my hands. I was riding on
adrenaline. A giddy feeling, in a way, except there was the dreamy edge
of impossibility to it—like running a dead-end maze—no way out—it
couldn't come to a happy conclusion and yet I was doing it anyway
because it was all I could think of to do. It was pure flight, fast and
mindless. I had no plan. Just hit the border at high speed and crash
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
through and keep on running. Near dusk I passed through Bemidji, then
turned northeast toward International Falls. I spent the night in the car
behind a closed-down gas station a half mile from the border. In the
morning, after gassing up, I headed straight west along the Rainy River,
which separates Minnesota from Canada, and which for me separated
one life from another. The land was mostly wilderness. Here and there I
passed a motel or bait shop, but otherwise the country unfolded in great
sweeps of pine and birch and sumac. Though it was still August, the air
already had the smell of October, football season, piles of yellow-red
leaves, everything crisp and clean. I remember a huge blue sky. Off to my
right was the Rainy River, wide as a lake in places, and beyond the Rainy
River was Canada.
For a while I just drove, not aiming at anything, then in the late
morning I began looking for a place to lie low for a day or two. I was
exhausted, and scared sick, and around noon I pulled into an old fishing
resort called the Tip Top Lodge. Actually it was not a lodge at all, just
eight or nine tiny yellow cabins clustered on a peninsula that jutted
northward into the Rainy River. The place was in sorry shape. There was
a dangerous wooden dock, an old minnow tank, a flimsy tar paper
boathouse along the shore.
The main building, which stood in a cluster of pines on high ground,
seemed to lean heavily to one side, like a cripple, the roof sagging toward
Canada. Briefly, I thought about turning around, just giving up, but then
I got out of the car and walked up to the front porch.
The man who opened the door that day is the hero of my life. How do I
say this without sounding sappy? Blurt it out—the man saved me. He
offered exactly what I needed, without questions, without any words at
all. He took me in. He was there at the critical time—a silent, watchful
presence. Six days later, when it ended, I was unable to find a proper way
to thank him, and I never have, and so, if nothing else, this story
represents a small gesture of gratitude twenty years overdue.
Even after two decades I can close my eyes and return to that porch at
the Tip Top Lodge. I can see the old guy staring at me. Elroy Berdahl:
eighty-one years old, skinny and shrunken and mostly bald. He wore a
flannel shirt and brown work pants. In one hand, I remember, he carried
a green apple, a small paring knife in the other. His eyes had the bluish
gray color of a razor blade, the same polished shine, and as he peered up
at me I felt a strange sharpness, almost painful, a cutting sensation, as if
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
his gaze were somehow slicing me open. In part, no doubt, it was my own
sense of guilt, but even so I'm absolutely certain that the old man took
one look and went right to the heart of things—a kid in trouble. When I
asked for a room, Elroy made a little clicking sound with his tongue. He
nodded, led me out to one of the cabins, and dropped a key in my hand. I
remember smiling at him. I also remember wishing I hadn't. The old
man shook his head as if to tell me it wasn't worth the bother.
"Dinner at five-thirty," he said. "You eat fish?"
"Anything," I said.
Elroy grunted and said, "I'll bet."
We spent six days together at the Tip Top Lodge. Just the two of us.
Tourist season was over, and there were no boats on the river, and the
wilderness seemed to withdraw into a great permanent stillness. Over
those six days Elroy Berdahl and I took most of our meals together. In
the mornings we sometimes went out on long hikes into the woods, and
at night we played Scrabble or listened to records or sat reading in front
of his big stone fireplace. At times I felt the awkwardness of an intruder,
but Elroy accepted me into his quiet routine without fuss or ceremony.
He took my presence for granted, the same way he might've sheltered a
stray cat—no wasted sighs or pity—and there was never any talk about it.
Just the opposite. What I remember more than anything is the man's
willful, almost ferocious silence. In all that time together, all those hours,
he never asked the obvious questions: Why was I there? Why alone? Why
so preoccupied? If Elroy was curious about any of this, he was careful
never to put it into words.
My hunch, though, is that he already knew. At least the basics. After
all, it was 1968, and guys were burning draft cards, and Canada was just
a boat ride away. Elroy Berdahl was no hick. His bedroom, I remember,
was cluttered with books and newspapers. He killed me at the Scrabble
board, barely concentrating, and on those occasions when speech was
necessary he had a way of compressing large thoughts into small, cryptic
packets of language. One evening, just at sunset, he pointed up at an owl
circling over the violet-lighted forest to the west. "Hey, O'Brien," he said.
"There's Jesus." The man was sharp—he didn't miss much. Those razor
eyes. Now and then he'd catch me staring out at the river, at the far
shore, and I could almost hear the tumblers clicking in his head. Maybe
I'm wrong, but I doubt it.
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
One thing for certain, he knew I was in desperate trouble. And he
knew I couldn't talk about it. The wrong word—or even the right word—
and I would've disappeared. I was wired and jittery. My skin felt too
tight. After supper one evening I vomited and went back to my cabin and
lay down for a few moments and then vomited again; another time, in
the middle of the afternoon, I began sweating and couldn't shut it off. I
went through whole days feeling dizzy with sorrow. I couldn't sleep; I
couldn't lie still. At night I'd toss around in bed, half awake, half
dreaming, imagining how I'd sneak down to the beach and quietly push
one of the old man's boats out into the river and start paddling my way
toward Canada. There were times when I thought I'd gone off the psychic
edge. I couldn't tell up from down, I was just falling, and late in the night
I'd lie there watching weird pictures spin through my head. Getting
chased by the Border Patrol—helicopters and searchlights and barking
dogs—I'd be crashing through the woods, I'd be down on my hands and
knees—people shouting out my name—the law closing in on all sides—
my hometown draft board and the FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police. It all seemed crazy and impossible. Twenty-one years old, an
ordinary kid with all the ordinary dreams and ambitions, and all I
wanted was to live the life I was born to—a mainstream life—I loved
baseball and hamburgers and cherry Cokes—and now I was off on the
margins of exile, leaving my country forever, and it seemed so impossible
and terrible and sad.
I'm not sure how I made it through those six days. Most of it I can't
remember. On two or three afternoons, to pass some time, I helped Elroy
get the place ready for winter, sweeping down the cabins and hauling in
the boats, little chores that kept my body moving. The days were cool and
bright. The nights were very dark. One morning the old man showed me
how to split and stack firewood, and for several hours we just worked in
silence out behind his house. At one point, I remember, Elroy put down
his maul and looked at me for a long time, his lips drawn as if framing a
difficult question, but then he shook his head and went back to work. The
man's self-control was amazing. He never pried. He never put me in a
position that required lies or denials. To an extent, I suppose, his
reticence was typical of that part of Minnesota, where privacy still held
value, and even if I'd been walking around with some horrible
deformity—four arms and three heads—I'm sure the old man would've
talked about everything except those extra arms and heads. Simple
politeness was part of it. But even more than that, I think, the man
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
understood that words were insufficient. The problem had gone beyond
discussion. During that long summer I'd been over and over the various
arguments, all the pros and cons, and it was no longer a question that
could be decided by an act of pure reason. Intellect had come up against
emotion. My conscience told me to run, but some irrational and powerful
force was resisting, like a weight pushing me toward the war. What it
came down to, stupidly, was a sense of shame. Hot, stupid shame. I did
not want people to think badly of me. Not my parents, not my brother
and sister, not even the folks down at the Gobbler Cafe. I was ashamed to
be there at the Tip Top Lodge. I was ashamed of my conscience, ashamed
to be doing the right thing.
Some of this Elroy must've understood. Not the details, of course, but
the plain fact of crisis.
Although the old man never confronted me about it, there was one
occasion when he came close to forcing the whole thing out into the
open. It was early evening, and we'd just finished supper, and over coffee
and dessert I asked him about my bill, how much I owed so far. For a
long while the old man squinted down at the tablecloth.
"Well, the basic rate," he said, "is fifty bucks a night. Not counting
meals. This makes four nights, right?"
I nodded. I had three hundred and twelve dollars in my wallet.
Elroy kept his eyes on the tablecloth. "Now that's an on-season price.
To be fair, I suppose we should knock it down a peg or two." He leaned
back in his chair. "What's a reasonable number, you figure?"
"I don't know," I said. "Forty?"
"Forty's good. Forty a night. Then we tack on food—say another
hundred? Two hundred sixty total?"
"I guess."
He raised his eyebrows. "Too much?"
"No, that's fair. It's fine. Tomorrow, though ... I think I'd better take off
tomorrow."
Elroy shrugged and began clearing the table. For a time he fussed with
the dishes, whistling to himself as if the subject had been settled. After a
second he slapped his hands together.
"You know what we forgot?" he said. "We forgot wages. Those odd jobs
you done. What we have to do, we have to figure out what your time's
worth. Your last job—how much did you pull in an hour?"
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
"Not enough," I said.
"A bad one?"
"Yes. Pretty bad."
Slowly then, without intending any long sermon, I told him about my
days at the pig plant. It began as a straight recitation of the facts, but
before I could stop myself I was talking about the blood clots and the
water gun and how the smell had soaked into my skin and how I couldn't
wash it away. I went on for a long time. I told him about wild hogs
squealing in my dreams, the sounds of butchery, slaughterhouse sounds,
and how I'd sometimes wake up with that greasy pig-stink in my throat.
When I was finished, Elroy nodded at me.
"Well, to be honest," he said, "when you first showed up here, I
wondered about all that. The aroma, I mean. Smelled like you was awful
damned fond of pork chops." The old man almost smiled. He made a
snuffling sound, then sat down with a pencil and a piece of paper. "So
what'd this crud job pay? Ten bucks an hour? Fifteen?"
"Less."
Elroy shook his head. "Let's make it fifteen. You put in twenty-five
hours here, easy. That's three hundred seventy-five bucks total wages.
We subtract the two hundred sixty for food and lodging, I still owe you a
hundred and fifteen."
He took four fifties out of his shirt pocket and laid them on the table.
"Call it even," he said.
"No."
"Pick it up. Get yourself a haircut."
The money lay on the table for the rest of the evening. It was still there
when I went back to my cabin. In the morning, though, I found an
envelope tacked to my door. Inside were the four fifties and a two-word
note that said
EMERGENCY FUND.
The man knew.
Looking back after twenty years, I sometimes wonder if the events of
that summer didn't happen in some other dimension, a place where your
life exists before you've lived it, and where it goes afterward. None of it
ever seemed real. During my time at the Tip Top Lodge I had the feeling
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
that I'd slipped out of my own skin, hovering a few feet away while some
poor yo-yo with my name and face tried to make his way toward a future
he didn't understand and didn't want. Even now I can see myself as I was
then. It's like watching an old home movie: I'm young and tan and fit.
I've got hair—lots of it. I don't smoke or drink. I'm wearing faded blue
jeans and a white polo shirt. I can see myself sitting on Elroy Berdahl's
dock near dusk one evening, the sky a bright shimmering pink, and I'm
finishing up a letter to my parents that tells what I'm about to do and
why I'm doing it and how sorry I am that I'd never found the courage to
talk to them about it. I ask them not to be angry. I try to explain some of
my feelings, but there aren't enough words, and so I just say that it's a
thing that has to be done. At the end of the letter I talk about the
vacations we used to take up in this north country, at a place called
Whitefish Lake, and how the scenery here reminds me of those good
times. I tell them I'm fine. I tell them I'll write again from Winnipeg or
Montreal or wherever I end up.
On my last full day, the sixth day, the old man took me out fishing on
the Rainy River. The afternoon was sunny and cold. A stiff breeze came
in from the north, and I remember how the little fourteen-foot boat
made sharp rocking motions as we pushed off from the dock. The current
was fast. All around us, I remember, there was a vastness to the world,
an unpeopled rawness, just the trees and the sky and the water reaching
out toward nowhere. The air had the brittle scent of October.
For ten or fifteen minutes Elroy held a course upstream, the river
choppy and silver-gray, then he turned straight north and put the engine
on full throttle. I felt the bow lift beneath me. I remember the wind in my
ears, the sound of the old outboard Evinrude. For a time I didn't pay
attention to anything, just feeling the cold spray against my face, but
then it occurred to me that at some point we must've passed into
Canadian waters, across that dotted line between two different worlds,
and I remember a sudden tightness in my chest as I looked up and
watched the far shore come at me. This wasn't a daydream. It was
tangible and real. As we came in toward land, Elroy cut the engine,
letting the boat fishtail lightly about twenty yards off shore. The old man
didn't look at me or speak. Bending down, he opened up his tackle box
and busied himself with a bobber and a piece of wire leader, humming to
himself, his eyes down.
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
It struck me then that he must've planned it. I'll never be certain, of
course, but I think he meant to bring me up against the realities, to guide
me across the river and to take me to the edge and to stand a kind of vigil
as I chose a life for myself.
I remember staring at the old man, then at my hands, then at Canada.
The shoreline was dense with brush and timber. I could see tiny red
berries on the bushes. I could see a squirrel up in one of the birch trees, a
big crow looking at me from a boulder along the river. That close—
twenty yards—and I could see the delicate latticework of the leaves, the
texture of the soil, the browned needles beneath the pines, the
configurations of geology and human history. Twenty yards. I could've
done it. I could've jumped and started swimming for my life. Inside me,
in my chest, I felt a terrible squeezing pressure. Even now, as I write this,
I can still feel that tightness. And I want you to feel it—the wind coming
off the river, the waves, the silence, the wooded frontier. You're at the
bow of a boat on the Rainy River. You're twenty-one years old, you're
scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest.
What would you do?
Would you jump? Would you feel pity for yourself? Would you think
about your family and your childhood and your dreams and all you're
leaving behind? Would it hurt? Would it feel like dying? Would you cry,
as I did?
I tried to swallow it back. I tried to smile, except I was crying.
Now, perhaps, you can understand why I've never told this story
before. It's not just the embarrassment of tears. That's part of it, no
doubt, but what embarrasses me much more, and always will, is the
paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn't decide, I couldn't
act, I couldn't comport myself with even a pretense of modest human
dignity.
All I could do was cry. Quietly, not bawling, just the chest-chokes.
At the rear of the boat Elroy Berdahl pretended not to notice. He held
a fishing rod in his hands, his head bowed to hide his eyes. He kept
humming a soft, monotonous little tune. Everywhere, it seemed, in the
trees and water and sky, a great worldwide sadness came pressing down
on me, a crushing sorrow, sorrow like I had never known it before. And
what was so sad, I realized, was that Canada had become a pitiful
fantasy. Silly and hopeless. It was no longer a possibility. Right then,
with the shore so close, I understood that I would not do what I should
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
do. I would not swim away from my hometown and my country and my
life. I would not be brave. That old image of myself as a hero, as a man of
conscience and courage, all that was just a threadbare pipe dream.
Bobbing there on the Rainy River, looking back at the Minnesota shore, I
felt a sudden swell of helplessness come over me, a drowning sensation,
as if I had toppled overboard and was being swept away by the silver
waves. Chunks of my own history flashed by. I saw a seven-year-old boy
in a white cowboy hat and a Lone Ranger mask and a pair of holstered
six-shooters; I saw a twelve-year-old Little League shortstop pivoting to
turn a double play; I saw a sixteen-year-old kid decked out for his first
prom, looking spiffy in a white tux and a black bow tie, his hair cut short
and flat, his shoes freshly polished. My whole life seemed to spill out into
the river, swirling away from me, everything I had ever been or ever
wanted to be. I couldn't get my breath; I couldn't stay afloat; I couldn't
tell which way to swim. A hallucination, I suppose, but it was as real as
anything I would ever feel. I saw my parents calling to me from the far
shoreline. I saw my brother and sister, all the townsfolk, the mayor and
the entire Chamber of Commerce and all my old teachers and girlfriends
and high school buddies. Like some weird sporting event: everybody
screaming from the sidelines, rooting me on—a loud stadium roar.
Hotdogs and popcorn—stadium smells, stadium heat. A squad of
cheerleaders did cartwheels along the banks of the Rainy River; they had
megaphones and pompoms and smooth brown thighs. The crowd
swayed left and right. A marching band played fight songs. All my aunts
and uncles were there, and Abraham Lincoln, and Saint George, and a
nine-year-old girl named Linda who had died of a brain tumor back in
fifth grade, and several members of the United States Senate, and a blind
poet scribbling notes, and LBJ, and Huck Finn, and Abbie Hoffman, and
all the dead soldiers back from the grave, and the many thousands who
were later to die—villagers with terrible burns, little kids without arms or
legs—yes, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were there, and a couple of popes,
and a first lieutenant named Jimmy Cross, and the last surviving veteran
of the American Civil War, and Jane Fonda dressed up as Barbarella, and
an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and my grandfather, and Gary
Cooper, and a kind-faced woman carrying an umbrella and a copy of
Plato's Republic, and a million ferocious citizens waving flags of all
shapes and colors—people in hard hats, people in headbands—they were
all whooping and chanting and urging me toward one shore or the other.
I saw faces from my distant past and distant future. My wife was there.
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
My unborn daughter waved at me, and my two sons hopped up and
down, and a drill sergeant named Blyton sneered and shot up a finger
and shook his head. There was a choir in bright purple robes. There was
a cabbie from the Bronx. There was a slim young man I would one day
kill with a hand grenade along a red clay trail outside the village of My
Khe.
The little aluminum boat rocked softly beneath me. There was the
wind and the sky.
I tried to will myself overboard.
I gripped the edge of the boat and leaned forward and thought, Now.
I did try. It just wasn't possible.
All those eyes on me—the town, the whole universe—and I couldn't
risk the embarrassment. It was as if there were an audience to my life,
that swirl of faces along the river, and in my head I could hear people
screaming at me. Traitor! they yelled. Turncoat! Pussy! I felt myself
blush. I couldn't tolerate it. I couldn't endure the mockery, or the
disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule. Even in my imagination, the shore just
twenty yards away, I couldn't make myself be brave. It had nothing to do
with morality. Embarrassment, that's all it was.
And right then I submitted.
I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was
embarrassed not to.
That was the sad thing. And so I sat in the bow of the boat and cried.
It was loud now. Loud, hard crying.
Elroy Berdahl remained quiet. He kept fishing. He worked his line
with the tips of his fingers, patiently, squinting out at his red and white
bobber on the Rainy River. His eyes were flat and impassive. He didn't
speak. He was simply there, like the river and the late-summer sun. And
yet by his presence, his mute watchfulness, he made it real. He was the
true audience. He was a witness, like God, or like the gods, who look on
in absolute silence as we live our lives, as we make our choices or fail to
make them.
"Ain't biting," he said.
Then after a time the old man pulled in his line and turned the boat
back toward Minnesota.
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
I don't remember saying goodbye. That last night we had dinner
together, and I went to bed early, and in the morning Elroy fixed
breakfast for me. When I told him I'd be leaving, the old man nodded as
if he already knew. He looked down at the table and smiled.
At some point later in the morning it's possible that we shook hands—I
just don't remember—but I do know that by the time I'd finished packing
the old man had disappeared. Around noon, when I took my suitcase out
to the car, I noticed that his old black pickup truck was no longer parked
in front of the house. I went inside and waited for a while, but I felt a
bone certainty that he wouldn't be back. In a way, I thought, it was
appropriate. I washed up the breakfast dishes, left his two hundred
dollars on the kitchen counter, got into the car, and drove south toward
home.
The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar names,
through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam,
where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it's not a
happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.
Enemies
One morning in late July, while we were out on patrol near LZ Gator,
Lee Strunk and Dave Jensen got into a fistfight. It was about something
stupid—a missing jackknife—but even so the fight was vicious. For a
while it went back and forth, but Dave Jensen was much bigger and
much stronger, and eventually he wrapped an arm around Strunk's neck
and pinned him down and kept hitting him on the nose. He hit him hard.
And he didn't stop. Strunk's nose made a sharp snapping sound, like a
firecracker, but even then Jensen kept hitting him, over and over, quick
stiff punches that did not miss. It took three of us to pull him off. When it
was over, Strunk had to be choppered back to the rear, where he had his
nose looked after, and two days later he rejoined us wearing a metal
splint and lots of gauze.
In any other circumstance it might've ended there. But this was
Vietnam, where guys carried guns, and Dave Jensen started to worry. It
was mostly in his head. There were no threats, no vows of revenge, just a
silent tension between them that made Jensen take special precautions.
On patrol he was careful to keep track of Strunk's whereabouts. He dug
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
his foxholes on the far side of the perimeter; he kept his back covered; he
avoided situations that might put the two of them alone together.
Eventually, after a week of this, the strain began to create problems.
Jensen couldn't relax. Like fighting two different wars, he said. No safe
ground: enemies everywhere. No front or rear. At night he had trouble
sleeping—a skittish feeling—always on guard, hearing strange noises in
the dark, imagining a grenade rolling into his foxhole or the tickle of a
knife against his ear. The distinction between good guys and bad guys
disappeared for him. Even in times of relative safety, while the rest of us
took it easy, Jensen would be sitting with his back against a stone wall,
weapon across his knees, watching Lee Strunk with quick, nervous eyes.
It got to the point finally where he lost control. Something must've
snapped. One afternoon he began firing his weapon into the air, yelling
Strunk's name, just firing and yelling, and it didn't stop until he'd rattled
off an entire magazine of ammunition. We were all flat on the ground.
Nobody had the nerve to go near him. Jensen started to reload, but then
suddenly he sat down and held his head in his arms and wouldn't move.
For two or three hours he simply sat there.
But that wasn't the bizarre part.
Because late that same night he borrowed a pistol, gripped it by the
barrel, and used it like a hammer to break his own nose.
Afterward, he crossed the perimeter to Lee Strunk's foxhole. He
showed him what he'd done and asked if everything was square between
them.
Strunk nodded and said, Sure, things were square.
But in the morning Lee Strunk couldn't stop laughing. "The man's
crazy," he said. "I stole his fucking jackknife."
Friends
Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk did not become instant buddies, but they
did learn to trust each other. Over the next month they often teamed up
on ambushes. They covered each other on patrol, shared a foxhole, took
turns pulling guard at night. In late August they made a pact that if one
of them should ever get totally rucked up—a wheelchair wound—the
other guy would automatically find a way to end it. As far as I could tell
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
they were serious. They drew it up on paper, signing their names and
asking a couple of guys to act as witnesses. And then in October Lee
Strunk stepped on a rigged mortar round. It took off his right leg at the
knee. He managed a funny little half step, like a hop, then he tilted
sideways and dropped. "Oh, damn," he said. For a while he kept on
saying it, "Damn oh damn," as if he'd stubbed a toe. Then he panicked.
He tried to get up and run, but there was nothing left to run on. He fell
hard. The stump of his right leg was twitching. There were slivers of
bone, and the blood came in quick spurts like water from a pump. He
seemed bewildered. He reached down as if to massage his missing leg,
then he passed out, and Rat Kiley put on a tourniquet and administered
morphine and ran plasma into him.
There was nothing much anybody could do except wait for the dustoff.
After we'd secured an LZ, Dave Jensen went over and kneeled at Strunk's
side. The stump had stopped twitching now. For a time there was some
question as to whether Strunk was still alive, but then he opened his eyes
and looked up at Dave Jensen. "Oh, Jesus," he said, and moaned, and
tried to slide away and said, "Jesus, man, don't kill me."
"Relax," Jensen said.
Lee Strunk seemed groggy and confused. He lay still for a second and
then motioned toward his leg. "Really, it's not so bad, Not terrible. Hey,
really—they can sew it back on—really."
"Right, I'll bet they can."
"You think?"
"Sure I do."
Strunk frowned at the sky. He passed out again, then woke up and
said, "Don't kill me."
"I won't," Jensen said.
"I'm serious."
"Sure."
"But you got to promise. Swear it to me—swear you won't kill me."
Jensen nodded and said, "I swear," and then a little later we carried
Strunk to the dustoff chopper. Jensen reached out and touched the good
leg. "Go on now," he said. Later we heard that Strunk died somewhere
over Chu Lai, which seemed to relieve Dave Jensen of an enormous
weight.
Christine Taylor Riendeau
Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:56:25 AM ET
How to Tell a True War Story
This is true.
I had a buddy in Vietnam. His name was Bob Kiley, but everybody
called him Rat.
A friend of his gets killed, so about a week later Rat sits down and
writes a letter to the guy's sister. Rat tells her what a great brother she
had, how together the guy was, a number one pal and comrade. A real
soldier's soldier, Rat says. Then he tells a few stories to make the point,
how her brother would always volunteer for stuff nobody else would
volunteer for in a million years, dangerous stuff, like doing recon or
going out on these really badass night patrols. Stainless steel balls, Rat
tells her. The guy was a little crazy, for sure, but crazy in a good way, a
real daredevil, because he liked the challenge of it, he liked testing
himself, just man against gook. A great, great guy, Rat says.
Anyway, it's a terrific letter, very personal and touching. Rat almost
bawls writing it. He gets all teary telling about the good times they had
together, how her brother made the war seem almost fun, always raising
hell and lighting up villes and bringing smoke to bear every which way. A
great sense of humor, too. Like the time at this river when he went
fishing with a whole damn crate of hand grenades. Probably the funniest
thing in world history, Rat says, all that gore, about twenty zillion dead
gook fish. Her brother, he had the right attitude. He knew how to have a
good time. On Halloween, this real hot spooky night, the dude paints up
his body all different colors and puts on this weird mask and hikes over
to a ville and goes trick-or-treating almost stark naked, just boots and
balls and an M-16. A tremendous human being, Rat says. Pretty nutso
sometimes, but you could trust him with your life.
And then the letter gets very sad and serious. Rat pours his heart out.
He says he loved the guy. He says the guy was his best friend in the
world. They were like soul mates, he says, like twins or something, th...
Purchase answer to see full
attachment