One of the most amazing books I have ever read was Tim O'Brien's novel,
The Things They Carried. I don't often do diaries but on this Memorial Weekend, I thought some of his words were perfect as we remember our fallen soldiers, the soldiers that still live with the horrors of Vietnam, and the soldiers that will live with the horrors of this current Iraq War.
This book is an anguished collection of linked stories about Vietnam. In it, Tim mingles fact with fiction, telling and retelling events from different points of view. The novel is as much about war as it is about the difference between truth and reality.
Tim explains:
You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever....
It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.
Tim served in Vietnam. He watched his friend, Kiowa, sink in a field of shit. He saw another get blown up in the tree. He watched young men of 19 and 20 fight a war they didn't understand.
And now, we're reliving another true war story. So easily do our leaders send these brave men and women to war. Do they ever sit and contemplate what they have done to these men and women? Only those that have served can begin to understand.
What is especially sad, though, is that there are those that have served, those that know the horrors of war, and they easily carry the lies of the Bush Administration.
They carry the lives of these men and women on their shoulders yet they seem incapable of feeling the weight.
Tim describes what it was like:
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, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost. They marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning foward 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....
Is it so different for the men and women now?
In Chapter 4, Tim is drafted and contemplates what he should do. I find it amazing nothing has really changed in 30 years.
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 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 the table down at the Old Gobbler Cafe on Main Street....At night, 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 simpleminded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-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 Lions Club and the Veterans of Foreign wars and the fine upstanding gentry at the country club...
Tim describes his "worst day":
In the months after Ted Lavender died, there were many other bodies. I never shook hands--not that--but one afternoon I climbed a tree and threw down what was left of Curt Lemon. I watched my friend Kiowa sink into the muck along the Song Tra Bong. And in early July, after a battle in the mountains, I was assigned a six-man detail to police up the enemy KIAs. There were twenty-seven bodies altogether, and parts of several others. The dead were everywhere. Some lay in piles. Some lay alone. One, I remember, seemed to kneel. Another was bent from the waist over a small boulder, the top of his head on the ground, his arms rigid, the eyes squinting in concentration as if he were about to perform a handstand or somersault. It was my worst day of the war.....
At one point Mitchell Sanders looked at me and said, "Hey, man, I just realized something."
"What?"
He wiped his eyes and spoke very quietly, as if awed by his own wisdom.
"Death sucks," he said.
I think Tim's words speak for themselves.
When will this madness end? Why have we not learned a thing? Why is it that there is another diary here about the Swift Board Liars that exacted revenge on Kerry 30 years later because he spoke out against this war?????
Finally, there is a section in the book about Norman, a soldier who returns home and is unable to speak to his loved ones about the war. Tim had written a story that Norman didn't think was accurate. So he tells Tim to write this story:
What you should do, Tim, is write a story about a guy who feels like he got zapped over in that shithole. A guy who can't get his act together and just drives around town all day and can't think of any damn place to go and doesn't know how to get there anyway. The guy wants to talk about it but he can't...I can't figure out what to say. Something about that field that night. The way Kiowa just disappeared into the crud. You were there--you can tell it.
Before Tim writes the story, he finds out Norman is gone.
Eight months later he [Norman] killed himself.
In August of 1978 his mother sent me a brief note explaining what had happened. He'd been playing pickup basketball at the Y; after two hours he went off for a drink of water; he used a jump rope; his friends found him hanging from a water pipe. There was no suicide note, no message of any kind. "Norman was a quiet boy," his mother wrote, "and I don't suppose he wanted to bother anybody."
So tomorrow, when Bush paints this war as a noble cause, and remembers those that have fallen for his illegal and unjust war, I'll think about the truth of Norman. will think about Tim's words and how we have not learned from our mistakes. How we keep sending another "Tim" and another "Norman" into war.
What really outrages me is that we don't know how many more Normans there will be--those that cannot deal with what they have seen. How many of those will we lose? I will remember them this weekend, too. And I will pray that the criminals in our midst--our government--will stop cutting their benefits and support them.
They owe them.
They've carried this war in their heads, their hearts, and on their backs. They deserve our utmost respect and help.
It is such a shame what we have done to our soldiers--what we did in past and what we continue to do.
Books like this should be required reading for a man like Bush. Too bad our Commander and Chief is proud that he doesn't read. Of course, Bush wouldn't know the truth. He is incapable, I'm afraid.