If I Die in a Combat Zone (3 page)

One day in May the high school held graduation ceremonies. Then I went away to college, and the town did not miss me much.

Three
Beginning

      T
he summer of 1968, the summer I turned into a soldier, was a good time for talking about war and peace. Eugene McCarthy was bringing quiet thought to the subject. He was winning votes in the primaries. College students were listening to him, and some of us tried to help out. Lyndon Johnson was almost forgotten, no longer forbidding or feared; Robert Kennedy was dead but not quite forgotten; Richard Nixon looked like a loser. With all the tragedy and change that summer, it was fine weather for discussion.

And, with all of this, there was an induction notice tucked into a corner of my billfold.

So with friends and acquaintances and townspeople, I spent the summer in Fred’s antiseptic cafe, drinking coffee and mapping out arguments on Fred’s napkins. Or I sat in Chic’s tavern, drinking beer with kids from the farms. I played some golf and tore up the pool table down at the bowling alley, keeping an eye open for likely looking high school girls.

Late at night, the town deserted, two or three of us would drive a car around and around the town’s lake, talking about the war, very seriously, moving with care from one argument to the next, trying to make it a dialogue and not a debate. We covered all the big questions: justice, tyranny, self-determination, conscience and the state, God and war and love.

College friends came to visit: “Too bad, I hear you’re drafted. What will you do?”

I said I didn’t know, that I’d let time decide. Maybe something would change, maybe the war would end. Then we’d turn to discuss the matter, talking long, trying out the questions, sleeping late in the mornings.

The summer conversations, spiked with plenty of references to the philosophers and academicians of war, were thoughtful and long and complex and careful. But, in the end, careful and precise argumentation hurt me. It was painful to tread deliberately over all the axioms and assumptions and corollaries when the people on the town’s draft board were calling me to duty, smiling so nicely.

“It won’t be bad at all,” they said. “Stop in and see us when it’s over.”

So to bring the conversations to a focus and also to try out in real words my secret fears, I argued for running away.

I was persuaded then, and I remain persuaded now, that the war was wrong. And since it was wrong and since people were dying as a result of it, it was evil. Doubts, of course, hedged all this: I had neither the expertise nor the wisdom to synthesize answers; the facts were clouded; there was no certainty as to the kind of government that would follow a North Vietnamese victory or, for that matter, an American victory, and the specifics of the conflict were hidden away—partly in men’s minds, partly in the archives of government, and partly in buried, irretrievable history. The war, I thought, was wrongly conceived and poorly justified. But perhaps I was mistaken, and who really knew, anyway?

Piled on top of this was the town, my family, my teachers, a whole history of the prairie. Like magnets, these things pulled in one direction or the other, almost physical forces weighting the problem, so that, in the end, it was less reason and more gravity that was the final influence.

My family was careful that summer. The decision was mine and it was not talked about. The town lay there, spread out in the corn and watching me, the mouths of old women and Country Club men poised in readiness to find fault. It was not a town, not a Minneapolis or New York, where the son of a father can sometimes escape scrutiny. More, I owed the prairie something. For twenty-one years I’d lived under its laws, accepted its education, eaten its food, wasted and guzzled its water, slept well at night, driven across its highways, dirtied and breathed its air, wallowed in its luxuries. I’d played on its Little League teams. I remembered Plato’s
Crito
, when Socrates, facing certain death—execution, not war—had the chance to escape. But he reminded himself that he had seventy years in which he could have left the country, if he were not satisfied or felt the agreements he’d made with it were unfair. He had not chosen Sparta or Crete. And, I reminded myself, I hadn’t thought much about Canada until that summer.

The summer passed this way. Golden afternoons on the golf course, an illusive hopefulness that the war would grant me a last-minute reprieve, nights in the pool hall or drug store, talking with townsfolk, turning the questions over and over, being a philosopher.

Near the end of that summer the time came to go to the war. The family indulged in a cautious sort of Last Supper together, and afterward my father, who is brave, said it was time to report at the bus depot. I moped down to my bedroom and looked the place over, feeling quite stupid, thinking that my mother would come in there in a day or two and probably cry a little. I trudged back up to the kitchen and put my satchel down. Everyone gathered around, saying so long and good health and write and let us know if you want anything. My father took up the induction papers, checking on times and dates and all the last-minute things, and when I pecked my mother’s face and grabbed the satchel for comfort, he told me to put it down, that I wasn’t supposed to report until tomorrow. I’d misread the induction date.

After laughing about the mistake, after a flush of red color and a flood of ribbing and a wave of relief had come and gone, I took a long drive around the lake. Sunset Park, with its picnic table and little beach and a brown wood shelter and some families swimming. The Crippled Children’s School. Slater Park, more kids. A long string of split-level houses, painted every color.

The war and my person seemed like twins as I went around the town’s lake. Twins grafted together and forever together, as if a separation would kill them both.

The thought made me angry.

In the basement of my house I found some scraps of cardboard. I printed obscene words on them. I declared my intention to have no part of Vietnam. With delightful viciousness, a secret will, I declared the war evil, the draft board evil, the town evil in its lethargic acceptance of it all. For many minutes, making up the signs, making up my mind, I was outside the town. I was outside the law. I imagined myself strutting up and down the sidewalks outside the depot, the bus waiting and the driver blaring his horn, the
Daily Globe
photographer trying to push me into line with the other draftees, the frantic telephone calls, my head buzzing at the deed.

On the cardboard, my strokes of bright red were big and ferocious looking. The language was clear and certain and burned with a hard, defiant, criminal, blasphemous sound. I tried reading it aloud. I was scared. I was sad.

Later in the evening I tore the signs into pieces and put the shreds in the garbage can outside. I went back into the basement. I slipped the crayons into their box, the same stubs of color I’d used a long time before to chalk in reds and greens on Roy Rogers’s cowboy boots.

I’d never been a demonstrator, except in the loose sense. True, I’d taken a stand in the school newspaper on the war, trying to show why it seemed wrong. But, mostly, I’d just listened.

“No war is worth losing your life for,” a college acquaintance used to argue. “The issue isn’t a moral one. It’s a matter of efficiency: What’s the most efficient way to stay alive when your nation is at war? That’s the issue.”

But others argued that no war is worth losing your country for, and when asked about the case when a country fights a wrong war, those people just shrugged.

Most of my college friends found easy paths away from the problem, all to their credit. Deferments for this and that. Letters from doctors or chaplains. It was hard to find people who had to think much about the problem. Counsel came from two main quarters, pacifists and veterans of foreign wars, but neither camp had much to offer. It wasn’t a matter of peace, as the pacifists argued, but rather a matter of when and when not to join others in making war. And it wasn’t a matter of listening to an ex-lieutenant colonel talk about serving in a right war, when the question was whether to serve in what seemed a wrong one.

On August 13, I went to the bus depot. A Worthington
Daily Globe
photographer took my picture standing by a rail fence with four other draftees.

Then the bus took us through corn fields, to little towns along the way—Rushmore and Adrian—where other recruits came aboard. With the tough guys drinking beer and howling in the back seats, brandishing their empty cans and calling one another “scum” and “trainee” and “GI Joe,” with all this noise and hearty farewelling, we went to Sioux Falls. We spent the night in a YMCA. I went out alone for a beer, drank it in a corner booth, then I bought a book and read it in my room.

At noon the next day our hands were in the air, even the tough guys. We recited the oath—some of us loudly and daringly, others in bewilderment. It was a brightly lighted room, wood paneled. A flag gave the place the right colors. There was smoke in the air. We said the words, and we were soldiers.

I’d never been much of a fighter. I was afraid of bullies: frustrated anger. Still, I deferred to no one. Positively lorded myself over inferiors. And on top of that was the matter of conscience and conviction, uncertain and surface-deep but pure nonetheless. I was a confirmed liberal. Not a pacifist, but I would have cast my ballot to end the Vietnam war, I would have voted for Eugene McCarthy, hoping he would make peace. I was not soldier material, that was certain.

But I submitted. All the soul searchings and midnight conversations and books and beliefs were voided by abstention, extinguished by forfeiture, for lack of oxygen, by a sort of sleepwalking default. It was no decision, no chain of ideas or reasons, that steered me into the war.

It was an intellectual and physical standoff, and I did not have the energy to see it to an end. I did not want to be a soldier, not even an observer to war. But neither did I want to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my own private world. It was not just that I valued that order. I also feared its opposite—inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that had happened in my life, the end of it all.

And the standoff is still there. I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows, from one who’s been there and come back, an old soldier looking back at a dying war.

That would be good. It would be fine to integrate it all to persuade my younger brother and perhaps some others to say no to wrong wars.

Or it would be fine to confirm the old beliefs about war: It’s horrible, but it’s a crucible of men and events and, in the end, it makes more of a man out of you.

But, still, none of this seems right.

Now, war ended, all I am left with are simple, unpro-found scraps of truth. Men die. Fear hurts and humiliates. It is hard to be brave. It is hard to know what bravery
is
. Dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are dreamers, drill sergeants are boors, some men thought the war was proper and others didn’t and most didn’t care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?

Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

Four
Nights

      I
ncoming,” the lieutenant shouted.

We dove for a foxhole. I was first in, the earth taking care of my belly; the lieutenant and some others piled in on top of me.

Grenades burst around the perimeter, a few rifle shots.

“Wow, like a sandwich,” I said. “Just stay where you are.”

“Yep, we’re nothing but sandbags for O’Brien,” Mad Mark said, peering up to watch the explosions go off.

It didn’t last long.

A blond-headed soldier ran over when the shooting ended. “Jesus, I got me a hunk of grenade shrapnel in my fuckin hand,” he said. He sucked the wound. It didn’t seem bad.

Mad Mark inspected the cut under a flashlight. “Will it kill you before morning?”

“Nope, I guess not. Have to get a tetanus shot, I suppose. Christ, those tetanus shots
hurt
don’t they?”

As it turned out, the fire fight had not been a fire fight. The blond soldier and a few others had been bored. Bored all day. Bored that night. So they’d synchronized watches, set a time, agreed to toss hand grenades outside our perimeter at 2200 sharp, and when 2200 came, they did it, staging the battle. They shouted and squealed and fired their weapons and threw hand grenades and had a good time, making noise, scaring hell out of everyone. Something to talk about in the morning.

“Great little spat,” they said the next day, slyly.

“Great?” I couldn’t believe it.

“Ah, you know. Little action livens up everything, right? Gets the ol’ blood boiling.”

“You crazy?”

“Mad as a hatter.”

“You like getting shot, for God’s sake? You
like
Charlie trying to chuck grenades into your foxhole? You
like
that stuff?”

“Some got it, some don’t. Me, I’m mad as a hatter.”

“Don’t let him shit you,” Chip said. “That whole thing last night was a fake. They planned it, beginning to end.”

“Except for old Turnip Head getting a piece of his own grenade,” Bates said. “They didn’t plan that.” Bates walked along beside me, the platoon straggled out across a wide rice paddy. “Turnip Head threw his grenade and it hit a tree and bounced right back at him. Lucky he didn’t blow his head off.”

Chip shook his head. He was a short, skinny soldier from Orlando, Florida, a black guy. “Me, I don’t take chances like that. You’re right, they’re nutty,” he said.