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English Studies Forum
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Just War and Tim O'Brien's Fiction Jacqueline A. Zubeck Just war standards are an appropriate framework by which to examine Tim O’Brien’s war stories because the fiction itself seeks to convey the agonized moral climate of the Vietnam War and the impact of combat on a man’s sensibilities. O’Brien’s novels show us the principles of justice – largely in the breach – so that he can examine the deadliest aspect of the conflict -- its impact on the moral consciousness of the soldier. Just war standards, an intersecting web of considerations, consider a war just if it is waged ‘as a last resort,’ in a morally ‘proportionate response’ to a serious military and moral transgression. Justice dictates that the conflict must fall under the mandate of a ‘legitimate authority’ which represents the population and takes into account the warrior’s won ethic: that soldiers fight for a ‘just cause,’ in a way that is morally ‘proportionate’ manner, in part, because ‘non-combatant immunity’ determines the status of soldier and civilian. Alas, American combat soldiers in Vietnam suffered the poor decisions of Presidents and policy makers who did not have a realistic grasp on history or military might going into the war (ad bellum) and therefore, put soldiers in war (in bello) into moral jeopardy as they fought the war. They have paid dearly for the privilege. In their kill-or-be-killed environment, combatants find that individual choice is narrowed to a primitive struggle for survival. And yet, a soldier does not lose his moral conscience nor the guiding principles of civilization, but superimposes their burden on his warrior practice. Just war thinkers consider the awful cost of combat and speak with the morally attuned vocabulary necessary to articulate the moral conflict implicit in war. Just war theory provides a language that accommodates the paradox of war, “an event . . . counter to human reason and human nature” (Tolstoy 729).
This paper will examine the moral conflict of O’Brien’s soldiers through the lens of just war thinking, and presents the argument that moral conflict was inflicted on combat veterans by policy makers who violated every aspect of just or legitimate ad bellum decision-making going into the war, and constructed similarly woeful policies for soldiers in bello. Completely ignorant of Vietnam’s centuries-long practice of the martial arts, and its long history of fighting off foreign invasion, US policy provided no overall strategy nor military goal which, once met, would signal the end of the conflict and initiate a suit for peace. Instead, U.S. forces were reduced to ‘wearing away’ of the enemy in a war of attrition, and doomed to documenting body parts for the count. The President and his Cabinet – acting without legitimate authority themselves -- entered the war without a just cause (no serious military and moral transgression to address) and therefore, no proportionate response, placing soldiers in a war where there was little ‘chance of success.’ O’Brien’s stories demonstrate the effects of policy makers poor leadership and ignorant and careless prosecution of war which had disastrous results on the consciousness of soldiers themselves. Such leadership betrayed the warrior’s own standards of behavior, primarily, because it was hard to differentiate between combatants and civilians, ally and foe. Just war theory, with its strict attention to an interrelated set of standards, show us the principles of war, that, when neglected, produce profound moral effects on combatants themselves. The just war tradition takes into account the warrior’s own standards of behavior -- his status as an international law enforcement officer, a “peacemaker” who protects the vulnerable borders of civilization against an opponent worthy of the name – and suggests the impact of the absence of justice in ad bellum choices and the subsequent effect on the consciousness of the soldier in bello and beyond.
O’Brien himself raises all the issues of just war ad bellum decision making. “On the Rainy River,” agonizing over his impending induction, O’Brien considers the morality of the war: was it a last resort? an action dictated by a legitimate authority? for a just cause? as a proportionate response? He asks:
O’Brien also considers the “smart men in pinstripes [who] could not agree on even the most fundamental matters of public policy” (Rainy River 40) and chastises the fine upholding citizens who “didn’t know Bao Dai from the man in the moon. . . didn’t know history. . . or the long colonialism of the French” (Rainy River 45). Just war standards provide the yardstick by which to measure the moral anxieties in the text, a framework by which to ascertain the moral “ambiguity” of the war (TTTC 82).
In the hallucination of “On the Rainy River,” the author describes “Tim O’Brien” on the border between the U.S. and Canada, vividly imagining a gathering of the entire population of his experience … family, friends, cultural icons . . . even the “slim young man I would one day kill with a hand grenade along a red clay trail outside the village of My Khe” (TTTC 59). He is in sight of the Canadian shoreline, he imagines exile from his community in the escape from armed service. The people whom O’Brien sees are, like him, culturally shaped by conceptions of masculinity conceived in martial and “patriotic” terms, where the conception is that men “become men” through the experience of war. This scene demonstrates that it is not just a military power which recruits O’Brien into the war, but the expectations of his family, friends, neighbors … all the people of his world. O’Brien puts the moral onus of civilians as well, who, like blithe policy makers, are “sending me off to fight a war they didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand. I help them responsible. . . I held them personally and individually responsible” (TTTC 45). Here is the soldier asking for a moral accountability from those who espouse war. An author with combat experience, O’Brien figures that the way to encourage a more just war as a ‘last resort,’ one prosecuted according to an “ethic of compassion” (Coates 105) is to make sure that a war is actually “worth it.” 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. [It oughta be] [a] law, I thought.
I also consider oxymoron as the linguistic equivalent of war’s mutually exclusive options, a pairing of irreconcilable difference. This trope finds its way into just war standards, and is a stylistic marker in O’Brien’s stories as well. A.J. Coates begins his wonderfully nuanced The ethics of war in paradoxical terms: “The moral regulation of limitation of war, it will be argued, is possible, though it depends in great part upon keeping the moral impulse itself in check” (A.J. Coates, Introduction, The Ethics of war. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997, 1). Coates explains the complicated nature of morality in warfare, and notes that “the greater the enthusiasm for war the easier the recourse to war and the more uninhibited its prosecution become. In short, moral enthusiasm undermines the attempt to impose moral limits upon war” (Coates 104). Paradoxically, zealous morality begets immoral behavior, perhaps because it discounts the very “[e]conomy or restraint” that characterizes a war deemed just (Coates 209). Just war thinkers retain “a certain humility” toward their subject matter, as a protection against the tragic confidence that conquers politicians and brings disaster to combatants. Decision makers should be aware that “the overall and long-term consequences of an act or policy are not only unknowable in advance but uncontrollable by the agents themselves” (Coates 172). In other words, war always metastasizes into something worse than imagined.
The nation’s refusal of realism or history and its effect on the consciousness of the soldier shows itself in oxymoron, as O’Brien makes evident the character’s fractured world, the disjunctive, deconstruction of self, as a conjunction of mutually exclusive options.[1] In this chapter, O’Brien shows us his lacerated remorse in an oxymoronic abutment. “I was a coward. I went to the war” (TTTC 61). Paradoxically, the transformation from civilian innocence to martial experience awakens within the soldier an agonized consideration of morality, heretofore unexamined, precisely because of the soldier’s age and lack of experience. “I was eighteen, thinking about girls, baseball, and beer, and suddenly I found myself in the jungle with an M-16 in my hands,” said a combat veteran friend to me once, implying that, as a youth, he had neither time nor inclination to yet examine morality nor a man’s right action in the world. O’Brien speaks for the sorrowful veteran who mourns his lost innocence in an interior confrontation that emerges from the very monstrosity of the war. “In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted” (TTTC 81). O’Brien’s soldier feels the effects of the government’s blatant disregard of principles of justice, harnessing the collective strength of its young, and then imposing upon them intolerable moral burdens. And yet, O’Brien shows us humane desires emerging out of the muck of monstrosity itself.
Oxymoron reigns. “A true war story," we are told, is characterized by an "absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil." And yet, it is simultaneously, “a love story" as well, manifesting a completely contrary impulse to grace and beatitude (TTTC 68-69, 85, italics in the original). Soldiers in Vietnam eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and peer into hell, knowing, first hand, the depths of degradation possible in a sinful world. “’Well, that’s Nam,’” says Mitchell Sanders, throwing his yo-yo, “‘Garden of Evil. Over here, man, ever sin’s real fresh and original’” (TTTC 80). Humping the boonies was, often, monotonous. But “[i]t was boredom with a twist. . . 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” (Spin 34). Here, a demonized “dink” can appear like an angel of light, and keep a whole company safe from a landscape mined with castrating bitch technology, “Bouncing Betties” and “booby-trapped artillery rounds” (Spin 33). “’Follow dink. . . you go pink,” the papa san sadly reminded them as they said goodbye to each other. And of course, this is a war with a "hearts and minds" ideal and a "free fire zone" practice. It seems perfectly appropriate, then, that the guy who steals your jackknife turns out to be the most faithful steward, covering your back in battle. Or the buddy who promises to put you out of your misery if you receive the million dollar wound, becomes the deadliest foe in the world when that wound actually occurs ("Enemies" and "Friends" from TTTC). The oxymoronic environment of Viet Nam manifests itself in O’Brien’s entropic decision to go to war: “I was ashamed of my conscience. I was ashamed of doing the right thing” (RR 52). More aware than policy makers of the injustice of the war, O’Brien is jockeyed into position by his government and his society, whose own enthusiasm for combat relied upon a “gross oversimplification of the reality of war,” (both tactical and ethical), where the “moral ambiguity” of warfare is “reduce[d] to a struggle between the forces of Darkness and Light,” a crude binary opposition of a justified “Us” and a demonized “Them” (Coates 105-6).
Those who lust for war rarely pay attention to the actual political or military contingencies of battle, however, and pointedly ignore the literal aspects of war: “the activity of reciprocal injuring where the goal is to out-injure the opponent” (Scarry 63). Presidents and politicians ignore the body and the impact of war on the bodies and psyches of their soldiers, while just war thinkers consider the effect of war on individual combatants. They base their evaluations of war on both realistic and compassionate grounds, and reject the honeyed words of hawkish jezebels who euphemize war, representing death and destruction in terms of “freedom” and “democracy”. Soldiers in Vietnam faced the actualized disintegration of body and soul, in the name of “defeating Communism,” a fragmentation unacknowledged by policy makers, nor witnessed by US citizens, those “dullards whom no cannon stuns. . . immune/ To pity and whatever moans in man” (Wilfrid Owen, “Insensibility,” found in Coates’ Introduction, 11). And yet, as O’Brien says, “[c]ertain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons” although “[t]he very facts were shrouded in uncertainty” (TTTC 40). Here, O’Brien speaks to the lack of realism in policy and the wager of war, as well as the disembodied language that softens the hard lines of combat.
War rhetoric is necessarily euphemistic in regard to the blood-letting, because realistic language would turn our heads away from the “glory” of war to the actual dismemberment of bodies. Scarry’s brilliant exposition about the euphemization of war and the contradiction between bloody reality and the prettied-up language which justifies (and obscures) it. However, the “contest” of “reciprocal injuring” that Elaine Scarry describes depends utterly upon a disembodied language that softens the hard lines of combat, a metaphoric “convention which assists the disappearance of the human body from accounts of the very event that is most radically embodying event in which human beings ever collectively participate” (Scarry 71 “The Structure of War”). In other words, the physicality of warfare is etched into the muscle memory and mind of the soldier yet the language used it relates more to fairy-tales and stories of giants (SEE SCARRY). The soldiers’ reality, however, is “the incontestable reality of the body – the body in pain, the body maimed, the body dead and hard to dispose of” but which is then appropriated, i.e. “separated from its source and conferred on an ideology or issue or instance of political authority” (Scarry 62). Decision-makers’ refusal to realistically acknowledge their policies, methods, or the ground of the war, fueled the rage of soldiers, who understood the betrayal of their officers; in answer, they rained down fire on the earth itself, sick with disgust at their own sacrifice. “All I could do was gape at the fact of the young man’s body,” O’Brien tells us in “Ambush” (TTTC 134) as the narrator pays tribute to the individuality and uniqueness of “The Man I Killed.”
Just war theory, far from being a mechanism to justify warfare or perpetrate it in an offhand and arrogant manner, takes pains to make manifest the inherent tragedy of war, taking note of its resonating failure of effort and humanity. These standards serve the novel as well, which also tracks the moral impact of war. The moral complexities of combat are related to the realistic or prosaic ethos that just war thinkers bring to the table, who include in their evaluations the ethical and emotional impact that combatants suffer, knowing full well that their puny efforts to render warfare into language or ethical system can never fully accommodate the disjunctions, fragmentation, and paradoxes of warfare itself. Thus, they may insist on a delineation between soldier and civilian, but will also concede that, for a soldier fighting a guerilla force, ‘noncombatant immunity’ is but a philosophical and moral luxury, where such pretty distinctions may prove fatal. Observant regarding the nuance and intricacy of battle, just war thinkers are humble before the specter of war, and conscious that academic postulation is a far cry from the experience of the warrior. They perceive the ambiguity and contingency of warfare, and yet continue to insist on and yet do not dismiss the unendurable juxtapositions of war -- an ivy league officer who becomes a deadly foe, the guerilla who poses as a child. “The object is to retain some semblance of a moral hold upon an activity that constantly threatens moral dissolution,” taking into account that “at best war is an extremely blunt and imperfect instrument of justice” (Coates 3, 2).
Just war theory’s attention to the effects of warfare on a single person suits the focus of the novel as well. O’Brien’s men engage in the experience of warfare and are marked -- physically, emotionally, genetically, morally -- with the cellular memory of battle. The very vocabulary of just war theory allows us to apprehend O’Brien’s fiction, a moral structure (or conceptual scaffolding), which shows us justice in the breach, the ethics of the warrior in negative terms, deconstructed in the experience and behavior of individual men. The shit field where Kiowa drowns is objective correlative of the war’s moral betrayal (Mark Taylor) just as the body lice that Mitchell Sanders sends “to his draft board in Ohio,” speaks of the invasive vampirism of the war -- munitions profits gained on blood and bone (“Spin” 31). Intelligence officers and strategists matched the interests of munitions manufacturers and Cold War desk warriors, and served up a diet heavy on technology and its resultant ‘awe,’ and propagated a questionable strategy that was “profligate and disproportionate by design” (Coates 220). O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods examines the life of a veteran who was present at My Lai, and flashes back to the frustrations of the guerilla war, its inexplicable losses and heart-breaking technologies. , as rage finds its most pleasing intensity of expression in a deafening barrages of artillery and gun ships, hypnotic in its sensational intensity, its very power a concomitant to the emotional and moral upheaval of the soldiers who make it happen. In “How to tell a true war story,” O’Brien marches out the arsenal when “they order up the firepower,” spooked by a silent week on listening post, surrounded only, perhaps, by the ghosts of their consciences and those from the land itself…, the ghosts of the jungle all around. One week in silence and their frustration, fear, and fury intensifies. In response, “[t[hey get arty and gunships. They call in air strikes. . . . All night long, they just smoke those mountains . . . Scorch time. They walk napalm up and down the ridges. They bring in the Cobras and F-4s, they use Willie Peter and HE and incendiaries. It’s all fire. They make those mountains burn” (“How to tell a true war story” 74). American hubris regarding its technology and its awe-generating power (Gibson, Michael Adas) illustrate policies and practices in which “[t]he intent, and not just the effect, in Vietnam, was one of ‘overkill’” (Coates 231??????)
Policies of attrition generated its own form of trauma and emotional impact. The combination of guerilla war in the midst of a civil conflict and the policies followed by the US government suggest that “[t]he massacre at My Lai was not an anomaly, but the natural outcome of the strategy and tactics of attrition” (Coates 231).
How does the soldier guard against the ‘wearing away’ of his own soul and person. He must guard against the very thing that would humanely keep him from such behavior. Lakes demonstrates the foggy ambiguity of warfare, where denial may be the most available form of sanity, despite its debilitating and self-delusional aspects. In the novel, “Sorcerer” fronts for “John Wade.” Like the John Wade –Sorcerer character, O’Brien portrays the men’s moral dilemma as a disintegration – literally, the breaking of unified or integral consciousness of a young self – and a reassembly into cubist “Geurnica.” (“That old image of myself as a hero, as a man of conscience and courage, all that was just a threadbare pipe dream” [“On the Rainy River” 57]). The fragmentation – the word reminiscent of the disjunctive “fragging” of officers who seriously jeopardized the lives of their own men -- shows itself in the monstrosity that recapitulates monstrosity. Morally divided, and completely foreign to his youthful self, John Wade discovers that “there was not the powerful certainty that the dominant track of his life had been permanently rerouted” (Lake 83-4).
O’Brien’s fiction is paradoxical, perhaps with the same considerations as magical realism -- because history is so bizarre and suppressed, so fragmented that it can only be articulated in a fantasy of unfeasible juxtapositions -- the futile propinquities of war. With a heart-of-darkness embodiment of the primitive and the culturally regressed, O’Brien admits: “I was atrocity – I was jungle fire, jungle drums – I was the blind stare in the eyes of all those poor, dead, dumbfuck ex-pals of mine – all the pale young corpses, Lee Strunk and Kiowa and Curt Lemon – I was the beast on their lips – I was Nam – the horror, the war” (TTTC 209). Like the Sweetheart of Darkness, Mary Ann Bell, all the soldiers are “caught up in the Nam shit” (107). Rat Kiley, the medic, explains the moral impact of delusional Presidents and a domino theory considered gospel: “What happened to [Mary Ann], Rat said, was what happened to all of them. You come over clean and you get dirty and then afterward it’s never the same. A question of degree. Some make it intact, some don’t make it al all” (TTTC 114).
O’Brien courageously speaks of his own failure to uphold the standards of just war, and makes itself heard in its disjunctive collusion: I couldn’t make myself be brave. It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was. . . 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 (“On the Rainy River” 59). O’Brien’s fiction shows us a nullified system of justice, as civilization slides into whoredom. The soldier experiences this betrayal of values as a violation of standards like “just cause” or “proportionate response,” the venue of decision-makers in ad bellum processes. Later, he will find more poignant violations, as “noncombatant immunity” is juxtaposed to “guerilla warfare,” where the distinction between soldier and civilian is all but a fatal or fatuous choice. War has the feel – the spiritual texture – of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can’t tell where you are, or why you’re there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity (TTTC 82). And yet, O’Brien could expect to suffer a belittling social segregation, expressed in mean-spirited, gendered ridicule if he did not participate in the war. Unmanned, as it were, by his own compatriots and fathers, O’Brien “couldn’t tolerate” the “patriotic ridicule,” nor bear the inevitable allegations -- “Turncoat! Pussy!” -- which could not be countered because the very notion of an “American!” “Man!” related to martial rectitude. In the innocence of his civilian consciousness, O’Brien imagines this patriotic “shunning” a foe more potent than the war itself, a particularly outlandish irony made cringingly apparent in retrospect.
On the other hand, O’Brien compares the moral ambiguity of the war, and its contradictory demands, to the more innocent games of his boyhood, where the playing field is level and everyone clearly understands how to make points and win the game. In the morning they would cross the river and enter the ville and search it, that was what Sidney Martin said... and still the quiet... He thought about basketball. Winning, that was the sweetest part. The moves and fakes and tactics were all fine, but winning was what made him warm . . . Winning—you knew the score, you knew what it would take to win, to come from behind, you knew exactly. The odds could be figured. Winning was the purpose, nothing else. A basket to shoot at, a target, and sometimes you scored and sometimes you didn't, but you had a true thing to aim at, you always knew, and you could count on the numbers. And in the morning... The fog rose. (Cacciato 136). This excerpt from Cacciato suggests the mental strain of guerilla tactics and its nerve-wracking demands, 24/7, a situation that O’Brien returns to in The Things They Carried, where the game is checkers, which had “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... There was a winner and a loser. There were rules" (Spin 32). The policy of attrition, however, provided no ‘ground’ on which to measure progress Moreover, soldiers were forced not only to document “kills” but also to return to especially dangerous zones, to retrieve the body parts for the bureaucrats to count. “I was assigned to a six-man detail to police up the enemy KIAs. There were twenty-seven bodies altogether, and parts of several others. . . They were all badly bloated. Their clothing was stretched tight like sausage skins” (The Lives of the Dead 242,243). Positioned as pawns, soldiers are sacrificed for king and court, the soldier deals with an enemy who is all but invisible. In the Lake of the Woods protagonist John Wade explains the stress, in vague terms, to his wife, Kathy: We keep taking casualties, mostly booby traps and stuff, but we can’t ever find old Victor Charlie. It gets frustrating and I guess everybody’s kind of wound-up. Hard to describe. Like this weird infection or something. Sometimes you can almost smell it, or taste it, like there’s something wrong with the air (Lake 99).
O’Brien shows us the toxic ecology of the war and its generation of paranoia, rage, and murderous frustration on the part of soldiers. “The war was aimless. No targets, no visible enemy. There was nothing to shoot back at. Men were hurt and then more men were hurt and nothing was ever gained by it. The ambushes never worked. The patrols turned up nothing but women and kids and old men” (Lake 102). Faced with invisible forces, paranoid and grief-stricken, the men found themselves on a battle ground with infinite borders in time and space. “All through February they worked an AO called Pinkville, a chain of dark, sullen hamlets tucked up against the South China Sea. The men hated the place, and feared it” (Lake 102). Then, someone “stumbled on a minefield” and “a booby-trapped 155 round blew Sergeant George Cox into several large wet pieces. Dyson lost both legs. Hendrixson lost an arm and a leg.” In Lake, O’Brien shows us the men in the business of revenge, a policy encouraged by the officers in charge. “Grease the place,’ says the Lieutenant Calley of the story, “’Kill it’” (Lake 103). Betrayed and outraged, the men feel justified in violating all moral strictures, and engage in a pornographic spilling of blood that was “not madness” but rather “sin” (Lake 107). John Wade, and his alter ego, "Sorcerer," show us parallel personas, in a condition tantamount to schizophrenia, as an effect of war trauma and the “undoing of character” in Shay’s words, as civilian atrocity faces a warrior's ethic. Like O’Brien in “Rainy River” John Wade expresses the fear of public shame and vanishes “behind the mirrors in his head, pretending to be elsewhere” (Lake 105). Sorcerer disguises his role because “it occurred to him that the weight of this day would ultimately prove too much, that sooner or later he would have to lighten the load” (Lake 108). We cannot tell if he participates in the atrocities that he describes, or suppresses the memory of his own behavior. Thus, “he would not remember squealing. He would not remember raising his weapon.” And yet, “he would remember forever how he turned and shot down an old man with a wisp beard and wire glasses and what looked to be a rifle. It was not a rifle. It was a small wooden hoe. The hoe he would always remember” (Lake 109). The hoe, of course, is the tool which would distinguish the old civilian from combatant status.
In his examination of evil, O’Brien considers the degradation of moral standards and its effect on the psychology of the soldiers. In so doing, O’Brien’s work is reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s novel, The Devils ([Besi, sometimes translated as The Possessed), in which a group of conspirators turn over their free will to the novel’s father of lies, and murder an unarmed, unthreatening protagonist. Afterwards, they are shown in their dehumanized state, and they squeal like the swine running over a cliff. Dostoevsky’s title and the murder scene in particular, makes reference to a possessed man, healed by Jesus, while the Gadarenes, more fearful of losing profit than relate to the evangelist Luke’s description demonic possession of the swine also represents the Gadarene’s rejection of truth, as they deny the obvious miracle in the healing of a diseased man, in preference for economic profit. The Devils, where the “[p]igs… squealing” (Lake 106) are the noises made by the killers,. Dostoevsky makes specific reference to account of a demonic possession and the spiritual healing of a man who had long terrorized the local people with his fierce demeanor. These creatures run “headlong over a cliff” to destruction that characterizes the killers (the title is often translated “The Possessed”). In its own kind of Dostoevskian conflagration, O’Brien shows us the soldier ‘possessed’ as John Wade-Sorcerer finds himself “at the bottom of an irrigation ditch” with “many bodies present, maybe a hundred. He was caught up in the slime.” From this debased ground, he shoots a fellow-American at close range, the same “Weatherby” who had been “killing whatever he could kill” in the village (Lake 107). Oxymoronically configured, O’Brien shows us the painful confusion and emotional trauma that results from the attritional environment. How does one cope psychologically. John Wade provides one answer: “This could not have happened. Therefore it did not. Already he felt better” (Lake 109).
Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist and Ph.D. who considers the injustice of warfare through its impact on his clients, combat veterans all. A writer who is concerned with the justice of warfare, he recounts (through the words of the soldiers) the moral severance that these combatants have experienced, who, with halting eloquence, describe the sense of radical disjunction from "the world" after battle field experience. They especially lament their own monstrous behavior, severed irrevocably, by conscience and history, from their innocent status in youth. Shay uses the Achilles story to show us the long martial ethics that structure men’s participation in war, and works with the men who have bestially violated their own moral codes, in rage at the betrayal they have suffered at the hands of their ‘betters.’ He explains: Any army, ancient or modern, is a social construction defined by shared expectations and values. Some of these are embodied in formal regulations, defined authority, written orders, ranks, incentives, punishments, and formal task and occupational definitions. Others circulate as traditions, archetypal stories of things to be emulated or shunned, and accepted truth about what is praiseworthy and what is culpable. All together, these form a moral world that most of the participants most of the time regard as legitimate, ‘natural,’ and personally binding. The moral power of an army is so great that it can motivate men to get up out of a trench and step into enemy machine-gun fire” (Shay 6).
In his treatment of the Vietnam veterans under his care, Shay shows the moral impact on individual men, as a military ethos is violated with a vengeance, with considerable effect in bello behavior. In Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Jonathan Shay considers Achilles as Homer “emphasizes two common events of heavy, continuous combat: betrayal of ‘what’s right’ by a commander, and the onset of the berserk state” (Shay xiii). Betrayed by his commander, Agamemnon, “wrongfully seizes the prize of honor voted to Achilles by the troops,” a negation of the very rules of war that the Greeks had thought to embody. Shay argues that “Achilles’ experience of betrayal of ‘what’s right,’ and his reactions to it, are identical to those of American soldiers in Vietnam” (Shay 3). Violating the dead becomes a way to communicate the monstrous nature of Achilles’ betrayal.
In Vietnam, deceived by his leaders and discounted by his officers who enforce the policies of attrition, a soldier might go berserk, driven to out-abominate the abomination, and throw himself into an abyss of intoxicating atrocity. "Kill Jesus!" cries the narrator John Wade, in In the Lake of the Woods, a sentiment that sums up the deliberate lacerating violation of innocence that he can pronounce, "brutal and disgraceful and final... the most terrible thing he could scream" (Woods 5). Here is an expression of his own violated innocence, which has capitulated him into an environment that encourages and arms extremes of violence and violation. The moral impact is cast in the language of sin, spoken in the language of fragmentation and dismemberment. “[A] pretty girl with her pants down . . . dead too. . . cross-eyed. Her hair was gone” (Lake 106). In a kaleidoscope of atrocities against civilians, “John Wade would remember Thuan Yen the way chemical nightmares are remembered,” oxymoronically, that is, in “impossible combinations, impossible events, and over time the impossibility itself would become the richest and deepest and most profound memory” (Lake 109).
In "The Ghost Soldiers," we see the narrator O’Brien's emotional and moral transformation, his severance from his own moral code, in his rage against an American medic. Shot in the buttocks , O'Brien is improperly treated by a inexperienced new guy who only makes matters worse. Botching the treatment, O’Brien is left with a suppurating wound , and the butt of some bad jokes as well. Brooding and furious, his wound suggests the metaphoric possibilities of self-aggrandizement, fraud, and betrayal, as O'Brien also perceives his own moral catastrophe, the dissolution of his moral universe:
While O’Brien teams up with the moral nightmare Azar in order to extract revenge from Jorgenson and Sorcerer struggles to erase his culpability in Lake of the Woods, O’Brien courageously presents "The Man I Killed" sculpted in the narrator’s gouged-out sorrow and sense of hopeless responsibility. O’Brien specifically discusses the man with reference to his noncombatant status, and the absence of an actual threat to his person. He laments the killing as a “disproportionate response,” without a ‘just cause,’ in monstrous service to the needs of attrition-based policy. O’Brien speaks to his own responsibility to just ad bello behavior and specifies: "I did not hate the young man. I did not see him as the enemy; I did not ponder issues of morality or politics or military duty" (Ambush 132). It is also his understanding of just war standards drives his moral writhing: "It was not a matter of live or die. There was no real peril. Almost certainly the young man would have passed by. And it will always be that way" (133 Ambush). In “The Man I Killed,” and its corollary story “Ambush,” (who is ambushed?) shows us the transfixed affliction of remorse, the soldier “stupefied into silence or shame” and “powerless . . . to approach the opened human body and make it not opened" (Scarry 72). "All I could do was gape at the fact of the young man's body" (Ambush 134). The perpetual sorrow of this act is embodied in O'Brien's immobility as he marks the scene, his witness of the solemnity of death. O'Brien keeps watch, as the sun moves over the body, so that at first the man’s “legs” are "in the shade" (Man Killed 126) and then the body is "almost entirely in shade" (The Man I Killed 129). Unable to tear himself away from the sight of the dead, O’Brien’s thoughts recur with an agonized if-only-I-could-go-back-up-in-time circularity. "... the star-shaped wound,” “the head wrenched sideways,” the “blood at the neck.”
Looking through the eyes of a just war combatant, he humanizes his foe and paints the portrait by describing the things that he carried: "rice, a comb, finger nail clippers" and “a snapshot of a young woman (129), a recital related to the idiosyncratic accoutrements of American soldiers. Here he invigorates the markers of the man's existence, the clean hair, the gold wedding ring, into embodied markers of his life in the world, and then noting well, the war-scarred "cheek peeled back in ragged strips" and a "star shaped whole that was his eye" (128). O’Brien approaches his victim, it seems, from a “universalist perspective,” a somewhat ecological approach, insofar as it considers carefully the impact of one sector on all sectors, and thus relates to the common good and “in relation to the international community as a whole” (Coates 177). Using his literary imagination, O’Brien tells the story of a man’s life, gleaned from physique and possessions, but garnered more out of the civilized moral striving that characterizes the stories. O’Brien conceives of the dead man as a "brother in arms," who suffers the same anxiety about courage, and is anxious not to disappoint, afraid to shame himself in the impossible demands placed on warriors. The slim young man, then "would not have wanted to be a soldier and in his heart would have feared performing badly in battle... he had often worried about this... He had no stomach for violence. He loved mathematics... He often wanted to [fight] but he was afraid, and this increased his shame” (TTTC 127). In fact, O’Brien’s account of the man’s life, a biography which echoes his own hallucination on the Rainy River, as the young man is shown his own recruitment nightmare, perhaps also persuaded to “go to the war... kill and maybe die” because he was "embarrassed not to” (TTTC 59). Thus, “the presence of his father and his uncles," the slim young man "pretended to look forward to doing his patriotic duty, which was also a privilege, but at night he prayed with his mother that the war might end soon" (127).
In this scene, O'Brien witnesses and acknowledges the specificity of "the man I killed," an irreplaceable character to whom O’Brien bears witness in his historical fiction. Standing in awe before the body, O’Brien mourns with profound sorrow and Kiowa, perhaps the most morally attuned character in The Things They Carried, realizes that O’Brien is on the verge of madness here. He must be dealt with gently, not an easy task in the environment of increased vulnerability as O’Brien stands and gazes. Kiowa, roughly in just war terms, tries to reassure O’Brien as to the justice of his act. “’I’ll tell you the straight truth,’ he said. ‘The guy was dead the second he stepped on the trail. Understand me? We all had him zeroed. A good kill”... meaning that the young man is an armed combatant, and had “weapon, ammunition, everything” (129). Later, O’Brien writes, “Kiowa tried to tell me that the man would’ve died anyway . . that I was a soldier and this was a war, that I should shape up and stop staring and ask myself what the dead man would’ve done if things were reversed” (133-134). O’Brien clearly bears witness, as he carefully impresses the scene on his flayed senses, and refuses to look away from his disfigured victim.
Faced with the fragmented body of the man he killed, O’Brien notes: “It was not a matter of live or die. There was no real peril. Almost certainly the young man would have passed by. And it will always be that way” (Ambush 133). O’Brien cannot justify the killing in terms of military necessity, and his moral agony shows him transfixed before the tangible particularity of the “slim young man.” “I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy, I did not ponder issues of morality or politics or military duty” (Ambush 132). In his own eyes, O’Brien’s action is “disproportionate and indiscriminate” (Coates 231) but his responsive moral agony finds expression in a tribute to the man. Forsaking the psychological armor of the soldier, O’Brien holds himself to the highest levels of human responsibility, insofar as that relates to acknowledging the other vis-à-vis oneself, but in so doing, makes himself vulnerable as a soldier. O’Brien stops to “linger intently” with that intense regard which Bakhtin thought indispensable to both artistic expression and ethical response (Act 64). Thus O’Brien refuses to capitulate to attritional policies and consign him to the nether regions of “body count. Rather, like Homer, O’Brien speaks to the man – “the name of the person; the weapon (‘freighted with dark pains’) as it approaches the body; the site of entry and the slow motion progress of the widening wound. . . and fourth and finally, one attribute of civilization as it is embodied and in that person” (Scarry 123).
Another extremely important aspect of the stories themselves is their longing for witness, for the listener who would hear the soldier’s lament. The characters often speak of the stinginess of listeners and their get-over-it mentality. O'Brien does not let us forget that the very nature of warfare is to rob language of its ability to articulate actuality or to address the disfigured forms with any heretofore encountered discourse. Elaine Scarry teaches, brilliantly, that not only is pain hard to express, it’s also hard to hear. The medium of the story, its hard facts and fragmented bodies, is the message, but such an account makes our calves twitch and our hearts close down. And yet, SHAY story: they asked me about the war, and when I told them, the room emptied in about 5 minutes and I never talked about the war again.
Thus, "[i]n a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe ‘Oh’" (77).
Paul Fussel, writing about the First World War, and the linguistic squeamishness of politicians and parents.
One of the cruxes of war. . . is the collision between events and the language available – or thought appropriate – to describe them. To put it more accurately, the collision . . . between events and the public language used for over a century to celebrate the idea of progress. Logically, there is no reason why the English language could not perfectly well render the actuality of. . . warfare: it is rich in terms like blood, terror, agony, madness, shit, cruelty, murder, sell-out and hoax, as well as phrases like legs blown off, intestines gushing out over his hands, screaming all night, bleeding to death from the rectum, and the like. . .”
In a way that is pertinent to O’Brien’s fiction, Fussel notes that “[t]he real reason” soldiers maintain silence about their combat experience, however, “is that [they] have discovered that no one is very interested in the bad news they have to report. What listener wants to be torn and shaken when he doesn’t have to be? We have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty” (The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell. London: Oxford UP, 1975). O’Brien’s stories imagine the reaction to their “nasty” realities: the “dumb cooze” who never writes back or prissy ________ who does like that world, the waste or merde that war implies. Scarry argues that listening is difficult and the stories make our calves twitch. Of course, official policy thrives on the euphemistic use of language, prettied-up and shorn of realistic content, it is necessarily mute on the actual degradation and fragmentation of war. Citizens’ refusal to witness a soldiers dilemma, constitutes, on its own, a moral betrayal, and also negates the very thing that could bring healing to beleaguered veterans.
In "Speaking of Courage," Bowker mourns for a listener, someone to acknowledge not the medals for "uncommon valor," but a witness to "common valor. The routine, daily stuff—just humping, just enduring—but that was worth something... it was... worth plenty" (Speaking of Courage 141). Much harder to speak about is the medal that he did not receive. Back in the world, and driving 'round and 'round the lake in a big Chevy, Bowker’s laps mimic the repetition and circularity of his own thoughts, as he longs to confess his cowardice. He had neglected to save his friend Kiowa, who was shot and drowning in a field of shit, mostly because the smell. With pitiful irony, Bowker refers to the element of war that finally conquered his courage and the "common valor" that had sustained him thus far. He can merely fantasize, however, someone might listen to him. "'How'd you like to hear about the war?' he might have asked as he drove around the lake, but the place could only blink and shrug. It did not know shit about shit and did not care to know” (143). Sally Kramer, his old girlfriend, would have shut her eyes, "if she were with him... she would've said, 'Stop it, I don't like that word,” (145) prissily reminding him to watch his manners. The stories grieve for a listening consciousness, a person who would actually witness what they have to say. But "Nobody listens. Nobody hears nothin'. Like that fatass colonel. The politicians, all the civilian types. Your girlfriend. My girlfriend. Everybody's sweet little virgin girlfriend" (How to Tell a True War Story 76). Even the "dumb cooze" who never writes back to Rat Kiley. They cannot bear to witness.
The acts of war, followed by a failure to communicate the experience, exacerbates the sense of radical divide that combat veterans can experience. Moral anguish, and its resistance to representation, recapitulate Scarry's evocation of the wordlessness and isolation of physical pain, here reconstituted as psychic dismemberment. O'Brien presents the sense of severance that men experience, outsiders now to a familiar community, the death-defying leap from innocence to experience because one cannot remain morally unscathed in battle and still remain alive. We see the isolation of a young soldier after the burlesque tragedy of Kiowa's drowning death in a shit field. Lt. Cross, who had ordered the bivouac while mooning over Martha, now takes note of the effects of his failure to provide a "compassionate and economic deployment of his troops" [Coates]. A "young soldier stood off by himself at the center of the field in knee-deep water." His "shoulders were shaking" but he "did not turn or look up. In his hooded poncho... the boy's face was impossible to make out" [163]. Here we see the boy-man crouched in mourning isolation, undifferentiated and irrevocably alone. Cross realizes that war by the very logic of war, the strategists were busy "transforming the men into identical copies of a single solider... interchangeable units of command" ["In the Field" 163]. He too knows the specificity of the death of one's brother, and here remains in his isolated agony, wracked for the deaths of his men.
Lt. Corson "who, though only average in intelligence and training and wisdom, was a platoon leader the men could finally love. He took no chances, he wasted no lives" [Going after Cacciato 62]. Thus, we see the longed-for officer in Corson (if you're a grunt), a man who, in a sense, witnesses for his men, and takes their actual participation to heart. He leads them but is not especially commanding. O'Brien's stories also recall the notorious sacrifice of men as inexperienced officers took command for six month gigs, who effectively lowered soldier survival rates, (which went up, statistically, as units gained experience.) On the other hand, command was also foisted upon those who were not suited for command, the poor Lt. Crosses of the war. [1] Don DeLillo’s Matt Shay ( Underworld ), bombardier in Vietnam turned bomb head, considers the impact of nuclear toxology in terms of the paradox of Vietnam: “he didn’t t think the story was completely far-fetched. He’d served in Vietnam after all, where everything he’d ever disbelieved or failed to imagine turned out, in the end, to be true” (DeLillo 418).
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