“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…” A few pages later:
“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.”
O’Brien clearly was there, and he can absolutely describe with uncanny accuracy what it’s like to be scared pitiless. But… (you knew it was coming), much like Mailer, his narrative voice suffers from his politics. He’s honest about it, but there comes a point when his writing suffers because his politics will not allow him to find anything ennobling about the Vietnam War, his unit’s participation in it, or his own experience. He knows that it was “wrong” and therefore it becomes impossible to find anything courageous, or dignified, or moral, about being there. At some point, he starts to say nonsensical things – like when he tells us that he came oh-so-close to going to Canada, but didn’t and instead he tells us that he was a “coward” and went to war because he was too afraid of the consequences of running (of the shame and embarrassment he would suffer in the eyes of his community) and he exports his own politics onto everyone who was there, every soldier… and thus is the person who fled the country (in O’Brien’s narrative) transformed into a courageous hero – and the warrior who wen tot fight his nation’s battle is called a “coward.”
O’Brien misses so much, both historically and morally, that some of the narrative suffers and we’re left wondering where the truth ends and the politics begins, but it’s still a wonderful read. I could go on and on about the failings of O’Brien’s metaphysics, but it’s sufficient to say that some men who went probably were afraid of not going, but there were also just as many men who went to Canada who were not nearly so noble. There were cowards all around. And O’Brien misses the obvious problem that every war is morally ambiguous – even WWII (which he uses- nostalgically – as the example of the easily identified just war). Of course, this ignores how long it took us to get involved in WWII, long after Hitler had annexed Austria (1938), invaded Poland (1939), and begun the systematic destruction of opposition in concentration camps (which began as early as 1933 and quadrupled by 1939) and begat the more infamous “death camps” designed to destroy the Jewish people (built through 1942). Now consider that we did virtually nothing about any of this until after we were attacked by Japan – and we didn’t move onto the European mainland until June, 1942. O’Brien misses the fact that the same arguments against war were made by a very loud minority of people during Hitler’s march over Europe in the late 30’s and into the early 40’s. The U.S. has a long isolationist history and recruiters offices weren’t being overrun prior to Pearl Harbor. So, O’Brien’s rationalization of his ardor for WWII, but his ambivalence for Vietnam, misses on a historical front.
It also misses in its condemnation of Diem and the Vietnamese regime. It’s not as if Vichy France was a great, heroic government when we invaded in 1942. They were fucking Nazi collaborators! And, ultimately, O’Brien’s condemnation of the tragic loss of life in Vietnam – at the hands of the U.S. either by accident or in those rare instances of U.S. war crimes – fails epically to discuss at all what happened after we quit the war – a common leftist exclusion from the Vietnam narrative. If we were “wrong” while we were there, then what is to be made of the millions (tens of millions) who were killed and sent to communist “re-education camps” after the fall of Saigon. Or in Cambodia. So, yes, it turns out the Domino Theory was quite correct. And compare it to South Korea, where we fought and held the line against the North Koreans to this day. Compare the two countries by any humanitarian metric. Just look at night-time Google earth imagery and note how dark North Korea is – i.e. there are no fucking lights, no cities, no infrastructure, no bustling metropolises, and widespread starvation. And you won’t find people in South Korea getting on homemade rafts and trying to float to Japan across the ocean like they do in the North.
Ditto, why did we have a massive influx of Vietnamese and Hmong refugees after the communists took over? Coincidence?
I don’t begrudge O’Brien his politics, but it’s like the famous Moynihan quote: “Everyone’s entitled to his own opinion, but not entitled his own facts.” If I seem like I’m being unduly harsh, it’s because I can’t stomach the continuing narrative, fueled by feckless and amoral pundits who insist that everything the U.S. does is “wrong” and who use how “wrong” the War was to justify their own fucking cowardice. Period. They didn’t want to go because they were too “good” to be “wasted” on such a wrongheaded war. Bullshit. All war sucks. And the reasons are rarely as cut-and-dry at the time (or when you’re the one shipping out) as they later are viewed in retrospect. But a generation of warriors in this country knows that someone, somewhere, has to man-the-fuck-up or we don’t have a Constitution, or a Republic, or we’re eating sushi or bratwurst at baseball games, singing “Deautschland Uber Alles” instead of God Bless America during the 7th inning stretch.
So, I love O’Brien’s writing. It is absolutely top-shelf. And I commend the book to anyone. But I just wish that O’Brien felt better about his service, but I suspect that his self-loathing is a combination of guilt that he hasn’t quite figured out and political fallacy that he’s clinging to. The rest of the Boomers are making up for their deferments and guilt with an outpouring of yellow ribbon magnets that drives me nuts, so I’ll at least give O’Brien marks for consistency. I’d just like to look him i the eye and tell him that being a warrior – that having gone and humped it when others found excuses and ways out of it – is ennobling in and of itself. Regardless of whether he won a medal or was scared shitless. Facing up to that fear and still humping the bush in order to be worthy of the men on your left and right is more than moral enough.