If I Die in a Combat Zone (15 page)

“Will you be glad to get to the rear, sir?”

“Sure,” he said, grinning and with a shrug. “I’ll miss the company. But I don’t suppose I’ll miss the war much.”

“I don’t know how you can be so dispassionate. God, I’d be hiding in my foxhole, a mile into the ground, just waiting for a chopper to take me out of here.”

Captain Johansen rolled up in a poncho; he lay on his side and seemed to go to sleep.

Whatever it is, soldiering in a war is something that makes a fellow think about courage, makes a man wonder what it is and if he has it. Some say Ernest Hemingway was obsessed by the need to show bravery in battle. It started, they say, somewhere in World War I and ended when he passed his final test in Idaho. If the man was obsessed with the notion of courage, that was a fault. But, reading Hemingway’s war journalism and his war stories, you get the sense that he was simply
concerned
about bravery, hence about cowardice, and that seems a virtue, a sublime and profound concern that few men have. For courage, according to Plato, is one of the four parts of virtue. It is there with temperance, justice, and wisdom, and all parts are necessary to make the sublime human being. In fact, Plato says, men without courage are men without temperance, justice, or wisdom, just as without wisdom men are not truly courageous. Men must
know
what they do is courageous, they must
know
it is right, and that kind of knowledge is wisdom and nothing else. Which is why I know few brave men. Either they are stupid and do not know what is right. Or they know what is right and cannot bring themselves to do it. Or they know what is right and do it, but do not feel and understand the fear that must be overcome. It takes a special man.

Courage is more than the charge.

More than dying or suffering the loss of a love in silence or being gallant.

It is temperament and, more, wisdom. Was the cow, standing immobile and passive, more courageous than the Vietnamese boys who ran like rabbits from Alpha Company’s barrage? Hardly. Cows are very stupid.

Most soldiers in Alpha Company did not think about human courage. There were malingerers in Alpha Company. Men who cared little about bravery. “Shit, man, the trick of being in the Nam is gettin’
out
of the Nam. And I don’t mean gettin’ out in a plastic body bag. I mean gettin’ out alive, so my girl can grab me so I’ll know it.” The malingerers manufactured some of the best, most persuasive ailments ever, some good enough to fool a skeptical high school nurse.

When we walked through the sultry villes and sluggish, sullen land called Pinkville, the mass of men in Alpha Company talked little about dying. To talk about it was bad luck, the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy. Death was taboo. The word for getting killed was “wasted.” When you hit a Bouncing Betty and it blows you to bits, you get wasted. Fear was taboo. It could be mentioned, of course, but it had to be accompanied with a shrug and a grin and obvious resignation. All this took the meaning out of courage. We could not gaze straight at fear and dying, not, at least, while out in the field, and so there was no way to face the question.

“You don’t talk about being a hero, with a star pinned on your shirt and feeling all puffed up.” The soldier couldn’t understand when I asked him about the day he ran from his foxhole, through enemy fire, to wrap useless cloth around a dying soldier’s chest. “I reacted, I guess. I just did it.”

“Did it seem the right thing to do?”

“No,” Doc said. “Not right, not wrong either.”

“Did you think you might be shot?”

“Yes. I guess I did. Maybe not. When someone hollers for the medic, if you’re a medic you run toward the shout. That’s it, I guess.”

“But isn’t there the feeling you might
die
?”

Doc had his legs crossed and was leaning over a can of C rations. He seemed intent on them. “No. I won’t die over here.” He laughed. “Maybe I’ll never die. I just wondered why I didn’t feel anything hit me. Something should have hit me, there was so much firing. I sort of ran over, waiting for a kind of blast or punch in the back. My back always feels most exposed.”

Before the war, my favorite heroes had been make-believe men. Alan Ladd of
Shane
, Captain Vere, Humphrey Bogart as the proprietor of Café d’Americain, Frederic Henry. Especially Frederic Henry. Henry was able to leave war, being good and brave enough at it, for real love, and although he missed the men of war, he did not miss the fear and killing. And Henry, like all my heroes, was not obsessed by courage; he knew it was only one part of virtue, that love and justice were other parts.

To a man, my heroes before going to Vietnam were hard and realistic. To a man, they were removed from other men, able to climb above and gaze down at other men. Bogie in his office, looking down at roulette wheels and travelers. Vere, elevated; the
Star
, searching justice. Shane, loving the boy, detesting violence, looking down and saying good-bye aboard that stocky horse.

To a man, my heroes were wise. Perhaps Vere was an exception. But when he allowed Billy Budd to die, he was at least seeking justice, tormented by a need for wisdom, even omniscience. But certainly Shane and Bogart and Henry had learned much and knew much, having gone through their special agonies.

And each was courageous. Bogie. How could a man leave Ingrid Bergman, send her away, even for the most noble of causes? Shane, facing his villain. Vere, sending a stuttering, blond, purely innocent youth to the gallows. And especially Frederic Henry. Talking with his love, Catherine Barkley:

“You’re brave.”

“No,” she said. “But I would like to be.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I know where I stand. I’ve been out long enough to know. I’m like a ball-player that bats two hundred and thirty and knows he’s no better.”

“What is a ball-player that bats two hundred and thirty? It’s awfully impressive.”

“It’s not. It means a mediocre hitter in base-ball.”

“But still a hitter,” she prodded me.

“I guess we’re both conceited,” I said. “But you are brave.”

Henry, and the rest of my heroes, had been out long enough to know; experienced and wise. Batting two hundred and thirty? Realistic, able to speak the truth. Conceited? Never. And, most strikingly, each of the heroes
thought
about courage,
cared
about being brave, at least enough to talk about it and wonder to others about it.

But in Vietnam, out in the villages of My Lai and My Khe, where the question of courage is critical, no one except Captain Johansen seemed to care. Not the malingerers, certainly. Not Arizona, the kid who was shot in the chest in his private charge. Not the Doc. So, when the time in my life came to replace fictional heroes with real ones, the candidates were sparse, and it was to be the captain or no one.

Looking at him, only a shadow rolled in a poncho, lying on his side asleep, I wondered what it was about him that made him a real hero.

He was blond. Heroes somehow are blond in the ideal. He had driven racing automobiles as a civilian and had a red slab of scarred flesh as his prize. He had medals. One was for killing the Viet Cong, a Silver Star. He was like Vere, Bogie, Shane, and Frederic Henry, companionless among herds of other men, men lesser than he, but still sad and haunted that he was not perfect. At least, so it appeared. Perhaps other men, some of the troopers he led who were not so brave, died when he did not and should have, by a hero’s standard.

Like my fictional prewar heroes, Captain Johansen’s courage was a model. And just as I could never match Alan Ladd’s prowess, nor Captain Vere’s intensity of conviction, nor Robert Jordan’s resolution to confront his own certain death (in Jordan’s place, I would have climbed back on my horse, bad leg and all, and galloped away till I bled to death in the saddle), I could not match my captain. Still, I found a living hero, and it was good to learn that human beings sometimes embody valor, that they do not always dissolve at the end of a book or movie reel.

I thought about courage off and on for the rest of my tour in Vietnam. When I compared subsequent company commanders to Johansen, it was clear that he alone cared enough about being brave to think about it and try to do it. Captain Smith admitted that he was a coward, using just that word. Captain Forsythe strutted and pretended, but he failed.

On the outside, things did not change much after Captain Johansen. We lost about the same number of men. We fought about the same number of battles, always small little skirmishes.

But losing him was like the Trojans losing Hector. He gave some amount of reason to fight. Certainly there were never any political reasons. The war, like Hector’s own war, was silly and stupid. Troy was besieged for the sake of a pretty woman. And Helen, for God’s sake, was a woman most of the grubby, warted Trojans could never have. Vietnam was under siege in pursuit of a pretty, tantalizing, promiscuous, particularly American brand of government and style. And most of Alpha Company would have preferred a likable whore to self-determination. So Captain Johansen helped to mitigate and melt the silliness, showing the grace and poise a man can have under the worst of circumstances, a wrong war. We clung to him.

Even forgetting the captain, looking at myself and the days I writhed insensible under bullets and the other days when I did okay, somehow shooting back or talking coherently into the radio or simply watching without embarrassment how the fighting went, some of the futility and stupidity disappeared. The idea is manliness, crudely idealized. You liken dead friends to the pure vision of the eternal dead soldier. You liken living friends to the mass of dusty troops who have swarmed the world forever. And you try to find a hero.

It is more difficult, however, to think of yourself in those ways. As the eternal Hector, dying gallantly. It is impossible. That’s the problem. Knowing yourself, you can’t make it real for yourself. It’s sad when you learn you’re not much of a hero.

Grace under pressure, Hemingway would say. That is how you recognize a brave man. But somehow grace under pressure is insufficient. It’s too easy to affect grace, and it’s too hard to see through it. I remembered the taut-faced GIs who gracefully buckled, copping out so smoothly, with such poise, that no one ever knew. The malingerers were adept: “I know we’re in a tight spot, sir. I wouldn’t go back to the rear, you know me. But—” then a straight-faced, solid, eye-to-eye lie. Grace under pressure means you can confront things gracefully or squeeze out of them gracefully. But to make those two things equal with the easy word “grace” is wrong. Grace under pressure is not courage.

Or the other cliché: A coward dies a thousand deaths but a brave man only once. That seems wrong, too. Is a man once and for always a coward? Once and for always a hero?

It is more likely that men act cowardly and, at other times, act with courage, each in different measure, each with varying consistency. The men who do well on the average, perhaps with one moment of glory, those men are brave.

And those who are neither cowards nor heroes, those men sweating beads of pearly fear, failing and whimpering and trying again—the mass of men in Alpha Company—even they may be redeemable. The easy aphorisms hold no hope for the middle man, the man who wants to try but has already died more than once, squirming under the bullets, going through the act of death and coming through embarrassingly alive. The bullets stop. As in slow motion, physical things gleam. Noise dissolves. You tentatively peek up, wondering if it is the end. Then you look at the other men, reading your own caved-in belly deep in their eyes. The fright dies the same way novocaine wears off in the dentist’s chair. You promise, almost moving your lips, to do better next time; that by itself is a kind of courage.

Seventeen
July

      C
aptain Johansen was one of the nation’s pride. He was blond, meticulously fair, brave, tall, blue-eyed, and an officer. He left Alpha Company at the end of June.

Standing bareheaded up on a little hill, Johansen said we were a good outfit, he was proud of us, he was sad some of the men were dead or crippled. There was a brief change-of-command ceremony. We all stood at attention, feeling like orphans up for adoption. We watched Johansen salute and shake hands with our new commander, a short, fat ROTC officer.

The new captain looked like a grown-up Spanky of “Our Gang.”

Like seventy percent of the officers around, he was from the South, a Tennessean named Smith. He planted his legs and gave us a pep talk. He wanted a good, tough fighting unit. He wanted professionals, he said, just as the battalion motto called for in big gold letters. He tried to sound authoritative, but it did not work. No one trusts a green officer, and if he’s short and fat and thinks he’s a good soldier, he had better be Patton himself.

With Smith leading Alpha Company, we returned to the My Lai—My Khe area. It was a two-day operation, simply a sweep through a string of villages; we would make camp for the night, then sweep right back again the next day.

A troop of tracks—armored personel carriers, tanklike vehicles but without the cannon—accompanied us.

Helicopters ferried us into a paddy to the north of one of the villages at My Khe. Smith’s face was red. He yelled at everyone, and nobody listened. He told us to spread out, watch the tree line.

“Damn it, Timmy boy, we’re gonna get killed here. Those guys better spread out. Jesus, they act like they been smokin’ a weed we grow back home.”

Then he smiled like a jolly fat man and said he always wanted to be a soldier. “My daddy used to say, Bobby, stay away from women and hard liquor. Join the army, my daddy said. Join the army and stay with it, and you’ll live to be a hundred. But, by cracker, those guys better keep their eyes open. Intel says this place is bad.”