The boys of my generation grew up during the draft. It was a given that we were going to have to serve.
And so we grew up wondering if we had the courage to serve in war. Did we have the right stuff? We watched the John Wayne war movies, heard the story of that brave fighter pilot Colin P. Kelly, who purposely flew his plane into a Japanese destroyer to save American lives. What kind of soldiers would we make? Could we be as brave in a righteous cause storming those beaches of Normandy or at Iwo Jima?
And then we grew into manhood. Along came Vietnam, and the righteousness of the cause was no longer clear.
Novelist Tim O’Brien was one of those unlucky enough to get drafted to fight in Vietnam. More than three decades have passed since then, and O’Brien has used his wartime experience to write the definitive novel of the Vietnam War, Going After Cacciato.
And, try as he might, he still couldn’t get Vietnam out of his consciousness and followed up with The Things They Carried, this year’s selection for One Book – One Philadelphia (available at the Free Library).
The Things They Carried is not an easy read. But, if you can tear yourself away from the latest Stephen King or Danielle Steel, you will experience what only great books can give you. Great books can take you many places where you wish you could be. This novel takes you where you never want to go – to the ultimate evil, into the hell of Vietnam.
Vietnam was not a glorious war. I am not taking anything away from the "greatest generation," but at least most of those men knew why they were there and believed that they were saving humanity from the barbarism of the Nazis and the banzai Japanese. In the jungles of Vietnam, men like Tim O’Brien did not know why they were there, nor did they believe in much except surviving to live another day.
There are some scenes in The Things They Carried that I will never forget: what it’s like to see a buddy die and sink under a muddy field that stinks like a latrine; the almost-casual horror of seeing a friend alive one moment and blown to bits the next, and then having to pick his remains out of a tree. The butchery of a puppy or a baby water buffalo for no reason other than by civilization’s standards you have already gone mad; you just don’t realize it because so is everyone else.
The need to carry the physical reminder of the love you miss back home, although in many cases that love is delusional; Lt. Jimmy Cross loves Martha who, it turns out, is a lesbian not interested at all in his physical love. But in the jungles of Vietnam, Lt. Cross still carries her photo and dreams of an affair with her, because in hell you look for angels to rescue you if only for a moment.
Some of my friends, especially my female friends, shy away from books or films about war. Too nasty. Too brutal. One such friend walked out in the first half-hour of Saving Private Ryan because she could not stand the horror of the slaughter at Normandy.
Some of my friends, especially the males, are drawn for the wrong reasons to war movies. They view war as just another action-adventure, another vehicle for phony superheroes played by Schwarzenegger, Stallone or Willis. They don’t particularly like Platoon or Full Metal Jacket, which some Vietnam veterans have told me are as close as it gets to the real experience.
I believe that those of us who never served in battle have an obligation to listen and read and watch the real horror of war. I believe that we will never learn how to avoid sending our kids into senseless war unless we smell and taste the horror, feel it deep in our gut. We can’t hope to duplicate what our soldiers have gone through, but we have an obligation to try.
Early on in the book, O’Brien candidly tells us that he came close to running away to Canada to avoid the draft, and says that only a lack of courage at the prospect of giving up his friends – indeed, his whole life – prevented him from going through with it. He writes that those of us who support a war ought to at least be willing to serve in it or, if we are too old, be willing to have our kids serve in it.
Using that yardstick, how many who supported the invasion of Iraq or are now contemplating Syria as the next country to "liberate" would be willing to send our kids over there to die for the cause?
I don’t blame President Bush for having successfully avoided serving in Vietnam, but I wonder if he ever asks himself in the dead of night, in that Lincoln bedroom, sleeping next to Laura, why other kids should serve in his own crusade?
I wonder.
