Читать книгу If I Die in a Combat Zone - Tim O’Brien - Страница 12

To understand what happens to the GI among the mine fields of My Lai, you must know something about what happens in America. You must understand Fort Lewis, Washington. You must understand a thing called basic training. A college graduate in May 1968, I was at Fort Lewis in mid-August. One hundred of us came. We watched one another’s hair fall, we learned the word ‘sir’, we learned to react to ‘To duh rear, HARCH!’ Above us the sixty-mile-distant mountain stood to the sky, white and shivering cold. The mountain was named Rainier, and it stood for freedom.

I made a friend, Erik, and together he and I stumbled like galley slaves through the first months of army life.

I was not looking for friendship at Fort Lewis. The place was too much the apotheosis of all nightmares about army life; the people were boors, a whole horde of boors – trainees and drill sergeants and officers, no difference in kind. In that jungle of robots there could be no hope of finding friendship; no one could understand the brutality of the place. I did not want a friend, that was how it stood in the end. If the savages had captured me, they would not drag me into compatibility with their kind. Laughing and talking of hometowns and drag races and twin-cammed racing engines – all this was for the others. I did not like them, and there was no reason to like them. For the other trainees, it came too easy. They did more than adjust well; they thrived on basic training, thinking they were becoming men, joking at the bullyism, getting the drill sergeants to joke along with them. I held my own, not a whisper more. I hated my fellows, my bunk mates and cell mates. I hated the trainees even more than the captors. I learned to march, but I learned alone. I gaped at the neat package of stupidity and arrogance at Fort Lewis. I was superior. I made no apologies for believing it. Without sympathy or compassion, I instructed my intellect and eyes: ignore the horde. I kept vigil against intrusion into my private life. I maintained a distance suitable to the black and white distinction between me and the unconscious, genuflecting herd.

I mouthed the words, shaping my lips and tongue just so, perfect deception. But no noise came out. The failure to bellow ‘Yes, Drill Sergeant!’ was a fist in the bastard’s face. A point for the soul. Standing in formation after chow, I learned to smoke. It was a private pleasure. I needed my lungs and my personal taste buds and my own hands and thoughts. I seemed older, wiser, removed, more confident.

I maintained silence. I thought about a girl. After thinking, she became a woman, only months too late. I spent time comparing her hair to the colour of sand just at dusk. That sort of thing.

I counted the number of soldiers I would trade for her. I memorized. I memorized details of her smell, knowing that without the work the details would be lost.

I memorized her letters, whole letters. Memorizing was a way to remember and a way to forget, a way to remain a stranger, only a visitor at Fort Lewis. I memorized a poem she sent me. It was a poem by Auden, and marching for shots and haircuts and clothing issue, I recited the poem, forging Auden’s words with thoughts I pretended to be hers. I lied about her, pretending that she wrote the poem herself, for me. I compared her to characters out of books by Hemingway and Maugham. Without ever knowing her – she would have me make the qualification boldly – I imagined she was made of the hardness of Lady Brett, of the fickle and spiritual in Rosy, and of the earthiness of Adams’ girl in the mountains. In her letters she claimed I created her out of the mind. The mind, she said, can make wonderful changes in the real stuff. So I hid from the drill sergeants, turned my back on the barracks, and wrote back to her.

I thought a little about Canada, I thought about refusing to carry a rifle.

I grew tired of independence.

One evening I asked Erik what he was reading. His shoes were shined, and he had his footlocker straight, and with half an hour before lights out, he was on his back looking at a book. Erik. Skinny, a deep voice, dressed in olive drab, calm. He said it was The Mint. ‘T. E. Lawrence. You know – Lawrence of Arabia. He went through something like this. You know, something like basic training. It’s a sort of how-to-do-it book.’ He said he was just paging through it, that he’d read the whole thing before, and he gave it to me. With The Mint I became a soldier, knew I was a soldier. I succumbed. Without a backward glance at privacy, I gave in to soldiering. I took on a friend, betraying in a sense my wonderful suffering.

Erik talked about poetry and philosophy and travel. But he talked about soldiering, too. We formed a coalition. It was mostly a coalition against the army, but we aimed also at the other trainees. The idea, loosely, was to preserve ourselves. It was a two-man war of survival, and we fought like guerrillas, jabbing in the lance, drawing a trickle of army blood, running like rabbits. We hid in the masses. Right under their bloodshot eyes. We exposed them, even if they were blind and deaf to it. We’d let them die of anaemia, a little blood at a time. It was a war of resistance; the objective was to save our souls. Sometimes it meant hiding the remnants of conscience and consciousness behind battle cries, pretended servility, bare, clench-fisted obedience. Our private conversations were the cornerstone of the resistance, perhaps because talking about basic training in careful, honest words was by itself an insult to army education. Simply to think and talk and try to understand was evidence that we were not cattle or machines.

Erik pretended sometimes that he lacked the fundamental courage of the men of poetry and philosophy whom he read during the first nights in Fort Lewis.

‘I was in Denmark when they drafted me. I did not want to come back. I wanted to become a European and write some books. There was even a chance for romance over there. But I come from a small town, my parents know everyone, and I couldn’t hurt and embarrass them. And, of course, I was afraid.’

Perhaps it was cowardice and perhaps it was good sense. Anyway, Erik and I rarely brought our war into the offensive stage, and when we were so stupid as to try, we were massacred like mice. One morning Erik cornered the company drill sergeant, a man named Blyton, and demanded an appointment, a private talk. Blyton hustled Erik through a door.

Erik informed him of his opposition to the Vietnam war. Erik explained that he believed the war was without just reason, that life ought not to be forfeited unless certain and fundamental principles are at stake, and not unless those principles stand in certain danger.

Erik did not talk to me about the episode for a week or more. And when he did talk, he only said that Blyton laughed at him and then yelled and called him a coward.

‘He said I was a pansy. It’s hard to argue, I suppose. I’m not just intellectually opposed to violence, I’m absolutely frightened by it. It’s impossible to separate in my mind the gut fear from pure reason. I’m really afraid that all the hard, sober arguments I have against this war are nothing but an intellectual adjustment to my horror at the thought of bleeding to death in some rice paddy.’

Blyton did not forget Erik, and we had to take the guerrilla war to the mountain for a while. We were good boys, good soldiers. We assumed a perfect, tranquil mediocrity. We returned to our detached, personal struggle.

We found a private place to talk, out behind the barracks. There was a log there. It was twice the thickness of an ordinary telephone pole and perhaps a fourth of its length, and on an afternoon in September Erik and I were sitting on that log, polishing boots, cleaning out M-14s and talking poetry. It was a fine log, and useful. We used it for a podium and as a soapbox. It was a confessional and a shoeshine stand. It was scarred. A hundred waves of men had passed through the training company before us; no reason to doubt that a hundred waves would follow.

On that September afternoon Erik smeared black polish on the log, marking it with our presence, and absently he rubbed at the stain, talking about poems. He explained (and he’ll forgive my imprecise memory as I quote him now): ‘Frost, by just about any standard, is the finest of a good bunch of American poets. People who deprecate American poetry need to return to Robert Frost. Then, as I rank them – let’s see – Marianne Moore and Robinson. And if you count Pound as an American, he has written the truest of poems. For all his mistakes, despite his wartime words on the radio, that man sees through ideology like you and I look through glass. If you don’t believe, just listen.’

Erik became Ezra Pound. Seriously, slowly, he recited a portion of ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberly’

These fought in any case,

and some believing,

pro domo, in any case …

Some quick to arm,

some for adventure,

some from fear of weakness,

some from fear of censure,

some for love of slaughter, in imagination.

learning later …

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;

Died some, pro patria,

non ‘dulce’ non ‘et decor’ …

‘Pound is right,’ Erik said. ‘Look into your own history. Here we are. Mama has been kissed good-bye, we’ve grabbed our rifles, we’re ready for extinction. All this not because of conviction, not for ideology; rather it’s from fear of society’s censure, just as Pound claims. Rather from fear of weakness, afraid that to avoid war is to avoid manhood. We come to Fort Lewis afraid to admit we are not Achilles, that we are not brave, not heroes. Here we are, thrust to the opposite and absurd antipode of what we think is good. And tomorrow we’ll be out of bed at three o’clock in the pitch-black morning.’

‘Up, up, up!’ the squad leader shouts. He has been in the army for two weeks, same as the rest of us. But he is big and he is strong and he is in charge. He loves the new power. ‘Out of the sack! Out!’

‘Ya damn lifer!’ It is Harry the Montanan, head under a sheet, pointing a thick middle finger at the squad leader’s back. ‘Lifer! Ya hear me? Take yer damn army an’ shove it. Use it fer grade-Z fertilizer!’ Harry pauses. The squad leader hits the lights, glaring and cold and excruciating bright lights. Harry shoves his face into the pillow. ‘Two-bit goddamn lifer!’

The squad leader orders Harry to scrub the commodes. Harry threatens to use the squad leader’s head as a scrub brush.

The squad leader is chastened but still in charge. ‘Okay, who’s gonna wax the floor?’ He checks his duty roster, finds a name.

Mousy whines. ‘Well, for Pete’s sake, they got the buffer downstairs. What the hell ya want? Want me to polish the damn thing with a sock?’

‘Use yer brown nose,’ the Montanan drawls, head still tucked into a pillow.

White paddles over to the shower. You hear him singing about Idaho. He was married two days before induction.

Mornings are the worst time. It is the most hopeless, most despairing time. The darkness of Fort Lewis mornings is choked off by brazen lights, the shrieks of angry men and frightened, homesick boys. The bones and muscles and brain are not ready for three-o’clock mornings, not ready for duties and harsh voices. The petty urgencies of the mornings physically hurt. The same hopeless feeling that overwhelmed inmates of Treblinka; prisoners of other human beings, caught up in a political marsh, unmotivated to escape and still unwilling to acquiesce, no one to help, no words to speak silently in consolation. The complete, certain reality of the morning kills any words. In the mornings at Fort Lewis comes a powerful want for privacy. You pledge yourself to finding an island someday. Or a bolted, sealed, air-conditioned hotel room. No lights, no admittance, no friends, not even your girl, and not even Erik or your starving grandmother.

The men search out cheer. The North Dakotan bellows out that we may be going to the PX that night.

‘Yeah, maybe!’ Harry rolls on to the floor. ‘Second Platoon went last night. That makes it our turn, damn right. Christ, I’ll buy me a million wads o’ chewin’ tobacco. An’ a case o’ Coke. Y’all gotta help me smuggle the stuff in here, right? Hide it in the footlockers.’

We make up the bunks. Taut, creases at a forty-five-degree angle. Tempers flare, ebb into despair.

‘KLINE!’ someone hollers. ‘Kline, you’re a goddamn moron! A goddamn, blubbering moron. You know that? Kline, you hear me? You’re a moron!’

Kline stands by his bunk. His tiny head goes rigid. His hands fidget. His eyes shift to the floor, to the walls, to a footlocker. He whimpers. He quivers. Kline is fat. Bewildered and timid and sensitive. No one knows.

‘Kline, you got two left boots on your feet. You see that? Look down, just look down once, will ya? You see your feet? You got two left boots on again. You see? Look down, for Christ’s sake! Stop starin’ around like you got caught snitchin’ the lieutenant’s pussy. There, ya see? Two left boots.’

Kline grins and sits on his bunk. The problem isn’t serious.

We make the bunks, dust the windows, tie up laundry bags, the strings anchored just so. The barracks have a high ceiling, criss-crossed by rafters and two-by-fours with no function except to give work. They have to be cleaned. The seventeen-year-olds, most agile and awed, do the climbing and balancing. The squad leader directs them: a peer and a sellout. Sweep and mop and wax the floor. Polish doorknobs, rub the army’s Brasso into the metal.

The squad leader glances at his watch, frenzied. ‘Jeez, you guys, it’s four-thirty already. Let’s go, damn it.’

We align footgear into neat rows, shave, polish our brass, buff-buff-buff that floor.

Outside it is Monday morning, raining again. Fort Lewis.

It is dark, and we are shadows double-timing to the parade ground for reveille. Someone pushes Kline into place at the end of the rank. ‘Good God, it’s freezin’.’ Kline practises coming to attention. Christ, he tries.

We shiver, stamping blood into our feet. Erik stands next to me. He is quiet, smoking, calm, ready.

Smells twist through the rain. Someone in the back rank cusses; forgot to lock his footlocker. KP is penalty. Someone asks for a smoke.

‘Fall in! Re-port!’

Afterwards Drill Sergeant Blyton struts his sleek, black, airborne body up and down the ranks. We hate Blyton. It is dark and it is gushing rain, and with our heads rammed straight ahead, Blyton is only a smudge of a Smokey-the-Bear hat, a set of gleaming teeth. He teases, threatens, humiliates. It is supposed to be an inspection. But it is much more than that, nearly life and death, and Blyton is the judge. It is supposed to be a part of the training. Discipline. Blyton is supposed to play a role, to make himself hated. But for Blyton it is much more. He is evil. He does not personify the tough drill sergeant; rather he is the army, a reflecting pool of inhumanity. Erik mutters that we’ll get the bastard someday, words will kill him.

Blyton finds Kline. The poor boy, towering above the drill sergeant and shifting his eyes to the left and right, up and down, whimpers. Kline is terrified. He shifts from one foot to the other. Blyton peers at him, at his belt buckle, at his feet. At his two left boots.

Blyton has Kline hang on to his left foot for an hour.

During the days of basic training and during the nights, we march. And sing. There are a thousand songs.

Around her hair

She wore a yellow bonnet.

She wore it in the springtime,

In the merry month of May.

And if

You ask

Her

Why the hell she wore it:

She wore it for her soldie

Who was far, far away.

You write beautifully, a girl says in her letters. You make it all so terrible and real for me … I am going to Europe next summer, she writes, and I’ll see a lot of places for you. As ever …

If I had a low IQ,

I could be a Lifer, too!

And if I didn’t have a brain,

I would learn to love the rain.

Am I right or wrong?

Am I goin’ strong?

Sound off!

Sound off!

One, two, three, four …

Sound Off!

We march to the night infiltration course. They use machine guns on us, firing overhead while Erik and Harry and White and Kline crawl alongside me, under barbed wire, red tracers everywhere, down into ditches, across the finish line. In the rain. Then in dead night we march back to the barracks.

Viet-nam

Viet-nam

Every night while you’re sleepin’

Charlie Cong comes a creepin’

All around.

We march to the Quick-Kill rifle range. We learn to snap off our shots, quickly, rapidly, without conscious aim. Without any thought at all. Quick-Kill.

We march to the obstacle course, and Blyton shoves Kline through the manoeuvres.

We march back to the barracks, and we are always singing.

If I die in a combat zone,

Box me up and ship me home.

An’ if I die on the Russian front,

Bury me with a Russian cunt.

Sound Off!

We march to the bayonet course, marching through green forests, through the ever-rain and through smells of rich loam and leaves and pine and every fine scent of nature, marching like toys under the free, white mountain, Rainier.

Blyton teaches us and taunts us. Standing with his legs spread wide on an elevated platform, he gives us our lesson on the bayonet. Left elbow locked, left hand on wood just below weapon’s sights, right hand on small of stock, right forearm pressed tightly along the upper stock, lunge with left leg, slice up with the steel. Again and again we thrust into mid-air imagined bellies, sometimes towards throats. ‘Dinks are little shits,’ Blyton yells out. ‘If you want their guts, you gotta go low. Crouch and dig.

‘Soldiers! Tell me! What is the spirit of the bayonet?’ He screams the question, rolling it like Sandburg’s poetry, thundering.

Raise your rifle, blade affixed, raise it high over your head, wave it like a flag or trophy, wave it in love, and bellow till you’re hoarse: ‘Drill Sergeant, the spirit of the bayonet is to kill! To kill!’

I know a girl, name is Jill,

She won’t do it, but her sister will.

Honey, oh, Baby-Doll.

I know a girl, dressed in black,

Makes her living on her back.

Honey, oh, Baby-Doll.

I know a girl, dressed in red,

Makes her living in a bed.

Honey, oh, Baby-Doll.

There is no thing named love in the world. Women are dinks. Women are villains. They are creatures akin to Communists and yellow-skinned people and hippies. We march off to learn about hand-to-hand combat. Blyton grins and teases and hollers out his nursery rhyme: ‘If ya wanta live, ya gotta be ag-ile, mo-bile, and hos-tile.’ We chant the words: ag-ile, mobile, hos-tile. We make it all rhyme. We march away, singing.

I don’t know, but I been told,

Eskimo pussy is mighty cold.

Am I goin’ strong?

Am I right or wrong?

Sound Off!

The company forms up for inspection. The battalion commander comes by in his dark glasses, and Blyton and the others are firm and mellow. We’ve been given instructions to say ‘No, sir’ when the colonel asks if we have any problems or any complaints or any needs. When he asks if there’s enough food and if we get enough sleep, we’re supposed to say ‘Yes, sir’. ‘No, sir’. ‘Yes, sir’.

They stuff us into the barracks at ten o’clock. The squad leader gears us up for night-time cleaning. He promises to allow an extra half-hour of sleep in the morning, and we know he’s lying, but the floor gets waxed and our shoes get shined and the lockers get wiped.

Blyton comes in and cusses and crams the light off and by eleven o’clock all the boors and frightened men snort their way to sleep. It is a cattle pen. Seething and stirring in their sleep or on their way to sleep, the men are animals, restless and caged. A giant rhythm takes up the barracks, a swelling and murmuring of human hearts and lungs; the wooden planks seem to move, in and out. You fight to hold to the minutes. Sleep is an enemy. Sleep puts you with the rest of them, the great, public, hopeless zoo. You battle hard complaint from the body. Then you sleep; dark, uneasy hum in your ears, as if you are in a beehive.

In the deep, red heart of the sleep, you are awakened. Fire watch. You sit on the darkened stairs between the two tiers of bunks, and you smoke. Fire watch is a good duty. You lose sleep at it, but the silence and letter-writing time and privacy make up for it, and you are free for an hour. The rain is falling, and you feel comfortable. You listen, smiling and smoking. Will you go to war? You think of Socrates; you see him beside you, stepping through basic training as your friend. He would be a joke in short hair and fatigues. He would not succumb. Certainly he would march through the days and nights in his white robes, with a white beard, and certainly Blyton would never break him. Socrates had fought for Athens: it could not have been a perfectly just war. What had he thought? Socrates, it has been told, was a brave soldier. You wonder if he had been a reluctant hero. Had he been brave out of a spirit of righteousness or necessity? Or resignation? You wonder how he felt, not how he thought, as a soldier on a night like this one, with the rain falling with just this temperature and sound. Then you think of him as an old man, you remember his fate, you think of him peering through iron bars as his ship sailed in, the final cue, only extinction ahead; his country, for which he had been a hero, ending the most certain of good lives. Nothing recorded about his weeping. But Plato may have missed something. Certainly, he must have missed something. You think about other heroes. John Kennedy, Audie Murphy, Sergeant York, T. E. Lawrence. You write letters to blonde girls from middle America, calm and poetic and filled with ironies and self-pity, then you smoke, then you rouse out Kline for the watch, and you go back to your bunk wondering what the fat man will think about for his hour.

Erik and I were discussing these things on that September afternoon, sitting behind the barracks and separating ourselves from everyone and putting polish on our boots, when Blyton saw us alone. He screamed and told us to get our asses over to him pronto.

‘A couple of college pussies,’ he said when we got there. ‘Out behind them barracks hiding from everyone and making some love, huh?’ He looked at Erik. ‘You’re a pussy, huh? You afraid to be in the war, a goddamn pussy, a goddamn lezzie? You know what we do with pussies, huh? We fuck ’em. In the army we just fuck ’em and straighten ’em out. You two college pussies out there hidin’ and sneakin’ a little pussy. Maybe I’ll just stick you two puss in the same bunk tonight, let you get plenty of pussy so tomorrow you can’t piss.’ Blyton grinned and shook his head and said ‘shit’ and called another drill sergeant over and told him he had a couple of pussies and wanted to know what to do. ‘They was out there behind the barracks suckin’ in some pussy. What the hell we do with puss in the army? We fuck ’em. don’t we? Huh? College puss almost ain’t good enough for good fuckin’.’

Erik said we were just polishing boots and cleaning our guns, and Blyton grabbed a rifle, stopped grinning, and had us chant, pointing at the rifle and at our bodies, ‘This is a rifle and this is a gun, this is for shooting and this is for fun.’ Then he told us to report to him that night. ‘You two puss are gonna have a helluva time. You’re gonna get to pull guard together, all alone and in the dark, nobody watchin’. You two are gonna walk ‘round and ‘round the company area, holdin’ hands, and you can talk about politics and nooky all the goddamn night. Shit, I wish I had a goddamn camera.’

We reported to Blyton at 2100 hours, and he gave us a flashlight and black guard helmets and told us to get the hell out of his sight, he couldn’t stand to look at pussy, and he told us to be sure the barracks lights were out by 2230 hours and to report to him every hour.

We went out, and Erik said that the bastard didn’t have the guts to order us to hold hands.

We enjoyed walking guard duty. It was a good, dry night, and it was peaceful. We did not have to go through the night-time quarrels and noise in the barracks, and we could talk and enjoy the feeling of aloneness.

In two hours we found a trainee stealing an unauthorized phone call. We debated about the justice of turning the poor kid in to Blyton. We were getting tired and we knew his punishment would be to relieve us for the night. We gave Blyton the man’s name.

In twenty minutes, the trainee came out, asked for the flashlight and told us to go to bed.

Basic training nearly ended, we marched finally to a processing station. We heard our numbers called off, our new names. Some to go to transportation school – Erik. Some to repeat basic training – Kline. Some to become mechanics. Some to become clerks. And some to attend advanced infantry training, to become foot soldiers – Harry and the squad leader and I. Then we marched to graduation ceremonies, and then we marched back, singing.

I wanna go to Vietnam

Just to kill ol’ Charlie Cong.

Am I right or wrong?

Am I goin’ strong?

Buses – olive drab, with white painted numbers and driven by bored-looking Spec 4s – came to take us away. Erik and I stood by a window in the barracks and watched Blyton talk with parents of the new soldiers. He was smiling.

‘We’ll get the bastard,’ Erik said. We could pick off the man with one shot from an M-14, no problem. He’d taught us well. Erik laughed and shook his fist at the window. ‘Too easy to shoot him.

‘There’s not much I can say to you,’ Erik said. ‘I had this awful suspicion they’d screw you, make you a grunt. Maybe you can break a leg during advanced training; pretend you’re insane.’ Erik had decided at the beginning of basic to enlist for three years, tacking on an extra year as a soldier but escaping infantry duty. I had gambled, thinking they would use me for more than a pair of legs, certain that someone would see the value of my ass behind a typewriter or a Xerox machine. We’d joked about the gamble for two months.

I shook Erik’s hand in the latrine and walked with him to his bus and shook his hand again.