Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien


P
remiering in 1972, M*A*S*H, the TV series about an emergency medical unit in the Korean War, was viewed by many as veiled commentary on the Vietnam War.  By focusing on an earlier war, the show rounded off the edges of controversy, avoiding the inevitable criticism – even censure – had the subject been Vietnam.   But at the same time, by stripping it of the emotion of now, it was easier to see clearly the futility of the war we were fighting.  Ironically, MASH, the movie, was not nearly as affective as the TV series.  The movie struck me as a much more naked display of rage – an unvarnished reflection of the national mood in 1968.  There was no question of it being a transparent indictment of the Vietnam War.  The movie captured the frustration and rage that characterized the 60s, not the post-WW II 1950s.   For me, the movie was less affective because it was too much in the moment.
What’s my point?   I wonder if we can view the war in Afghanistan more clearly by imagining a time twenty years hence; I wonder if an imagined distance in time can lend clarity to what often seems like confusing and contradictory messages, fraught with the dire predictions and forebodings that fog our vision. 
While reading the book “MATTERHORN: A Novel of the Vietnam War” (reviewed here earlier) and Tim O’Brien’s now classic “The Things They Carried,” it occurred to me that a thoughtful reexamination of an earlier war provides an opportunity to more deeply contemplate the cost of the two wars we are fighting now; especially the Afghanistan War.  It’s not that the strategies employed are the same as earlier wars, nor are the rationale and objection to fighting it the same, but reading these two books vividly spotlights the profound cost in human lives – those fighting on either side and those caught in the middle – and provide a powerful antidote for Americans’ tendency towards a cavalier attitude towards wars, particularly the Afghanistan War. 
The only responsible examination must start on the ground, with this question: What is the cost of war in lives?  Everything else is an abstraction, providing a vague and often theoretical basis for war that may or may not have any basis in fact and, at any rate, is pure speculation.  Only history can validate a war and even then, it’s debatable.
Here’s an example.  One could argue that the Korea War prevented the entire Korean peninsula from becoming a despotic dictatorship dominated by North Korea.  But we can only guess that that would have been the consequence.  History might have turned out differently had North Korea succeeded in defeating the US and SK forces.  One could argue that the continued presence of 25,000 or more US soldiers in the DMZ for almost fifty years and the existence of a hostile regime to the south provided North Korea with just the enemies it needed to sustain itself and wall itself off from the world, enabling it to successfully enslave its people and distract them from the dismal conditions there.  Had Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il, been denied those convenient facts, history might have turned out differently.   The only thing that can be said with certainty is that thousands of allied soldiers, thousands of Korean soldiers, and a million or more of civilians died.  Everything else is conjecture.
In Vietnam the story has played itself out and the consequences are nothing like those imagined at the time.  As I pointed out in my review of “MATTERHORN,” dominos didn’t fall; China and the USSR were not the beneficiaries of our defeat.  Vietnam realized their decades-long determination to be free of colonial powers and, today, Vietnam his become one of our trading partners in SE Asia.   For most Vietnamese, the war is a distant memory.  For most of the American who fought there, it is a painful memory.
What would have happened if we had never escalated the Vietnamese War?  Who can say?  The only thing we can say with certainty is that many thousands US and allied soldiers died, thousands of North and South Vietnamese soldiers died, and a million or more of Vietnamese civilians died.  Add to this accounting the chaos and deaths in Laos and Cambodia, and the collateral damage that occurred in our own country during this time.  How many deaths might have been avoided?  No serious reexamination of that war could draw a conclusion other than that it was folly.  People died in vain.  History has pulled the rug out from under the empty platitudes that served as cover for our being there.
Thoughts like these led me to read “The Things They Carried,” a much studied and discussed novel derived from Tim O’Brien’s experiences in Vietnam, but pared in the intervening years to their essence – made-up stories refracted through a long lens of time to more perfectly reflect the truth of what he experienced; a powerful and paradoxical refutation of the assertion that truth is more powerful that fiction. 
Or, in O’Brien’s own words: 
“I want you to feel what I felt.  I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”
Most of “The Things They Carried” is presented as Tim O’Brien’s fictional wartime memoir.  Tim O’Brien is the protagonist and the book is dedicated to his own fictional characters.  It’s deeply personal and, in some instances, painfully confessional in tone. 
It starts simply.  He introduces his characters by describing, literally, the things each member of his platoon carried; calculating the weight of each item of standard issue – the M-16, the M-79, the M-60, the canteen, the radio, the star scope – the weight of personal items that each soldier carried, and the weight of memories and dreams they bore – welcome diversions against the tedium of war or, in a flash of inattention, as lethal distractions in the line of sight of a sniper or in the startling, terrifying moments of combat.  As O’Brien puts it:
“In the field, though, the causes were immediate.  A moment of carelessness or bad judgment or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever.”
In this book, O’Brien tells just a half dozen stories, but he circles back to them time and again, as if haunted by them decades later.   For example, in a later chapter, as a writer reflecting on the war twenty years later, he returns to the image of the death of his friend Kiowa in a shit-filled, swampy field, and reflects on this pivotal moment of profound change he experienced in himself. 
“[It] was hard to find any real emotion.  It simply wasn’t there.  After that long night in the rain, I’d seemed to grow cold inside, all the illusions gone, all the old ambitions and hopes for myself sucked away into the mud.  … For twenty years this field had embodied all the waste that was Vietnam, all the vulgarity and horror.”
Embedded in his stories of Vietnam is a story of how he got there, when he received his draft notice and of his own aborted flight to Canada.  As he tells it, for him, submitting to the draft was an act of cowardice – he made it all the way to the Canadian border; he just had to exit a small boat and go ashore.  But he was not brave enough to turn his back on his town, his family, his school, and all things familiar and escape into an unimagined life of exile.  While he is convinced that the war is unjust, he can’t bring himself to abandon his familiar life and be branded a draft-dodger.  So he’s drawn into the war he believes to be wrong, and experiences the death of his platoon mates and friends, of young men whose promise, conveyed sympathetically, even lovingly, is extinguished in random acts of combat and cruel acts of chance.
Page by page, O’Brien absorbs the reader into his stories, so much so that, gradually, you refuse to believe the book is a work of fiction.  I found myself wondering if O’Brien’s stories were really truth masquerading as fiction in order to provide cover for his candor and avoid hurting those with whom he fought; of blurring the lines between invention and truth, consequently, having the effect of amplifying the sense of reality.  As a reader, when you will the stories to be true, they become so.
O’Brien serves up fragments of memories, at one point saying, “What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning or end.”  But these fragments of memory form a mosaic of detail that breaths life into his characters. 
And he serves up passages like this that are both generous, loving description and damning commentary:
“Henry Dobbins was a good man, and a superb soldier, but sophistication was not his strong suit.  The ironies went beyond him.  In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot and always plodding along, always there when you need him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor.  Like his country, too, Dobbins was drawn towards sentimentality.”
Many readers may be confused, finding this book too fragmentary, with no clear beginning, middle or end; and there’s truth in that.  But taken together, it hits you like a fragmentary grenade; full of vivid imagery that are, like scars, impossible to erase.  In that you will share something of the lives of those who fought in Vietnam, unable to shake free of the experience no matter how much time has gone by.   And you will remember lines like these:
“If it had been possible, which it wasn’t, [Norman Bowker] would have explained how his friend Kiowa slipped away that night beneath the dark swampy field.  He was folded in with the war; he was part of the waste.” 
The final pronoun, intentionally ambiguous, could describe Kiowa or Norman Bowker, who is haunted by Vietnam and his friend’s death, so much so that he ends his own live ten years later.
“The Things They Carried” was published in 1990.  Tim O’Brien was interviewed recently on the PBS NewsHour[1] on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the end of the war and the 20th anniversary of the publication of his book.  What struck me during the interview is that today O’Brien’s memory of the war is as vivid and painful as ever.  When reexamining the Vietnam War, or trying to clear the fog of the war in Afghanistan, it’s worth remembering Amos Oz’s prophetic statement.
“No idea has ever been defeated by force.”
The only question that remains is this: whose idea is more potent?  That is the surest predictor of the outcome of any conflict.
Thomas Friedman, the writer and NY Times columnist recently said it best, when discussing the recent change in US military leadership in Afghanistan (NY Times 6/22/2010):
“The president can bring Ulysses S. Grant back from the dead to run the Afghan war. But when you can’t answer the simplest questions, it is a sign that you’re somewhere you don’t want to be and your only real choices are lose early, lose late, lose big or lose small.”  [Italics are mine.]
Now, imagine that it is 2030 and you are looking back on this period of our history, writing the epilogue to the war.  If you favored our continued involvement, how does that look to you now?  Would your rationale be best characterized as empty platitudes or sound reasoning?   And, if you could, what would you say to the thousands of people who died?  Would they agree it was worth it?
To help clear your head of the fog of war, add “The Things they Carried” to your list of truly important books to read.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Matterhorn, A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes


At its heart, stripped of its brutal detail and long list of characters, Matterhorn is a story of how one young Marine Corps Lieutenant, Waino Mellas, a platoon leader, is transformed by his experience in Vietnam and gradually absorbed into the permanent fabric of the Marine Corps.  Taking place during just a few short months at the beginning of his deployment, Matterhorn is a story of transformation.  Success is survival.  You play the game or die.
What emerges is a brilliant and unforgettable account of the Vietnam war and the men who fought it – a cross-section of Americans, compressed and thrown together into the most traumatic conditions imaginable to fight people they knew nothing about, in an alien, Asian jungle far from home.
As a green officer, fresh out of Quantico and assigned to lead an infantry platoon, Mellas scrambles from a helicopter under machine gun fire onto the landing zone of Matterhorn, the name the Marines call a mountain outpost in northwest Vietnam, near the DMZ and Laos border.  A Princeton graduate, clever, resourceful and savvy enough to downplay his ivy league education, Mellas slowly wins the respect of his platoon and fellow officers.  Like many officers, Mellas harbors an ambition that surfaces from time to time, but he recognizes that an overt display of ambition would be futile.  But it’s complicated.  As an officer, an instinct for survival serves ambition; the higher you rise, the further from the front you are likely to be.  And, in war, all too frequently, promotion derives from attrition, or put more plainly, the death of one’s superiors, not to be celebrated, but on the field of battle, if one is honest, secretly welcome.  Yes, it’s complicated.
The list of characters is long.  There is a helpful diagram of the chain of command in the front of the book to help keep things straight.  But not everyone is listed there; we’re only invited to get to know well the original cast, the men Mellas gets to know best.  In the early chapters of the book, the character development is thorough.  When someone dies you will feel loss.  As the book progresses, Marlantes intentionally retreats from developing fully the characters he throws into the fray.  No longer are they richly drawn, with names, backgrounds, and distinct voices.  Gradually the replacements deployed almost become faceless.  Marlantes wants you, the reader, to feel firsthand the dehumanizing effect of war, just as Lt. Mellas or any soldier[1] would have experienced it.  And, just as Mellas felt distress and guilt after his first enemy kill and, of necessity, recovers to kill again, so too does he gradually become immune to the deaths of those fighting beside him – not indifferent; their deaths just become less painful, less personal.  Eventually, the loss of a soldier becomes a tactical loss.  The natural consequence is that Mellas gradually becomes less inclined to want to get to know the green replacements beyond what is necessary to use them affectively.  This is the inhuman transformation dictated by battle.  For most, there is a profound loss of innocence; eventually replaced by a sort of euphoria of battle, as epitomized by Lt. Hawke, who can’t stand being away from the action and breaks regulations to return to Matterhorn.  This dehumanizing process can go so far as to nullify the value of ones own life – what else explains the sudden urge to stand up and run at the enemy, screaming on full-automatic, Marine and M16 both, racing head-on to a certain death?  Some celebrate it and call it valor.  I’d call it the endgame in a natural process, where life, even one’s own, ceases to have any value at all.
At first, Mellas’ platoon patrolled the jungle surrounding Matterhorn, occasionally engaging the enemy, and reinforcing a defensive perimeter, stringing barbed wire and building up bunkers with sandbags.  But Lt. Mellas also had to work at maintaining peace inside his platoon, especially between black and white Marines.  The men brought with them all of the prejudices and anger, certainty and doubts of the population at large, along with an expanding list of grievances.  This was 1969.  How could they not be affected by the chaos at home?  The doubts, the peace marches, the assassinations, the dissembling, the music and, certainly, the drugs.  To be sure, when faced with a determined enemy, there emerged a truce and a semblance of cohesion.  But between patrols and battles grievances bubbled to the surface, as certain as the ever present fog, rain and leaches that fall from the trees. 
Unlike today’s all-volunteer armed forces, in Vietnam the average age of the men (boy really) was 19.  The “old man”, Colonel Simpson, a Korean War veteran, was all of 39!  All are convincingly represented here -- black (splibs), white (chucks), navy medics (squids), short-timers, red-necks, officers, non-commissioned officers (NCOs), gung-ho enlistees, hapless draftees, lifers, literate and illiterate, men from ivy league schools (a few), others from undistinguished state colleges, laidback farmers, hardened city boys, alcoholics, drug addicts, larcenists, the addled and the sane, the humane and the murderous (“fraggers”.)   It would be amazing to think you could form a cohesive team with such men, much less fight a war.  Certainly, the goal of boot camp is to erase all vestiges of the individual, but soldiers revert quickly, given half a chance.  For most – draftees – it was count-the-days (and, for the short-timers, the hours too).  Others – lifers, NCOs, career officers – sought recognition – combat metals, promotions, a bigger command, the respect and admiration of fellow Marines.   The successful leaders, those who rise through the ranks, learn quickly that lives you command are commodities.  If you don’t push your men, you’re soft – a slacker.  Void of a credible justification, Vietnam devolved into a numbers game.  When the nightly news on TV leads with body counts, day after day, it doesn’t take long for the men on the front lines to conclude that that is the measure of success.  As body counts were reported up the chain of command, estimates of  “confirmed and probables” grew with every retelling.  Everyone looked good.  Body count was king.  When Colonel Simpson “grimly” issued an order to attack without knowing the strength of the North Vietnam Army units they was up against, Major Blakely, his executive officer, thought to himself, “If the NVA reinforced during the night, an assault by Bravo Company would surely go badly, but those were the breaks.  They were there to kill gooks.”  
As quickly as Mellas and Bravo Company took possession of Matterhorn, blasted away its top to make way for a landing zone, and constructed a perimeter, Bravo Company is ordered to abandon Matterhorn and nearby Helicopter Hill to relieve a depleted and nearly starved Charlie Company and sweep the valley and jungles to the south to interdict North Vietnamese supply lines, and destroy a suspected enemy ammo cache.  A miscalculation and bad communications back at headquarters – covered up by the officer responsible – results in days without food, water and ammunition; an error compounded further by Colonel Simpson’s insistence that Bravo Company and its commander, Lt. Fitch, were slacking off.  He stubbornly refused relief flights, resulting in the near starvation of an entire company and several deaths.  Finally, the company, or what’s left of it, is airlifted back to headquarters, where it is assigned to the “Bald Eagle-Sparrow Hawk Company” – a stand-by designation for the company sent to backup or rescue another unit at a moments notice.
Inevitable, trouble finds them.  A six-man reconnaissance team, code name “Sweet Alice”, has run into a NVA division or company (no one is quite sure) in the vicinity of Matterhorn.  Bravo Company is sent in, first to rescue them, then – in zealous pursuit of numbers and disregard for his men –ordered by Colonel Simpson to attack and reoccupy the now well-defended Matterhorn (thanks to Bravo Company’s earlier efforts).
This book includes characters at all levels of the chain of command, from privates to generals.  It is this, along with stunning dialogue and rich details that could only have come from personal experience, that lends it its authenticity.  In the officer ranks, there are officers with widely different experiences, from WWII and Korea to desk jobs at the Pentagon.  Without a clear objective, their understanding of what their mission is varies wildly and, naturally, conflicts arose.  Colonel Mulvaney, the division commander, has the most concern for the well-being of the combat Marines and little patience for Colonel Simpson and his executive officer, Major Blakely, who are prone to misuse the men under their command, caring only that a company reaches assigned checkpoints on schedule, regardless of terrain, obstacles, deprivation or hostility encountered along the way.
During the final push to retake Matterhorn, Mellas is injured by a grenade and almost loses an eye.  He is evacuated to a hospital ship where he recovers, and then, just five days later, is sent back into battle.
Throughout the book, as the war progresses, we see how the war affects Mellas, as though he’s passing through predictable stages.  Mellas starts out as a green officer, eager to engage personally with his men and win their acceptance, then passes through stages of incomprehension, reflection, frustration, rage – at one point ready to frag the battalion commander – and on to a phase of “inert, sick weariness”, knowing “with utter certainty, that the North Vietnamese would never quit”, and finally, with the simple act of assimilation that a promotion confers, arrives at a state, not of rejection, not even resignation, but of acceptance.  He is transformed into a career officer.  The most revealing dialogue comes near the end of the book, after Mellas is promoted to company executive officer.  Lt. Hawke asks,
“You still feel like killing Simpson up there”?  [As he did on Matterhorn.]
“Naw.  You know I went crazy up there.  He was just doing his job.”
Only after reading Matterhorn will you realize what an incredibly jarring statement that is.  It’s as though Mellas has passed through a wormhole, witnesses unspeakable horrors, and emerges, his blood pooled forever with the blood of his fellow soldiers.  The two officers who pose this question, Fitch and Hawke, passed through the wormhole months earlier.  In a surreal beer-stoked atmosphere of a fraternity initiation, it’s as though they are serving as the Marine Corps’ surrogate midwives, welcoming Mellas into another state of being, the fraternity of career officers.
Experienced through Lt. Mellas, Matterhorn emerges as a darkly complex story of the corrupting effects of ambition in war, and its essential role in building a military command hierarchy.  It is about how armies depend on acceptance of the legitimacy of death, by undermining its moral foundation – expelling the personal and bestowing a license to kill.  Soldiers are trained to become anonymous and interchangeable, to be used anonymously to kill an anonymous enemy.  Sentimentality is an impediment. War is utterly destructive of those who are recruited to fight it, whether they survive or not, and some even welcome this destruction.  Can they ever regain the values that they must abandon to succeed?  Only the dead have fathers, mothers, brothers or sisters.  Without a doubt, there are those who would vigorously protest this interpretation, even find it offensive.  But it’s impossible to reconcile the brutality of war otherwise.  Knowing just how morally destructive wars are, we must avoid them at all cost, and only fight when we must, with the sober acknowledgement that our own men and women are its first victims.
Why another novel about Vietnam?  We, as a nation, are still trying to come to grips with the national trauma we experienced.  And many, like Karl Marlantes, who experienced it first hand, will have to live with their memories forever.  Americans are still trying to bridge the schism it produced; those diverging historical narratives that seem harder and harder to reconcile.
As a Marine officer himself, Karl Marlantes lived it, and for 30 the years he spent writing and rewriting this book (at one stage 1600 pages), he struggled to convey that reality with military precision.  It seared his consciousness and few have written more convincingly about the lives of those who experienced Vietnam first hand.   His efforts deserve a careful reading.
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Additional thoughts on our Vietnam experience
It is over thirty-five years since images were broadcast on TVs around the world of helicopters evacuating American personnel from our embassy in Saigon and of helicopters being pushed off the decks of carriers into the sea, yet we still haven’t come to terms with the war. 
Near the end of Scott Turow’s latest novel, Innocent, its protagonist, Rusty Sabich, says, “Accepting the truth is often the hardest task human beings face.”
Turow’s quote aptly describes a nation that refused to face the many contradictions of our Vietnam misadventure.  It’s the answer to why most Americans resist facing up to the truth of Vietnam even today – that there was just no good reason for our being there.  Many who were alive back then would dispute this.   Sides were drawn; sides remain.
Things can be said about wars:
1.     The rationale and strategies that a nation employs when going to war more aptly apply to the last war, not the one its fighting.   Vietnam was not WWII; Vietnam wasn’t even a remote theater of the cold war, although we thought so at the time.
2.     The rationale for protesting a war is predicated on perceptions of the last war rather than the war we’re in.   While there might be similarities, Afghanistan is not Vietnam.  (That doesn’t mean we should be there or that it is a just war – that’s another question entirely.)
3.     Military leaders will always speak confidently about chances for success and will skew the facts to support the war, as General Westmoreland did, and the majority of public will believe them. 
4.     When emotions run high, restraining a nation from fighting is nearly impossible.  Consider the overwhelming push for going to war after 9/11 and how quickly Iraq was made part of the conflict.  Imagine the storm of recrimination, had President Obama rejected General McChrystal’s plan for Afghanistan and withdrawn our troops last year.
5.     Nations enjoy the spectacle of war as sport.
When reflecting on the Vietnam War these many decades later, the truth, clear to me now, was hardly clear to me then.  It’s hard not to express it as an indictment, but I don’t know of a gentler way to say this – It was a stupid war waged by an ignorant people too lazy to think beyond the two-word justification offered by our leaders and accepted almost universally at home: “Domino Theory.”   And, the lives of the men and woman who died were wasted or, put another way, “they died in vain.”
Let’s be honest.  Dominos didn’t fall.  Russia and China were not the beneficiaries of our defeat.  The Vietnamese would have fought as fiercely to eject them as it did to eject the French and the US.  The Vietnamese were determined to rid themselves of decades of colonial rule, period.  That was their only objective.  In retrospect, the truth seems simple.  How could we – the overwhelming majority of Americans – have missed it?  “Domino Theory” clouded our thoughts.  Easy answers always do.
The most disturbing thing was that most Americans bought it, especially those who had lived through WWII and Korea.  The famous “generation gap” of the 60’s was between those whose memories were of WWII, and those who were too young.  And, among those under 30, even among those harboring doubts, most accepted their parents’ generation’s attitude and trusted their leaders.
Inevitably, confusion reigns in the fog of war.  Dissent grows slowly, as reality set in, first by a few courageous leaders such as Senators Eugene McCarty and J. William Fulbright, then spreads, primarily among those asked to fight, especially on college campuses.  Adults (those over 30) were angered at having their worldview questioned; the youth were frustrated by the paucity of the justification for having to fight in the first place and by the increasingly empty assurances that it was going well.
What William Fulbright said, in retrospect, of President Johnson could have applied to most Americans:
I'm sure that President Johnson would never have pursued the war in Vietnam if he'd ever had a Fulbright to Japan, or say Bangkok, or had any feeling for what these people are like and why they acted the way they did.  He was completely ignorant.” 
Amen to that.
American’s experience of Vietnam ensures that the nation remains divided.  This divide is evident even today, played out every few years during congressional and presidential campaigns.  It casts a long, dark shadow; it remains the third-rail of dinner conversations.  Summon Scot Turow.  It’s really hard to admit you were wrong.
But, our confusion back then is forgivable. Why?  Consider this: WWII, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the prospect of another world war more devastating than the last were as fresh in the minds of American’s in the early 1960s as 9/11 was in 2002 when we sent troops to Afghanistan.  Much more than al Qaeda is today, the Soviet Union with their nuclear arsenal was universally perceived to be an existential threat (as our arsenal was to the USSR.)  Was there any force that might have prevented our response to 9/11?
Before Vietnam, conditioned by the shared sacrifice and certainty of the rightness of WWII, Americans trusted their government.  The Vietnam War did great damage to the country; it broke that trust and bred a nation of cynics.  While a degree of skepticism is healthy, the degree of cynicism and rancor it unleashed may well be our undoing.
Quoting William Fulbright once more – 
The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust our own government statements.  I had no idea until then that you could not rely on them.”
The selling of the Iraq war to the American public rekindled America’s distrust.  But nations run on emotions, not analysis and intellect.  Facing the truth squarely is what we expect of our leaders, but, more often than not, they are driven by the emotions of an electorate, and therein lies the danger.
Is Afghanistan this generations Vietnam?  Will it take 30 years for us to find out?

For a print copy of this review, go here>> Print version

[1] While some Marines may object, I use the word "soldier" rather than Marine when I am speaking generally, referring collectively to Marine, Army and Naval personnel.