On War

Examination through Tim O'Brien

Photo by Duncan Kidd on Unsplash.

Did you kill anyone she asks over drinks at Christmas dinner. After years it still surprises me when a grown person asks the question. Like all war comes down to killing and not politics. Like my answering yes or no will explain something about the human adventure. The right answer will satisfy a private fetish. Secretly she wants the answer to be yes. She doesn’t want to have to be near a war zone but she wants to taste the blood. Like the crowds in the coliseum. So long as she is safe.

I don’t have to say anything. I wait for someone with common sense to intervene. Pour myself another whiskey and look away, secretly upset that my smile feels fake. She has given me cause to dislike myself a little more. I wonder if she knows it. Her smile says she knows. That she has placed a small granule of doubt in my head working around like a pebble in a shoe.

I will think of this all night like a tarp rolled tight with last year’s forest. The clock on the mantel makes gibberish sounds. I skate to the shelf of books to be alone. If war can be bifurcated then the soldier, too, can be bifurcated. I am simple commands again. Following orders and giving orders and trying to make sense of daily situations that defy sense. We return to the States for people to make casual critique of decisions made in foreign lands. I don’t get angry. This is how it’s supposed to be. Soldiers in service to the nation, held accountable by the people.

At West Point we were allowed four responses. Yes sir, no sir, no excuse sir, and, sir I do not understand. When she asked the question all four of them scrolled through my head. Did you kill anyone? The answer should be so simple.

The first time I really cried about the war was at the VA. A stint in rehab for a drinking problem. In the army drinking is the laying on of hands. A vigil to tradition. I heard it said that the Class VI on Fort Bragg, North Carolina has the highest per capita drinking rate anywhere in the world. I don’t know if that’s true but I wouldn’t want to be the cashier when paratroopers return from the field.

I met Ryan at the Zablocki VA in Milwaukee. Turned out Ryan was in the same part of Afghanistan. Only a few months before. Small world out there. Just not quite small enough to feel guilty long. We went through a class about PTSD work where I learned I was angry. Angry at questions I suppose. Angry at yellow ribbons. Angry at the pointlessness of it all. Just angry. Doc said that was okay. Nothing wrong with being angry, just keep it civil. I cried. Then we went back to our rooms. Ryan had been blown up in Zangabad or someplace. I didn’t have any scars like that. Wished I did though. People understand a scar. They can conceive a no-good arm. People understand what they see.

Tim O’Brien wrote a book called The Things They Carried. Published in March 28, 1990 it became the quintessential Vietnam war story.

“It was very sad, he thought. The things men carried inside. The things men did or felt they had to do.” — Tim O’Brien

I wonder sometimes about the things I carry. The meaninglessness of it all. Course different things mean differently. Things that mean powerfully one day fatigue and mean nothing on another. It gets exhausting. A man can’t care about it all.

In war you do what you must. But that’s no answer is it? A man always has a choice. Man is a textile made of choice. A summation of moments around doing or not doing. Choose to hold it in or let it go.

“But the thing about remembering is that you don’t forget.”
- Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

The leap is that remembering or knowing is nothing to do with carrying. We are still carrying long after we go numb from the knowing.

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.” 
- Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

When I came home from rehab it was like I’d found home again. I touched the war and it touched me. Because war can be many things.

“War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.” 
- Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

I watched the news in County Jail when American troops withdrew from Afghanistan. Was like falling into an empty well. All those years had been for what? We carry those things too. Questions.

So many people missing the point. Asking the wrong questions. Maybe that’s what hurts. It’s a different kind of pain. An ache that was once sharp but now dull, soft throbbing beneath the surface. We have fascination for the things we cannot touch. And we don’t listen to the people who have. And the people who have go quiet. Another light in the tower blinked out.

“They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity.”
- Tim O’Brien, The Things We Carried

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Imagine. You are in a cavern. It’s throaty, monstrous, deep. Beyond conception. You shout expecting the echo that always happens in caverns but never get it. Your voice sinks into endless dark and you get nothing back. That’s the way of it sometimes. Thinking about war or trying to draw sense from it. A dark and endless cavern that gives nothing back.

I guess that’s what the therapy was for. Making meaning from those months and years. But my meaning challenges their meaning and that gets confused. You and I are not at war. But there’s transference. The war starts on the streets of Iraq, goes to the valleys of Afghanistan, sails the ocean to Washington, then settles into a home. Lastly it makes ashes inside a man.

What I have carried is a whisper that maybe I am not the man I think I am. Then I wonder what man I think I am. Not particularly brilliant. Not particularly brave. Little valor to speak of. Just enough to mix into hot war and be palatable.

During infantry training we dreaded the casualty assessor. No man left behind. So when a casualty is assessed the platoon has to carry the wounded soldier and all his gear. More things to carry. We pick up the burdens shouldered by others as well. Maybe I tried carrying too much for too long. Emotions. Guilt. How do you carry invisible things? How do you set them down?

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Leaning into love rather than out of it.

“…but Lieutenant Cross reminded himself that his obligation was not to be loved but to lead. He would dispense with love; it was not now a factor.”
- Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

Putting love into a box where it cannot trip you up. That is the way of war. Placing a lock onto the box so nobody can open the box and take it. Because you have a job and the job excludes permissions or room for anything else. The job demands one hundred percent of a man and that one hundred percent of a man be unaffected by love. War might be the only place where love happens after action instead of before. Then again. Maybe that is true love.

“In those burned letters Martha had never mentioned the war, except to say, Jimmy, take care of yourself. She wasn’t involved. She signed the letters ‘love’, but it wasn’t love, and all the fine lines and technicalities did not matter.”
- Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

Chasm. Also. Small fissures. All of it means the same thing. That there is space between you and me. Between Martha and Jimmy. Letters reach people but don’t reach people. Letters deliver to people but don’t involve them.

I made a phone call to my wife once every two weeks. Sat on the phone in mostly silence while soldiers formed lines behind me. Then I hung up and planned platoon operations. I don’t recall any of those conversations. There wasn’t much to say. Some distances can’t be crossed with phones.

Going through divorce while I was in Panj’wai. More year old forest rolled up in tarp. Love didn’t do any dramatic collapse. It just sort of crumbled apart like sandstone. The bombs and hellfires and casualty reports and death of love all muddled together. Stitched into a wool blanket.

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“The war didn’t ask anything of them. It didn’t touch their lives. When I left the [dinner] party, I knew I would never go back. I would never have a connection with any of them again.”
- Nellie Coakley, BOOM!

The impacts are strange and many and alien. They surface when you realize, again, that there are still separations. No man wants to be a curiosity. Not if it’s at the expense of touch.

“You never really leave the battlefield. I was older at twenty-four than I am today.”
- Senator James Webb

I come home to it. Not everyday. But I come home to it. Not every moment. But I come home to it. The ghosts sit on flat surfaces like blown napkins. They hang like plastic sacks.

Did you kill anyone she asks. The conversation goes unanswered. The festivities continue. I refill my drink.

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Roman Newell is hard at work on his debut novel — 20XX — a work in magical realism, which explores the complexities and conflicts in modern day societies amid confusing social norms, rapidly evolving technology, and impact traumas. Follow Roman’s Substack to be added to the 20XX contact list.