If I Die in a Combat Zone Read Online Free Page A

ex-lieutenant colonel talk about serving in a right war, when the question was whether to serve in what seemed a wrong one.
    On August 13, I went to the bus depot. A Worthington Daily Globe photographer took my picture standing by a rail fence with four other draftees.
    Then the bus took us through corn fields, to little towns along the way—Rushmore and Adrian—where other recruits came aboard. With the tough guys drinking beer and howling in the back seats, brandishing their empty cans and calling one another “scum” and “trainee” and “GI Joe,” with all this noise and hearty farewelling, we went to Sioux Falls. We spent the night in a YMCA. I went out alone for a beer, drank it in a corner booth, then I bought a book and read it in my room.
    At noon the next day our hands were in the air, even the tough guys. We recited the oath—some of us loudly and daringly, others in bewilderment. It was a brightly lighted room, wood paneled. A flag gave the place the right colors. There was smoke in the air. We said the words, and we were soldiers.
    I’d never been much of a fighter. I was afraid of bullies: frustrated anger. Still, I deferred to no one. Positively lorded myself over inferiors. And on top of that was the matter of conscience and conviction, uncertain and surface-deep but pure nonetheless. I was a confirmed liberal. Not a pacifist, but I would have cast my ballot to end the Vietnam war, I would have voted for Eugene McCarthy, hoping he would make peace. I was not soldier material, that was certain.
    But I submitted. All the soul searchings and midnight conversations and books and beliefs were voided by abstention, extinguished by forfeiture, for lack of oxygen, by a sort of sleepwalking default. It was no decision, no chain of ideas or reasons, that steered me into the war.
    It was an intellectual and physical standoff, and I did not have the energy to see it to an end. I did not want to be a soldier, not even an observer to war. But neither did I want to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and my own private world. It was not just that I valued that order. I also feared its opposite—inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that had happened in my life, the end of it all.
    And the standoff is still there. I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows, from one who’s been there and come back, an old soldier looking back at a dying war.
    That would be good. It would be fine to integrate it all to persuade my younger brother and perhaps some others to say no to wrong wars.
    Or it would be fine to confirm the old beliefs about war: It’s horrible, but it’s a crucible of men and events and, in the end, it makes more of a man out of you.
    But, still, none of this seems right.
    Now, war ended, all I am left with are simple, unpro-found scraps of truth. Men die. Fear hurts and humiliates. It is hard to be brave. It is hard to know what bravery is . Dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are dreamers, drill sergeants are boors, some men thought the war was proper and others didn’t and most didn’t care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?
    Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.

Four
Nights
          I ncoming,” the lieutenant shouted.
    We dove for a foxhole. I was first in, the earth taking care of my belly; the lieutenant and some others piled in on top of me.
    Grenades burst around the perimeter, a few rifle shots.
    “Wow, like a sandwich,” I said. “Just stay where you are.”
    “Yep, we’re nothing but sandbags for O’Brien,” Mad Mark said, peering up to watch the explosions go