The Things They Carried: List 4

In the spring of 1975, near the time of Saigon’s final collapse, I received a long, disjointed letter in which Bowker described the problem of finding a meaningful use for his life after the war.

The letter covered seventeen handwritten pages, its tone jumping from self-pity to anger to irony to guilt to a kind of feigned indifference.

In the middle of the letter, for example, he reproached himself for complaining too much...

One thing I hate—really hate—is all those whiner-vets. Guys sniveling about how they didn’t get any parades.

Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat. Partly catharsis, partly communication, it was a way of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to me, how I’d allowed myself to get dragged into a wrong war, all the mistakes I’d made, all the terrible things I had seen and done.

For the scenery I borrowed heavily from my own hometown. Wholesale thievery, in fact. I lifted up Worthington, Minnesota—the lake, the road, the causeway, the woman in pedal pushers, the junior college, the handsome houses and docks and boats and public parks—and carried it all a few hundred miles south and transplanted it onto the Iowa prairie.

As a consequence I’d lost the natural counterpoint between the lake and the field. A metaphoric unity was broken.

Over the next several months, as it often happens, I managed to erase the story’s flaws from my memory, taking pride in a shadowy, idealized recollection of its virtues.

Kiowa, after all, had been a close friend, and for years I’ve avoided thinking about his death and my own complicity in it.

The kid’s father taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, where Kiowa had been raised to believe in the promise of salvation under Jesus Christ, and this conviction had always been present in the boy’s smile, in his posture toward the world, in the way he never went anywhere without an illustrated New Testament that his father had mailed to him as a birthday present back in January.

The order had come from higher, true, but still he should’ve exercised some field discretion. He should’ve moved to higher ground for the night, should’ve radioed in false coordinates.

In the letter to Kiowa’s father he would apologize point-blank. Just admit to the blunders.

No sense of direction, though, and the field seemed to suck him under, and everything was black and wet, and he couldn’t get his bearings, and then another round hit nearby, and for a few moments all he could do was hold his breath and duck down beneath the water.

...it was all a matter of luck and happenstance.

Near the center of the field First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross squatted in the muck, almost entirely submerged.

He was back home in New Jersey. A golden afternoon on the golf course, the fairways lush and green, and he was teeing it up on the first hole.

It’s time to be blunt. I’m forty-three years old, true, and I’m a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier.
Almost everything else is invented.

For the most part she’d held up well—far better than I—and over the first two weeks she’d trooped along without complaint as we hit the obligatory tourist stops. Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum in Hanoi. A model farm outside Saigon. The tunnels at Cu Chi.

There were birds and butterflies, the soft rustlings of rural-anywhere.

For a few moments I could not bring myself to move. Like waking from a summer nap, feeling lazy and sluggish, the world collecting itself around me.

He was green and incompetent and scared.

Bobby Jorgenson didn’t know about shock, or if he did, the fear made him forget. To make it worse, he bungled the patch job...

You become a civilian. You forfeit membership in the family, the blood fraternity, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t pretend to be part of it.

There were a million ways to die. Getting shot was one way. Booby traps and land mines and gangrene and shock and polio from a VC virus.

No, I botched it. Period. Got all frozen up, I guess. The noise and shooting and everything—my first firefight—I just couldn’t handle it.

He looked so earnest, so sad and hurt, that it almost made me feel guilty.

I’d come to this war a quiet, thoughtful sort of person, a college grad, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, all the credentials, but after seven months in the bush I realized that those high, civilized trappings had somehow been crushed under the weight of the simple daily realities.

I’d come to this war a quiet, thoughtful sort of person, a college grad, Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, all the credentials, but after seven months in the bush I realized that those high, civilized trappings had somehow been crushed under the weight of the simple daily realities.

It was ghost country, and Charlie Cong was the main ghost. The way he came out at night. How you never really saw him, just thought you did. Almost magical—appearing, disappearing. He could blend with the land, changing form, becoming trees and grass. He could levitate. He could fly.

He was sitting there with Dave Jensen and Mitchell Sanders and a few others, and he seemed to fit in very nicely, all chumminess and group rapport.

Eyes open, be alert—old imperatives, old movies. It all swirls together, clichés mixing with your own emotions, and in the end you can’t tell one from the other.

He’d try to bring the night into focus, willing coherence, but the effort would only cause distortions.

I was the land itself—everything, everywhere—the fireflies and paddies, the midnight rustlings, the cool phosphorescent shimmer of evil—I was atrocity—I was jungle fire, jungle drums...

Starlight sparkled in the barbed wire, and there were curious reflections and layerings of shadow, and the big white moon added resonance. There was nothing moral in the world.

“Poor, poor boy,” he said. The rest was inflection and white eyes.

I was lucid—things were clear—but my tongue wouldn’t fit around the words.

The gas puffed up in a thin cloud that partly obscured Bunker Six.

It was a World War Two film: the Allies devise a scheme to mislead Germany about the site of the upcoming landings in Europe.

Other stories were passed down like legends from old-timer to newcomer. Mostly, though, we had to make up our own. Often they were exaggerated, or blatant lies, but it was a way of bringing body and soul back together, or a way of making new bodies for the souls to inhabit.

For a second I wondered if somebody had made a terrible blunder. A technical mistake: pumped her too full of formaldehyde or embalming fluid or whatever they used.