This is true.
I had a buddy in Vietnam. His name was Bob Kiley, but everybody called him Rat.
A friend of his gets killed, so about a week later Rat sits down and writes a letter to the guy's sister. Rat tells her what a great brother she had, how strack the guy was, a number one pal and comrade. A real soldier's soldier, Rat says. Then he tells a few stories to make the point, how her brother would always volunteer for stuff nobody else would volunteer for in a million years, dangerous stuff, like doing recon or going out on these really badass night patrols. Stainless steel balls, Rat tells her. They guy was a little crazy, for sure, but crazy in a good way, a real daredevil, because he like the challenge of it, he liked testing himself, just man against gook. A great, great guy, Rat says.
Anyway, it's a terrific letter, very personal and touching. Rat almost bawls writing it. He gets all teary telling about the good times they had together, how her brother made the war seem almost fun, always raising hell and lighting up villes and bringing smoke to bear every which way. A great sense of humor, too. Like the time at this river when he went fishing with a whole damn crate of hand grenades. Probably the funniest thing in world history, Rat says, all that gore, about twenty zillion dead gook fish. Her brother, he had the right attitude. He knew how to have a good time. On Halloween, this real hot spooky night, the dude paints up his body all different colors and puts on this weird mask and goes out on ambush almost stark naked, just boots and balls and an M-16. A tremendous human being, Rat says. Pretty nutso sometimes, but you could trust him with your life.
And then the letter gets very sad and serious. Rat pours his heart out. He says he loved the guy. He says the guy was his best friend in the world. They were like soul mates, he says, like twins or something, they had a whole lot in common. He tells the guy's sister he'll look her up when the war's over.
So what happens?
Rat mails the letter. He waits two months. The dumb cooze never writes back.
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done.
In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't
extract
the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really,
there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh." True
war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.
For
example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly
true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can't believe it
with my stomach. Nothing turns inside.
It
comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach
believe.
This
one does it for me. I've told it before - many times, many versions - but
here's what actually happened.
We
crossed that river and marched west into the mountains. On the third day, my
friend Curt Lemon stepped on a boobytrapped artillery round. He was playing
catch with Rat Kiley, laughing, and then he was dead. The trees were thick; it
took nearly an hour to cut an LZ for the dustoff.
Later,
higher in the mountains, we came across a baby VC water buffalo. What it was
doing there I don't know - no farms, no paddies—but we chased it down and,
got a rope around it and led it along to a deserted village where we set up for
the night. After supper Rat Kiley went over and stroked its nose.
He
opened up a can of C rations, pork and beans, but the baby buffalo wasn't
interested.
Rat shrugged.
He
stepped back and shot it through the right front knee.
The
animal did not make a sound. It went down hard, then
got up again, and Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot it in the
hindquarters and in the little hump at its back. He shot it twice in the
flanks. It wasn't to kill; it was to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle up against
the mouth and shot the mouth away. Nobody said much. The whole platoon stood
there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn't a great deal of
pity for the baby water buffalo. Curt Lemon was dead. Rat Kiley had lost his
best friend in the world. Later in the week Rat would write a long personal
letter to the guy's sister, who would not write back, but for now, it was
simply a question of pain. He shot off the tail. He shot away—chunks of
meat below the ribs. All around us there was the smell of smoke and filth and
greenery, and the evening was humid and very hot. Rat went to automatic. He
shot randomly, almost casually, quick little spurts in the belly. Then he
reloaded, squatted down, and shot it in the left front knee. Again the animal
fell hard and tried to get up, but this time it couldn't quite make it. It
wobbled and went down sideways. Rat shot it in the nose. He bent forward and
whispered something, as if talking to a pet, then he
shot it in the throat. All the while the baby water buffalo was silent, or
almost silent, just a little bubbling sound where the nose had been. It lay
very still. Nothing moved except the eyes, which were enormous, the pupils shiny
black and dumb.
Rat
Kiley was crying. He tried to say something, but them cradled his rifle and
went off by himself.
The
rest of us stood in a ragged circle around the baby buffalo. For a long time
no one spoke. We had witnessed something essential, something brand-new
and profound, a piece of the world so startling there was not yet a word
for it.
Somebody
kicked the baby buffalo.
It
was still alive, though just barely, just in the eyes. "Amazing," Dave
Jensen said. "My whole life, I never seen anything
like it."
"Never?" "Not hardly.
Not once."
Kiowa
and Mitchell Sanders picked up the baby buffalo. They hauled it across the open
square, hoisted it up, and dumped it in the village well.
Afterward,
we sat waiting for Rat to get himself together.
"Amazing," Dave
Jensen kept saying. "A new wrinkle. I never seen it before."
Mitchell
Sanders took out his yo-yo. "Well, that's
How
do you generalize?
War
is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is 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; makes you dead.
The
truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is
grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can't help
but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding
through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch in ambush as a cool,
impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire the fluid
symmetries of troops on the move, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down
from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply
orange glow of napalm, the rocket's red glare. It's not pretty, exactly. It's
astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes
do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle
or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral
indifference—a powerful, implacable beauty—and a true war story will
tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.
To
generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is
true. Almost nothing is true. Though it's odd, you're never more alive than
when you're almost dead. You recognize what's valuable. Freshly, as if for the
first time, you love what's best in yourself and in the world, all that might
be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide
river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the
morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible
things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on
the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are
filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always
should be, but now is not.
Mitchell
Sanders was right. For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel - the
spiritual texture - of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no
clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths
no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, hate
into love, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The
vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the
only certainty is absolute ambiguity.
In
war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and
therefore it's safe to say that in a true war story nothing is absolutely true.
Often
in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn't hit
you until, say, twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake
your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end
you've forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there
watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife's breathing.
The war's over. You close your eyes. You smile and think, Christ, what's the point?
This
one wakes me up.
In
the mountains that day, I watched Lemon turn sideways. He laughed and said
something to Rat Kiley. Then he took a funny half step, moving from shade into
bright sunlight, and the booby-trapped artillery round blew him into a tree.
The parts were just hanging there, so Dave Jensen and I were ordered to shinny
up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of
skin and something wet and yellow. The gore was horrible, and stays with me.
But what wakes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing "Lemon
Tree" as we threw down the parts.
You
can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story,
let's say, and afterward you ask, "Is it true?" and if the answer
matters, you've got your answer.
For
example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails
out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.
Is
it true?
The
answer matters.
You'd
feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it's just a
trite bit of puffery, pure
Twenty
years later, I can still see the sunlight on Curt Lemon's face. I can see him
turning, looking back at Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that curious half
step from shade into sunlight, his face brown and shining, and when his foot
touched down, in that instant, he must've thought it was the sunlight that was
killing him. It was not the sunlight. It was a rigged 105 round. But if I could
ever get the story right, how the sun seemed to gather around him and pick him
up and lift him into that tree, if I could somehow recreate the fatal whiteness
of that light, the quick glare, the obvious cause and effect, then you would
believe the last thing Curt Lemon believed, which for him must've been the
final truth. Sunlight was killing him.
Now
and then, when I tell this story, someone will come up to me afterward and say
she liked it. It's always a woman. Usually it's an older woman of kindly
temperament and humane politics. She'll explain that as a rule she hates war
stories; she can't understand why people want to wallow in all the blood and
gore. But this one she liked. The poor baby buffalo, it made her sad.
Sometimes, even, there are little tears. What I should do, she'll say, is put
it all behind me.
Find new stories to tell.
I
won't say it but I'll think it.
I'll
picture Rat Kiley's face, his grief, and I'll think, You dumb cooze.
Because she wasn't listening.
It
wasn't a war story. It was a love story.