If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

“Wear the yellow bastards down, right?”

O'Brien says these words to Barney. They are discussing their mission. Barney says, "Captain says we're gonna search one more ville today" (4). They have searched numerous villages already, and O'Brien thinks the search is pointless. They won't find the enemy, because "Charlie finds us," as O'Brien says (4). However, perhaps searching village after village, exhausting themselves, will wear the enemy down, too. This is the context of the passage. But it is also noticeable for the racial slur. Often in If I Die in a Combat Zone, when an anti-Asian racial slur is used, it appears in other characters' dialogue. But this passage shows O'Brien is not above this kind of racist denigration. In the Vietnam War, the Americans' enemy is seen as a racialized other.

“For more than two hours, we walked and enjoyed the night. No barracks quarrels, no noise. A sense of privacy and peace […]We felt…what? Free. In control. Pardoned. We walked and walked, not talking when there was no desire to talk, talking when words came, walking, pretending it was the deep woods, a midnight hike, just walking and feeling good.”

Erik and O'Brien are on night guard duty at Fort Lewis, in Washington state. Their drill sergeant, Blyton, has punished them with guard duty because they have formed an exclusive friendship, hanging out together all the time like "college pansies," as Blyton says (47). Here, they turn the punishment into a pleasure, enjoying their time alone together. Like O'Brien, Erik likes to be somewhat apart from the mass of fellow soldiers. Ironically the act of walking, which O'Brien here experiences as pleasure, will become a torment in Vietnam, where every step could trigger a mine or booby trap. Although O'Brien and Erik feel "free" and "in control" during their guard duty walk, they are also under the thumb of Blyton (48). When they bullyingly foist the rest of their hours of guard duty onto a weaker new recruit, O'Brien wonders "whether Blyton hadn't won a big victory that night" (49).

“You wear a uniform, you march, you shoot a rifle, but you aren't a soldier. Not really. You don't belong here. Some ghastly mistake.”

O'Brien is in advanced infantry training at Fort Lewis. He has still not resigned himself to his participation in the war, even though being in advanced infantry training means he is definitely on the way to Vietnam. Even though he is closer than ever to departing for Vietnam, he still thinks there is some way for him to escape, as the chapter's title indicates. As ever, O'Brien sees himself as unlike the other soldiers.

“‘Sir, the reason I'm here—I'm disturbed about the Vietnam war. I think it's, you know, wrong. I'm worried about having to—’

‘I know how it is, trooper, we all get scared.’”

At Fort Lewis, O'Brien talks to his battalion commander, hoping his misgivings about the war will be recognized. He thinks he will get some sort of special, official status—perhaps conscientious objector—and be removed from the Army. O'Brien wants to discuss matters of principle, but the battalion commander misunderstands him. The commander treats O'Brien's doubts about the war as fleeting and emotional, not matters of firm principle. O'Brien is hoping for a pardon, a reprieve; what he gets, instead, is a pat on the head. This passage also shows why O'Brien's reluctance about the war goes unheard. He is not a fierce, articulate defender of the anti-war position; he mumbles and blathers. The "you know" weakens the simple declarative sentence "I think it's wrong." And even "I think it's wrong" is a less firm stance than "It is wrong." O'Brien gives up even as he seems to be trying to get out of the war.

“The AWOL bag was ready to go, but I wasn't. I slept some more, dreaming, and when I awakened I vomited and saw it was getting light. I burned the letters to my family. I read the others and burned them too. It was over. I simply couldn't bring myself to flee.”

O'Brien is in a cheap hotel in Seattle, on a weekend leave from Fort Lewis. He has planned his escape. He has his passport and his AWOL bag, and he knows how much money he needs to earn for an airplane ticket to Canada. Like the private protest O'Brien staged in his basement in Minnesota, painting protest signs no one would ever see, this moment of rebellion is short-lived and hobbled from the start. He has made his stand solitary, and it is unobserved. If he had announced it, and told the battalion commander "I quit," or mailed the letter to his family, he would not be able to take it back his gesture silently. 

“Enemy rounds crashed in. The earth split. Most of Alpha Company slept.”

O'Brien has been in Vietnam just one week. He has just arrived at LZ Gator, the headquarters for the Fifth Battalion, Forty-Sixth Infantry. At one or two in the morning, the base comes under enemy fire. This passage shows the difference in perceptions between new-guy O'Brien and the more seasoned soldiers. To O'Brien, enemy fire is as terrifying a cataclysm as the earth splitting open. To most of the other soldiers, it is an unremarkable, everyday event.

“It was not a bad war until we sent a night patrol into a village called Tri Binh 4.”

O'Brien has been in Vietnam about a month. His first month in the field is oddly peaceful. They "wander up and down the beaches outside Chu Lai" (79). They drink beer, relax, lounge in the sun. When O'Brien interrupts this idyll with "it was not a bad war until," it seems the mild understatement is going to introduce something horrific. This is not quite true. O'Brien himself does not go on the night patrol. He knows about it only from the Kid's ecstatic description: "They were right there, right in the open!" (83). And he knows about the battle from the human ear Mad Mark brings back. However, this is bad enough; the idyll on the beach is over, and O'Brien's war has truly begun.

“The man to the front is civilization. He is the United States of America and every friend you have ever known. He is Erik and blond girls and a mother and father. He is your life.”

O'Brien is describing going on night patrol in Vietnam. They walk single file, and each soldier is aware he could be lost if he loses sight of the soldier in front of him. To describe the vital importance of keeping the man in front of him in sight, O'Brien uses a list of important things. The list mixes the generic ("a mother and a father") with the deeply personal ("Erik"). The relentlessness of the list, along with the length of it, shows how O'Brien feels on the verge of losing everything.

“I remembered one of Hemingway's stories. It was about a battle in World War I, about the hideous deaths of tides of human beings, swarming into the fight, engaging under the sun, and ebbing away again into two piles, friend and foe. I wondered why he did not care to talk about the thoughts those men must have had.”

In discussing literary representations of war, O'Brien is implicitly commenting on his own writing about the Vietnam War. His book will be different from Hemingway's, in part because his war is different. There are no "tides of human beings," no masses of soldiers confronting other masses, as in trench warfare in World War I. Instead, the Vietnam War has no vistas of immense battlefields, only the single-file walk along a path, and the unseen enemy encountered most commonly in the form of mines and boobytraps they leave behind. Another difference between Hemingway's war and O'Brien's war writing is the psychological depth. Hemingway's spare prose does not delve into the soldiers' thoughts. O'Brien relies almost entirely on recording his thoughts and emotions.

“We lay in private groups on the tarred parking lot of an airfield. The black soldiers joked and were too loud for the early morning.”

O'Brien and the other soldiers are waiting to be airlifted into combat in Pinkville, an area of Vietnam known to be thickly sown with mines and boobytraps. This casual observation of O'Brien's records the social divisions that still existed in the racially-integrated U.S. Army. While "black soldier" is not at all a racist term, it does highlight O'Brien's white perspective. For O'Brien, a white soldier is just called a soldier; "black soldier" is the marked case, which has to be differentiated from just “the soldier,” meaning the white soldier. Some black soldiers were radicalized in Vietnam, drawing parallels between the United States' war against an Asian nation and the oppression of black Americans at home. This is not part of O'Brien's collection of "war stories," in part because of who he is and whom he befriends in Vietnam.

“When [Colonel Daud] was killed by sappers in a midnight raid, we heard the news over the radio. A lieutenant led us in song, a catchy, happy, celebrating song: Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead. We sang in good harmony. It sounded like a choir.”

Colonel Daud is the officer who orders Alpha Company to make Combat Assaults in Pinkville. The junior officers despise him for being reckless and gung-ho. "What a pompous asshole," another junior officer says of Daud (107). The soldiers show their contempt by feminizing Daud after death, referring to him as a female witch. There are very few women in If I Die in a Combat Zone. More often than actually being encountered in the world, women are an idea or an image in this book: the "blond girls" O'Brien thinks about, or the "Korean stripper" at the floor show. 

“She's a pretty woman, pretty for a gook. You don't see many pretty gooks, that's for damn sure.”

O'Brien does not record who said this; it is one of the "dozen GIs" who anxiously hover over a dying woman, a Viet Cong bleeding out from a bullet wound. It is fatuous and condescending and racist. And yet the men are also somewhat awestruck. They remain standing around her, watching, unable to help but also unable to look away. They seldom encounter the enemy at all; most often, they encounter the mines and boobytraps left by unseen hands, or they come upon the dead the morning after a fight. It is as though they have come close to the mystery of what they are doing in Vietnam, which is killing people. But they have no words for the mystery, only stock phrases laden with racism and sexism.

“The day was quiet and hot, and I was thinking about Coke and rest. Then the bushes just erupted […] I remember getting separated from [the company commander], thinking that I had to get up there. But I couldn't. I lay there. I screamed, I buried my head.”

Here, Alpha Company is on patrol in My Lai. At first, given this description of the chaos and O'Brien's helplessness, it seems he might have been wounded. But he mentions no wound; he is simply reacting to the eruption of violence all around him. O'Brien is concerned about what courage is and how a soldier should act, but in If I Die in a Combat Zone, he also honestly displays his own fear in battle.

“In the next days it took little provocation for us to flick the flint of our Zippo lighters. Thatched roofs take the flame quickly, and on bad days the hamlets of Pinkville burned, taking our revenge in fire. It was good to walk from Pinkville and to see fire behind Alpha Company. It was good, just as pure hate is good.”

Alpha Company has had a rough time of it in Pinkville, encountering mines and uncooperative civilians, and also coming under mortar fire. Out of revenge, the soldiers of Alpha Company burn down huts. The official reason for burning a village is a tactical one: to deprive guerilla fighters of aid from the village. But for Alpha Company, the revenge is personal. These are some of the same acts that horrified the world in the behavior of Charlie Company in My Lai in 1968. The two companies do not behave exactly the same; Calley was on trial for having machine-gunned civilians. But the two groups of soldiers display the same pattern of frustration and revenge. 

“Jet fighters were called in. The hamlet was leveled, and napalm was used. I heard screams in the burning black rubble. I heard the enemy's AK-47 rifles crack out like impotent popguns against the jets. There were Viet Cong in that hamlet. And there were babies and children and people who just didn't give a damn in there too. But Chip and Tom were on their way to Graves Registration in Chu Lai, and they were dead, and it was hard to be filled with pity.”

This is the ordinary course of the Vietnam War. This is the conduct for which there are no court martials: a hamlet reduced to "black rubble" from which screams come. O'Brien uses a rhetoric of justified revenge; "our friends" were killed. Aloof as he is, it is surprising O'Brien has friends in Alpha Company. As earnest and philosophical as he is at other times, O'Brien seems no different than the hard-nosed Major Callicles in this moment. 

“Mail came. My girlfriend traveled in Europe with her boyfriend. My mother and father were afraid for me, praying; my sister was in school, and my brother was playing basketball. The Viet Cong were nearby. They fired for ten seconds and I got onto the radio, called for helicopters, popped smoke, and the medics carried three men to the choppers, and we went to another village.”

This passage shows the huge gulf separating civilian life from O'Brien's wartime experiences. There is some irony in O'Brien calling one of his correspondents "my girlfriend." Since she has written about traveling in Europe with her boyfriend, it seems clear she does not consider O'Brien her boyfriend anymore. The passage has two lists of unremarkable events. The civilian list is full of ordinary events like school and basketball. The wartime list is also full of ordinary events: calling helicopters for the wounded, "popping smoke" so the helicopter pilot can see where to land. These are not exceptional events, like O'Brien lying down and screaming in terror during a firefight. By ending the list with "and we went on to another village," O'Brien makes clear these events will all be repeated: the seconds of gunfire, the wounded, the evacuation. 

“Chip, my black buddy from Orlando, strayed into a hedgerow and triggered a 105 artillery round. He died in such a way that, for once, you could never know his color. He was wrapped in a plastic body bag, we popped smoke, a helicopter took him away, my friend.”

O'Brien seldom speaks of Army friends, apart from Erik, his friend from basic training. So, it is somewhat surprising to see O'Brien referring to this Chip as "my black buddy" and "my friend." Since Chip appears nowhere in the book but here, perhaps in death he loomed larger than in life, more of a friend now that he is gone. His death is horrific, and the dispassionate way O'Brien records it emphasizes how unspeakable it is. There is a long list of clauses, including "He was wrapped in a plastic body bag,” and “we popped smoke." The way the sentence is propelled onward shows Chip's death taken up into the routines of Alpha Company: body bag, helicopter, smoke.

“‘It's more than the fear of death that chews on your mind,’ one soldier, nineteen years old, eight months in the field, said.”

This awkward swerve into journalism is unlike anything else in the book. At first, a reader might wonder if they are seeing the book's roots in earlier, journalistic pieces, perhaps badly edited and leaving some bits of journalism-speak showing. And perhaps that is what this passage is. But O'Brien may have been going for a deliberate effect. The "soldier, nineteen," is unlikely to have been O'Brien himself, who was born in 1946 and would have been 22 or 23 in 1969. In any case, what chews on the kid's mind is what chews on O'Brien's: the "many ways the VC can do it." O'Brien goes on from here to list all the mines and boobytraps the Viet Cong use.

“We walk through the mines, trying to catch the Viet Cong Forty-Eighth Battalion like inexperienced hunters after a hummingbird. But Charlie finds us far more often than we find him. He is hidden among the mass of civilians, or in tunnels, or in jungles. So we walk to find him, stalking the mythical, phantom-like Forty-Eighth Battalion from here to there to here to there. And each piece of ground left behind is his from the moment we are gone on our next hunt.”

O'Brien points out how the asymmetry in American and Viet Cong forces can work against the Americans. A hunter is much bigger than a hummingbird, but the hummingbird is swift, graceful, and elusive. He also points out a consequence of the ghostlike nature of the enemy. The frustration caused by an invisible enemy is well known, and in other passages O'Brien also invokes this as a justification for revenge. But here O'Brien points out something else: the shifting, fluid nature of guerilla warfare in Vietnam means the Americans can never occupy land. The Vietnam War could not have been followed by Americans at home, with maps and radio sets, charting out the positions of the opposing forces, the way children did during World War II. The Americans cannot hold the land; they only pass over it in a series of lethal but futile encounters.

“Death was taboo […] The word for getting killed was 'wasted' […] It could be mentioned, of course, but it had to be accompanied with a shrug and a grin and obvious resignation. All this took the meaning out of courage. We could not gaze straight at fear and dying, not, at least, while out in the field, and so there was no way to face the question.”

Having defined courage as "wise endurance," O'Brien points out the ways the culture of the military prevents soldiers from behaving with true courage. They lack wisdom, because they have all agreed not to talk about fear or death. Thus, they can only endure.

“Then Captain Smith and three others opened fire inside the perimeter. The thing they shot lay there all night, and in the morning we kicked a dead pig.”

The courageous Captain Johansen has been replaced by the cowardly Smith. The perimeter is around a village; Smith's fear, in the middle of the night, is that the enemy has crept inside the perimeter. Although Smith is not the only one to fire on the pig, it happens on his watch and with his participation. Moreover, since O'Brien names only Smith, he puts most of the blame on Smith. The killing of the pig has all the hallmarks of a Smith operation: noisy, frantic, and pointless. 

“Thirty-three villagers were wounded. Thirteen were killed: Bi Thi Cu, two years old; Dao Van Cu, Bi's brother, 4; Le Xi, 2; Dao Thi Thuong, 9; Pham Ti Ku, 4; Pham Khan, 15; Le Chuc, 8; Le Thi Tham, 10—the children.”

After the horrors of My Lai and Pinkville, Alpha Company has an easy time at a lagoon on the seashore. The lagoon is calm. At night, the "mortarmen" fire practice shots, calibrating the correct coordinates for defensive fire, to protect the village. One night they miscalculate and end up firing on the village they mean to protect. Of the thirteen dead, O'Brien lists the names and ages of the children. 

“When the plane leaves the ground, you join everyone in a ritualistic shout, trying to squeeze whatever drama you can out of leaving Vietnam.

But the effort makes the drama artificial. You try to manufacture your own drama, remembering how you promised to savor the departure. You keep to yourself. It's the same, precisely the same, as the arrival: a horde of strangers spewing their emotions and wanting you to share with them.”

As on arrival, the ordinariness of the commercial airline flight is unsettling to O'Brien. It seems out of scale with the occasion. As he asks in the following pages, "What kind of war is it that begins and ends this way, with a pretty girl, cushioned seats, and magazines?"But in this passage what gets to O'Brien is his estrangement from his fellow soldiers. He does not call them "fellow soldiers" but strangers, and ones who "spew their emotions," at that.