If I Die in a Combat Zone. Tim O’Brien
get the bastard,’ Erik said. We could pick off the man with one shot from an M-14, no problem. He’d taught us well. Erik laughed and shook his fist at the window. ‘Too easy to shoot him.
‘There’s not much I can say to you,’ Erik said. ‘I had this awful suspicion they’d screw you, make you a grunt. Maybe you can break a leg during advanced training; pretend you’re insane.’ Erik had decided at the beginning of basic to enlist for three years, tacking on an extra year as a soldier but escaping infantry duty. I had gambled, thinking they would use me for more than a pair of legs, certain that someone would see the value of my ass behind a typewriter or a Xerox machine. We’d joked about the gamble for two months.
I shook Erik’s hand in the latrine and walked with him to his bus and shook his hand again.
In advanced infantry training, the soldier learns new ways to kill people.
Claymore mines, booby traps, the M-60 machine gun, the M-70 grenade launcher. The old .45-calibre pistol. Drill sergeants give lessons on the M-16 automatic rifle, standard weapon in Vietnam.
On the outside, AIT looks like basic training. Lots of push-ups, lots of shoe-shining and firing ranges and midnight marches. But AIT is not basic training. The difference is inside the new soldier’s skull, locked to his brain, the certainty of being in a war, pending doom that comes in with each day’s light and stays with him all the day long.
The soldier in advanced infantry training is doomed, and he knows it and thinks about it. War, a real war. The drill sergeant said it when we formed up for our first inspection: every swingin’ dick in the company was now a foot soldier, a grunt in the United States Army, the infantry, Queen of Battle. Not a cook in the lot, not a clerk or mechanic among us. And in eight weeks, he said, we were all getting on a plane that would fly to a war.
The man who finds himself in AIT is doomed, and he knows it and thinks about it. There are no more hopes of being made into a rear-echelon trooper. The drill sergeant said it when we formed up for our first inspection: every swingin’ dick in the company was now a foot soldier, a grunt in the United States Army. Not a cook or typist in the lot. And in eight weeks, he said, we were all getting on a plane bound for Vietnam.
‘I don’t want you to mope around thinkin’ about Germany or London,’ he told us. ‘Don’t even think about it, ’cause there just ain’t no way. You’re leg men now, and we don’t need no infantry in Piccadilly or Southampton. Besides, Vietnam ain’t all that bad. I been over there twice now, and I’m alive and still screwin’ everything in sight. You troops pay attention to the trainin’ you get here, and every swingin’ dick will be back in one piece, believe me. Just pay attention, try to learn something. The Nam, it ain’t so bad, not if you got your shit together.’
One of the trainees asked him about rumours that said we would be shipped to Frankfurt.
‘Christ, you’ll hear that crap till it makes you puke. Every swingin’ dick is going to Nam, every big fat swingin’ dick.’
Someone raised his hand and asked when we’d get our first pass.
‘Okay,’ the drill sergeant said, acting like a sixth-grade schoolteacher. ‘You men are damn lucky. You got a square company commander. He knows what it’s like to get out of basic, and he told me to get you the hell out of here, fast. So, damn it, if you troops play right with me, there’ll be no problem. Get your gear into the barracks, sweep the place down, and you’ll be in Seattle in an hour.’
I went to the library in Tacoma. I found the Reader’s Guide and looked up the section on the United States Army. Under the heading ‘AWOL and Desertion’ I found the stuff I was looking for. Articles about soldiers who had crept away from the campfires, into Canada, Sweden, France, and Ireland. The librarian fetched out old copies of Newsweek and Time, and I went into a corner and made notes.
Most of the articles were nothing more than interviews with deserters, stories of their lives in Stockholm, where they lived openly, or in Paris, where they hid and used assumed names and grew beards. That was interesting reading – I was concerned with their psychology and with what compelled them to pack up and leave – but I needed something more concrete. I was after details, how-to-do-it stuff. I wanted to know the laws of the various nations, which countries would take deserters, and under what conditions. In one of the Time pieces I found a list of organizations in Sweden and Denmark and the name of a man in Holland, a member of Parliament, who ran a covert underground-railroad system, shipping disenchanted GIs to places where they would be free. I wrote down the names and addresses.
In another article, someone described the best routes into Canada, places where deserting GIs crossed. None of the NATO nations would accept US military deserters; some sort of a mutual extradition pact was in force. I knew Canada harboured draft dodgers, but I couldn’t find anything on their policy towards deserters, and I doubted our northern neighbours went that far. Sweden, despite all the problems of adjustment and employment, seemed the best bet.
I smiled at the librarian when I returned the magazines; then I went into the library’s lobby and called the bus depot. To be sure, I disguised my voice – perhaps they had some sort of tape-recording system – and asked about rates and time schedules for Vancouver. From Seattle, Vancouver was only a two-hour drive, the fellow said, and the rates were low and buses ran frequently, even during the night.
Then I called the Seattle airport and checked on rates to Dublin, Ireland. Playing it carefully, professionally, I inquired first with one of the large American firms, telling them I was a student and wanted to do research there. Then I called Air Canada, gave them the same story, and mentioned that I might want to leave from Vancouver. The man asked if I wanted one-way or round-trip fare. I was ready for that question, and, pausing for a realistic second or two, I said he might as well give me rates for both fares. I might be staying in Dublin for several months. And maybe longer.
Having done all these things, I went back to my corner in the library and, for the first time, persuaded myself that it was truly possible. No one would stop me at the Canadian border, not in a bus. A flight to Ireland would raise no suspicions. From Ireland it was only a day or two by boat to Sweden. There was no doubt that it could be done.
I wrote a letter to my parents, and in the middle of it I asked them to send my passport and immunization card. I’d been to Europe in the summer of 1967, back when travel was fun and not flight. I told them I needed the passport for R & R when I got to Vietnam. I said the shot card was necessary for my army health records.
I itemized the expenses. Five hundred dollars would pull it off. I was two hundred dollars short, but I could find a job in Vancouver and have the balance in two weeks. Or, if I didn’t want to waste the time, there were college people and old friends to borrow from. I wrote letters to a girl friend, crying some and hinting at what was up. I asked her to fly out for my Thanksgiving Day pass.
It was dark when I left the library. It was funny to think my first day of freedom since mid-August had been spent in a building full of books and old ladies. It was remarkable. Drill sergeants and company commanders would laugh at the thought of it, and I was chuckling myself, because that library and those words and those helpful old librarians were going to get me out of this.
Fort Lewis in the winter is sloppy and dirty. It’s wet and very cold, and those things together make your gloves freeze on the firing ranges. On bivouac your sleeping bag stiffens. It’s no fun to smoke – too much trouble to get the pack out, and because there’s no warm place to put your hands after you throw the butt into the slush. Better to stand and wiggle your fingers. After spending days trying to knock down targets with the black rifles, you ride back to the barracks in open cattle trucks, everyone bunched together like the animals that are supposed to ride there and you don’t say anything, just watch the trees, big lush pines in the snow.
But there’s so much to write about, and the details pile on one another so that a massive, grey picture of each day is