And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever.
Together we understood what terror was: you’re not human anymore. You’re a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in. You know you’re about to die. And it’s not a movie and you aren’t a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait.
In a way I wanted to stop myself. It was cruel, I knew that, but right and wrong were somewhere else.
They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing – these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.
Is there sound, he wondered, without reception? Do you hear the shot that gets you? How big, in fact, was the Big Bang? Do our pathetic earthly squeals fall upon deaf ears? Is silence golden or common stone.
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity.
What they carried was partly a function of rank, partly of field specialty.
What they carried varied by mission.
The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition.
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.
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.
Every dark cloud may well have its silver lining, but I have come to learn that every silver lining has its dark consequences.
He killed me at the Scrabble board, barely concentrating, and on those occasions when speech was necessary he had a way of compressing large thoughts into small, cryptic packets of language.
Looking back after twenty years, I sometimes wonder if the events of that summer didn’t happen in some other dimension, a place where your life exists before you’ve lived it, and where it goes afterward.
It had nothing to do with morality. Embarrassment, that’s all it was. And right then I submitted. I would go to the war – I would kill and maybe die – because I was embarrassed not to.
It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.
And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe “Oh.
The day was cloudy. I passed through towns with familiar last names, through the pine forests and down to the prairie, and then to Vietnam, where I was a soldier, and then home again. I survived, but it’s not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.
There were red checkers and black checkers. The playing field was laid out in a strict grid, no tunnels or mountains or jungles. You knew where you stood. You knew the score. The pieces were out on the board, the enemy was visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into larger strategies. There was a winner and a loser. There were rules.
Nostalgia – that’s the basic sickness, and I never heard of a doctor who can cure it.