The war wasn't all terror and violence.

Sometimes things could almost get sweet. For instance, I remember a
little boy with a plastic leg. I remember how he hopped over to Azar and asked for a chocolate bar—"GI number one," the kid said—and Azar laughed and handed over the chocolate. When the boy hopped away,
Azar clucked his tongue and said, "War's a bitch." He shook his head sadly. "One leg, for Chrissake. Some poor fucker ran out of ammo."

I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to pry off the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing the lice in a blue USO envelope. His eyes were tired. It had been a long two weeks in the bush. After an hour or so
he sealed up the envelope, wrote FREE in the upper right-hand corner, and addressed it to his draft board in Ohio.
On occasions the war was like a Ping-Pong ball. You could put fancy spin on it, you could make it dance.

I remember Norman Bowker and Henry Dobbins playing checkers every evening before dark. It was a ritual for them. They would dig a foxhole and get the board out and play long, silent games as the sky went
from pink to purple. The rest of us would sometimes stop by to watch. There was something restful about it, something orderly and reassuring. 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.

I'm forty-three years old, and a writer now, and the war has been over for a long while. Much of it is hard to remember. I sit at this typewriter and stare through my words and watch Kiowa sinking into the deep muck of a shit field, or Curt Lemon hanging in pieces from a tree, and as I write about these things, the remembering is turned into a kind of rehappening. Kiowa yells at me. Curt Lemon steps from the shade into bright sunlight, his face brown and shining, and then he soars into a tree.
The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.
But the war wasn't all that way.

Like when Ted Lavender went too heavy on the tranquilizers. "How's the war today?" somebody would say, and Ted Lavender would give a soft, spacey smile and say, "Mellow, man. We got ourselves a nice mellow war today."

And like the time we enlisted an old poppa-san to guide us through the mine fields out on the Batangan Peninsula. The old guy walked with a limp, slow and stooped over, but he knew where the safe spots were and where you had to be careful and where even if you were careful you could end up like popcorn. He had a tightrope walker's feel for the land
beneath him—its surface tension, the give and take of things. Each morning we'd form up in a long column, the old poppa-san out front, and for the whole day we'd troop along after him, tracing his footsteps, playing an exact and ruthless game of follow the leader. Rat Kiley made up a rhyme that caught on, and we'd all be chanting it together: Step out of line, hit a mine; follow the dink, you're in the pink. All around us, the
place was littered with Bouncing Betties and Toe Poppers and boobytrapped
artillery rounds, but in those five days on the Batangan
Peninsula nobody got hurt. We all learned to love the old man.
It was a sad scene when the choppers came to take us away. Jimmy
Cross gave the old poppa-san a hug. Mitchell Sanders and Lee Strunk
loaded him up with boxes of C rations.
There were actually tears in the old guy's eyes. "Follow dink," he said
to each of us, "you go pink."
If you weren't humping, you were waiting. I remember the monotony.
Digging foxholes. Slapping mosquitoes. The sun and the heat and the
endless paddies. Even in the deep bush, where you could die in any
number of ways, the war was nakedly and aggressively boring. But it was
a strange boredom. It was boredom with a twist, the kind of boredom
that caused stomach disorders. You'd be sitting at the top of a high hill,
the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot
and utterly vacant, and you'd feel the boredom dripping inside you like a
leaky faucet, except it wasn't water, it was a sort of acid, and with each
little droplet you'd feel the stuff eating away at important organs. You'd
try to relax. You'd uncurl your fists and let your thoughts go. Well, you'd
think, this isn't so bad. And right then you'd hear gunfire behind you and
your nuts would fly up into your throat and you'd be squealing pig
squeals. That kind of boredom.
I feel guilty sometimes. Forty-three years old and I'm still writing war
stories. My daughter Kathleen tells me it's an obsession, that I should
write about a little girl who finds a million dollars and spends it all on a
Shetland pony. In a way, I guess, she's right: I should forget it. But the
thing about remembering is that you don't forget. You take your material
where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and
present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it
goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the
traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a
writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things
down as they come at you. That's the real obsession. All those stories.
Not bloody stories, necessarily. Happy stories, too, and even a few
peace stories.
Here's a quick peace story:
A guy goes AWOL. Shacks up in Danang with a Red Cross nurse. It's a
great time—the nurse loves him to death—the guy gets whatever he
wants whenever he wants it. The war's over, he thinks. Just nookie and
new angles. But then one day he rejoins his unit in the bush. Can't wait to
get back into action. Finally one of his buddies asks what happened with
the nurse, why so hot for combat, and the guy says, "All that peace, man,
it felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back."
I remember Mitchell Sanders smiling as he told me that story. Most of
it he made up, I'm sure, but even so it gave me a quick truth-goose.
Because it's all relative. You're pinned down in some filthy hellhole of a
paddy, getting your ass delivered to kingdom come, but then for a few
seconds everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and a few
puffy white clouds, and the immense serenity flashes against your
eyeballs—the whole world gets rearranged—and even though you're
pinned down by a war you never felt more at peace.
What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have
no beginning and no end:
Norman Bowker lying on his back one night, watching the stars, then
whispering to me, "I'll tell you something, O'Brien. If I could have one
wish, anything, I'd wish for my dad to write me a letter and say it's okay
if I don't win any medals. That's all my old man talks about, nothing else.
How he can't wait to see my goddamn medals."
Or Kiowa teaching a rain dance to Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen, the
three of them whooping and leaping around barefoot while a bunch of
villagers looked on with a mixture of fascination and giggly horror.
Afterward, Rat said, "So where's the rain?" and Kiowa said, "The earth is
slow, but the buffalo is patient," and Rat thought about it and said,
"Yeah, but where's the rain?"
Or Ted Lavender adopting an orphan puppy—feeding it from a plastic
spoon and carrying it in his rucksack until the day Azar strapped it to a
Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device.
The average age in our platoon, I'd guess, was nineteen or twenty, and
as a consequence things often took on a curiously playful atmosphere,
like a sporting event at some exotic reform school. The competition could
be lethal, yet there was a childlike exuberance to it all, lots of pranks and
horseplay. Like when Azar blew away Ted Lavender's puppy. "What's
everybody so upset about?" Azar said. "I mean, Christ, I'm just a boy."
I remember these things, too.
The damp, fungal scent of an empty body bag.
A quarter moon rising over the nighttime paddies.
Henry Dobbins sitting in the twilight, sewing on his new bucksergeant
stripes, quietly singing, "A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow
basket."
A field of elephant grass weighted with wind, bowing under the stir of
a helicopter's blades, the grass dark and servile, bending low, but then
rising straight again when the chopper went away.
A red clay trail outside the village of My Khe.
A hand grenade.
A slim, dead, dainty young man of about twenty.
Kiowa saying, "No choice, Tim. What else could you do?"
Kiowa saying, "Right?"
Kiowa saying, "Talk to me."
Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet
the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead
to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are
for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the
night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to
where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when
there is nothing to remember except the story.