54 pages • 1 hour read
If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
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Themes
Courage
Much of the book is an investigation into the nature of courage. O'Brien quotes philosophy and poetry, observes various officers, and examines his own pre-Vietnam heroes for clues to the nature of courage. However, it is not an abstract question. It matters because O'Brien wants to conduct himself honorably in the war. He is aware that soldiers lacking courage can do terrible things. During one firefight, O'Brien finds himself "writh[ing] in a meadow," terrified (135). It is not shame that concerns him; rather, he sees a connection between the lack of courage and the commission of war crimes. A cowardly soldier is a dangerous soldier: "If a man can squirm in a meadow, he can shoot children. Neither are examples of courage" (135). As much as O'Brien fears dying, he also does not want to leave Vietnam as a war criminal.
Two main definitions of courage emerge, both of them drawn from works of philosophy by Plato. The first is the idea that courage is "wise endurance" (137). This phrase comes from Plato's philosophical dialogue Laches, in which Laches and Socrates agree that surviving is courageous, but that it also matters how you survive. Only if one knows what they’re doing can their actions be counted as courageous. O'Brien does not want to follow the example of the malingerers, the soldiers who fake illnesses or shoot off their toes in order to get sent to the rear. These men survive, but without courage. Part of the wisdom involved in "wise endurance" is knowing death is possible. The placid cow who faces down an army is not courageous, because the cow doesn't understand what weapons are. Captain Johansen, when he charges at Viet Cong soldier and doesn't waver, is courageous, because he’s aware of the possible repercussions of the act.
O'Brien's other definition of courage is also drawn from Plato, from the Republic. This definition gives Chapter 22 its title: "Courage Is a Certain Kind of Preserving." Unlike enduring, which in this context means surviving the war, the "certain kind of preserving" is preserving the sense of what is terrible. O'Brien does not draw out the discussion of this point, and it remains somewhat opaque. However, it is revealing when considered in the context of O'Brien's experiences of war. Before the war, he would have said that throwing a carton of milk at an old blind man's head was terrible. He would have said it is terrible to shoot children, and terrible to shoot civilians of any age. During the war, he still believes those are terrible things. This is Plato's point: someone who lacks courage can alter their sense of what is terrible. Since O'Brien is fighting in a war he believes is wrong, it is an open question of whether he has preserved his sense of what is terrible, or whether he has forsaken courage to fit in with the majority.
Death
Death is ever-present in O'Brien's account of his tour of duty in Vietnam, beginning with the book's title, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. The title has the rhythm and attitude of one of the marching songs O'Brien learns in basic training. The title suggests an insouciant attitude toward death, perhaps a kind of bravado that functions as a veil for fear. However, these are not O'Brien's attitudes; he does not display a devil-may-care casualness about death, nor does he deal with it through bluster and bravado. In the writing of the book, he takes pains to honestly show himself as afraid of dying in Vietnam. In Chapter 15, "Centurion," O'Brien describes how frightened he became while being fired upon in a meadow: "you writhe like a man suddenly waking during a heart transplant […] the terror is in waiting […] for life to start throbbing and pumping again" (135). As O'Brien's friend Erik writes to him in a letter, their exposure to death has left them with no time to be anything but honest: "We must be honest or be silent" (170).
Other soldiers O'Brien observes find ways to not talk about death. O'Brien feels even the use of slang terms is a way of not facing death: "The word for getting killed was 'wasted'" (141). By avoiding talking about death honestly, the soldiers put on a front: "Fear was taboo. It could be mentioned, of course, but it had to accompanied with a shrug and a grin and obvious resignation" (141).
Several of the chapter titles are references to an often-quoted line from the ancient Roman poet Horace: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," or, "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country." This line is also repeated in a World War I poem by Wilfrid Owen, which describes a death during trench warfare, from poison gas. In the poem, the speaker doubts people would still exhort the young to die for the country if they could witness a grisly death from poison gas. In Chapter 12, "Mori," O'Brien describes the death of guerilla fighter, a woman, who bleeds out through an exit wound in her groin. Although he mentions the fact of the wound, and that she is covered with flies, most of the description is not grisly. Instead, O'Brien observes how shaken the watching American soldiers are.
War Crimes
During his tour of duty, O'Brien fights in "Pinkville," the U.S. Army's name for an area of Vietnam colored pink on its maps. O'Brien's Alpha Company fights in a group of villages called My Lai, and in another called My Khe. In presenting his experiences to the reader, O'Brien is dealing with two perspectives on My Lai. For U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, My Lai is the name of an area thickly sown with mines and booby traps, a place of American deaths. For the reading public at the time O'Brien's book came out, "My Lai" is the name of a war atrocity and represents the deliberate slaughter of Vietnamese civilians.
O'Brien is in Vietnam in 1969. One year before, on March 16, 1968, U.S. soldiers in Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd (Americal) Infantry Division, massacred hundreds of unarmed Vietnam civilians in a village of My Lai. The death toll was somewhere between 347 and 504, and these included women and children, along with men. Some of the women were also raped. Initially, the U.S. Army claimed "128 communists" had been killed. The following year, in November 1969, the story came out in the U.S. press. In the ensuing investigation, only one soldier was convicted, Lieutenant William Calley.
A big question in If I Die in a Combat Zone is whether the kind of brutality exhibited by Lieutenant Calley at My Lai is an exception or the rule. The point of the March 16 mission in My Lai, according to a letter by veteran Robert C. Ridenhour, to thirty members of Congress, was to "destroy the trouble spot and all of its inhabitants." This would mean the orders themselves were the war crime. But only a junior officer, Calley, was convicted. This solitary conviction raises the possibility that the My Lai Massacre was a fluke, perverse actions taken by atypical soldiers.
In If I Die in a Combat Zone, O'Brien gives a voice to a pro-Army point-of-view on the My Lai Massacre and lets Major Callicles defend the U.S. Army's conduct in My Lai. Callicles scoffs at the notion of "civilians" in Vietnam, as the war is being conducted in guerilla fashion, with Viet Cong irregulars and armed civilians carrying out attacks, and other civilians giving aid to the Viet Cong. Callicles says, "Those civilians—you call them civilians—they kill American GIs. They plant mines and snipe and spy and kill us" (193). However, O'Brien gives him the name Callicles, the name of a hard-nosed realist from Plato's dialogue, Gorgias. Callicles possesses one viewpoint in If I Die in a Combat Zone, but his is not O'Brien's viewpoint. Early on, O'Brien even intimates the kind of acts committed at My Lai are somehow a part of the U.S. Army's culture, and even part of American culture: "To understand what happened in the mine fields of My Laiyou have to understand what happens in America […] You must understand a thing called basic training" (32).
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By Tim O'Brien
