A Long Walk Through Hell
A young American solider takes pause for a shot post landing in 1965 Vietnam.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
For all the charm a moustache wields, Movember’s real meaning is darker than we’d think — and it should be.
Let’s be blunt about this: We wear moustaches this month for good men who’ve got it bad.
Does said cause abolish the fun in wearing some hair above our lips?
No, moustaches are to be enjoyed, like a restored, mint green, 1990 Fiat Panda that hums like new. But should the fun that follows sporting a ‘stache blur your moral boundaries, remember — and always remember — that the moustaches we wear mark our ability to care about those around us who ail, both in their bodies and their minds.
But knowing this still won’t extinguish the horrors that haunt the minds of war vets, men who’ve seen things no one should see.
To be clear, post traumatic stress disorder isn’t more or less severe than, say, testicular cancer in normative value; both can kill a man if left alone, and that’s what matters in the end.
According to an American Addiction Centers article posted just last summer, “about 20 American vets” will kill themselves on any given day.
And in our country of Canada, vets are 1.4 times more likely to commit suicide than the average citizen. However you look at that, it’s fucked up.
And if you’re wondering why we didn’t warn you about the dark subject matter at hand, don’t. Instead, know that there are times for learning about shave cream and there are times to learn about real life. Being mired in a morass of shit, whether that be an addiction or something far worse, is all the same when good men die with no need.
We’re not just in this to help you groom better, we’re here to help you live better, too. And part of that means knowing — and appreciating — where fallen men once tread, lest you tread there, too, whether it be in war or in life.
Also, you know we’re suckers for a good read, and there’s one worth sharing in honour of our brothers who live through war only to suffer in life.
What you’re about to read is a pre-selected excerpt from a beloved — and partially banned — 1990 fiction about an American platoon bearing the mental hell of the Vietnam war, one that, to this day, begs the question “why?”
And no, this story isn’t about jocular heroes who dodge bullets and sling one-liners. It’s as close to being “in the shit” as you’ll get without going back in time.
Without further ado, here is The Things They Carried, written (and narrated) by multi-award winning American author and Vietnam veteran, Tim O’Brien.
(Warning: The following content is graphic and describes brutal images of war. Reader discretion is advised.)
“We kept the dead alive with stories.”
In Vietnam, too, we had ways of making the dead seem not quite so dead.
Shaking hands, that was one way. By slighting death, by acting, we pretended it was not the terrible thing it was. By our language, which was both hard and wistful, we transformed the bodies into piles of waste. Thus, when someone got killed, as Curt Lemon did, his body was not really a body, but rather one small bit of waste in the midst of a much wider wastage. I learned that words make a difference. It's easier to cope with a kicked bucket than a corpse; if it isn't human, it doesn't matter much if it's dead. And so a VC nurse, fried by napalm, was a crispy critter. A Vietnamese baby, which lay nearby, was a roasted peanut. "Just a crunchie munchie," Rat Kiley said as he stepped over the body.
We kept the dead alive with stories.
When Ted Lavender was shot in the head, the men talked about how they'd never seen him so mellow, how tranquil he was, how it wasn't the bullet but the tranquilizers that blew his mind. He wasn't dead, just laid-back. There were Christians among us, like Kiowa, who believed in the New Testament stories of life after death. Other stories were passed down like legends from old-timer to newcomer. Mostly, though, we had to make up our own. Often they were exaggerated, or blatant lies, but it was a way of bringing body and soul back together, or a way of making new bodies for the souls to inhabit. There was a story, for instance, about how Curt Lemon had gone trick-or-treating on Halloween.
A dark, spooky night, and so Lemon put on a ghost mask and painted up his body all different colors and crept across a paddy to a sleeping village—almost stark naked, the story went, just boots and balls and an M-16—and in the dark Lemon went from hootch to hootch—ringing doorbells, he called it—and a few hours later, when he slipped back into the perimeter, he had a whole sackful of goodies to share with his pals: candles and joss sticks and a pair of black pajamas and statuettes of the smiling Buddha. That was the story, anyway. Other versions were much more elaborate, full of descriptions and scraps of dialogue. Rat Kiley liked to spice it up with extra details: "See, what happens is, it's like four in the morning, and Lemon sneaks into a hootch with that weird ghost mask on. Everybody's asleep, right? So he wakes up this cute little mama-san. Tickles her foot. 'Hey, Mama- san,' he goes, real soft like. 'Hey, Mama-san—trick or treat!' Should've seen her face. About freaks. I mean, there's this buck naked ghost standing there, and he's got this M-16 up against her ear and he whispers, 'Hey, Mama-san, trick or fuckin' treat!' Then he takes off her pj's. Strips her right down. Sticks the pajamas in his sack and tucks her into bed and heads for the next hootch."
Pausing a moment, Rat Kiley would grin and shake his head. "Honest to God," he'd murmur. "Trick or treat. Lemon—there's one class act."
To listen to the story, especially as Rat Kiley told it, you'd never know that Curt Lemon was dead. He was still out there in the dark, naked and painted up, trick-or-treating, sliding from hootch to hootch in that crazy white ghost mask. But he was dead.
In September, the day after Linda died, I asked my father to take me down to Benson's Funeral Home to view the body. I was a fifth grader then; I was curious. On the drive downtown my father kept his eyes straight ahead. At one point, I remember, he made a scratchy sound in his throat. It took him a long time to light up a cigarette.
"Timmy," he said, "you're sure about this?"
I nodded at him. Down inside, of course, I wasn't sure, and yet I had to see her one more time. What I needed, I suppose, was some sort of final confirmation, something to carry with me after she was gone.
When we parked in front of the funeral home, my father turned and looked at me. "If this bothers you," he said, "just say the word. We'll make a quick getaway. Fair enough?"
"Okay," I said.
"Or if you start to feel sick or anything—" "I won't," I told him.
Inside, the first thing I noticed was the smell, thick and sweet, like something sprayed out of a can. The viewing room was empty except for Linda and my father and me. I felt a rush of panic as we walked up the aisle. The smell made me dizzy. I tried to fight it off, slowing down a little, taking short, shallow breaths through my mouth. But at the same time I felt a funny excitement. Anticipation, in a way—that same awkward feeling when I walked up the sidewalk to ring her doorbell on our first date. I wanted to impress her. I wanted something to happen between us, a secret signal of some sort. The room was dimly lighted, almost dark, but at the far end of the aisle Linda's white casket was illuminated by a row of spotlights up in the ceiling. Everything was quiet. My father put his hand on my shoulder, whispered something, and backed off. After a moment I edged forward a few steps, pushing up on my toes for a better look.
It didn't seem real. A mistake, I thought. The girl lying in the white casket wasn't Linda. There was a resemblance, maybe, but where Linda had always been very slender and fragile-looking, almost skinny, the body in that casket was fat and swollen. For a second I wondered if somebody had made a terrible blunder. A technical mistake: like they'd pumped her too full of formaldehyde or embalming fluid or whatever they used. Her arms and face were bloated. The skin at her cheeks was stretched out tight like the rubber skin on a balloon just before it pops open. Even her fingers seemed puffy. I turned and glanced behind me, where my father stood, thinking that maybe it was a joke—hoping it was a joke—almost believing that Linda would jump out from behind one of the curtains and laugh and yell out my name.
But she didn't. The room was silent. When I looked back at the casket, I felt dizzy again. In my heart, I'm sure, I knew this was Linda, but even so I couldn't find much to recognize. I tried to pretend she was taking a nap, her hands folded at her stomach, just sleeping away the afternoon. Except she didn't look asleep. She looked dead. She looked heavy and totally dead.
I remember closing my eyes. After a while my father stepped up beside me.
"Come on now," he said. "Let's go get some ice cream."
In the months after Ted Lavender died, there were many other bodies. I never shook hands—not that—but one afternoon I climbed a tree and threw down what was left of Curt Lemon. I watched my friend Kiowa sink into the muck along the Song Tra Bong. And in early July, after a battle in the mountains, I was assigned to a six-man detail to police up the enemy KIAs. There were twenty-seven bodies altogether, and parts of several others. The dead were everywhere. Some lay in piles. Some lay alone. One, I remember, seemed to kneel. Another was bent from the waist over a small boulder, the top of his head on the ground, his arms rigid, the eyes squinting in concentration as if he were about to perform a handstand or somersault. It was my worst day at the war. For three hours we carried the bodies down the mountain to a clearing alongside a narrow dirt road. We had lunch there, then a truck pulled up, and we worked in two-man teams to load the truck. I remember swinging the bodies up. Mitchell Sanders took a man's feet, I took the arms, and we counted to three, working up momentum, and then we tossed the body high and watched it bounce and come to rest among the other bodies.
The dead had been dead for more than a day. They were all badly bloated. Their clothing was stretched tight like sausage skins, and when we picked them up, some made sharp burping sounds as the gases were released. They were heavy. Their feet were bluish green and cold. The smell was terrible. At one point Mitchell Sanders looked at me and said, "Hey, man, I just realized something."
"What?"
He wiped his eyes and spoke very quietly, as if awed by his own wisdom.
"Death sucks," he said.
Lying in bed at night, I made up elaborate stories to bring *Linda alive in my sleep. I invented my own dreams. It sounds impossible, I know, but I did it. I'd picture somebody's birthday party—a crowded room, I'd think, and a big chocolate cake with pink candles—and then soon I'd be dreaming it, and after a while Linda would show up, as I knew she would, and in the dream we'd look at each other and not talk much, because we were shy, but then later I'd walk her home and we'd sit on her front steps and stare at the dark and just be together.
She'd say amazing things sometimes. "Once you're alive," she'd say, "you can't ever be dead."
Or she'd say: "Do I look dead?"
It was a kind of self-hypnosis. Partly willpower, partly faith, which is how stories arrive.
But back then it felt like a miracle. My dreams had become a secret meeting place, and in the weeks after she died I couldn't wait to fall asleep at night. I began going to bed earlier and earlier, sometimes even in bright daylight. My mother, I remember, finally asked about it at breakfast one morning. "Timmy, what's wrong?" she said, but all I could do was shrug and say, "Nothing. I just need sleep, that's all." I didn't dare tell the truth. It was embarrassing, I suppose, but it was also a precious secret, like a magic trick, where if I tried to explain it, or even talk about it, the thrill and mystery would be gone. I didn't want to lose Linda.
She was dead. I understood that. After all, I'd seen her body, and yet even as a nine-year-old I had begun to practice the magic of stories. Some I just dreamed up. Others I wrote down—the scenes and dialogue. And at nighttime I'd slide into sleep knowing that Linda would be there waiting for me. Once, I remember, we went ice skating late at night, tracing loops and circles under yellow floodlights. Later we sat by a wood stove in the warming house, all alone, and after a while I asked her what it was like to be dead. Apparently Linda thought it was a silly question. She smiled and said, "Do I look dead?"
I told her no, she looked terrific. I waited a moment, then asked again, and Linda made a soft little sigh. I could smell our wool mittens drying on the stove.
For a few seconds she was quiet.
"Well, right now," she said, "I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like ... I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading."
"A book?" I said.
"An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading."
Linda smiled at me.
"Anyhow, it's not so bad," she said. "I mean, when you're dead, you just have to be yourself." She stood up and put on her red stocking cap. "This is stupid. Let's go skate some more."
So I followed her down to the frozen pond. It was late, and nobody else was there, and we held hands and skated almost all night under the yellow lights.
* Linda was Mr. O’Brien’s childhood girlfriend who died when he and her were both nine-years-old.
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Every November, we donate either a percentage of the proceeds we earn or thousands of dollars in actual grooming supplies to the Movember foundation, a Canadian initiative that drives awareness regarding life-threatening health issues that ail men by the millions worldwide. We want to help good men who have it harder than us, so if you can, join us in our efforts and visit ca.movember.com.
And if you know a man who needs help, talk to him.
Like they say, “it’s never too late.”
The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien
Penguin Random House, 1990