For this trip to France, I brought along Tim O’Brien’s 1990 book The Things They Carried. I think everyone should read this. It’s lovely and harsh and sad and inspiring. A collection of remembrances. I gathering of insights to teach us all.
O’Brien writes of the moral confusion of that time – which reminds me of the moral confusion of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (and so much other the moral confusion, e.g. of a civilized country without universal healthcare).
O’Brien writes: “The only certainty that summer [1968] was moral confusion. It was my view then, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.”
And John Kerry asked us, “How do you ask a man [or woman] to die for a mistake?”
In one of the most affecting chapters (On the Rainy River) in The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien talks about why he went to Vietnam rather than leave the U.S. It was too hard to imagine a life without his family, without his friends. It was too embarrassing to leave.
“I couldn’t tolerate it. I couldn’t endure the mockery, or the disgrace, or the patriotic ridicule…. I couldn’t make myself be brave…. I would go to the war – I would kill and maybe die – because I was too embarrassed not to…. I was a coward. I went to the war.”
Now that’s an insight: That it might actually require more courage to leave all that is familiar and risk the criticism of one’s peers.That evading the call to war – whether as a soldier or a goverment – demands greater courage than the commonly-accepted patriotic fervor.
P.S. Now you can subscribe to my blogs through an RSS feed. Just visit the utility bar or the top of the left-hand navigation bar.
