If I Die in a Combat Zone. Tim O’Brien

squad leader’s back. ‘Lifer! Ya hear me? Take yer damn army an’ shove it. Use it fer grade-Z fertilizer!’ Harry pauses. The squad leader hits the lights, glaring and cold and excruciating bright lights. Harry shoves his face into the pillow. ‘Two-bit goddamn lifer!’

      The squad leader orders Harry to scrub the commodes. Harry threatens to use the squad leader’s head as a scrub brush.

      The squad leader is chastened but still in charge. ‘Okay, who’s gonna wax the floor?’ He checks his duty roster, finds a name.

      Mousy whines. ‘Well, for Pete’s sake, they got the buffer downstairs. What the hell ya want? Want me to polish the damn thing with a sock?’

      ‘Use yer brown nose,’ the Montanan drawls, head still tucked into a pillow.

      White paddles over to the shower. You hear him singing about Idaho. He was married two days before induction.

      Mornings are the worst time. It is the most hopeless, most despairing time. The darkness of Fort Lewis mornings is choked off by brazen lights, the shrieks of angry men and frightened, homesick boys. The bones and muscles and brain are not ready for three-o’clock mornings, not ready for duties and harsh voices. The petty urgencies of the mornings physically hurt. The same hopeless feeling that overwhelmed inmates of Treblinka; prisoners of other human beings, caught up in a political marsh, unmotivated to escape and still unwilling to acquiesce, no one to help, no words to speak silently in consolation. The complete, certain reality of the morning kills any words. In the mornings at Fort Lewis comes a powerful want for privacy. You pledge yourself to finding an island someday. Or a bolted, sealed, air-conditioned hotel room. No lights, no admittance, no friends, not even your girl, and not even Erik or your starving grandmother.

      The men search out cheer. The North Dakotan bellows out that we may be going to the PX that night.

      ‘Yeah, maybe!’ Harry rolls on to the floor. ‘Second Platoon went last night. That makes it our turn, damn right. Christ, I’ll buy me a million wads o’ chewin’ tobacco. An’ a case o’ Coke. Y’all gotta help me smuggle the stuff in here, right? Hide it in the footlockers.’

      We make up the bunks. Taut, creases at a forty-five-degree angle. Tempers flare, ebb into despair.

      ‘KLINE!’ someone hollers. ‘Kline, you’re a goddamn moron! A goddamn, blubbering moron. You know that? Kline, you hear me? You’re a moron!’

      Kline stands by his bunk. His tiny head goes rigid. His hands fidget. His eyes shift to the floor, to the walls, to a footlocker. He whimpers. He quivers. Kline is fat. Bewildered and timid and sensitive. No one knows.

      ‘Kline, you got two left boots on your feet. You see that? Look down, just look down once, will ya? You see your feet? You got two left boots on again. You see? Look down, for Christ’s sake! Stop starin’ around like you got caught snitchin’ the lieutenant’s pussy. There, ya see? Two left boots.’

      Kline grins and sits on his bunk. The problem isn’t serious.

      We make the bunks, dust the windows, tie up laundry bags, the strings anchored just so. The barracks have a high ceiling, criss-crossed by rafters and two-by-fours with no function except to give work. They have to be cleaned. The seventeen-year-olds, most agile and awed, do the climbing and balancing. The squad leader directs them: a peer and a sellout. Sweep and mop and wax the floor. Polish doorknobs, rub the army’s Brasso into the metal.

      The squad leader glances at his watch, frenzied. ‘Jeez, you guys, it’s four-thirty already. Let’s go, damn it.’

      We align footgear into neat rows, shave, polish our brass, buff-buff-buff that floor.

      Outside it is Monday morning, raining again. Fort Lewis.

      It is dark, and we are shadows double-timing to the parade ground for reveille. Someone pushes Kline into place at the end of the rank. ‘Good God, it’s freezin’.’ Kline practises coming to attention. Christ, he tries.

      We shiver, stamping blood into our feet. Erik stands next to me. He is quiet, smoking, calm, ready.

      Smells twist through the rain. Someone in the back rank cusses; forgot to lock his footlocker. KP is penalty. Someone asks for a smoke.

      ‘Fall in! Re-port!’

      Afterwards Drill Sergeant Blyton struts his sleek, black, airborne body up and down the ranks. We hate Blyton. It is dark and it is gushing rain, and with our heads rammed straight ahead, Blyton is only a smudge of a Smokey-the-Bear hat, a set of gleaming teeth. He teases, threatens, humiliates. It is supposed to be an inspection. But it is much more than that, nearly life and death, and Blyton is the judge. It is supposed to be a part of the training. Discipline. Blyton is supposed to play a role, to make himself hated. But for Blyton it is much more. He is evil. He does not personify the tough drill sergeant; rather he is the army, a reflecting pool of inhumanity. Erik mutters that we’ll get the bastard someday, words will kill him.

      Blyton finds Kline. The poor boy, towering above the drill sergeant and shifting his eyes to the left and right, up and down, whimpers. Kline is terrified. He shifts from one foot to the other. Blyton peers at him, at his belt buckle, at his feet. At his two left boots.

      Blyton has Kline hang on to his left foot for an hour.

      During the days of basic training and during the nights, we march. And sing. There are a thousand songs.

       Around her hair

       She wore a yellow bonnet.

       She wore it in the springtime,

       In the merry month of May.

       And if

       You ask

       Her

       Why the hell she wore it:

       She wore it for her soldie

       Who was far, far away.

      You write beautifully, a girl says in her letters. You make it all so terrible and real for me … I am going to Europe next summer, she writes, and I’ll see a lot of places for you. As ever …

       If I had a low IQ,

       I could be a Lifer, too!

       And if I didn’t have a brain,

       I would learn to love the rain.

       Am I right or wrong?

       Am I goin’ strong?

       Sound off!

       Sound off!

       One, two, three, four …

       Sound Off!

      We march to the night infiltration course. They use machine guns on us, firing overhead while Erik and Harry and White and Kline crawl alongside me, under barbed wire, red tracers everywhere, down into ditches, across the finish line. In the rain. Then in dead night we march back to the barracks.

       Viet-nam

       Viet-nam

       Every night while you’re sleepin’

       Charlie Cong comes a creepin’

       All around.

      We march to the Quick-Kill rifle range. We learn to snap off our shots, quickly, rapidly, without conscious aim. Without any thought at all. Quick-Kill.

      We march to the obstacle course, and Blyton shoves Kline through the manoeuvres.

      We march back to the barracks, and we are always singing.

       If I die in a combat zone,

       Box me up and ship me home.

       An’ if I die on the Russian front,

       Bury me with a Russian cunt.

       Sound Off!

      We march to the bayonet course, marching through green forests, through the ever-rain and through smells of rich loam and leaves and