| American Fighter Donald
Pfarrer
8
I was a naval gunfire officer in
the Vietnam War—a Navy lieutenant
serving in the 7th Marine (Infantry) Regiment. I was among the
Marines but not one of them. When
they marched into battle I marched
with them. When they got hit, I hit back.
If you’re
in a close-range firefight, “hitting
back” is easy because the enemy is trying to kill you and you can
often seem him or his muzzle flash and the noise pierces your ears.
The bullets seem to lash a whip beside your head, and you are high.
You are way up there. In such a fight the enemy is too
close for
naval guns or Marine Corps howitzers. The men on your side hit back
with small arms and grenades. But there is a different
case. You
and your comrades come under fire. The slugs crease around your ears
and the mortar rounds thud in and blast dirt and sometimes
death—but you can’t see the enemy. If you’re lucky you catch a
flash in a treeline, or he sends out tracers (which he uses to aim
his machine gun, but which you can use to aim at him). He’s far
away—more than 300 meters, let’s say. What you throw back at him
is the big stuff, which you control by radio communication with a
ship or battery. You stand up, which is the exhilarating part, to see
the fall of shot; then you adjust—add, drop, left, right—till you
have the target bracketed. Then you pour it on, you “fire for
effect.” The problem is that the big
weapons kill
civilians, as they are still doing in Iraq today. Guns and bombs are
more accurate now, but the problem is actually worse because the
military seems to think precision is possible and because we are
fighting in cities. And, as is painfully apparent in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the big weapons and munitions create a hundred new
enemies for every one they kill. Maybe because this is still going
on, Vietnam is present to me every day.
After the
war I
wrote a novel called Neverlight about a naval gunfire officer whose
job was to minimize Marine deaths by silencing enemy guns. American
armies do not send troops into battle naked. They protect them with
the three “supporting arms” of naval gunfire, artillery, and air
power. I would never argue that we are wrong to do so. But there is a
cost. Neverlight was my attempt to
create a true drama,
fiction that was faithful to reality, about the tearing of the psyche
that comes with controlling the big guns. Here is a united,
integrated man; and this, some time later, is half a man, the half
charged with keeping marine casualties to a minimum. Let no Marine
die through my neglect. Here is the other half, the one charged with
a full consciousness of what happens at the end of the trajectory of
a 5-inch-54 naval rifle or a 105mm
howitzer. For many years
I believed I could leave Vietnam alone because I had done all I could
do in a novel about that war and the use of big weapons that
characterized it. Years later I felt myself being pulled back to
Vietnam. I think the reason was partly that going there was the most
transforming—burning, flooding—experience of my life. But another
reason, a part perhaps of the first, was the “tearing.” If you
can’t stand the tear, you might leap to one side and cauterize the
other. I have known men who do this. I think it is fatal to the soul
and I have not done it. This is what pulled me back to
Vietnam, this determination to remain whole as I understand
wholeness. It translates to a need to reach an honest understanding
of the fighter’s duty and the stresses that change him. And having
written a novel on the war I thought of writing a memoir, of
exploring Vietnam through the lens of my own experience. But this
time I would go beyond the main concerns of Neverlight, which were to
set forth the moral conflict of a man wielding the big weapons, and
of his wife’s progress toward moral opposition to the
war. I
thought my own (true) story could provide the
kind of
history that sheds light on the present. And with 19 years’
experience as a reporter covering civil rights, the antiwar movement,
and finally politics, I believed I could write a clear and objective
account of the conflicts inherent in the American way of fighting.
‚Ä©I thought of Francis Parkman’s pioneer soldiers marching through
the woods at night in Montcalm and Wolfe, “lashed by branches they
could not see.” A novelist’s detail or a historian’s? I thought
of James B. Puller Jr.’s autobiography, which has all the force of
the best fiction. ‚Ä©A memoir must be shaped as art is shaped, and a
novel that violates the truth cuts off its own legs. The difference
between memoir and fiction, then, may not be quite so important as it
seems.‚Ä©It is, nonetheless, a fundamental difference. Fiction is an
open field for the informed imagination. It has its own constraints,
but they tend to liberate the writer rather than to limit his or her
scope and powers. A writer constrained by form is freer than one
constrained by fact. Form in fiction is its own style of freedom. It
is a river; you can swim from bank to bank, you can shoot the rapids,
but you cannot crawl out; if you do, you’re dead, like a fish out
of water. It is freedom within boundaries
and constraints that
opens a writer’s opportunities to create the truest imitation of
life. In
my intellect I agreed with Aristotle’s dictum
that poetry (I read that to include fiction) is “more philosophic
and of graver import” than history. Aristotle says that history
tells what happened in the past. Poetic fiction tells what could
happen at any time. But some nonfiction exceeds Aristotle’s
estimate. Nobody can approach an understanding of the Vietnam War
without reading the major nonfiction. These works convey more than
“understanding.” Many of the best also arouse the strongest
emotions—an awed respect for men like Puller; anger verging on fury
when he was driven to suicide; incredulity and rage that Johnson,
Westmoreland, McNamara, and their clown group could have been so
wrong, so persistently, inexcusably, and fatally wrong, at such
expense to the country and its youth.
Thinking
about a
memoir, not quite committed, I went over my notes from Vietnam,
written in crude Spanish and Greek characters, in case of capture. I
found them haunting, stirring, and incomplete. I had had little time
to write them and often couldn’t write when time was there because
of the monsoon. Many entries were perfectly unintelligible to me and
some of the people were lost to
memory. But what fascinated and
drew me in was the incompleteness. It seemed to rule out any account
of my experience. It did something more important. It led me to a new
appreciation of the power of implication in
fiction. A story or
novel may and possibly should seem complete and rounded; it should
tell a whole story or present a whole segment of a larger story. But
this seeming completeness, if the fiction really works, is an
illusion. The power is not necessarily, as Hemingway says, in
what’s left out. But much of it flows from what a seemingly
complete narrative leaves to
implication. I knew then that I
wanted to write fiction again. I started The Fearless Man with the
specific intent of showing what infantry combat in I Corps, Vietnam,
1967–1968, was really like. This time my canvas would be broader. I
wanted to create a truthful and representative narrative. The
eccentric, the aberrant, and the surrealistic had drawn other writers
about Vietnam, but these had no appeal to me. I knew I was going
after something elusive. My only hope was to stick to the story and
to suppress any desire that might arise to “tell the truth.” I
preached at myself to avoid preaching to my reader. My idea was this:
let truth emerge; never tell it. Once I may have stepped
over this line, and Bob Loomis at Random House scolded me. I drew
back.
I
tried to be true to my characters,
to write their stories, especially the stories of Mac and Paul,
a combat leader and a chaplain,
“torn” men in my sense
of that word. They lived in my
mind with sharper reality and deeper
implication than any figure in a memoir ever could. Because of
them I chose the truth of fiction
over fact. <
Excerpt
from
The Fearless Man
Mac advanced
into the clearing on the hilltop—his new
command post, he hoped—with a keen sense of being a stranger, and
of danger. He dropped to his right knee,
propped his rifle
against his side, looked over his shoulder, and crossed his wrists
over his head. A fire team came forward and he sent them left to
search the periphery of the hilltop. He repeated the signal and sent
another fire team right. He brought up an eight-man squad, formed it
in a wedge, and led it straight across the
plateau. It was a
defensible position. He laid out a perimeter and the men of 1st
Platoon began digging and setting out trip flares and claymore
mines. Walking the perimeter, Mac thought
that the enemy could
catch one of the squad-sized search teams down near the valley and
fix it, and begin to kill marines. The squad would call for help and
the platoon leader would charge into an ambush en route to the squad.
The platoon would be fixed in its turn, and thus piece by piece Delta
Company would rush into the fire. Mac thought: “Every
day we stay
out here gives him more time to assemble his troops and figure out my
pattern.” But Mac would change his pattern
with the gunny’s
mission tonight. “And maybe,” he thought,
“the sky will clear
and the planes will fly.”
And in some recess of his mind
he knew there was another world where he would be changed from
the creature that he was. He had forgotten how the change would
happen. But if he could only stop
for a minute, if he could only
detach himself from
this—from this—if he could
only—
©2004
by DONALD PFARRER. Published by
RANDOM HOUSE. All rights reserved.
Donald Pfarrer
is the author of Cold
River, Neverlight, Temple
and Shipman, and The Fearless Man.
Originally published in the December
2004/January 2005 issue of Boston Review |
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