The introductory readings, Obrien's If I die in a Combat Zone, Hasford's The
Short-Timers, Moore's The Green Berets, and Obrien's Going After Cacciato, all share a
common element - fear. An integral part of each story is a sense of fear that helps to
intensify the experiences being related by the author; ie make the stories more
realistic. Without the use of fear, these stories would lose much of their impact. The
entire experience of Vietnam pivots on fear for many of the characters in these stories.
In Obrien's If I die in a Combat Zone, the main character struggles to balance his fear
with his duty to his country, his town, and himself. "So to bring the conversations to a
focus and also to try out in real words my secret fears, I argued for running away,"
(Combat, 29) the character says. He simply is torn between what he feels is a
responsibility, and the many parts of his fear. Afraid of not upholding his pride,
afraid of dying in a, "[war that] was wrongly conceived and poorly justified," (Combat,
29), and crippled by, "Doubts...hedged all this: I had neither the expertise nor the
wisdom to synthesize answers..." (Combat, 29), the character simply is paralyzed by
fear, and because of this, gets on the draftee bus without really having made a decision.
It was an intellectual and physical stand-off, and I did not have the energy to see
it to an end. I did not want to be a soldier, not even a observer to war. But neither
did I want to upset a peculiar balance between the order I knew, the people I knew, and
my own private world. It was not that I valued that order. But I feared its opposite,
inevitable chaos, censure, embarrassment, the end of everything that had happened in my
life, the end of it all (Combat, 34).
This quote best illustrates his inability to make that necessary decision, and his
failure to overcome his debilitating fear.
In Hasford's The Short Timers, fear is an underlying current to much of the segment that
we have read. From when the poges say, "Fucking grunts...they're nothing but
animals...," (Short-Timers, 39) and the Marines' reaction, to the exchange between Joker
and Animal Mother when Joker must establish himself as a non-poge, the atmosphere has
fear right below the surface emotions. It is important to them to establish that they
are not afraid of anything, yet it is easy to see that right beneath that bravado is a
fear that someone will call their bluff. All the hard talk, "the baddest of the bad, the
leanest of the lean, the meanest of the mean," (Short-Timers, 40) is all just this little
show, as much for the performer as the audience. Their need for this demonstration of
manhood is taken a step further by Cowboy when he talks about taking over squad leader
for Crazy Earl, "I'm just waiting for Craze to get wasted. Or maybe he'll just go plain
fucking crazy. That's how Craze got to be honcho. Ol' Stark, he was our honcho before
Craze. Ol' Supergrunt. Went stark raving. Pretty soon it'll be my turn,"
(Short-Timers, 42). Perhaps it will be Cowboy's turn as squad leader; or is it his
chance to, "[go] stark raving,"?
The driving force behind PFC Paul Berlin in Obrien's Going After Cacciato is the fear of
dying. The exercise involving the booby-traps upsets Berlin because he doesn't
understand how the NCO can veto his life without him making any mistakes. "He was a
straight-forward, honest, decent sort of guy. He was not dumb. He was not small or weak
or ugly. True the war scared him silly, but this was something he hoped to bring under
control," (Cacciato, 40). Berlin at least is honest enough to realize how much the war
scares him, and takes it heart. "He was scared, yes, and confused and lost, and he had
no sense of what was expected of him or of what to expect from himself," (Cacciato, 41).
This delirium stems from the fear - the fear of everything that is so different from his
norms.
Moore's The Green Berets packages the aspect of fear more as a situational constant than
the others. "I felt a sense of quickening excitement as the little eight-place
single-engine plane closed on Pan Chau in a hilly section along the Cambodian border,"
(Green Berets, 30). Right from the beginning, we are put on the edge, with a tingle of
fear rippling at our senses. The buildup of Sven Kornie's history only adds the
excitement, as anyone with a background like that could only be involved in the most
dangerous missions. As the main character is brought to Kornie, we are told by Borst,
"We're sure hoping we don't get hit in the next few days. The camp isn't secure yet,"
(Green Berets, 33). This seems to be said almost flippantly, but the reality of an
insecure base is far from a joke, and both the narrator and Borst know this. Towards the
end of this selection, Sven says, "Those Vietnamese generals --stupid! Dangerous stupid.
Two hundred fifty my best men that sneak-eyed yellow-skinned bastard cops commander
take out of here yesterday -- and our big American generals? Politics they play while
this camp gets zapped," (Green Berets, 33). The loss of those men obviously is more than
a minor annoyance to Kornie, who, from his background, would seem to need extreme
measures to have fear.
In all the selections that we were to read, there exists many parallels. Many are
superficial, and some go to the core of the Vietnam experience. Following the thread of
fear from one story to the next is interesting because the authors use it in so many
different ways - but it remains one of the common denominators to all of them. How the
characters deal with the fear, and in what context it is described in is a large part of
the Vietnam story as a whole, and many of the issues that Vietnam is famous for build
almost solely upon the constant fear that pervaded the lives of those there.
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