Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

The omens were obvious. It occurred to me that the world’s mainspring had tightened up a notch. Much later, when I looked up, the missile had vanished and there was a light snow falling, soft and deadly.

“No sweat,” I said.

Imagination, that was my strong suit. I pretended nothing had happened.

But it happened, and it kept happening.

In February I watched thirteen marines die along a paddy dike near Chu Lai.

I recall an encounter with napalm.

Voices, too—people shouting. In the hours before dawn I was awakened by Phantom jets. I saw burning villages. I saw the dead and maimed. I saw it. I was not out of my mind. I was in my mind; I was a mind’s eyewitness to atrocity by airmail. There were barricades before public buildings. There were cops in riot masks, and clubs and bullhorns, and high rhetoric, and Kansas burning, and a black bomb pinwheeling against a silver sky, and 50,000 citizens marching with candles down Pennsylvania Avenue. I heard guns and helicopters and LBJ’s nasal twang: This will be a disorderly planet for a long time… turbulence and struggle and even violence .

Disorder, I reasoned, begets disorder, and no one is immune. Even Chicken Little got roasted.

But I held tight.

Day to day, I waited it out. February was dreary, March was worse. Delusion seemed optional. I couldn’t quite choose; I couldn’t unburden myself. In the bathroom, pants at my knees, it was easy to envision a set of circumstances by which I would ultimately expire of unknown causes in the confines of some public toilet stall—in a Texaco station outside Tucson, or behind a door marked “Gents” in a Howard Johnson’s along the road to Cleveland. It made a poignant image. A night janitor would find my corpse; the autopsy would be brisk and businesslike. For a month, perhaps, my remains would lie unclaimed, and afterward I would go to a pauper’s grave, in an aluminum box, and there I would present my modest tribute to the worms.

No question, I was depressed. Scared, too. One evening I picked up a scissors and held it to my throat. It was a ticklish sensation, not unpleasant. I drew the blade upward. No blood, just testing.

The time had come, I decided, to seek help.

Quickly, I dropped the scissors and walked down the hallway to a pay phone and put in a call to Chuck Adamson.

No answer, though.

So while the phone rang, I talked about the facts of the case. I told him I was boxed in by disorder. I described the pressures. “I swear to God,” I said, “it’s like I might explode or something. I keep seeing things.” Then I told him about that missile over the Little Bighorn. Nothing mystical, I said. It was there. I went on for some time about napalm and Phantom jets, how things were accelerating toward crack-up, high velocity, how I couldn’t cope, how I couldn’t make any headway with Gromyko and LBJ, how it was down-the-tubes time, the scissors, the temptation to call it quits, how I couldn’t shit, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t find my place in the overall pattern of events. “Otherwise,” I said, “I’m doing pretty well.” Then I pressed the phone tight to my ear. There were cracklings on the line, long-distance buzzings, but I paid attention while Adamson explained that he’d gone through the same experiences back in college, a tough time, and that it was finally a question of maintaining mental traction, keeping purchase on slippery winter roads.

“The first step,” he said, “is to stop talking to yourself.”

I nodded and said, “What else?”

There was a pause.

“These visions of yours. You have to figure out what’s fact and what’s—”

“It is fact,” I said sharply. “The war, it’s a fact.”

“True.”

“So?”

Adamson seemed pensive. “Imagination,” he said, “that’s your special gift, but you have to use it. Take charge. And stay away from scissors.”

There was a sharp clicking sound. The phone kept ringing, no answer, but for a few moments I was back in his office again. He winked at me. His eyes were clear and lucid. Smiling, he swiveled in his chair and stood up and went to the window. And there it was: the shining dome on the state capitol, buffed and golden. “Politics,” he said, “give it some thought.”

I was no radical, not by a long shot.

But what does one do?

I recovered. I spent the next six months seeking traction. Finally, though, what does one do?

By the autumn of my junior year, October 1966, the American troop level in Vietnam exceeded 325,000. Operation Rolling Thunder closed in on Hanoi. The dead were hopelessly dead. The bodies were bagged and boxed. In Saigon, General Westmoreland called for fresh manpower, and at the State Department, Dean Rusk assured us that rectitude would soon prevail, a matter of attrition. Yet the dead remained dead. For the dead there was no rectitude. For the dead there was nothing more to die for. The dead were silent on the matter of attrition. So what does one do? Among the living, Richard Nixon peeled his eyes and bided time. Robert Kennedy waffled. Richard Daley ruled a peaceful city. Beneath the surface, however, premonition was evolving toward history. I was a witness. Like déjà vu in reverse, lots of backspin. In Los Angeles, Sirhan Sirhan came into possession of a .22-caliber Iver Johnson revolver. I watched the transaction. In Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy reviewed his options; in Washington, Robert McNamara entertained misgivings; in Hollywood, Jane Fonda began setting an agenda. Hawks were at the throats of doves. It was a fitful, uncertain autumn, but the dead kept dying. They died on the six o’clock news, then they died again at midnight, and now and then I could hear the shearings of a great continental fault, I could feel the coming fracture.

In a time of emergency, the question will not be begged: What does one do?

I made my decision on a Sunday evening.

Politics, I thought.

On Monday morning I purchased some poster paper and black ink. The language came easily. In simple block letters I wrote: THE BOMBS ARE REAL.

Trite, I realized, but true.

At the noon hour I took up a position in front of the cafeteria. The place was crowded but there was the feeling of absolute aloneness. I lifted the poster with both hands. As people filed by, nothing much registered, just background noise, a brisk wind and giggles and wisecracks. That was the price. I knew it and I paid it.

Weird William, I thought.

In hindsight, it might seem silly, a kid holding up a sign that announced the obvious, but for me it represented something substantial. I felt proud. Embarrassment, too, but mostly pride.

I’m not sure how long I stood there. Twenty minutes, a half hour. I remember how bright the day was, no clouds, very crisp and clean, that wind off the river. I remember the sound of clanking plates in the cafeteria. There was laughter, but it didn’t bother me. In a sense, I suppose, I wasn’t entirely there. Drifting, maybe. The faces seemed to blend and dissolve. There was a war on—they didn’t know. There was butchery—they didn’t know. “Shit,” someone said, but they simply did not know, they had no inkling, so I smiled and let my sign speak sign language: the blunt, trite, unarguable truth. Real. The guns were real, and the dead, and the silos and hot lines and Phantom jets. The war was real. The technology was real. Even that which could not be seen was real, the unseen future, the unseen letting of unseen blood—and the bombs—the fuses and timers and tickings—and the consequences of reality, the consequences were also real. But no one knew. No one imagined. “What this brings to mind,” a voice said, “is shit.” And that, too, was real. And Sarah Strouch, who paused at the cafeteria doors, watching me with cool black eyes. Real, I thought. She wore blue shorts and a pink T-shirt scooped low at the neck. There was a hesitation, then she tilted her head sideways and said, “Such true shit.”