Perseverance and Heroism Theme Analysis

Peewee and I had breakfast together. I asked him if he liked the army […]

“You got all this chickenshit to go through,” he said. “And I don’t like that. But this is the first place I ever been in my life where I got what everybody else got.”

“What does that mean?”

“Back home when everybody got new sneakers, I didn’t get none,” Peewee said. “Either Moms didn’t have the money, or she had the money, and we had to get some other stupid thing, like food. When everybody got a bike, I didn’t get one ’cause there was no way we could get the money for a bike. But anything anybody got in the army, I got. You got a gun, I got a gun. You got boots, I got boots. You eat this lousy-ass chip beef on toast, guess what I eat?”

“Lousy-ass chip beef on toast,” I said.

Sometimes, when I was tired and the competition was really rough, things would change for me. There would be a flow of action around me and it would seem as if I were outside of myself, watching myself play ball, watching myself try to establish a place for myself on the hard park courts. It was then that I would feel a pressure to give in, to let a rebound go over my head, to take the outside shot when I knew I had to take the ball inside. I told Kenny about the feeling and he hadn’t understood it. I told Mrs. Liebow, my English teacher, and she said it was what separated heroes from humans, the not giving in, and I hadn’t understood that. It was a weakness in my game, not about being a hero.

The village was a good ten minutes away and everybody seemed relaxed. I wasn’t. I was scared.

I had never thought of myself as being afraid of anything. I thought I would always be a middle-of-the-road kind of guy, not too brave, but not too scared, either. I was wrong. I was scared every time I left the hooch.

On the way to the chopper, I found myself holding my breath. I kept thinking of the noise I had heard when Jenkins got it. By the time we took off I was panting.

“Hey, Lobel, I didn’t mean anything,” I said. “I guess I’m just a little nervous.”

“No sweat […] I’m a little nervous, too. I’d be real nervous, except I know none of this is real and I’m just playing a part.”

“What part are you playing?”

“The part where the star of the movie is sitting in the foxhole explaining how he feels about life and stuff like that. You never get killed in movies when you’re doing that. Anytime you get killed in a movie, it’s after you set it up.”

“You play a part when we were on patrol?”

“That wasn’t a patrol […] that was a firefight […] Anytime anybody is getting shot at it’s a firefight. […] Anyway, I was playing Lee Marvin as a tough sergeant. That’s my best part.”

“You trying to figure out who the good guys, huh?” Johnson spoke slowly. “So what you come up with?”

“I guess somebody back home knows what they’re doing,” I said. “What it means and everything. You talk about Communists—stuff like that—and it doesn’t mean much when you’re in school. Then when you get over here the only thing they’re talking about is keeping your ass in one piece.”

“Vietnam don’t mean nothing, man,” Johnson said. “We could do the same thing someplace else. We just over here killing people to let everybody know we gonna do it if it got to be done.”

“That might be a good reason to be over here,” I said.

“That’s for people like you to mess with,” Johnson said.

“I don’t know about that.”

“Then why you messin’ with it?”

I had come into the army at seventeen, and I remembered who I was, and who I was had been a kid. The war hadn’t meant anything to me then, maybe because I had never gone through anything like it before. All I had thought about combat was that I would never die, that our side would win, and that we would all go home somehow satisfied. And now all the dying around me, and all the killing, was making me look at myself again, hoping to find something more than the kid I was. Maybe I could sift through the kid’s stuff, the basketball, the Harlem streets, and find the man I would be. I hoped I did it before I got killed.

The mortar shells landed behind us. They were long again. Long but walking. They had spotters who saw where the shells were landing, and who were directing the fire. They kept shortening up the range to get closer and closer to us. And the shells were coming fast.

The noise was terrible. Every time a mortar went off, I jumped. I couldn’t help myself. The noise went into you. It touched parts of you that were small and frightened and wanting your mommy. Being away from the fighting had weakened my stamina. It did even more to my nerves. I was shaking. I had to force myself to keep my eyes open.

I just told him that war was about us killing people and about people killing us […] I had thought this war was right, but it was only right from a distance. Maybe when we all got back to the World and everybody thought we were heroes for winning it, then it would seem right from there. Or maybe if I made it back and I got old I would think back on it and would seem right from there. But when the killing started, there was no right or wrong except in the way you did your job, except in the way that you were part of the killing.

What you thought about, what filled you up more than anything, was the being scared and hearing your heart thump in your temples and all the noises, the terrible noises, the screeches and the booms and the guys crying for their mothers or their wives.

I got to sit up in a wheelchair, and the leg felt all right in spite of the cast. It felt good. I hoped it wasn’t. I could make it with a limp. I just didn’t want to go back to the boonies anymore.

We got a call from Lieutenant Gearhart on the ham radio network. He told us the other guys in the squad were all right. It was nice of him to call us, but it wasn’t true. Monaco wasn’t all right. Monaco was like me and Peewee. We had tasted what it was like being dead. We had rolled it around in our mouths and swallowed it and now the stink from it was coming from us. We weren’t all right. We would have to learn to be alive again.

He also told us that Captain Stewart had been promoted.