If I Die in a Combat Zone: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

Mad Mark announces that they’ll be setting up an ambush tonight. He explains the details to his squad leaders and everyone makes preparations. Often, when headquarters orders ambushes, Alpha Company simply lies and reports that they did as ordered without actually going anywhere—but tonight, Mad Mark wants to try to take out some Viet Cong. At midnight, squad leaders gather their men, hang grenades on belts and ready ammo. Twenty soldiers make their way down a road that encircles a village. O’Brien can hear civilians whispering frantically in the huts as the American soldiers, the “intruders,” make their way past. They make one circle around the village and leave it alone.

Marching in the dark, O’Brien thinks the most frightening prospect is getting separated from his unit and lost in a foreign, hostile jungle. The soldiers march single file, and each one focuses on the man in front of him, desperately trying not to lose him. “The man to the front is civilization,” O’Brien reflects. “He is the United States of America and every friend you have ever known.” As they march, O’Brien thinks of a dream he had as a 14-year-old in which he was held captive as a slave and worked beneath a big mountain. In the dream, O’Brien escaped and ran away through the forest, pursued by gunfire and explosions. He met a woman who pointed him to freedom but then he saw her with her arms around one his former captors. Together, the man and woman recaptured O’Brien and took him back to slavery.

Mad Mark arranges the soldiers along two trails that intersect in an L-shape. He gives O’Brien a claymore mine and tells him to set it up down the road. Carrying the mine, O’Brien feels both “brave and silly.” He sets the mine up in the dirt, aimed toward the road and wired to a remote detonator in his hand. All the soldiers are paired off. O’Brien is partnered with a squad leader named Reno, and they take turns sleeping and holding the detonator while watching the road. O’Brien feels jittery and wonders if the mine will actually work and if his M-16 rifle in his lap will fire when he needs it to. He wonders if the Viet Cong will not actually ambush them and he thinks it stupid that all of the American soldiers are facing the same direction, as if the enemy can only approach from that side.

O’Brien wakes Reno and takes his turn to sleep. He notices that Reno lights a cigarette, which is stupid since they’re easy to spot at night, but O’Brien decides not to say anything. Reno wakes O’Brien again an hour later (10 minutes too early) and they trade places again. In the darkness, O’Brien thinks about his girlfriend but he has a hard time picturing her face anymore. He thinks about what he’ll do after the war, that he’ll become a writer and expose all of the war’s evils and the evil people who carry it out. He thinks about Hemingway reporting on the brutality of war while also nodding toward the “rightness” of it, and wonders what one is supposed to write when their war is “dead wrong.”

O’Brien fantasizes about buying an old sailboat and sailing to Austria to rent a cottage and settle down for awhile. Thinking about Europe reminds him of the summer he spends studying Prague in 1967. A Czech friend of O’Brien’s introduced him to his roommate, a young North Vietnamese man named Li. O’Brien and Li talked about the war for three hours, and Li patiently explained that from the Vietnamese perspective, America was the “aggressor,” a foreign invader, and that all North Vietnam wanted was a unified country. Li stated that he himself did not think Americans were necessarily evil but that many of his countrymen though otherwise, especially since they often saw American bombers kill civilians. When Li and O’Brien parted, Li explained that he was an officer in the North Vietnamese Army and he hoped they’d never meet again.

After another hour, Mad Mark calls off the ambush, and they pack everything up and leave. Although this ambush led to nothing, some are far more effective. In May, Captain Johansen leads three platoons in ambushing a village where a Viet Cong meeting is being held. The platoons stretch themselves out around the village. O’Brien carries Captain Johansen’s radio, ready to relay firing coordinates to a nearby artillery base. In the dark of night, two of the platoons shoot at Viet Cong soldiers as they see them leaving the village. Captain Johansen calls out artillery coordinates, telling the big guns where to hit. He seems happy to be having his “revenge”—the Forty-eighth Viet Cong Battalion killed many of his men in the past.

An officer standing next to Johansen and O’Brien points out three Viet Cong soldiers sneaking out of a building. The three Americans take aim with their rifles and fire. O’Brien realizes that he does not hate the man in his rifle sights, nor does he want him dead; he just fears him. Two of the three Viet Cong escape, but one goes down. O’Brien wonders what the other two feel—if they are angry or sad that they’re comrade died. He wonders if the three were family, and hopes that the dead man is not Li. Despite the two Viet Cong that escape, Captain Johansen is proud of his men, having executed “Alpha Company’s most successful ambush.” While the officers are listing kills, Tom, a squad leader, and Chip touch a mine and are blown apart while searching the village.