Tim O’Brien was drafted and served in the Vietnam War from 1969 to 1970, which inspired many of the books he wrote throughout his career. In Obrien’s memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, the first and most autobiographical account he wrote of his time in Vietnam, he describes serving as an infantryman with Alpha Company and witnessing the horrors of war firsthand. Although as a foot soldier, O’Brien does not feel qualified to derive moral lessons from his experience, only to “tell war stories,” his account of the war depicts it as nightmarish, brutal, and completely unnecessary. Through his depictions of horrific violence, O’Brien argues that the Vietnam War is misguided and results in tremendous amounts of death and suffering and is therefore evil.
Although most of O’Brien’s superiors during the Vietnam War claim that America is fighting a just conflict, O’Brien finds the whole campaign misguided and entirely unnecessary. By the late 1960s, American public opinion is divided over the Vietnam War: some argue that it is a just campaign to defeat communism, but more and more civilians see it as an unnecessary crusade. However, nearly all of O’Brien’s military superiors fully believe that the war is a righteous and noble cause. When O’Brien voices his own moral objections to an army chaplain, Edwards, during basic training, the chaplain is furious that O’Brien would challenge America’s morality. Edwards shouts, “If you accept, as I do, that America is one helluva great country, well, then, you follow what she tells you. She says fight, then you go out and do your damnedest. You try to win.” The chaplain’s argument puts forth the worldview of America as a moral country, and thus any action it takes as the right action. However, O’Brien knows that other countries do not share America’s belief in the country’s moral superiority. Before O’Brien is drafted, he spends a summer studying abroad in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He occasionally sees protest posters condemning American killings of Vietnamese civilians, indicating that the international perception of America’s war is mixed at best. A friend introduces O’Brien to a North Vietnamese student named Li, who is also an officer in the North Vietnamese Army fighting against America. They discuss the war for hours, and Li explains that the Vietnamese see Americans as the “aggressors,” especially when “they see [American] airplanes killing people.” Li’s perspective on the Vietnam War suggests that, for many Vietnamese people, America seems like a predator rather than a moral defender. During O’Brien’s deployment, although he and his fellow soldiers fight dutifully, he notes that almost all of the general infantry are “not committed, not resigned, to having to win a war.” The American soldiers’ disinterest suggests that they recognize the futility of their military campaign. To the men actually fighting and dying, the war is clearly misguided and unnecessary.
O’Brien witnesses horrific death and suffering during his year of combat, demonstrating that the Vietnam War is not only misguided, but devastating in its violence and destruction. Many of O’Brien’s American comrades die in combat in horrific ways. He sees men’s limbs get blown off by mines; men disemboweled by explosions; and men who are shot, stabbed, or suffocated. O’Brien recalls that one day, 17 men in his platoon either die or are permanently maimed by mines within 30 minutes. He sees a piece of shrapnel slice a soldier’s nose off while he is eating breakfast, causing him to drown in his own blood. On another day, snipers ambush O’Brien and his friend at least 10 times, their bullets narrowly missing them every time. For foot soldiers like O’Brien, death and horrific violence are a constant presence. Even worse, O’Brien sees numerous Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, horrifically maimed and killed by American crossfire. Because the Viet Cong engage in guerrilla warfare (hiding and ambushing, waging war through small-scale battles), firefights often break out in villages and farms. Every time O’Brien’s unit approaches a village, they expect Viet Cong fighters to ambush them. In one instance, soldiers throw grenades into a house, believing Viet Cong fighters are hiding there, only to realize they’ve killed an old woman. In another instance, while watching a village burn to the ground after American jets hit it in an airstrike, O’Brien reflects, “There were Viet Cong in that hamlet. And there were babies and children and people who just didn’t give a damn in there, too,” indicating that civilians are often butchered in crossfire. The carnage O’Brien witnesses demonstrates the catastrophic costs of such a war: not only is the Vietnam War simply misguided, but utterly devastating, causing horrific suffering for millions of people on all sides of the conflict.
Since the Vietnam War is both unnecessary and causes widespread suffering, O’Brien argues that America’s presence in Vietnam is not simply wrong, but evil. Looking back on his experience of the war, O’Brien states, “I was persuaded then, and I remain persuaded now, that the war was wrong. And since it was wrong and since people were dying as a result of it, it was evil.” O’Brien’s friend Erik, also serving in Vietnam, echoes this thought. As Erik prepares to go home, he feels disturbed by the violence Americans have wrought on the Vietnamese people. Erik writes in a letter, “Perhaps it's that I know I will leave [Vietnam] alive and I need to suffer for that. But, more likely, what I see is evil.” Erik’s shame at participating in Vietnam—even though he was drafted—and O’Brien’s belief that the war served no purpose other than horrific death and suffering argues, in no uncertain terms, that the Vietnam War is evil, a blight on America’s history and moral character.
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The Evils of the Vietnam War ThemeTracker
The Evils of the Vietnam War Quotes in If I Die in a Combat Zone
On the perimeter of the village, the company began returning fire, blindly, spraying the hedges with M-16 and M-70 and M-60 fire. No targets, nothing to aim at and kill. Aimlessly, just shooting to shoot.
Norwegians and Swedes and Germans had taken the [Minnesota] plains from the Sioux. The settlers must have seen endless plains and eased their bones and said, “Here as well as anywhere, it’s all the same.”
I declared my intention to have no part of Vietnam. With delightful viciousness, a secret will, I declared the war evil, the draft board evil, the town evil in its lethargic acceptance of it all.
Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories.
“Mama has been kissed good-bye, we’ve grabbed our rifles, we’re ready for war. All this not because of conviction or ideology; rather it’s from fear of society’s censure […] Fear of weakness. Fear that to avoid war is to avoid manhood.”
We laughed. We congratulated ourselves. We felt smart. And later—much later—we wondered if maybe Blyton hadn’t won a big victory that night.
“If you accept, as I do, that America is one helluva great country, well, then you follow what she tells you. She says fight, the you go out and do your damnedest. You try to win.”
Later two or three more men straggled out. No helmets, no weapons. They laughed and joked and drank. The first sergeant shouted something, but the men just giggled and sat on sandbags in their underwear.
Enemy rounds crashed in. The earth split. Most of Alpha Company slept.
[N]o one in Alpha Company gave a damn about the causes or purposes of their war: it is about “dinks and slopes,” and the idea is simply to kill them or avoid them.
I asked if the North Vietnamese were not the aggressors in the war. [Li] laughed and stated that of course the opposite was the case. They were defending Vietnam from American aggression.
We stood straight up, in a row, as if it were a contest. I confronted the profile of a human being through my sight. It did not occur to me that a man would die when I pulled the trigger of that rifle.
I neither hated the man nor wanted him dead, but I did fear him.
More Combat Assaults came in the next days. We learned to hate Colonel Daud and his force of helicopters. When he was killed by sappers in a midnight raid, we head the news over the radio. A lieutenant led us in song, a catchy, happy, celebrating song: Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead.
In the next days it took little provocation for us to flick the flint of our Zippo lighters. Thatched roofs take the flame quickly, and on bad days the hamlets of Pinkville burned, taking our revenge in fire. It was good to walk from Pinkville and to see fire behind Alpha Company. It was good, just as pure hate is good.
[The old men] were only a few feet away, hanging to their saplings like the men at Golgotha. I went to the oldest of them and pulled his gag out and let him drink from my canteen.
I was not at My Lai when the massacre occurred. I was in the paddies and sleeping in the clay, with Johansen and Arizona and Alpha Company, a year and more later. But if a man can squirm in the meadow, he can shoot children. Neither are examples of courage.
Courage is nothing to laugh at, not if it is proper courage and exercised by men who know what they do is proper. Proper courage is wise courage. It's acting wisely, acting wisely when fear would have a man act otherwise. It is the endurance of the soul in spite of fear—wisely.
Captain Johansen helped to mitigate and melt the silliness [of the war], showing the grace and poise a man can have under the worst of circumstances, a wrong war.
The next day we blew up tunnels and bomb shelters. A piece of clay came down and hit a man, slicing off his nose, and he drowned to death in his own blood. He had been eating ham and eggs out of a can.
Thirty-three villagers were wounded. Thirteen were killed […] Certain blood for uncertain reasons. No lagoon monster ever terrorized like this.
We weren’t the old soldiers of World War II. No valor to squander for things like country or honor or military objectives. All the courage in August was the kind you dredge up when you awaken in the morning, knowing it will be a bad day.
Needless to say, I am uncomfortable in my thoughts toady. Perhaps it’s that I know I will leave this place alive and I need to suffer for that.
But, more likely, what I see is evil.
“When you go into My Lai you assume the worst. When you go into My Lai, shit, you know—you assume—that they’re all VC [Viet Cong]. Ol’ Charlie with big tits and nice innocent, childlike eyes. Damn it, they’re all VC, you should know that.”
The stewardess comes through the cabin, spraying a mist of invisible sterility into the pressurized, scrub-filtered, temperature-controlled air, killing mosquitoes and unknown diseases, protecting herself and America from the Asian evils, cleansing us all forever.
You add things up. You lost a friend to the war, and you gained a friend. You compromised one principle and fulfilled another. You learned, as old men tell in front of the courthouse, that war is not all bad; it may not make a man of you, but it teaches you that manhood is not something to scoff; some stories of valor are true; dead bodies are heavy, and it’s better not to touch them; fear is paralysis, but it is better to be afraid than to move out and die […]
