Speaking of Courage
Tim O'brien
The war was over, and there was no place in particular to go. Paul Berlin followed the tar road in its seven-mile loop around the lake, then he started all over again, driving slowly, feeling safe inside his father’s big Chevy, now and again looking out onto the lake to watch the boats and waterskiers and scenery. It was Sunday and it was summer, and things seemed pretty much the same. The lake was the same. The houses were the same, all low-slung and split level and modern, porches and picture windows facing the water. The lots were spacious. On the lake-side of the road, the houses were handsome and set deep in, well-kept and painted, with docks jutting out into the lake, and boats moored and covered with canvas, and gardens, and sometimes even gardeners, and stone patios with barbecue spits and grills, and wooden shingles saying who lived where. On the other side of the road, to his left, the houses were also handsome, though less expensive and on a smaller scale and with no docks or boats or wooden shingles. The road was a sort of boundary between the affluent and the almost affluent, and to live on the lake-side of the road was one of the few natural privileges in a town of the prairie—the difference between watching the sun set over cornfields or over the lake.
It was a good-sized lake. In high school he’d driven round and round and round with his friends and pretty girls, talking about urgent matters, worrying eagerly about the existence of God and theories of causation,1 or wondering whether Sally Hankins, who lived on the lake-side of the road, would want to pull into the shelter of Sunset Park. Then, there had not been a war. But there had always been the lake. It had been dug out by the southernmost advance of the Wisconsin glacier. Fed by neither springs nor streams, it was a tepid, algaed lake that depended on fickle prairie rains for replenishment. Still, it was the town’s only lake, the only one in twenty-six miles, and at night the moon made a white swath across its waters, and on sunny days it was nice to look at, and that evening it would dazzle with the reflections of fireworks, and it was the center of things from the very start, always there to be driven around, still mesmerizing and quieting and a good audience for silence, a seven-mile flat circumference that could be traveled by slow car in twenty-five minutes. It was not such a good lake for swimming. After college, he’d caught an ear infection that had almost kept him out of the war. And the lake had drowned Max Arnold, keeping him out of the war entirely. Max had been one who liked to talk about the existence of God. “No, I’m not saying that,” he would say carefully against the drone of the engine. “I’m saying it is possible as an idea, even necessary as an idea, a final cause in the whole structure of causation.” Now he knew, perhaps. Before the war, they’d driven around the lake as friends, but now Max was dead and most of the others were living in Des Moines or Sioux City, or going to school somewhere, or holding down jobs. None of the girls was left. Sally Hankins was married. His father would not talk. His father had been in another war, so he knew the truth already, and he would not talk about it, and there was no one left to talk with.
He turned on the radio. The car’s big engine fired machinery that blew cold air all over him. Clockwise, like an electron spinning forever around its nucleus, the big Chevy circled the lake, and he had little to do but sit in the air-conditioning, both hands on the wheel, letting the car carry him in orbit. It was a lazy Sunday. The town was small. Out on the lake, a man’s motorboat had stalled, and the fellow was bent over the silver motor with a wrench and a frown, and beyond him there were waterskiers and smooth July waters and two mud hens.
The road curved west. The sun was low in front of him, and he figured it was close to five o’clock. Twenty after, he guessed. The war had taught him to figure time. Even without the sun, waking from sleep, he could usually place it within fifteen minutes either way. He wished his father were there beside him, so he could say, “Well, looks about five-twenty,” and his father would look at his watch and say, “Hey! How’d you do that?” “One of those things you learn in the war,” he would say. “I know exactly what you mean,” his father would then say, and the ice would be broken, and then they would be able to talk about it as they circled the lake.
He drove past Slater Park and across the causeway and past Sunset Park. The radio announcer sounded tired. He said it was five-thirty. The temperature in Des Moines was eighty-one degrees, and “All you on the road, drive carefully now, you hear, on this fine Fourth of July.” Along the road, kicking stones in front of them, two young boys were hiking with knapsacks and toy rifles and canteens. He honked going by, but neither boy looked up. Already he’d passed them six times, forty-two miles, nearly three hours. He watched the boys recede in his rearview mirror. They turned purply colored, like clotted blood, before finally disappearing.
“How many medals did you win?” his father might have asked.
“Seven,” he would have said, “though none of them were for valor.”
“That’s all right,” his father would have answered, knowing full well that many brave men did not win medals for their bravery, and that others won medals for doing nothing. “What are the medals you won?”
And he would have listed them, as a kind of starting place for talking about the war: the Combat Infantryman’s Badge, the Air Medal, the Bronze Star (without a V-device for valor), the Army Commendation Medal, the Vietnam Campaign Medal, the Good Conduct Medal, and the Purple Heart, though it wasn’t much of a wound, and there was no scar, and it didn’t hurt and never had. While none of them was for valor, the decorations still looked good on the uniform in his closet, and if anyone were to ask, he would have explained what each signified, and eventually he would have talked about the medals he did not win, and why he did not win them, and how afraid he had been.
“Well,” his father might have said, “that’s an impressive list of medals, all right.”
“But none were for valor.”
“I understand.”
And that would have been the time for telling his father that he’d almost won the Silver Star, or maybe even the Medal of Honor.
“I almost won the Silver Star,” he would have said.
“How’s that?”
“Oh, it’s just a war story.”
“What’s wrong with war stories?” his father would have said.
“Nothing, except I guess nobody wants to hear them.”
“Tell me,” his father would have said.
And then, circling the lake, he would have started the story by saying what a crazy hot day it had been when Frenchie Tucker crawled like a snake into the clay tunnel and got shot in the neck, going on with the story in great detail, telling how it smelled and what the sounds had been, everything, then going on to say how he’d almost won the Silver Star for valor.
“Well,” his father would have said, “that’s not a very pretty story.”
“I wasn’t very brave.”
“You have seven medals.”
“True, true,” he would have said, “but I might have had eight,” but even so, seven medals was pretty good, hinting at courage with their bright colors and heavy metals. “But I wasn’t brave,” he would have admitted.
“You weren’t a coward, either,” his father would have said.
“I might have been a hero.”
“But you weren’t a coward,” his father would have insisted.
“No,” Paul Berlin would have said, holding the wheel slightly right of center to produce the constant clockwise motion, “no, I wasn’t a coward, and I wasn’t brave, but I had the chance.” He would have explained, if anyone were there to listen, that his most precious medal, except for the one he did not win, was the Combat Infantryman’s Badge. While not strictly speaking a genuine medal—more an insignia of soldierdom—the CIB meant that he had seen the war as a real soldier, on the ground. It meant he’d had the opportunity to be brave, it meant that. It meant, too, that he’d . . . seen Frenchie Tucker crawl into the tunnel so that just his feet were left showing, and heard the sound when he got shot in the neck. With its crossed rifles and silver and blue colors, the CIB was really not such a bad decoration, not as good as the Silver Star or Medal of Honor, but still evidence that he’d once been there with the chance to be very brave. “I wasn’t brave,” he would have said, “but I might have been.”
The road descended into the outskirts of town, turning northwest past the junior college and tennis courts, then past the city park where tables were spread with sheets of colored plastic as picnickers listened to the high school band, then past the municipal docks where a fat woman stood in pedal-pushers and white socks, fishing for bullheads.2 There were no other fish in the lake, excepting some perch and a few worthless carp. It was a bad lake for swimming and fishing both.
He was in no great hurry. There was no place in particular to go. The day was very hot, but inside the Chevy the air was cold and oily and secure, and he liked the sound of the big engine and the radio and the air-conditioning. Through the windows, as though seen through one-way glass, the town shined like a stop-motion photograph, or a memory. The town could not talk, and it would not listen, and it was really a very small town anyway. “How’d you like to hear about the time I almost won the Silver Star for valor?” he might have said. The Chevy seemed to know its way around the lake.