Speaking of Courage
Tim O'brien
It was late afternoon. Along an unused railway spur, four men were erecting steel launchers for the evening fireworks. They were dressed alike in khaki trousers, work shirts, visored caps and black boots. They were sweating. Two of them were unloading crates of explosives from a city truck, stacking the crates near the steel launchers. They were talking. One of them was laughing. “How’d you like to hear about it?” he might have murmured, but the men did not look up. Later they would blow color into the sky. The lake would be like a mirror, and the picnickers would sigh. The colors would open wide. “Well, it was this crazy hot day,” he would have said to anyone who asked, “and Frenchie Tucker took off his helmet and pack and crawled into the tunnel with a forty-five and a knife, and the whole platoon stood in a circle around the mouth of the tunnel to watch him go down. ‘Don’t get blowed away,’ said Stink Harris, but Frenchie was already inside and he didn’t hear. You could see his feet wiggling, and you could smell the dirt and clay, and then, when he got shot through the neck, you could smell the gunpowder and you could see Frenchie’s feet jerk, and that was the day I could have won the Silver Star for valor.”
The Chevy rolled smoothly across the old railroad spur. To his right, there was only the open lake. To his left, the lawns were scorched dry like October corn. Hopelessly, round and round, a rotating sprinkler scattered water into Doctor Mason’s vegetable garden. In August it would get worse. The lake would turn green, thick with bacteria and decay, and the golf course would dry up, and dragonflies would crack open for lack of good water. The summer seemed permanent.
The big Chevy curled past the A&W and Centennial Beach, and he started his seventh revolution around the lake.
He followed the road past the handsome low-slung houses. Back to Slater Park, across the causeway, around to Sunset Park, as though riding on tracks.
Out on the lake, the man with the stalled motorboat was still fiddling with the engine.
The two boys were still trudging on their hike. They did not look up when he honked.
The pair of mud hens floated like wooden decoys. The waterskiers looked tan and happy, and the spray behind them looked clean.
It was all distant and pretty.
Facing the sun again, he figured it was nearly six o’clock. Not much later the tired announcer in Des Moines confirmed it, his voice seeming to rock itself into a Sunday afternoon snooze.
Too bad, he thought. If Max were there, he would say something meaningful about the announcer’s fatigue, and relate it to the sun low and red now over the lake, and the war, and courage. Too bad that all the girls had gone away. And his father, who already knew the difficulties of being brave, and who preferred silence.
Circling the lake, with time to talk, he would have told the truth. He would not have faked it. Starting with the admission that he had not been truly brave, he would have next said he hadn’t been a coward, either. “I almost won the Silver Star for valor,” he would have said, and, even so, he’d learned many important things in the war. Like telling time without a watch. He had learned to step lightly. He knew, just by the sound, the difference between friendly and enemy mortars, and with time to talk and with an audience, he could explain the difference in great detail. He could tell people that the enemy fired 82-millimeter mortar rounds, while we fired 81’s, and that this was a real advantage to the enemy since they could steal our rounds and shoot them from their own weapons. He knew many lies. Simple, unprofound things. He knew it is a lie that only stupid men are brave. He knew that a man can die of fright, literally, because it had happened just that way to Billy Boy Watkins after his foot had been blown off. Billy Boy had been scared to death. Dead of a heart attack caused by fright, according to Doc Peret, who would know. He knew, too, that it is a lie, the old saying that you never hear the shot that gets you, because Frenchie Tucker was shot in the neck, and after they dragged him out of the tunnel he lay there and told everyone his great discovery; he’d heard it coming the whole way, he said excitedly; and then he raised his thumb and bled through his mouth, grinning at the great discovery. So the old saying was surely a lie, or else Frenchie Tucker was lying himself, which under the circumstances was hard to believe. He knew a lot of things. They were not new or profound, but they were true. He knew that he might have won a Silver Star, like Frenchie, if he’d been able to finish what Frenchie started in the foul tunnel. He knew many war stories, a thousand details, smells and the confusion of the senses, but nobody was there to listen, and nobody knew a damn about the war because nobody believed it was really a war at all. It was not a war for war stories, or talk of valor, and nobody asked questions about the details, such as how afraid you can be, or what the particular sounds were, or whether it hurts to be shot, or what you think about and hear and see on ambush, or whether you can really tell in a firefight which way to shoot, which you can’t, or how you become brave enough to win the Silver Star, or how it smells of sulfur against your cheek after firing eighteen fast rounds, or how you crawl on hands and knees without knowing direction, and how, after crawling into the red-mouthed tunnel, you close your eyes like a mole and follow the tunnel walls and smell Frenchie’s fresh blood and know a bullet cannot miss in there, and how there is nowhere to go but forward or backward, eyes closed, and how you can’t go forward, and lose all sense, and are dragged out by the heels, losing the Silver Star. All the details, without profundity, simple and age old, but nobody wants to hear war stories because they are age old and not new and not profound, and because everyone knows already that it hadn’t been a war like other wars. If Max or his father were ever to ask, or anybody, he would say, “Well, first off, it was a war the same as any war,” which would not sound profound at all, but which would be the truth. Then he would explain what he meant in great detail, explaining that, right or wrong or win or lose, at root it had been a real war, regardless of corruption in high places or politics or sociology or the existence of God. His father knew it already, though. Which was why he didn’t ask. And Max could not ask. It was a small town, but it wasn’t the town’s fault, either.
He passed the sprawling ranch-style homes. He lit a cigarette. He had learned to smoke in the war. He opened the window a crack but kept the air-conditioner going full, and again he circled the lake. His thoughts were the same. Out on the lake, the man was frantically yanking the cord to his stalled outboard motor. Along the causeway, the two boys marched on. The pair of mud hens sought sludge at the bottom of the lake, heads under water and tails bobbing.
Six-thirty, he thought. The lake had divided into two halves. One half still glistened. The other was caught in shadow. Soon it would be dark. The crew of workers would shoot the sky full of color, for the war was over, and the town would celebrate independence. He passed Sunset Park once again, and more houses, and the junior college and tennis courts, and the picnickers and the high school band, and the municipal docks where the fat woman patiently waited for fish.
Already, though it wasn’t quite dusk, the A&W was awash in neon lights.
He maneuvered his father’s Chevy into one of the parking slots, let the engine idle, and waited. The place was doing a good holiday business. Mostly kids in their fathers’ cars, a few farmers in for the day, a few faces he thought he remembered, but no names. He sat still. With the sound of the engine and air-conditioning and radio, he could not hear the kids laughing, or the cars coming and going and burning rubber. But it didn’t matter, it seemed proper, and he sat patiently and watched while mosquitoes and June bugs swarmed off the lake to attack the orange-colored lighting. A slim, hipless, deft young blonde delivered trays of food, passing him by as if the big Chevy were invisible, but he waited. The tired announcer in Des Moines gave the time, seven o’clock. He could trace the fall of dusk in the orange lights which grew brighter and sharper. It was a bad war for medals. But the Silver Star would have been nice. Nice to have been brave. The tactile, certain substance of the Silver Star, and how he could have rubbed his fingers over it, remembering the tunnel and the smell of clay in his nose, going forward and not backward in simple bravery. He waited patiently. The mosquitoes were electrocuting themselves against a Pest-Rid machine. The slim young carhop ignored him, chatting with four boys in a Firebird, her legs in nylons even in mid-summer.
He honked once, a little embarrassed, but she did not turn. The four boys were laughing. He could not hear them, or the joke, but he could see their bright eyes and the way their heads moved. She patted the cheek of the driver.
He honked again, twice. He could not hear the sound. The girl did not hear, either.
He honked again, this time leaning on the horn. His ears buzzed. The air-conditioning shot cold air into his lap. The girl turned slowly, as though hearing something very distant, not at all sure. She said something to the boys, and they laughed, then she moved reluctantly toward him. EAT MAMA BURGERS said the orange and brown button on her chest. “How’d you like to hear about the war,” he whispered, feeling vengeful. “The time I almost won the Silver Star.”
She stood at the window, straight up so he could not see her face, only the button that said, EAT MAMA BURGERS. “Papa Burger, root beer, and french fries,” he said, but the girl did not move or answer. She rapped on the window.
“Papa Burger, root beer, and french fries,” he said, rolling it down.
She leaned down. She shook her head dumbly. Her eyes were as lovely and fuzzy as cotton candy.
“Papa Burger, root beer, and french fries,” he said slowly, pronouncing the words separately and distinctly for her.
She stared at him with her strange eyes. “You blind?” she chirped suddenly. She gestured toward an intercom attached to a steel post. “You blind or something?”
“Papa Burger, root beer, and french fries.”
“Push the button,” she said, “and place your order.” Then, first punching the button for him, she returned to her friends in the Firebird.
“Order,” commanded a tinny voice.
“Papa Burger, root beer, and french fries.”
“Roger-dodger,” the voice said. “Repeat: one Papa, one beer, one fries. Stand by. That’s it?”
“Roger,” said Paul Berlin.
“Out,” said the voice, and the intercom squeaked and went dead.
“Out,” said Paul Berlin.
When the slim carhop brought him his tray, he ate quickly, without looking up, then punched the intercom button.
“Order,” said the tinny voice.
“I’m done.”
“That’s it?”
Yes, all done.”
“Roger-dodger, over n’ out,” said the voice.
“Out.”
On his ninth revolution around the lake he passed the hiking boys for the last time. The man with the stalled motorboat was paddling toward shore. The mud hens were gone. The fat woman was reeling in her line. The sun had left a smudge of watercolor on the horizon, and the bandshell was empty, and Doctor Mason’s sprinkler went round and round.
On his tenth revolution, he switched off the air-conditioning, cranked open a window, and rested his elbow comfortably on the sill, driving with one hand. He could trace the contours of the tunnel. He could talk about the scrambling sense of being lost, though he could not describe it even in his thoughts. He could talk about the terror, but he could not describe it or even feel it anymore. He could talk about emerging to see sunlight, but he could not feel the warmth, or see the faces of the men who looked away, or talk about his shame. There was no one to talk to, and nothing to say.
On his eleventh revolution, the sky went crazy with color.
He pulled into Sunset Park and stopped in the shadow of a picnic shelter. After a time, he got out and walked down to the beach and stood with his arms folded and watched the fireworks. For a small town, it was a pretty good show.
Making Meanings
Speaking of Courage
1. How would you have felt if you had been in Paul Berlin’s shoes?
2. Explain why it is so difficult for Paul and his father to talk. What do you think Paul means when he says that his father “knew the truth already”? What truth does his father know, and how does he know it?
3. Discuss the symbolic meaning of the repeated circular action in the story and of the repeated references to time.
4. What is the symbolic meaning of the date in the story’s context?
5. Given his experiences, what is ironic about the military language in Paul’s conversation with the disembodied voice on the drive-in restaurant’s intercom system?
6. Find the passages in which Paul mentions conversations about God. What purpose do you think these passages serve?
7. Do you think Paul’s internal conflict has been resolved by the end of the story? Explain.
8. Do you think Paul is or is not a courageous person? Explain your answer.
9. What will happen to Paul next? Share your predictions about Paul’s future, and explain your reasons.