Indolent Historians of the Age of Charities,

I continue to learn about history in the laziest of ways possible. This time I learned about the Vietnam War by reading If I Should Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien and looking over the helpful notes in the back of the edition that I bought. I managed to glean that it was a mess, there were the South Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese, the Vietcong, the people, the Buddhists, the Cambodians, the French and of course, the Americans and they all rooted around the jungles and killed in an often indiscriminate fashion, well, the innocent people didn’t and the Buddhists only killed themselves.

The book is chiefly the memoirs of Tim O’Brien, a university graduate who was strongly opposed to the war but, essentially, not strong enough to object to being sent to Vietnam. The memoirs begin in basic training, where he plots to desert the army before deployment, but he doesn’t have the strength to see it through despite having made all the arrangements, before continuing throughout his year of service in Vietnam. He knows his and his country’s intrusion into a conflict in a distant land is wrong so it’s not the case that he wrestles with his conscience throughout the war, what is conveyed most is his sense of frustration that no one else around him seems to have similar objections to the US involvement.

He refers to Alpha Company frequently, but although he is the man who carries the radio for the squad leaders and therefore should be quite central to the group, he never really seems anything but alone in his tales. Firstly, this is most likely be related to the fact that he doesn’t really meet anyone in the company who objects or sees wrong in what they are doing, except his mail correspondent, Eric (a friend from basic training) and secondly, wastage of men in the group is routine and expected, it seems that any relationship or attachment would be futile. O’Brien doesn’t really discuss killing anyone himself and at the end of it all, it doesn’t seem as though he was an effective tool in the war and the question has to be asked: was there any point to Tim’s involvement? This question might well be a scaled down version of the question over the need for USA’s involvement in affairs in a distant nation.

If I Should Die in a Combat Zone is a decent read. Some of the references to classic literature might mean more to a scholar of the subject but overall, the book is one man’s personal memoirs and because it’s a personal account and because O’Brien doesn’t try to pretend that his experience was representative of every soldier, I don’t feel that I can argue with this piece of work.