If I Die in a Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien Read Free Book Online

colonel asks if we have any problems or any complaints or any needs. When he asks if there’s enough food and if we get enough sleep, we’re supposed to say “Yes, sir.”
    They stuff us into the barracks at ten o’clock. The squad leader gears us up for nighttime cleaning. He promises to allow an extra half-hour of sleep in the morning, and we know he’s lying, but the floor gets waxed and our shoes get shined and the lockers get wiped.
    Blyton comes in and cusses and turns the light off and by eleven o’clock all the boors and bullies snort their way to sleep. It is a cattle pen. A giant rhythm takes up the barracks, a swelling and murmuring of hearts and lungs; the wooden planks seem to move, in and out. You fight to hold to the minutes. Sleep is an enemy. Sleep puts you with the rest of them, the great, public, hopeless zoo. You battle the body. Then you sleep.
    But in the heart of sleep, you are awakened.
    Fire watch.
    You sit on the darkened stairs between the two tiers of bunks, and you smoke. Fire watch is good duty. You lose sleep, but the silence and letter-writing time and privacy make up for it, and you are free for an hour.
    The rain is falling; you feel comfortable. You listen, smiling and smoking. Will you go to war? You think of Socrates; you see him beside you, stepping through basic training as your friend. He would be a joke in short hair and fatigues. He would not succumb. He would march through the days and nights in his white robes, with a white beard, and certainly Blyton would never break him. Socrates had fought for Athens: It could not have been a perfectly just war, but Socrates, it has been told, was a brave soldier. You wonder if he had been a reluctant hero. Had he been brave out of a spirit of righteousness? Or necessity? Or resignation? You wonder how he felt as a soldier on a night like this one, with the rain falling, with just this temperature and sound. Then you think of him as an old man, you remember his fate, you think of him peering through iron bars as his ship sailed in, the final cue, only extinction ahead; his country, for which he had been a hero, ending the most certain of good lives. Nothing recorded about his weeping. But Plato may have missed something. Certainly, he must have missed something. You think about other heroes. John Kennedy, Audie Murphy, Sergeant York, T. E. Lawrence. You write letters to blond girls from middle America, calm and poetic and filled with ironies and self-pity, then you smoke, then you rouse out Kline for the next watch.
    Erik and I were discussing these things on that September afternoon, sitting behind the barracks and separating ourselves from everyone and putting polish on our boots, when Blyton saw us alone. He screamed and told us to get our asses over to him pronto.
    “A couple of college pussies,” he said when we got there. “Out behind them barracks hiding from everyone and making some love, huh?” He looked at Erik, “You’re a pussy, huh? You afraid to be in the war, a goddamn pussy, a goddamn lezzie? You know what we do with pussies, huh? We fuck ’em. In the army we just fuck ’em and straighten ’em out. You two college pussies out there hidin’ and sneakin’ a little pussy. Maybe I’ll just stick you two puss in the same bunk tonight, let you get plenty of pussy so tomorrow you can’t piss.” Blyton grinned and shook his head and said “shit” and called another drill sergeant over and told him he had a couple of pussies and wanted to know what to do. “They was out there behind the barracks suckin’ in some pussy. What the hell we do with puss in the army? We fuck ’em, don’t we? Huh? College puss almost ain’t good enough for good fuckin’.”
    Erik said we were just polishing boots and cleaning our guns, and Blyton grabbed a rifle, stopped grinning, and had us chant, pointing at the rifle and at our bodies, “This is a rifle and this is a gun, this is for shooting and this is for fun.” Then he told us