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Every war, it seems, produces its famous novel, a book that captures not merely the tactics and the terrain but the moral weather of its time. The American Civil War gave us The Red Badge of Courage. World War I gave us All Quiet on the Western Front. World War II offered more competitors, as if the scale of the catastrophe demanded more witnesses; but among them, for me, stands The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer’s brutal and magnificent debut.
The Vietnam War and Korean War, however, don’t seem to have yielded a single canonical work. But there are some candidates. For Korea, James Salter’s The Hunters, rare among war novels in its devotion to air combat, achieves a cold, fierce beauty that infantry novels rarely touch. For Vietnam, Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn climbs closer to the canon. Closer, but maybe not there.
For their part, short stories about war are usually less well known than longer fiction; indeed, Tim O’Brien and, more recently, Phil Klay have almost a monopoly on popular imagination when it comes to the genre. Yet our recent wars have not been quite as coherent, nor the ends quite as clear, as earlier conflicts, and it is for this reason that I think the short story — with its episodic humility — is actually the form that best fits modern conflict. To that end, I want to recommend three war stories that might not be familiar to every reader. Two come from the same author, and I will not apologize for that except to say: Read Thom Jones first, and you will understand why! The other piece I recommend is by Mark Helprin, one of the world’s great novelists.
Jones’s The Pugilist at Rest, a collection of short stories, appeared in 1993. I was a summer intern in Washington that year. An enthusiastic review in the Washington Post caught my attention, and I bought the book that afternoon. I did not put it down. I read through the evening, through midnight, through the small hours, through the stirrings of dawn. At seven in the morning, I finished it. I had not slept. I have never, before or since, done that with a book.
Jones had been a boxer. He was an epileptic. He had struggled with substances. He had trained with Force Recon in the Marine Corps and had been discharged mysteriously — perhaps, the records suggest, in connection with a brain seizure. It seemed from the book that all of this was somehow intertwined; boxing had led to seizures, which led to discharge, which led to drugs and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer (both of whom get many discussions in the collection). Whether what followed in the stories came from experience or from the raw pressure of imagination, the result was miraculous, a prose of such density and violence and sorrow that it makes most war writing look decorative. The two stories I urge upon you are the eponymous “The Pugilist at Rest” and “Break on Through.”
The third story I will recommend belongs to a different tradition and almost a different world entirely. Helprin’s “Charlotte of the Utrechtseweg,” from his collection The Pacific and Other Stories, shares Jones’s themes — violence, endurance, memory — but the voice is as different as candlelight from fluorescent. Helprin is a political conservative (a McCain speechwriter in his spare time) with a classical style, and he seems to have read everything ever written while also serving in the Israel Defense Forces and the British Merchant Navy. His novels — A Soldier of the Great War above all — have earned him a place among the serious writers of our era, which is a rarer distinction than even his many prizes suggest. I read “Charlotte of the Utrechtseweg” years ago. But I still think about it nearly every day. That, in the end, is the only measure that matters.
“Break on Through” by Thom Jones in The Pugilist at Rest
There are people — not many, but enough to recognize — who exist as if designed for a single purpose. They are sealed away from the ordinary consolations of normalcy and are legible only in extremity. In the military, I think of these types as “break glass in time of war” men; you would not necessarily choose them as neighbors, and they are restless and ill-behaved among the mundane and quotidian. The most vivid such figure I have encountered outside of fiction — whose story I taught often when I was a professor and upon whose example I still brood — is Army Col. Michael Steele; his controversial exploits in Iraq were documented in The New Yorker piece “The Kill Company.” Steele was, in many ways, an extraordinary leader: his champions argued that he simply understood the cold reality of what was required in combat. He had all the qualities that are virtues in war, though, some would argue, few others.
Jones’s “Break on Through” is about a similar man.
His name is Baggit. He arrives in the story as a Navy SEAL, decorated beyond reason, broken beyond repair, awaiting trial in Leavenworth for fragging a senior officer, when the Phoenix Program, considering military necessity more than military justice, assigns him to Force Recon. The Marine unit he joins calls itself Break on Through, and it operates in the mountainous northern terrain of South Vietnam, which, in Jones’s imagination, is a combat-intense, drug-addled, psychedelic fever dream of triple-canopy jungle and fast-moving trails and enemies who appear and dissolve like smoke.
The story is narrated by a man known only as Hollywood. When Baggit arrives, the jaded, combat-experienced members of Break on Through can scarcely credit his backstory. Over time, it emerges that everything is true — the medals, the murder, and more. For all of his personal wreckage, Baggit is a genius at war. In the mountains of Vietnam, where Break on Through finds itself constantly in the mix, this is not a small thing.
Hollywood’s own protection comes from a different source. He has communed, or believes he has communed, with what he calls the “purple field” — a phrase that gestures at once toward Jimi Hendrix and toward something older and darker, a Luciferian metaphor for the heightened state that combat and methamphetamine and the accumulated pressure of nearly dying can produce in a man who survives long enough. Lying in the jungle, encased by claymores, giant pythons slithering nearby, he can envision a cloven-hoofed presence, there to guide and protect him. As Hollywood puts it:
“That gave me the ability to see Charles in fields of purple — literally sense his location, see his energy and assume control of it and be the first to kill. I didn’t need a starlight scope. The personal purple forest was no boonie voodoo. It was something real, and if you didn’t pick up on it and use it, there was only one thing that could happen to you — you ended up dead. I wondered often if it was the gift of Satan.”
In the story’s climactic engagement, Break on Through finds itself fragmented and surrounded inside the overwhelming jungle, the enemy converging from every direction. Hollywood is certain he is about to be overrun. Out of nowhere — out of the dark, out of the trees — Baggit arrives. He kills the forces descending on Hollywood’s position, and, as the latter flees through the emerging daybreak, he sees dead Viet Cong everywhere, all with their noses cut off, a playing card stuck between their teeth. Baggit has been busy.
Discharged after he loses his thumb, Baggit, unsurprisingly, does not end well. It is an old story, and Jones does not linger over it. In a terse closing passage set on the same day, as it happens, that Jim Morrison is reported dead in Paris, Hollywood reads in the Los Angeles Times that Baggit had barricaded himself for 14 hours in a Salinas, California, beauty parlor with his estranged wife before shooting her and then himself. Strewn around the bodies, police found heroin, narcotics paraphernalia, and a bloodstained Medal of Honor. As Hollywood reflects, “In a matter of days, Break on Through lost its raison d’être in a man who wasn’t good for much on the streets of America but knew the purple fields better than anyone I knew.” It may be fiction, but I think — or maybe fear — there are many such cases.
“Charlotte of the Utrechtseweg” by Mark Helprin in The Pacific and Other Stories
And what he does while waiting is remember Charlotte.
She is 18, his daughter, back in London, conscripted into an air defense unit. And she is the love of his life. Bleeding, the major kneels in something resembling the attitude of prayer, but the object of his final oblations is only the image of his daughter, whom he cannot banish from his mind. He does not even try, for he has arrived, in these final minutes, at a terminal clarity. “There was no comfort, he understands — that was the trick at the end, to understand finally that every comfort was in vain, and then to understand that comfort was unneeded, and thus somehow to rise into death reassured and quiet.”
He is a barrister. In another life, he would have been looking forward, as Helprin writes, to “a slow unfurling of the years, with London their background — moving from case to case as if on stepping stones across a stream, keeping a watchful eye out for Charlotte, bringing presents for her baby, sharing a drink in town with her husband, his shotguns eventually going to the grandchildren if they were boys.” On the opening day of the operation, a glider had dropped him into a field that immediately came under heavy German machine-gun fire. He encounters a comrade nearby, already hit — a man with phosphorus burning in his chest, smoke rising from the wound, begging without success to be shot. As the protagonist observes, “No one came, or could come. When the line of flame reached the man, he shot himself.”
Before the operation, the major had proposed an alternative to his battalion commander. Give everyone small flotation devices, he urged, which would have allowed the troops to flank the German position and avoid the killing ground entirely. But his commander refused, and as he lies dying, the major contemplates this not with rage, as rage requires a future and he has none, but with the quiet irony of a man who has finally been relieved of the obligation to be right.
Charlotte had been something of a mascot for the unit. She lived with her father and visited the parade ground often. She was nearsighted, physically ungainly, and prone to stumbling, traits which only made the soldiers love her more. She was respectful and earnest and utterly without pretension, and the hardened soldiers had responded to her with real tenderness.
For the major, the final, fatal bullet comes from a German soldier who, as Helprin puts it, perhaps objected to “the incongruous, plinth-like shape rising from the flatness of the Utrechtseweg — and fired. The impact spun the major around and left him on the pavement.”
Shot twice, prone now, and only faintly alive, something opens at this last instant for the major: “How the holy and the profane mix in the light of day, and at the end of life is sometimes the most beautiful thing in the world and a compassionate entry into the next. After failure and defeat, a concentration upon certain beauties, though forever lost and unretrievable, can lift the wounded past its woundedness and the dying past its dying. It protects them with an image still and bright that will ride with them on their long ride, never to fade and never to retreat.”
The last line of the story is a single sentence: “He died with a vision of his daughter Charlotte in his eyes.”
“The Pugilist at Rest” by Thom Jones in The Pugilist at Rest
At the center of the boot camp section stands Jorgensen, the best of the recruits, and the one least susceptible to the Marine mythology that Jones renders as both absurd and genuinely powerful. There are moments, Jones notes, when even hardened recruits find their eyes welling at the recounting of legendary Marine exploits. Not Jorgensen. He maintains “an icy look of absolute contempt” for any such display of weakness. He is the kind of man who, in another life — the life he had perhaps imagined for himself — would have been a painter-poet in Soho, wearing a beret, smoking French cigarettes, arguing about Edith Piaf and Neal Cassady in some borrowed studio. By the time Vietnam found him, he had forgotten all of that. Or so it seemed. Jorgensen encourages the protagonist to join Force Recon, and together they go looking for the war.
What happens to Jorgensen is swift and without consolation. The two men’s Force Recon unit finds combat on Day 1 in theater, and Jorgensen acquits himself more than well. When most of the team is killed, Jorgensen fights off the enemy, almost single-handedly. In the end, a rocket-propelled grenade opens his abdomen, and as he lies on the ground, a North Vietnamese soldier drives a bayonet into his heart. The protagonist watches from a distance, helpless and fearful. He can — or does he choose to — do nothing.
What follows is a confession offered without self-pity. After Jorgensen’s death, the protagonist discovers in himself “a reservoir of malice, poison, and vicious sadism.” He pulls three tours. He wants payback for Jorgensen, and he commits, in his own words, unspeakable crimes. He receives medals for them: the Navy Cross and two Silver Stars. He comes home as decorated as he is hollowed out. He is a war hero in the technical sense of the term, which is the sense that, to him, matters least.
Back at Pendleton, the protagonist finds himself disillusioned and going soft. One evening — after working through a six-pack of Hamm’s — he climbs into the ring at a Marine boxing match. He has no business being there, and he is pummeled. He leaves with a permanent injury to his head, a wound that manifests, in time, as epilepsy; it is uncontrollable, unglamorous, and incurable. It is, in its way, a fitting end to a career defined by controlled violence. The body, which had been a weapon, has turned on its owner.
The epilepsy leads him, as such conditions have sometimes led men before him, toward a particular kind of philosophy. He finds himself thinking of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was epileptic, and of Saint Paul, who may have been. He thinks of the visions that attend the falling sickness and wonders whether they are gifts or damage, or whether that distinction means anything at all. And he finds himself reading Schopenhauer, who tells him what he already knows but has not yet had words for: “How hollow and unreal a thing is life, how deceitful are its pleasures, what horrible aspects it possesses.” The world calls Schopenhauer a pessimist and moves on. The protagonist does not move on. “It is peace and self-renewal,” he says, “that I have found in his pages.”
Through all of this — through the boot camp and the jungle and the medals and the ring and the seizures and Schopenhauer — there runs a single image, which is also the story’s title. In Rome, there is a bronze statue entitled “The Pugilist at Rest.” It depicts Theagenes, a fighter of the ancient world who is reported to have fought 1,425 times. These were fights to the death, not bouts in the modern sense, with regulations, referees, and binding rules. The statue depicts Theagenes sitting with his forearms balanced on his thighs, his head slightly bowed, looking pensive, looking weary, looking like a man who has seen enough to know that the seeing does not stop.
Channeling the protagonist’s lost soul, Jones writes: “What is courage? What is cowardice? He considers Davy Crockett, the hero of the frontier, reportedly cowering under a bed when Santa Anna’s soldiers stormed the Alamo. He considers Jack Dempsey, who sometimes wet himself before fights, and then went out and nearly killed Jess Willard and Luis Firpo — the wild bull of the pampas — in bouts that were something close to homicide.” He thinks of Roberto Durán, who quit, famously, in the middle of a fight, and yet who had displayed over a long career a fighting heart that few men in any era could match.
The story is written, we eventually understand, as a set of notes composed on the way to surgery. The brain injury from the Pendleton ring has progressed to the point where an operation is required; it is experimental, as the operations for such things tend to be, and he has chosen to take it. As he goes under — or prepares to go under — he thinks of Jorgensen. “A real American hero,” he calls him, with an irony that is not quite irony, who “created a stunning body count even if he had only something like 12 minutes total in the theater of war.”
The protagonist has the Navy Cross and two Silver Stars, but he cannot forget the bayonet in the heart. He knows that, in truth, he cut and ran from that field that day. And yet he pulled three more tours, earned more medals than Jorgensen ever could have, and arrived at Pendleton a decorated man. He has spent years trying to understand what that means about courage, about cowardice, about the difference between them, and if there is one. Meanwhile, Theagenes sits on his pedestal in Rome, forearms on his thighs, and does not answer.
Brad Carson is the president of Americans for Responsible Innovation.
Image: Ginny via Wikimedia Commons
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