Free The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien Page B

they're off in this special zone—and the mountains are absolutely dead-flat silent. Like
Brigadoon
—pure vapor, you know? Everything's all sucked up inside the fog. Not a single sound, except they still
hear
it.
    "So they pack up and start humping. They head down the mountain, back to base camp, and when they get there they don't say diddly. They don't talk. Not a word, like they're deaf and dumb. Later on this fat bird colonel comes up and asks what the hell happened out there. What'd they hear? Why all the ordnance? The man's ragged out, he gets down tight on their case. I mean, they spent six trillion dollars on firepower, and this fatass colonel wants answers, he wants to know what the fuckin' story is.
    "But the guys don't say zip. They just look at him for a while, sort of funny like, sort of amazed, and the whole war is right there in that stare. It says everything you can't ever say. It says, man, you got
wax
in your ears. It says, poor bastard, you'll never know—wrong frequency—you don't
even
want to hear this. Then they salute the fucker and walk away, because certain stories you don't ever tell."

    You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end. Not then, not ever. Not when Mitchell Sanders stood up and moved off into the dark.
    It all happened.
    Even now, at this instant, I remember that yo-yo. In a way, I suppose, you had to be there, you had to hear it, but I could tell how desperately Sanders wanted me to believe him, his frustration at not quite getting the details right, not quite pinning down the final and definitive truth.
    And I remember sitting at my foxhole that night, watching the shadows of Quang Ngai, thinking about the coming day and how we would cross the river and march west into the mountains, all the ways I might die, all the things I did not understand.
    Late in the night Mitchell Sanders touched my shoulder. "Just came to me," he whispered. "The moral, I mean. Nobody listens. Nobody hears nothin'. Like that fatass colonel. The politicians, all the civilian types. Your girlfriend. My girlfriend. Everybody's sweet little virgin girlfriend. What they need is to go out on LP. The vapors, man. Trees and rocks—you got to
listen
to your enemy."

    And then again, in the morning, Sanders came up to me. The platoon was preparing to move out, checking weapons, going through all the rituals that preceded a day's march. Already the lead squad had crossed the river and was filing off toward the west.
    "I got a confession to make," Sanders said. "Last night, man, I had to make up a few things."
    "I know that."
    "The glee club. There wasn't any glee club."
    "Right."
    "No opera."
    "Forget it, I understand."
    "Yeah, but listen, it's still true. Those six guys, they heard wicked sound out there. They heard sound you just plain won't believe. "
    Sanders pulled on his rucksack, closed his eyes for a moment, and let out a short, throat-clearing sigh. I knew what was coming.
    "All right," I said, "what's the moral?"
    "Forget it."
    "No, go ahead."
    For a long while he was quiet, looking away, and the silence kept stretching out until it was almost embarrassing. Then he shrugged and gave me a stare that lasted all day.
    "Hear that quiet, man?" he said. "That quiet—just listen. There's your moral."

    In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh."
    True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis.
    For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can't believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside.
    It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.

    This one does it for me. I've told it