Sunday, January 11, 2015
Boredom and Chaos
During our training in the Marine Corps, we are told that combat consists of 99 percent shear boredom and 1 percent chaos. Tim's story of his mates playing catch with a hand grenade captures precisely the type of shenanigans Marines get themselves into when sitting around endlessly waiting for something to happen. I have never been deployed myself, but my brother served in Iraq. He showed me pictures of him and his buddies swimming in one of Saddam Hussein's pools, pissing on a statue of the former dictator, then sitting in his throne. We are also briefed about the "fog of war" referred to by O'Brien in How to Tell a True War Story. Suddenly chaos interrupts the boredom; things get cloudy. Your basic instincts and your years of training take over. Everything blends together; specific details get lost. For this reason, vets these days sometimes use pictures as a way of remembering what happened during their service. Not just innocent photographs of comrades, but gruesome shots of the aftermath of battle. My brother showed me these pictures too. Most disturbing was his nonchalant description of them, "Oh yeah, this dude drew a gun on me in a house, so I blew his fuckin' head open. And these guys ran threw a checkpoint without stopping, so we lit 'em up." It was a disturbing moment for us, the family members of this man. That's when I knew he needed help coping with PTSD. In addition to the mental distress caused by experiences like these, physical trauma to the brain also amplifies PTSD in a person. My brother was on patrol when an IED blew up underneath his hummer. The man next to him died. In addition to littering his leg with shrapnel, the blast rattled his head causing serious brain damage. Thankfully he is doing better now.
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I am sorry to hear about what happened to your brother and I am happy that he is okay. Using his stories as an example to prove the reality of O’Brian’s war story provides a great resource. It allows the reader to juxtapose elements of your brother’s story with O’Brian’s story so that one can decide whether or not they believe O’Brian’s story to be true. Seemingly your brother and O’Brian had similar situations when it comes to goofing off and talking so casually about death. It is interesting to see how their emotions sort of detach from the reality of the situation. I’m not sure if this detached nature is simply the result of training the soldiers to see the enemy as a sort of inhuman and monstrous thing, making killing easy. Or rather, if the detached nature is a result of witnessing so much death that it no longer fazes you. I guess only someone that has been to war and experienced those things could provide an answer.
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