54 pages • 1 hour read
Tim O'BrienIf I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 22-AfterwordChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 22 Summary: “Courage Is a Certain Kind of Preserving”
The chapter begins with a long quotation from Plato's The Republic. Socrates and a character named Adeimantus are discussing the function of the army. Socrates says a part of the city is courageous, referring to the army. The army's courage consists of "preserv[ing] the opinion about which things are terrible" (190-91).In Socrates' ideal republic, the ruler, or "the lawgiver," educates the citizens about what is terrible and what is not—about right and wrong. The army preserves that teaching.
It is common to think of war as an exception to society's morality. For example, we should not kill, but soldiers do kill. Socrates is talking about something different. In his view, an army uses war to preserve society's morality.
O'Brien describes the battalion executive officer, the second in command, Major Callicles. He is a barrel-chested military man who rose from the ranks to become an officer, "avoiding West Point [officers school] and doing it the hard way" (191). He is obsessed with stamping out certain lax behaviors he thinks are pernicious to the military: "moustaches, prostitution, pot, and sideburns" (191).
Three months after Major Callicles takes over the job of executive officer, the My Lai Massacre story breaks in the U.S. press. The actual massacre happened a year and a half before Callicles took the job, but the reporting happens in the autumn of 1969. Callicles becomes a kind of press officer, talking to reporters from "Reuters, AP, CBS, ABC, UPI, and NBC" (193).
Callicles makes several arguments. First, Lieutenant Calley and others should be presumed innocent until proven guilty in court. Second, the so-called civilians in Vietnam "kill American GIs" (193).Thus, the non-combatants are actually combatants; "they're all VC" (197). Third, civilians always suffer in war; that's what war is. Finally, O'Brien believes that Callicles privately thinks that perhaps My Lai was a massacre, "just as Newsweek reported it" (198).If so, it is the fault of the decay of professionalism in the army, which is caused by moustaches, prostitution, pot, and sideburns, in Callicles' view.
Callicles' arguments contradict each other. Civilians suffer in war, but in fact there were no civilians at My Lai, because according to Callicles all Vietnamese are the Viet Cong enemy. My Lai wasn't a massacre, it was ordinary warfare; then again, it was a massacre, caused by unprofessionalism in the US military.
After the My Lai investigation ends, Major Callicles continues his crusade against the decay of professionalism in the military. Privately, a soldier named Porter makes fun Major Callicles' obsessive zeal, comparing the major to a Nazi officer.
Major Callicles takes O'Brien on patrol, even though O'Brien now works a non-combat role. Major Callicles says, "Maybe we'll get some kills, surprise everybody, huh?" (202). They drive to a village and Callicles has O'Brien set up a Claymore mine, and then they settle down to wait for a Viet Cong soldier to happen by, so they can explode the Claymore. No enemy appears, and finally the major brings the patrol to an end.
The fruitless patrol gets Major Callicles in trouble: "Several days later he burned down the whorehouse, and the next day he was given two hours to leave LZ Gator for good" (204).
Chapter 23 Summary: “Don't I Know You?”
O'Brien describes his journey home to Minnesota. First is the flight from Vietnam. As on arrival, he is in a commercial airplane: "What kind of war is it that begins and ends this way, with a pretty girl, cushioned seats, and magazines?"(207).He finds the feel and smell of the airplane artificial, and the stewardess seems artificial, too. She has a "carefree smile" and she displays "boredom" (205). This enrages O'Brien, because he senses "she doesn't want to understand" (205).
The departure is undramatic, a letdown. O'Brien thinks he should feel something intense, but he doesn't. He holds himself aloof: "You keep to yourself" (206). The other returning soldiers are "a horde of strangers spewing their emotions and wanting you to share with them" (206). He feels no sentimentality for them, or for the people of Vietnam. The only emotion he can work up is for the red dirt of Vietnam, which he has come to know very well.
Flying to Seattle, O'Brien thinks back over his tour of duty, trying to "add things up" (207). He gained one friend and lost another. He "compromised one principle and fulfilled another" (207). He has learned some flat, shallow truths: "Dead bodies are heavy, and it is better not to touch them" (207).
Near Seattle, he is processed out of the Army. This involves having a steak dinner, signing papers, and saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Finally, he returns to Minnesota; apparently it is spring, because his plane passes over melting snow. Before returning home, he puts on civilian clothes. He has no civilian shoes, but he is confident "no one will notice" (209).
Afterword Summary
In the Afterword, O'Brien discusses the composition of the book. A very small part of it—"maybe twenty-five printed pages altogether"—was written during the war (211). The rest of the book he wrote after the war, "first in my hometown of Worthington, Minnesota, and then later in Cambridge, Massachusetts" (211). While he was in Vietnam, writing served many purposes for O’Brien. He wrote in the evenings, "after we had dug our foxholes," because he "was terrified. Even the twilight scared me, for I knew night was soon coming, and the nights were full of pictures of all the ways I might die" (211). He also wrote out of "a craving for revenge" and at other times "out of purest sorrow," or "self-pity and despair" (211).
He also had various reasons for the writing he did later, in Minnesota and Massachusetts. He "sought to bear witness, not only to the war, but also to [his] own failings" (212). He says his aim was "not to make literature" and claims he instead wanted to write "a document of the sort that might be discovered on the corpse of a young PFC [private first class], a Minnesota boy, a boy freshly slaughtered in Quang Ngai Province in the year 1969" (212).
Chapter 22-Afterword Analysis
Late in the book, in Chapter 22, O'Brien introduces a second definition of courage, this one also drawn from Plato. In Plato's Republic, a book about the ideal form of government, Socrates says, "courage is a certain kind of preserving" (191). This definition of courage is not very clear, and O'Brien leaves the quotation unexplained. In context, Socrates and Adeimantus are talking about how entire city-states can be either courageous or cowardly. This isn't a matter of polling the inhabitants; what matters is whether the army is courageous. And that in turn is a matter of the soldiers' preserving the law, internalizing and preserving the city's law. A soldier who stops being loyal when he is in pain or in danger is not courageous. Further, a soldier who breaks the law is not courageous. This definition is fitting for this chapter, which discusses war crimes and the My Lai Massacre.
O'Brien assumes the role of reporter here. He lets Major Callicles give all the pro-Army and pro-Calley arguments. Callicles is not the major’s actual name; instead, O’Brien gives the major a name—Callicles—from Plato's Gorgias. In that dialogue, Callicles argues it is natural for the strong to rule over the weak, and that it is unfair for the weak to try to rein in the strong through rule of law. Since Callicles is Socrates' opposite in this dialogue, it seems O'Brien is signaling he does not agree with Major "Callicles." The views of this contemporary Callicles on the My Lai Massacre are not O'Brien's.
The tour of duty in Vietnam is book-ended by two, similar commercial-airplane flights. On both of them, O'Brien holds him aloof from the other men. The comfort of the commercial airliner is unsettling, and so is the slick commercial charm of the stewardess. His attempts to "add things up" about his tour of duty seem designed to prove to the reader there is almost nothing to add up (207). He has written a book without a message, a book that is not wholly pro-war or wholly anti-war.
Related Titles
By Tim O'Brien
