How close the clouds press this October first
and the rain—a gray scarf across the sky.
In separate hospitals my father and a dear friend
lie waiting for their respective operations,
hours on a table as surgeons crack their chests.
They were so brave when I talked to them last
as they spoke of the good times we would share
in the future. To neither did I say how much
I loved them, nor express the extent of my fear.
Their bodies are delicate glass boxes
at which the world begins to fling its stones.
Is this the day their long cry will be released?
How can I live in this place without them?
But today is also my son’s birthday.
He is eight and beginning his difficult march.
To him the sky is welcoming, the road straight.
Far from my house he will open his presents—
a book, a Swiss army knife, some music. Where
is his manual of instructions? Where is his map
showing the dark places and how to escape them?
“No Map” by Stephen Dobyns from Velocities. © Penguin, 1994. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)
The first computed tomography scan was performed on a patient on this date in 1971. It’s also known as a CT scan or sometimes a CAT scan, for computed axial tomography. A CT scan produces images of cross-sections or “slices” of the human body. It makes it possible for doctors to examine the soft tissues of the body, which are difficult to see with traditional X-rays.
It’s the birthday of William Timothy O’Brien (books by this author), better known as Tim O’Brien, born in Austin, Minnesota (1946). When he was seven, the family moved to the “turkey capital of the world” — Worthington, Minnesota. O’Brien grew up there, on the shores of Lake Okabena, and part of his book The Things They Carried (1990) was set there.
O’Brien studied political science at Macalester College in St. Paul; he got good grades, was elected student body president, and graduated in 1968. The summer he graduated, he was served with a draft notice for the Vietnam War. He was against the war, and had participated in protests. Before he had to report, he spent some time in northern Minnesota, near the Canadian border, and he thought about dodging the draft. “My conscience kept telling me not to go,” he later wrote, “but my whole upbringing told me I had to.”
He served in the 23rd Infantry Division. Before he arrived in Vietnam, a platoon from the same division had carried out the My Lai massacre, but O’Brien and his fellow soldiers didn’t find out until later. He said: “I arrived in Vietnam roughly a year after the massacre happened. And I was assigned just by serendipity to a unit battalion that had the Pinkville area, the My Lai area. And so a good portion of my tour, I was walking through these villages where this horrible atrocity occurred prior to my arrival to Vietnam. And part of our fear [...] had to do with the hostility that you could read on the faces of the people there, even among the little children.”
When he returned home, he went to graduate school at Harvard, and was one of few vets there at that time. He left Harvard for an internship at The Washington Post, and while there, he wrote several articles about the war, which he later collected and published as a memoir in 1973. That book was called If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. His next book, Northern Lights (1975), was a novel about two brothers, one of whom went to Vietnam while the other did not.
O’Brien’s most famous book, a collection of linked short stories about the war, is The Things They Carried (1990). The stories blur the line between fiction and memoir; they feature a character named “Tim O’Brien” — but O’Brien the author insists it’s a work of fiction. He wrote: “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” The Things They Carried was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
From The Things They Carried (1990):
How do you generalize?
War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.
The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies. You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the rocket’s red glare. It’s not pretty, exactly. It’s astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference — a powerful, implacable beauty — and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.