It might at first glance appear a bit odd that Jim Nye, who served two tours in
Vietnam with the 101st Airborne and later with 5th Special Forces Group
(MACSOG), was wounded (two Purple Hearts), held the dying in his hands, and is
plagued by ghosts of the dead, would at the same time admit to, even 40 years
later, of doing it all over again. However, as John Keegan (1976) “We must take
account of the undoubted willingness of some men at all times to risk, even
apparently to enjoy, extreme danger and arbitrary cruelty. . . . [war provides] the
thrill of comradeship, the excitements of the chase, the exhilarations of surprise,
deception and the ruse de guerre, the exaltations of success, the sheer fun of
prankish irresponsibility” (Keegan, 1976, 324-25).
Gwynne Dyer follows up on Keegan’s observation: “There is such a thing as a
‘natural soldier’: the kind of man who derives his greatest satisfaction from male
companionship, from excitement, and from the conquering of physical and
psychological obstacles” (Dyer, 1985, 117).
Sebastian Junger sees this same apparent anomaly with American soldiers who
fought in Afghanistan: “That’s the problem when they come home, I thought: not
necessarily that they come back traumatized—which some do—but that they miss
it.” However, he goes on to note that “Missing something as horrible as war is
deeply confusing not just to the men themselves but to their wives, their families,
their friends” (Junger, 2010, 275).
This seeming contradiction is resolved, however uneasily: yes, the experience was
horrible, but, likewise, the “rush” of living at such a high level of awareness and
action could not be duplicated in civilian life. As Vietnam vet and author Karl
Marlantes told me, “I was only in Vietnam for one year, but it was a helluva year.”
He amplifies this a bit when he mentions an offer from the CIA to train tribesmen
in Laos: “And there would be the biggest drug of all, and one I still miss, the
passionate intensity of life on the edge. It was perfect heroic self-destruction”
(Marlantes, 2011, 189-190).
Related to this psychological split, this anxious duality, is Shelly Rambo’s analysis:
“When Freud began to work with soldiers returning home from World War I, he
made a simple but profound observation: the past does not stay in the past.
Veterans were experiencing vivid war scenes in the form of haunting nightmares or
flashbacks. The past was flashing back to them, . . . The veterans were not simply
remembering the past: they were reenacting it in the present” (ERambo, 2010, 19). (1)
Jim Nye’s poems in Aftershock: Poems and Prose from the Vietnam War (1991),
and 26 years later, Eating the Ashes (2017), explore these dualities. His use of the
third-person in a number of poems is a way to create psychological distance from
the war experience and the post-war present, to try to prevent being overtaken by
the past, while in others he confronts the ghosts directly. In other poems he
acknowledges how pivotal combat was and central to his life.
For example, in “Three A.M.,” from Aftershock, the ghosts intrude to the degree
that there is no separation between their appearance and “reality”; the ghosts are
reality: “Why is it 3 a.m. /When they appear? . . . I should be afraid./I was at
first,/but now we talk/in grainy voices. . . . Their cigarettes glow . . . ” (Nye, 1991,
62).
“Try So Hard” similarly speaks to the difficulty, if not impossibility, of reconciling
the “public face” of the present – job, friends, family – with the wartime past. The
“public face” is a precariously thin veneer which is in jeopardy of dissolving: “I try
so hard/to be normal./I smile, laugh at jokes,/My tie matches my coat . . . .” But
this edifice of his usual routine and self-control is shattered when, hearing the news
helicopter overhead, “the sweat pools/in the small of my back . . . .” As the poem
concludes, Nye is in his office and hears a door slam. Suddenly, the past intrudes:
“In the mud/Scotty dancing/plucked by secret strings/Screaming/Flowers of red on
green” (Ibid, 66).
In “Mornings” the past and present are experienced simultaneously. The speaker is
beside a stream, listening to the rain, waiting for the water for coffee to boil before
he starts fishing. The scene reminds him of the jungles of Vietnam, “those days 20
years ago, . . . seep into the edges of my memory,” and he tastes the C’s and other
GI rations. The poem ends somewhat ambiguously, as he faces a choice:
“upstream/ or/ down,/I must decide . . . I’ll go downstream” (Ibid, 70-71). Does he
succumb to the past or does he choose to live in the present?
“Lunch” continues with the theme of the split experience, where images in the
present create an unwanted connection to the wartime past. The setting of the poem
is a Dim sum restaurant. The mood is relatively upbeat. A server comes to the table
and asks if he ready to select items from the cart, and even though he feels that the
Dim sum cart is “hardly reminiscent/of the gurneys,” his memories return to the
casualties he witnessed in the hospital: “One body per/Wheeled to and fro, . . .
Followed by the buzzing flies . . . .” The poem ends with his response to the server:
“‘I’m not ready for the cart’” (Ibid, 72). Again, he is not able to evade the war;
everyday images and experiences touch off inescapable memories. (2)
In “Shadows” the past and present again co-exist. He hears gunfire and grenades
burst around him. Enemy soldiers run through a clearing: “He put his head
down./When he looked up his daughter/and her dog were running/across the lawn
toward him” (Ibid, 33). “Fuel” and “In For a Penny” are attempts to escape from
the past. In the former, he symbolically puts the memories in a bonfire “and you
toss all the bodies of/those you killed on that fire/the smoke rises like lost
memories.” However, even years later, “you take a jacket out/ of the closet,/and
covering the sleeves,/the shoulders/—- ashes” (Ibid, 48). In the latter poem he
writes of the failure of psychological dissociation to eliminate the effects of
combat. The soldier pretends that the violence and killing happened to others, but
“Many cannot find their separation,/that schism between then and now./For some,
that then is now” (Ibid, 54).
Still, even with the appearance of ghosts and the intrusive memories of violence
and death, Nye writes that he would return to war. Karl Marlantes discusses this
apparent contradiction when he writes of war as an initiation and a transformative
experience: “The second kind [of initiation] goes beyond societal roles and is of a
spiritual nature. It is about accepting one’s mortality. It is about facing death”
(Marlentes, 2011, 9). There is also a sense of camaraderie and connection to an
entity larger than the solipsistic self.
With this in mind the “other side” of war expressed in some of Nye’s poems is
more easily understood. In “Odds Against,” his choice to join the military was
psychologically, and perhaps spiritually, mandatory: “His choice completed
him./He could not imagine another life” (Nye, 1991, 2). This theme is reflected in
“Damned If You Do.” The memories of war still affect him, the killing “could
bring me/to tears,” but the poem concludes that given the chance he would go to
war again (Ibid, 10). In “Apprehensions” the past and present merge. As he reaches
out to hold the hand of his wife, angry and tearful, the poet is suddenly “holding
the rough hand of the medic/shouting at me over the noise of the rotor/blades,/I
wonder which reality/I would choose, had I the choice” (Ibid, 18). The comforts of
home and family are at odds with the call of war. Similar to “Mornings,” which life
would he choose? Even the ambiguity suggests a sense of dislocation in the
domestic world.
In “My Son, the Soldier” he recognizes the violence and death in war, but also
admits to loving war, the seeming contradiction left unresolved. In the poem Nye
recounts meeting a woman whose son was killed in Afghanistan. Seeing his 101st
Airborne hat, she asks if he knew her son. He explains that, no, my war was forty
years ago. As he thinks about this incident he is reminded of “the young/the old,
the alive, the dead/all the soldiers sent to die./I knew it all, the loss, the pain –” but
the last line highlights the enigma of war: “So then, why did I love it so —-” (Ibid,
59).
Perhaps Nye comes to a tentative explanation of this “love” (and it is not the love
of killing) in “Epiphany,” where he reveals, at least for himself, but echoing
Keegan, Dyer, and Marlantes, the “secret truth of war”:
There is nothing like the sheer joy of fear,
Spiking adrenalin that drives the heart.
The air is like crystal
Time slows
And life and death
Merge and focus,
Forging all of life
Into this single moment
Of ecstasy
(Ibid, 58).
Notes
1 The theme of the actual, literal presence of ghosts of those killed in combat
is a persistent theme in war writing. Siegfried Sassoon writes in his poem
“Sick Leave”: “When I’m asleep, dreaming and lulled and warm, —-/They
come, the homeless ones, the noiseless dead” (Sassoon, 1961, 85). Robert
Graves in Goodbye to All That likewise writes about an incident early in the
war when he was having dinner with his billet: “At Bethune, I saw the ghost
of a man named Private Challoner, who had been at Lancaster with me, and
again in ‘F’ Company at Wrexham. . . . Private Challoner looked in at the
window, saluted, and passed on. I could not mistake him, . . . I jumped up,
looked out of the window, and saw nothing except a fag-end smoking on the
pavement. Challoner had been killed at Festubert in May” (Graves, 1960,
103). Living in Harlech after the war Graves is plagued by the same visions:
“Shells used to come bursting on my bed at midnight, even though Nancy
shared it with me; strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends
who had been killed” (Ibid, 235). Graves calls his condition “reminiscential
neurasthenia” (Ibid, 257). Today it would be termed PTSD. Vietnam vets
Tim O’Brien and Karl Marlantes also write about the occurrence of ghosts.
O’Brien summarizes an incident in which he kills an enemy soldier with a
grenade even though, he says, there was “no real peril.” But the dead soldier
keeps reappearing well after the war: “In the ordinary hours of life . . . I’ll
look up and see the young man coming out of the morning fog” (O’Brien,
1990, 133-134). Marlantes’ experience is similar. He and his buddy Ohio
are tossing grenades at an enemy foxhole. He’s not sure if his grenade killed
the young VC but years later “That kid’s dark eyes would stare at me in my
mind’s eye at the oddest times. I’d be driving at night and his face would
appear on the windscreen. I’d be talking at work and that face with its angry
snarl would suddenly overwhelm me . . . ” (Ibid, 32). For them, their guilt
takes the form of the ghost.
2 For the ways that “innocent” everyday incidents can ignite memories see
“American Sniper’s PTSD Battle: The Hidden Struggle Behind the Scope.”
https://neurolaunch.com/american-sniper-ptsd/ (August, 2024). Although the
essay focuses mainly on the film American Sniper it discusses how PTSD
affects the veteran.
Works Cited above
Dyer, Gwynne. War. New York: Crown Publishers, 1985.
Graves, Robert. Goodbye to All That. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1960.
Junger, Sebastian. War. New York: Hatchette Book Group, 2010.
Keegan, John. The Face of Battle. New York: Vintage Books, 1976.
Marlantes, Karl. What It Is Like to Go to War. New York: Grove Press, 2011.
Nye, Jim. Aftershock, Poems and Prose from the Vietnam War. El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press, 1991.
______. Eating the Ashes. Las Cruces, NM: Grandma Moses Press, 2017.
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway Books, 1990.
Rambo, Shelly. Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.
Sassoon, Siegfried. Collected Poems 1908-1956. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1961.