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The guy’s dead, he kept saying, which seemed profound–the guy’s dead. I mean really.
On a logical level, the men in Tim O’Brien’s platoon know that they are in a dangerous situation in which people will likely die. But the first death of one of their men – Ted Lavender – is so shocking that Rat Kiley, the medic, can barely articulate any thoughts about it beyond “the guy’s dead.” The finality of that death is so horrifying and permanent that it’s difficult to put the sensation of witnessing it into words. Death – especially violent, sudden death – has gone from a faraway possibility to a visceral reality.
You know you’re about to die. And it’s not a movie and you aren’t a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait.
Tim O’Brien makes it clear that any fantasies of heroism and glory are often immediately abandoned when young men are put into a life-or-death situation. For Tim and his peers, combat is confusing and chaotic. Most people shoot blindly at the enemy with no real strategy. Or they curl up and try to shield themselves from the grenades and gunfire. There are no real heroes standing tall and masterfully taking out the enemy line, as might happen in a war movie. Rather, the reality of impending death is so powerful that all most men can do is panic and hide.
In Vietnam, too, we had ways of making the dead seem not quite so dead. Shaking hands, that was one way. By slighting death, by acting, we pretended it was not the terrible thing it was.
The men of Tim’s platoon have a ritual of shaking hands and talking with corpses they come across on their marches. The ritual is off-putting to Tim and Kiowa, but it’s clear that the behavior is a coping mechanism for the men, who are using dark humor to make the constant reminder of death more bearable. The men must distract themselves from the terrible power of death by making light of it, or else they would not be able to emotionally handle the fear and trauma of their circumstances.
