I am going to level with you: I hate the war. I have hated the war since the day I walked off the battlefield. I hate it now even as it works its way up my throat and slips across my tongue — to you.
I hate the war so much I can no longer think of it in any terms other than personal. I no longer give a damn about its political legacy, about its cultural vicissitudes, its historical aftershocks, its literary revisionism, its misapplied lessons, its frauds and fakes and Johnny-come-latelies. My hate, my unbridled passion, sweeps all that away. For me Vietnam now is the first person singular.
I am, I always will be, what I was — a boy pulled from his time, a man who left something essential behind him. You ask, where am I now? I answer, still in the killing zone.
I am fire and I am smoke. I am a dark red spot on a dusty road. I am corpses stacked like cordwood on the fender of a tank. I am a little girl crying before my burning house.
Most of all, I am afraid. I am crouched atop this ridge at the head of a column and something is moving in front of me — there, across the divide. A tree is moving, turning, now half tree and half man, a tree-man holding a rifle, a rifle pointed at me. I am reaching for my weapon, I am pulling back the slide to put a round in the chamber. I must kill this man before he kills me. I must take his life away from him. My hand shakes. I will ask God to steady my hand. I will ask God to help me kill this man killing me.
And now I am rifling his body, picking in his pockets, puffing his wallet from his pants. Here is Dong. And here is Dong’s wife. And here is Dong’s child. Mine was the bullet that left them alone.
I, too, of course, am dead. The bullet that killed Dong killed me. One shot, two souls. I now am a hollow man, empty and alone. My psyche has a cicatrix.
I am at home now, sitting in church. The bishop is in fine voice this Christmas Eve, telling the congregation that God is on our side, that the war is just, the enemy evil. I am getting up now, in full view of all these people and my parents, getting right up without so much as an excuse me and walking out into the cold air and swearing never to go back, never again. I hope Dong can see all this. Semper fidelis, Dong.
I am chasing a career, sitting at the rewrite desk of my newspaper, and a colleague is complaining about all these mewling, crying Vietnam veterans demanding everyone’s attention, these scruffy men marching in the street. And I say, tell me, my friend, what bad battles left you so bitter? And he says, actually, you see, actually he did not wear a uniform. He could have served, you see, but he really didn’t believe in the war, you see, and damn if he was going to be cannon fodder for someone else’s cause. And I say, yes, I see. I really do see.
And now I have written a book about the war, a five-years- in-the-making book, a book meant to exorcise all the ghosts, exorcise me, the ghost I’ve become. I am sitting in a San Francisco radio station and the host of the program is saying to me, Mike, may I call you Mike? Yes? Good. Mike, I bet this book was great therapy, wasn’t it. Don’t you feel, well, healed? And I am stumped, right there in front of hundreds of thousands of listeners. I want to say, Well, Mr. Host, I am healed. As a matter of fact we’re all healed, every man jack one of us, even my friend Squeaky, who lost an eye, and my friend Belknap, who had his hip and hand blown off, and my friend Charles, who has a metal plate in his skull. We’re all feeling a whole lot better. Healed? You want me healed? Should I invoke Eliot? Time is no healer because the patient is no longer here.
The truth is I’m not really playing it straight with you here. I gave Dong a name he didn’t have and put him in a place where he wasn’t. I found the body and saw the pictures and that was truth enough for me. As for the rest, most of it happened, not exactly as I have delivered it here, but then, when it comes to the war, I don’t know anymore where my memory ends and where my dreams take over. With the war there is no telling what is true. The truth always turns on the meaning of life and I have been talking about death.
So I have no truth. My grandfather was gassed in the trenches of the Argonne, my father narrowly escaped the beaches of Normandy. War makes men like me, hollow men, men weighed down by memory, out of time and out of place, men who spend their lives trying to recover what has been lost, men haunted by the awful mystery that spared them, that left them alone, walking in the empty spaces.
Norman, Michael. “The Hollow Man.” The New York Times Magazine. 25 January 2000: 54.