Guilt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  The young man's fingernails were clean. There was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, a sprinkling of blood on the forearm. He wore a gold ring on the third finger of his right hand. His chest was sunken and poorly muscled—a scholar, maybe. His life was now a constellation of possibilities. So, yes, maybe a scholar. And for years, despite his family's poverty, the man I killed would have been determined to continue his education in mathematics. The means for this were arranged, perhaps, through the village liberation cadres, and in 1964 the young man began attending classes at the university in Saigon, where he avoided politics and paid attention to the problems of calculus. He devoted himself to his studies. He spent his nights alone, wrote romantic poems in his journal, took pleasure in the grace and beauty of differential equations. The war, he knew, would finally take him, but for the time being he would not let himself think about it. He had stopped praying; instead, now, he waited. And as he waited, in his final year at the university, he fell in love with a classmate, a girl of seventeen, who one day told him that his wrists were like the wrists of a child, so small and delicate, and who admired his narrow waist and the cowlick that rose up like a bird's tail at the back of his head. She liked his quiet manner; she laughed at his freckles and bony legs. One evening, perhaps, they exchanged gold rings. Now one eye was a Star. "You okay?" Kiowa said. The corpse lay almost entirely in shade. There were gnats at the mouth, little flecks of pollen drifting above the nose. The butterfly was gone. The bleeding had stopped except for the neck wounds. Kiowa picked up the rubber sandals, clapping off the dirt, then bent down to search the body. He found a pouch of rice, a comb, a fingernail clipper, a few soiled piasters, a snapshot of a young woman standing in front of a parked motorcycle. Kiowa placed these items in his rucksack along with the gray ammunition belt and rubber sandals. Then he squatted down. "T'll tell you the straight truth," he said. "The guy was dead the second he stepped on the trail. Understand me? We all had him zeroed. A good kill —weapon, ammunition, everything." Tiny beads of sweat glistened at Kiowa's forehead. His eyes moved from the sky to the dead man's body to the knuckles of his own hands. "So listen, you best pull your shit together. Can't just sit here all day." Later he said, "Understand?" Then he said, "Five minutes, Tim. Five more minutes and we're moving out."

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Even now I haven't finished sorting it out. Sometimes I forgive myself, other times I don't. In the ordinary hours of life I try not to dwell on it, but now and then, when I'm reading a newspaper or just sitting alone in a room, I'll look up and see the young man step out of the morning fog. I'll watch him walk toward me, his shoulders slightly stooped, his head cocked to the side, and he'll pass within a few yards of me and suddenly smile at some secret thought and then continue up the trail to where it bends back into the fog. Style There was no music. Most of the hamlet had burned down, including her house, which was now smoke, and the girl danced with her eyes half closed, her feet bare. She was maybe fourteen. She had black hair and brown skin. "Why's she dancing?" Azar said. We searched through the wreckage but there wasn't much to find. Rat Kiley caught a chicken for dinner. Lieutenant Cross radioed up to the gunships and told them to go away. The girl danced mostly on her toes. She took tiny steps in the dirt in front of her house, sometimes making a slow twirl, sometimes smiling to herself. "Why's she dancing?" Azar said, and Henry Dobbins said it didn't matter why, she just was. Later we found her family in the house. They were dead and badly burned. It wasn't a big family: an infant and an old woman and a woman whose age was hard to tell. When we dragged them out, the girl kept dancing. She put the palms of her hands against her ears, which must've meant something, and she danced sideways for a short while, and then backwards. She did a graceful movement with her hips. "Well, I don't get it," Azar said. The smoke from the hootches smelled like straw. It moved in patches across the village square, not thick anymore, sometimes just faint ripples like fog. There were dead pigs, too. The girl went up on her toes and made a slow turn and danced through the smoke. Her face had a dreamy look, quiet and composed. A while later, when we moved out of the hamlet, she was still dancing. "Probably some weird ritual," Azar said, but Henry Dobbins looked back and said no, the girl just liked to dance. That night, after we'd marched away from the smoking village, Azar mocked the girl's dancing. He did funny jumps and spins. He put the palms of his hands against his ears and danced sideways for a while, and then backwards, and then did an erotic thing with his hips. But Henry Dobbins, who moved gracefully for such a big man, took Azar from behind and lifted him up high and carried him over to a deep well and asked if he wanted to be dumped in. Azar said no. "All right, then," Henry Dobbins said, "dance right." Speaking of Courage

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  spirators, App. B.C. 2. 5. II. σ. ἑαυτῷ to be conscious, with part. in nom., σ. καὶ αὐτοὶ σφίσιν ws ἠδικηκότες Lys, 115. 11; σ. ἑαυτοῖς κακῶς βουλευύμενοι Dion. H. 2. 55; but with part. in dat., σ. αὐτοῖσιν ὑμῖν οὐ ποιήσασι ὀρθῶς Hdt. 5. ο΄, cf. Dion. H. 3. 60:—so in Med., συνεγινώσκετο ἑωυτῷ οὐκέτι εἶναι δυνατός Hdt. 3. 53; and without ἑαυτῷ. εἰ συγγινώσκεαι εἶναι ἕσσων Id. 4.126, cf. 1. 45., 5. 86. 2. to allow, acknowledge, own, confess, Tt Id. 4. 3, Ar. Eq. 427, Thuc. 7. 733; c. acc. et inf. to acknowledge, allow, confess that .., συγγνόντες ποιέειν σε δίκαια Hdt. 1. 89; συνέγνω ἑωυτοῦ εἶναι τὴν ἁμαρτάδα Ib. ΟἹ, cf. 4. 43 3—S0, ¢. part., παθόντες ἂν ξυγγνοῖμεν ἡμαρτηκότες Soph. Ant. 926; also, σ. ws.. Plat. Legg. 717 D:—absol. to confess one’s error, νῦν συγγνοὺς χρήσομαι τῇ ἐκείνου γνώμῃ Hat. 7. 13, cf. 9. 122: —so also in Med., οὔτε συγγινωσκόμενοι (sc. τοῦτο) Id. 5. 94. cf. 6. 92 ; c. inf., οὐ συνεγινώσκετο αὐτὸς .. εἶναι αἴτιος Id. 6. 61, cf. 140. c. acc. rei, to yield up, Xen. Ath. 2, 20. TIL. to collect or con- clude from premises, ἔκ τινος ὅτι .. Dion. H. 4. 4. IV. to have a fellow-feeling with another: and so, to make allowance for him, excuse, pardon, forgive, Soph. El. 257, Eur. Ion 1440, Xen. Cyr. 5. 1,13; τινι Soph. Tr. 279, Eur. El. 1105, εἴς. ; σ. τινὶ τὴν ἁμαρτίαν, Lat. ignoscere alicui culpam, Id. Andr. 840, cf. Aesch. Supp. 215; τινὶ τῆς ἐπιθυμίας Plat. Euthyd. 306 C; τινὶ ὅτι... Id. Menex. 244 B; ἔ. ef.. Ar. Vesp. 959; also, ξ. τοῖς εἰρημένοις Eur. El. 348, Plat. Symp. 218 B; κλοπαῖς Eur. 1. T. 1400, cf. Ar. Eq. 12993; ἐξ. ἡμῖν τοῖς λελεγμένοις Eur. Hel. 82:—so in Med., Aesch. Supp. 216 :—Pass., used impersonally, συγγι- γνώσκεταί μοι, Lat. ignoscitur mihi, v.1. Xen. Cyr. 7.1, 44, and cited from Synes.—This last sense of the Verb first occurs in Att., though Hadt. uses συγγνώμη in the sense of pardon. ovyyAvKatvw, to join in sweetening, στόμα Nic. Eug. 5. 202. σύγγνοια, ἡ, -- συγγνώμη 2, only in Soph. Ant. 66.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  He, too, blamed himself. Bent forward at the waist, groping with both hands, he seemed to be chasing some creature just beyond reach, something elusive, a fish or a frog. His lips were moving. Like Jimmy Cross, the boy was explaining things to an absent judge. It wasn't to defend himself. The boy recognized his own guilt and wanted only to lay out the full causes. Wading sideways a few steps, he leaned down and felt along the soft bottom of the field. He pictured Kiowa's face. They'd been close buddies, the tightest, and he remembered how last night they had huddled together under their ponchos, the rain cold and steady, the water rising to their knees, but how Kiowa had just laughed it off and said they should concentrate on better things. And so for a long while they'd talked about their families and hometowns. At one point, the boy remembered, he'd been showing Kiowa a picture of his girlfriend. He remembered switching on his flashlight. A stupid thing to do, but he did it anyway, and he remembered Kiowa leaning in for a look at the picture—"Hey, she's cute," he'd said—and then the field exploded all around them. Like murder, the boy thought. The flashlight made it happen. Dumb and dangerous. And as a result his friend Kiowa was dead. That simple, he thought. He wished there were some other way to look at it, but there wasn't. Very simple and very final. He remembered two mortar rounds hitting close by. Then a third, even closer, and off to his left he'd heard somebody scream. The voice was ragged and clotted up, but he knew instantly that it was Kiowa. He remembered trying to crawl toward the screaming. No sense of direction, though, and the field seemed to suck him under, and everything was black and wet, and he couldn't get his bearings, and then another round hit nearby, and for a few moments all he could do was hold his breath and duck down beneath the water. Later, when he came up again, there were no more screams. There was an arm and a wristwatch and part of a boot. There were bubbles where Kiowa's head should've been. He remembered grabbing the boot. He remembered pulling hard, but how the field seemed to pull back, like a tug-of-war he couldn't win, and how finally he had to whisper his friend's name and let go and watch the boot slide away. Then for a long time there were things he could not remember. Various sounds, various smells. Later he'd found himself lying on a little rise, face-up, tasting the field in his mouth, listening to the rain and explosions and bubbling sounds. He was alone. He'd lost everything. He'd lost Kiowa and his weapon and his flashlight and his girlfriend's picture. He remembered this. He remembered wondering if he could lose himself.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  The one eye did a funny twinkling trick, red to yellow. His head was wrenched sideways, as if loose at the neck, and the dead young man seemed to be staring at some distant object beyond the bell-shaped flowers along the trail. The blood at the neck had gone to a deep purplish black. Clean fingernails, clean hair—he had been a soldier for only a single day. After his years at the university, the man | killed returned with his new wife to the village of My Khe, where he enlisted as a common rifleman with the 48th Vietcong Battalion. He knew he would die quickly. He knew he would see a flash of light. He knew he would fall dead and wake up in the stories of his village and people. Kiowa covered the body with a poncho. "Hey, you're looking better," he said. "No doubt about it. All you needed was time—some mental R&R." Then he said, "Man, I'm sorry." Then later he said, "Why not talk about it?" Then he said, "Come on, man, talk." He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay with one leg bent beneath him, his jaw in his throat, his face neither expressive nor inexpressive. One eye was shut. The other was a star-shaped hole. "Talk," Kiowa said. Ambush When she was nine, my daughter Kathleen asked if I had ever killed anyone. She knew about the war; she knew I'd been a soldier. "You keep writing these war stories," she said, "so I guess you must've killed somebody." It was a difficult moment, but I did what seemed right, which was to say, "Of course not," and then to take her onto my lap and hold her for a while. Someday, I hope, she'll ask again. But here I want to pretend she's a grown-up. I want to tell her exactly what happened, or what I remember happening, and then I want to say to her that as a little girl she was absolutely right. This is why I keep writing war stories: He was a short, slender young man of about twenty. I was afraid of him —afraid of something—and as he passed me on the trail I threw a grenade that exploded at his feet and killed him. Or to go back:

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  "Oh, man, you fuckin' trashed the fucker," Azar said. "You scrambled his sorry self, look at that, you did, you laid him out like Shredded fuckin’ Wheat." "Go away," Kiowa said. "I'm just saying the truth. Like oatmeal." "Go," Kiowa said. "Okay, then, I take it back," Azar said. He started to move away, then stopped and said, "Rice Krispies, you know? On the dead test, this particular individual gets A-plus." Smiling at this, he shrugged and walked up the trail toward the village behind the trees. Kiowa kneeled down. "Just forget that crud," he said. He opened up his canteen and held it out for a while and then sighed and pulled it away. "No sweat, man. What else could you do?" Later, Kiowa said, "I'm serious. Nothing anybody could do. Come on, stop staring." The trail junction was shaded by a row of trees and tall brush. The slim young man lay with his legs in the shade. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut and the other was a star-shaped hole. Kiowa glanced at the body. "All right, let me ask a question," he said. "You want to trade places with him? Turn it all upside down—you want that? I mean, be honest." The star-shaped hole was red and yellow. The yellow part seemed to be getting wider, spreading out at the center of the star. The upper lip and gum and teeth were gone. The man's head was cocked at a wrong angle, as if loose at the neck, and the neck was wet with blood. "Think it over," Kiowa said. Then later he said, "Tim, it's a war. The guy wasn't Heidi—he had a weapon, right? It's a tough thing, for sure, but you got to cut out that staring." Then he said, "Maybe you better lie down a minute." Then after a long empty time he said, "Take it slow. Just go wherever the spirit takes you."

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  The guy at the front asking if anybody’s had a drink since the last group, and though I wonder about raising my hand, it hangs in the air of its own accord. I tell them I’m no alcoholic, but I’d shared a passed joint with a former boss, not wanting to seem like an ingrate. I fail to mention the five-dollar bottle of wine I’d drained later. Part of me expects to be handed some kind of hall pass that says the occasional joint—when part of a necessary business interaction—is okay. Another part of me thinks—hopes?—the group police will charge down the aisle, hoist me up by the shoulders, then show me the door . But I haven’t yet seen anybody get kicked out, even a hallucinating homeless dude and one individual with Tourette’s syndrome who once hollered out, I wanna suck your titties . Over the months, I keep going back to the bottle, though with each relapse, I come back one notch humbler, more willing to take a suggestion I’ve scorned. Like, get phone numbers of ladies and pick one for a sobriety coach you can call every day till you can get a grip. So I pick a lady in an A-line denim skirt and penny loafers, and maybe because her society lockjaw accent has the cadence of my mother-in-law’s, I never call before I pick up a drink—when she could talk me out of it—only after. How does Warren miss all this? Maybe he conks out, or maybe I’m a sneaky bitch. I wake one night on the back stair landing, choking on bile that’s erupted from my throat while passed out. Feeling my way up the unlit stairwell, I see at the top my pajama’ed boy, his frayed polar bear tucked under his arm, and around him is glowing some pale blue corona from a source I can’t name, and his eyes are acetylene torches. I hoist him in my arms and feel his soft arms around my neck, and he pats my cheek and says, Are you okay, Mommy? I lie that I am, and after I’ve settled him in his brand new big-boy bed, he corkscrews his way back into a dream. Then I stay all night propped against the wall, watching the light sift over him as if grated from the moon. Get a fucking grip, you drunk bitch, the sober part of me says. The two halves seldom war anymore, because they’re never in my head at the same time. They’ve worked out some system of shifts: the sober voice only gets in during periods I’m drowning in remorse; the drunk voice is otherwise resident as I hurtle toward a drink. The next night I humbly return to the shit-brown chair, trying to read the Boy Scout aphorisms hung from the wall, and I promise myself the first woman who makes me laugh, I’ll get her number and call her the second I get up tomorrow.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  After another trip to the grocery store, where Dev grabs all the candy bars off the shelf, the doctor teaches me how to put him in a time-out—a minute for every year of his life—which I initially hate to do, for it feels like punishment. So I wait till he’s pulled stuff off the supermarket shelf six times rather than doing it right off. Which means by the time I get to it, I’m rattled, and he knows he’s got me. I sit moldering at midnight on the back porch, holding what’s become a tumbler of whiskey sans ice and floating cherry—my ten thousandth last drink. The doctor has agreed to squeeze me in for an emergency appointment at dawn. Our couples sessions have become me alone in Parenting 101. She explains that if I wait till I’m mad to put Dev in time-out, that anger becomes the only limit he’ll recognize, and he’ll wait till I’m screaming to stop. The time-out isn’t punishment, it’s a circuit breaker you throw. Sleep. I crave sleep. That night his coughing keeps us up all night. I’m filled with wet sand. The doctor tells me that Dev has to learn to settle. I should only go in at increasing intervals, adding a minute each time. You can’t engage him, she says, otherwise, it’s reinforcing the waking. Even looks like in The Exorcist? Even if he’s possessed by Satan, she says. He’ll cry himself to sleep . As I’m gathering my stuff up, she lowers the pen to ask again, What about your drinking? For an instant, the plant-filled room inches over a little. I lie to her, saying, I’ve cut way down. Not long after, on a warm afternoon while Dev’s in the tub, Warren and I step across the hall to the bedroom to jack up our sniping. You always this, and you never that. We unzip our mild parental personas, shedding them, rising up like four-legged beasts reared back. The room is swirling with our invectives when—in the doorway—there stands Dev in his three-year-old body. He’s naked and gap-mouthed. All the raging that swirls around us arrests into violent stasis. The fury in the room dispels itself like smoke siphoned up with a hose. Coming from the tub, Dev’s pale body shines with water, ringlets damp alongside his blazing cheeks. He’s dragged behind him a brown and soaking towel like the hide of some slaughtered animal. (Almost twenty years later, he told me that this crisply drawn memory was the worst of his life.) I’ve never been on the receiving end of such a plaintive stare. Standing in a sniper’s crosshairs would feel safer. Later, as we draw the quilt up over him and his stout polar bear—named, prosaically enough, Mr. Bear—we practically sing our lame guarantees. Over his horizontal body, our shadows cross same as ever. We swear to him that the lady we’re talking to helps us play nicer. Like Martin Luther King? he says.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  When a man died, there had to be blame. Jimmy Cross understood this. You could blame the war. You could blame the idiots who made the war. You could blame Kiowa for going to it. You could blame the rain. You could blame the river. You could blame the field, the mud, the climate. You could blame the enemy. You could blame the mortar rounds. You could blame people who were too lazy to read a newspaper, who were bored by the daily body counts, who switched channels at the mention of politics. You could blame whole nations. You could blame God. You could blame the munitions makers or Karl Marx or a trick of fate or an old man in Omaha who forgot to vote. In the field, though, the causes were immediate. A moment of carelessness or bad judgment or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever. For a long while Jimmy Cross lay floating. In the clouds to the east there was the sound of a helicopter, but he did not take notice. With his eyes still closed, bobbing in the field, he let himself slip away. He was back home in New Jersey. A golden afternoon on the golf course, the fairways lush and green, and he was teeing it up on the first hole. It was a world without responsibility. When the war was over, he thought, maybe then he would write a letter to Kiowa's father. Or maybe not. Maybe he would just take a couple of practice swings and knock the ball down the middle and pick up his clubs and walk off into the afternoon. Good Form It's time to be blunt. I'm forty-three years old, true, and I'm a writer now, and a long time ago I walked through Quang Ngai Province as a foot soldier. Almost everything else is invented. But it's not a game. It's a form. Right here, now, as I invent myself, I'm thinking of all I want to tell you about why this book is written as it is. For instance, I want to tell you this: twenty years ago I watched a man die on a trail near the village of My Khe. I did not kill him. But I was present, you see, and my presence was guilt enough. I remember his face, which was not a pretty face, because his jaw was in his throat, and I remember feeling the burden of responsibility and grief. I blamed myself. And rightly so, because I was present. But listen. Even that story is made up. I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies with real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I'm left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  προστρόπαιος, Dor. ποτιτρόπαιος, ov, (προστροπήγ: I. act. turning oneself towards, hence 1. of one who has incurred pol- lution by committing murder or some grievous crime or done something that was deemed impious (even ignorantly), and turns to a god or man to obtain purification, a suppliant for purification (more specific than ἱκέτης), τὸν mp., τὸν ἱκέτην Soph. Ph. 930, cf. Aesch. Supp. 362, Soph. Aj. 1173, Ph. 930, Eur. Heracl. 1015, etc.; and as Adj., mp. λιταΐ Soph. Ο. Ο. 1309; c. gen., mp. ἑστίας Aesch. Ag. 1587. 2. of one who has not yet been purified after committing such crimes, a polluted person, Lat. homo piacularis, elsewhere évayns, Aesch. Eum. 41, 176, 234, 237; 445, Eur. H. F. 1259; mp. τῆς πόλεως bringing pollution on the city, Eupol. Δῆμ. 20. 8. of the pollution incurred, mp. αἷμα blood- guiltiness, Eur. Ion 1260, H. F. 1161; τὸ mp. guilt, Antipho 125. 2, Dio C. 42. 3—On the nature of such pollution, the condition of the suppliant, etc., v. Miiller Eumenid. § 51 sq. II. pass., ᾧ ἄν τις προστρέποιτο δεόμενος (ap. Eust. 1807. 11), the god to whom the murdered person turns for vengeance, i.e. ax avenger, like ἀλάστωρ, 6 πρ. τοῦ θανόντος Antipho 125. 32., 126. 39, Aeschin. 49. 22, Polyb. 24. 8, 2, Paus. 2. 18, 2:—hence also of the Manes of murdered Persons, wistting with vengeance, implacable, Antipho 119. 6, cf. Aesch. Cho. 287.—For the same double (act. and pass.) sense, cf. ἀφίκτωρ, προσίκτωρ. προστροπή, 7, properly a turning oneself towards; hence, the turning of a suppliant (ἱκέτης) to a god or man to implore protection or purifi- cation, the prayer or supplication of such person, Aesch. Eum. 718, cf. Plut. 2. 560 E:—then any address to a god, prayers, esp. of a solemn kind with sacrifices, θεοὺς οἰ προστροπαῖς ἱκνουμένη Aesch. Pers. 216, cf. Eur. Alc. 1156; ἱκεσία ξένων mp. Eur. Heracl. 108; προστροπὴν καὶ ἀρὰν ὑπὲρ τούτων ἐποιήσαντο Aeschin. 69. 11; προστροπὴν θεᾶς ἔχειν το discharge the duty of praying to the goddess, i.e. to be her minister, Eur. 1. T. 618; but, πόλεως προστροπὴν ἔχειν to address a petition to the city, Soph. O. C. 558; of libations, Aesch. Cho. 85. 2. mp. γυναι- κῶν a suppliant band of women, Ib. 21. II. the gutlt or pollu- tion of a murderer, Synes. 186 A, 202 D. προστρόπιος, ov, poét. for προστρόπαιος, Orph. Arg. 1233. πρόστροπος, ον. (προστρέπω) turned to or towards:—hence, like προσ- τρόπαιος, a suppliant, τινος Soph. Ph. 773; absol.. Id.O.T. 41. ΤΙ, accursed, Phot. πρόστροχος, ον, round, Hesych. 1323

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  aityT Hs, οὔ, 6, one that asks, a petitioner, DioC. Excerpt. p. 67.39 Reim. αἰτητικός, 7, cv, fond of asking, τινός Arist. Eth.N. 4.1, 16. Adv., αἰτητικῶς ἔχειν πρός Twa Diog. L. 6. 31. αἰτητός, dv, verb. Adj. asked for, ἀρχὴν δωρητόν. οὐκ airnréy freely given, not asked for, Soph. O. T. 384. αἰτία, ἡ, (αἰτέω) a charge, accusation, imputation, blame, Lat.crimen, and so the guilt or fault implied in such accusation, first in Pind. O. 1. 55 and Hdt. (but Hom. uses αἴτιος, ἀναίτιος, and αἰτιάομαι in this sense) :— Phrases: αἰτίαν ἔχειν, Lat. crimen habere, to have the imputation, be accused, τινός of a thing, Hdt. 5. 70, Aesch. Eum. 579; also c. inf., Ar. Vesp. 506; foll. by ὡς... Plat. Apol. 38 C; c. part., Id. Phaedr. 249 E; ὑπό τινος by some one, Aesch. Eum. 90. Plat. Rep. 565 B;—reversely, αἰτία ἔχει με Hdt. 5. 70, 71 ;—also, αἰτίαν ἔχειν τινός from a person, Soph. Ant. 1312; air. φεύγειν τινός Id. Ph. 1404; ἐν αἰτίᾳ εἶναι. οἵ γίγνεσθαι Hipp. Art. 830, Xen. Cyr. 5. 3, 18; αἰτίαν ὑπέχειν to lie under a charge, Plat. Apol. 33 B, Xen. Cyr. 6. 3, τό; ὑπομένειν Aeschin. 73. 24; φέρεσθαι Thuc. 2. 60; λαβεῖν ἀπό τινος Ib. 18; so, αἰτίαις ἐνέχεσθαι Plat. Crito 52 A; αἰτίαις περιπίπτειν Lys. 108. 21; εἰς αἰτίαν ἐμπίπτειν Plat. Theaet. 150 A; αἰτίας τυγχάνειν Dem. 1467.17; «Tos αἰτίας κυρεῖν Aesch. Pr. 330:—opp. to these are ἐν αἰτίᾳ ἔχειν to hold one guilty, accuse, Hdt. 5. 106; δι᾽ αἰτίας ἔχειν Thuc. I. 35, etc.; ἐν αἰτίᾳ βάλλειν Soph. O. T. 655; τὴν αἰτίαν ἐπιφέρειν τινί to impute the faut to one, Hdt. 1. 26; αἰτίαν νέμειν τινί Soph. Aj. 28; ἐπάγειν Dem. 320. 9; προσβάλλειν τινι Antipho 121. 32; ἀνατιθέναι, προστιθέναι, etc., Att.; ἀπολύειν τινὰ τῆς αἰτίας to acquit of guilt, Oratt. 2. in good sense, εἰ... εὖ πράξαιμεν, αἰτία θεοῦ the credit is his, Aesch. Theb. 4; δ ὅντινα αἰτίαν ἔχουσιν ᾿Αθηναῖοι βελτίους γεγονέναι are reputed to have become better, Plat. Gorg. 503 B, cf. Alc. 1. 119 A; ὧν... πέρι αἰτίαν ἔχεις διαφέρειν in which you are reputed to excel, Id. Theaet. 169 A; οἱ... ἔχουσι ταύτην THY αἰτίαν who have this as their characteristic, Id. Rep.435 E, cf. Legg. init., Arist. Metaph. 1. 3, 17:—cf. αἰτιάομαι, κατηγορέ- ομαι. 3. expostulation, admonition, μὴ ἐπ᾽ ἔχθρᾳ τὸ πλέον ἢ αἰτίᾳ Thue. 1. 69. 11. in Plat. and the philosophic writers, a cause, Lat. causa, Tim. 68 E, Phaedo 97 A sq., etc.; on the four causes of Arist., v. Phys. 2. 3, Metaph. 1. 3:—airia τοῦ γενέσθαι or γεγονέναι Plat. Phaedo 97 A; τοῦ μεγίστου ἀγαθοῦ τῇ πόλει αἰτία ἣ κοινωνία Id. Rep. 464 B:—dat. αἰτίᾳ, like Lat. causa, for the sake of, κοινοῦ τινος ἀγαθοῦ Thue. 4. 87, cf. Dion. H. 8. 29 :—the first traces of this sense are in Hdt. prooem. δ᾽ ἣν αἰτίην ἐπολέμησαν :---αἴτιον (neut. of αἴτιος) 9 » Ae A αἰσχύνωμα ---- LLITVALOS.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  But in the morning Lee Strunk couldn't stop laughing. "The man's crazy," he said. "I stole his fucking jackknife." Friends Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk did not become instant buddies, but they did learn to trust each other. Over the next month they often teamed up on ambushes. They covered each other on patrol, shared a foxhole, took turns pulling guard at night. In late August they made a pact that if one of them should ever get totally fucked up—a wheelchair wound—the other guy would automatically find a way to end it. As far as I could tell they were serious. They drew it up on paper, signing their names and asking a couple of guys to act as witnesses. And then in October Lee Strunk stepped on a rigged mortar round. It took off his right leg at the knee. He managed a funny little half step, like a hop, then he tilted sideways and dropped. "Oh, damn," he said. For a while he kept on saying it, "Damn oh damn," as if he'd stubbed a toe. Then he panicked. He tried to get up and run, but there was nothing left to run on. He fell hard. The stump of his right leg was twitching. There were slivers of bone, and the blood came in quick spurts like water from a pump. He seemed bewildered. He reached down as if to massage his missing leg, then he passed out, and Rat Kiley put on a tourniquet and administered morphine and ran plasma into him. There was nothing much anybody could do except wait for the dustoff. After we'd secured an LZ, Dave Jensen went over and kneeled at Strunk's side. The stump had stopped twitching now. For a time there was some question as to whether Strunk was still alive, but then he opened his eyes and looked up at Dave Jensen. "Oh, Jesus," he said, and moaned, and tried to slide away and said, "Jesus, man, don't kill me." "Relax," Jensen said. Lee Strunk seemed groggy and confused. He lay still for a second and then motioned toward his leg. "Really, it's not so bad. Not terrible. Hey, really—they can sew it back on—veally." "Right, I'll bet they can." "You think?" "Sure I do." Strunk frowned at the sky. He passed out again, then woke up and said, "Don't kill me." "IT won't," Jensen said. "I'm serious." "Sure." "But you got to promise. Swear it to me—swear you won't kill me." Jensen nodded and said, "I swear," and then a little later we carried Strunk to the dustoff chopper. Jensen reached out and touched the good leg. "Go on now," he said. Later we heard that Strunk died somewhere over Chu Lai, which seemed to relieve Dave Jensen of an enormous weight. How to Tell a True War Story This is true. I had a buddy in Vietnam. His name was Bob Kiley, but everybody called him Rat.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him. What stories can do, I guess, is make things present. I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again. "Daddy, tell the truth," Kathleen can say, "did you ever kill anybody?" And I can say, honestly, "Of course not." Or I can say, honestly, "Yes." Field Trip A few months after completing "In the Field," I returned with my daughter to Vietnam, where we visited the site of Kiowa's death, and where I looked for signs of forgiveness or personal grace or whatever else the land might offer. The field was still there, though not as I remembered it. Much smaller, I thought, and not nearly so menacing, and in the bright sunlight it was hard to picture what had happened on this ground some twenty years ago. Except for a few marshy spots along the river, everything was bone dry. No ghosts—just a flat, grassy field. The place was at peace. There were yellow butterflies. There was a breeze and a wide blue sky. Along the river two old farmers stood in ankle-deep water, repairing the same narrow dike where we had laid out Kiowa's body after pulling him from the muck. Things were quiet. At one point, I remember, one of the farmers looked up and shaded his eyes, staring across the field at us, then after a time he wiped his forehead and went back to work. I stood with my arms folded, feeling the grip of sentiment and time. Amazing, I thought. Twenty years. Behind me, in the jeep, my daughter Kathleen sat waiting with a government interpreter, and now and then I could hear the two of them talking in soft voices. They were already fast friends. Neither of them, I think, understood what all this was about, why I'd insisted that we search out this spot. It had been a hard two-hour ride from Quang Ngai City, bumpy dirt roads and a hot August sun, ending up at an empty field on the edge of nowhere. I took out my camera, snapped a couple of pictures, and stood gazing out at the field. After a time Kathleen got out of the jeep and stood beside me. "You know what I think?" she said. "I think this place stinks. It smells like ... God, I don't even know what. It smells rotten." "It sure does. I know that." "So when can we go?" "Pretty soon," I said.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  should've taken one look and headed for higher ground. No excuses. At one edge of the field was a small ville, and right away a couple of old mama- sans had trotted out to warn him. Number ten, they'd said. Evil ground. But it was a war, and he had his orders, so they'd set up a perimeter and crawled under their ponchos and tried to settle in for the night. He remembered how the water kept rising, how a terrible stink began to swell up out of the earth. It was a dead-fish smell, partly, but something else, too, and then late in the night Mitchell Sanders had crawled through the rain and grabbed him hard by the arm and asked what he was doing setting up in a shit field. The village toilet, Sanders said. He remembered the look on Sanders's face. The guy stared for a moment and then wiped his mouth and whispered, "Shit," and then crawled away into the dark. A stupid mistake. That's all it was, a mistake, but it had killed Kiowa. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross felt something tighten inside him. In the letter to Kiowa's father he would apologize point-blank. Just admit to the blunders. He would place the blame where it belonged. Tactically, he'd say, it was indefensible ground from the start. Low and flat. No natural cover. And so late in the night, when they took mortar fire from across the river, all they could do was snake down under the slop and lie there and wait. The field just exploded. Rain and slop and shrapnel, it all mixed together, and the field seemed to boil. He would explain this to Kiowa's father. Carefully, not covering up his own guilt, he would tell how the mortar rounds made craters in the slush, spraying up great showers of filth, and how the craters then collapsed on themselves and filled up with mud and water, sucking things down, swallowing things, weapons and entrenching tools and belts of ammunition, and how in this way his son Kiowa had been combined with the waste and the war. My own fault, he would say. Straightening up, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross rubbed his eyes and tried to get his thoughts together. The rain fell in a cold, sad drizzle. Off toward the river he again noticed the young soldier standing alone at the center of the field. The boy's shoulders were shaking. Maybe it was something in the posture of the soldier, or the way he seemed to be reaching for some invisible object beneath the surface, but for several moments Jimmy Cross stood very still, afraid to move, yet knowing he had to, and then he murmured to himself, "My fault," and he nodded and waded out across the field toward the boy. The young soldier was trying hard not to cry.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  He, too, blamed himself. Bent forward at the waist, groping with both hands, he seemed to be chasing some creature just beyond reach, something elusive, a fish or a frog. His lips were moving. Like Jimmy Cross, the boy was explaining things to an absent judge. It wasn't to defend himself. The boy recognized his own guilt and wanted only to lay out the full causes. Wading sideways a few steps, he leaned down and felt along the soft bottom of the field. He pictured Kiowa's face. They'd been close buddies, the tightest, and he remembered how last night they had huddled together under their ponchos, the rain cold and steady, the water rising to their knees, but how Kiowa had just laughed it off and said they should concentrate on better things. And so for a long while they'd talked about their families and hometowns. At one point, the boy remembered, he'd been showing Kiowa a picture of his girlfriend. He remembered switching on his flashlight. A stupid thing to do, but he did it anyway, and he remembered Kiowa leaning in for a look at the picture—"Hey, she's cute," he'd said—and then the field exploded all around them. Like murder, the boy thought. The flashlight made it happen. Dumb and dangerous. And as a result his friend Kiowa was dead. That simple, he thought. He wished there were some other way to look at it, but there wasn't. Very simple and very final. He remembered two mortar rounds hitting close by. Then a third, even closer, and off to his left he'd heard somebody scream. The voice was ragged and clotted up, but he knew instantly that it was Kiowa. He remembered trying to crawl toward the screaming. No sense of direction, though, and the field seemed to suck him under, and everything was black and wet, and he couldn't get his bearings, and then another round hit nearby, and for a few moments all he could do was hold his breath and duck down beneath the water. Later, when he came up again, there were no more screams. There was an arm and a wristwatch and part of a boot. There were bubbles where Kiowa's head should've been. He remembered grabbing the boot. He remembered pulling hard, but how the field seemed to pull back, like a tug-of-war he couldn't win, and how finally he had to whisper his friend's name and let go and watch the boot slide away. Then for a long time there were things he could not remember. Various sounds, various smells. Later he'd found himself lying on a little rise, face-up, tasting the field in his mouth, listening to the rain and explosions and bubbling sounds. He was alone. He'd lost everything. He'd lost Kiowa and his weapon and his flashlight and his girlfriend's picture. He remembered this. He remembered wondering if he could lose himself.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Among the men there would be grumbling, of course, and maybe worse, because their days would seem longer and their loads heavier, but Lieutenant Jimmy Cross reminded himself that his obligation was not to be loved but to lead. He would dispense with love; it was not now a factor. And if anyone quarreled or complained, he would simply tighten his lips and arrange his shoulders in the correct command posture. He might give a curt little nod. Or he might not. He might just shrug and say, Carry on, then they would saddle up and form into a column and move out toward the villages west of Than Khe. Love Many years after the war Jimmy Cross came to visit me at my home in Massachusetts, and for a full day we drank coffee and smoked cigarettes and talked about everything we had seen and done so long ago, all the things we still carried through our lives. Spread out across the kitchen table were maybe a hundred old photographs. There were pictures of Rat Kiley and Kiowa and Mitchell Sanders, all of us, the faces incredibly soft and young. At one point, I remember, we paused over a snapshot of Ted Lavender, and after a while Jimmy rubbed his eyes and said he'd never forgiven himself for Lavender's death. It was something that would never go away, he said quietly, and I nodded and told him I felt the same about certain things. Then for a long time neither of us could think of much to say. The thing to do, we decided, was to forget the coffee and switch to gin, which improved the mood, and not much later we were laughing about some of the craziness that used to go on. The way Henry Dobbins carried his girlfriend's pantyhose around his neck like a comforter. Kiowa's moccasins and hunting hatchet. Rat Kiley's comic books. By midnight we were both a little high, and I decided there was no harm in asking about Martha. I'm not sure how I phrased 1t—just a general question—but Jimmy Cross looked up in surprise. "You writer types," he said, "you've got long memories." Then he smiled and excused himself and went up to the guest room and came back with a small framed photograph. It was the volleyball shot: Martha bent horizontal to the floor, reaching, the palms of her hands in sharp focus. "Remember this?" he said. I nodded and told him I was surprised. I thought he'd burned it. Jimmy kept smiling. For a while he stared down at the photograph, his eyes very bright, then he shrugged and said, "Well, I did—I burned it. After Lavender died, I couldn't ... This is a new one. Martha gave it to me herself."

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Moving away, the men found things to do with themselves, some smoking, some opening up cans of C rations, a few just standing in the rain. For all of them it was a relief to have it finished. There was the promise now of finding a hootch somewhere, or an abandoned pagoda, where they could strip down and wring out their fatigues and maybe start a hot fire. They felt bad for Kiowa. But they also felt a kind of giddiness, a secret joy, because they were alive, and because even the rain was preferable to being sucked under a shit field, and because it was all a matter of luck and happenstance. Azar sat down on the dike next to Norman Bowker. "Listen," he said. "Those dumb jokes—I didn't mean anything." "We all say things." "Yeah, but when I saw the guy, it made me feel—I don't know—like he was listening." "He wasn't." "I guess not. But I felt sort of guilty almost, like if I'd kept my mouth shut none of it would've ever happened. Like it was my fault." Norman Bowker looked out across the wet field. "Nobody's fault," he said. "Everybody's." Near the center of the field First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross squatted in the muck, almost entirely submerged. In his head he was revising the letter to Kiowa's father. Impersonal this time. An officer expressing an officer's condolences. No apologies were necessary, because in fact it was one of those freak things, and the war was full of freaks, and nothing could ever change it anyway. Which was the truth, he thought. The exact truth. Lieutenant Cross went deeper into the muck, the dark water at his throat, and tried to tell himself it was the truth. Beside him, a few steps off to the left, the young soldier was still searching for his girlfriend's picture. Still remembering how he had killed Kiowa. The boy wanted to confess. He wanted to tell the lieutenant how in the middle of the night he had pulled out Billie's picture and passed it over to Kiowa and then switched on the flashlight, and how Kiowa had whispered, "Hey, she's cute," and how for a second the flashlight had made Billie's face sparkle, and how right then the field had exploded all around them. The flashlight had done it. Like a target shining in the dark. The boy looked up at the sky, then at Jimmy Cross. "Sir?" he said. The rain and mist moved across the field in broad, sweeping sheets of gray. Close by, there was thunder. "Sir," the boy said, "I got to explain something." But Lieutenant Jimmy Cross wasn't listening. Eyes closed, he let himself go deeper into the waste, just letting the field take him. He lay back and floated.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  As the novel developed over the next year, and as my own ideas clarified, it became apparent that the chapter had no proper home in the larger narrative. Going After Cacciato was a war story; "Speaking of Courage" was a postwar story. Two different time periods, two different sets of issues. There was no choice but to remove the chapter entirely. The mistake, in part, had been in trying to wedge the piece into a novel. Beyond that, though, something about the story had frightened me—I was afraid to speak directly, afraid to remember—and in the end the piece had been ruined by a failure to tell the full and precise truth about our night in the shit field. Over the next several months, as it often happens, I managed to erase the story's flaws from my memory, taking pride in a shadowy, idealized recollection of its virtues. When the piece appeared in an anthology of short fiction, I sent a copy off to Norman Bowker with the thought that it might please him. His reaction was short and somewhat bitter. "It's not terrible," he wrote me, "but you left out Vietnam. Where's Kiowa? Where's the shit?" Eight months later he hanged himself. In August of 1978 his mother sent me a brief note explaining what had happened. He'd been playing pickup basketball at the Y; after two hours he went off for a drink of water; he used a jump rope; his friends found him hanging from a water pipe. There was no suicide note, no message of any kind. "Norman was a quiet boy," his mother wrote, "and I don't suppose he wanted to bother anybody." Now, a decade after his death, I'm hoping that "Speaking of Courage" makes good on Norman Bowker's silence. And I hope it's a better story. Although the old structure remains, the piece has been substantially revised, in some places by severe cutting, in other places by the addition of new material. Norman is back in the story, where he belongs, and I don't think he would mind that his real name appears. The central incident—our long night in the shit field along the Song Tra Bong—has been restored to the piece. It was hard stuff to write. Kiowa, after all, had been a close friend, and for years I've avoided thinking about his death and my own complicity in it. Even here it's not easy. In the interests of truth, however, I want to make it clear that Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to Kiowa. Norman did not experience a failure of nerve that night. He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own. In the Field

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  both hands as if chasing some object just beneath the surface. The boy's shoulders were shaking. Jimmy Cross yelled again but the young soldier did not turn or look up. In his hooded poncho, everything caked with mud, the boy's face was impossible to make out. The filth seemed to erase identities, transforming the men into identical copies of a single soldier, which was exactly how Jimmy Cross had been trained to treat them, as interchangeable units of command. It was difficult sometimes, but he tried to avoid that sort of thinking. He had no military ambitions. He preferred to view his men not as units but as human beings. And Kiowa had been a splendid human being, the very best, intelligent and gentle and quiet-spoken. Very brave, too. And decent. The kid's father taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, where Kiowa had been raised to believe in the promise of salvation under Jesus Christ, and this conviction had always been present in the boy's smile, in his posture toward the world, in the way he never went anywhere without an illustrated New Testament that his father had mailed to him as a birthday present back in January. A crime, Jimmy Cross thought. Looking out toward the river, he knew for a fact that he had made a mistake setting up here. The order had come from higher, true, but still he should've exercised some field discretion. He should've moved to higher ground for the night, should've radioed in false coordinates. There was nothing he could do now, but still it was a mistake and a hideous waste. He felt sick about it. Standing in the deep waters of the field, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross began composing a letter in his head to the kid's father, not mentioning the shit field, just saying what a fine soldier Kiowa had been, what a fine human being, and how he was the kind of son that any father could be proud of forever. The search went slowly. For a time the morning seemed to brighten, the sky going to a lighter shade of silver, but then the rains came back hard and steady. There was the feel of permanent twilight. At the far left of the line, Azar and Norman Bowker and Mitchell Sanders waded along the edge of the field closest to the river. They were tall men, but at times the muck came to midthigh, other times to the crotch. Azar kept shaking his head. He coughed and shook his head and said, "Man, talk about irony. I bet if Kiowa was here, I bet he'd just laugh. Eating shit—tt's your classic irony." "Fine," said Norman Bowker. "Now pipe down." Azar sighed. "Wasted in the waste," he said. "A shit field. You got to admit, it's pure world-class irony."

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Mitchell Sanders made a sound in his throat. He hoisted up the rucksack, slipped into the harness, and pulled the straps tight. "All right, but this much for sure. The man knew it was raining. He knew about the river. One plus one. Add it up, you get exactly what happened." Sanders glared at the river. "Move it," he said. "Kiowa's waiting on us." Slowly then, bending against the rain, Azar and Norman Bowker and Mitchell Sanders began wading again through the deep waters, their eyes down, circling out from where they had found the rucksack. First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross stood fifty meters away. He had finished writing the letter in his head, explaining things to Kiowa's father, and now he folded his arms and watched his platoon crisscrossing the wide field. In a funny way, it reminded him of the municipal golf course in his hometown in New Jersey. A lost ball, he thought. Tired players searching through the rough, sweeping back and forth in long systematic patterns. He wished he were there right now. On the sixth hole. Looking out across the water hazard that fronted the small flat green, a seven iron in his hand, calculating wind and distance, wondering if he should reach instead for an eight. A tough decision, but all you could ever lose was a ball. You did not lose a player. And you never had to wade out into the hazard and spend the day searching through the slime. Jimmy Cross did not want the responsibility of leading these men. He had never wanted it. In his sophomore year at Mount Sebastian College he had signed up for the Reserve Officer Training Corps without much thought. An automatic thing: because his friends had joined, and because it was worth a few credits, and because it seemed preferable to letting the draft take him. He was unprepared. Twenty-four years old and his heart wasn't in it. Military matters meant nothing to him. He did not care one way or the other about the war, and he had no desire to command, and even after all these months in the bush, all the days and nights, even then he did not know enough to keep his men out of a shit field. What he should've done, he told himself, was follow his first impulse. In the late afternoon yesterday, when they reached the night coordinates, he