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Tim O'BrienIf I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1973A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Man at the Well”
The platoon spends a day in a village, attended to by a kindly old blind man. He draws water from the well for them, saying, in his ingratiating way, "Good water for good GIs" (99). They lounge in his hut, eating and drinking cold beer and food from the resupply helicopters. The old man bathes the soldiers in an outdoor shower, soaping them up like a servant. Village children look on. "The day was as hot and peaceful as a day can be," O'Brien observes (100).
The old man is in the midst of showering a soldier when another solider heaves a carton of milk at the old man's head. The carton breaks, cutting the old man; he drips milk and blood. The man stands there, momentarily stunned, "with the ruins of goodness spread over him" (100). Then he resumes his kindly ministrations. He drops the bucket in the well again and "[comes] up with water, and [begins] showering the next soldier" (100).
Chapter 11 Summary: “Assault”
In April, O'Brien gets a letter from Erik, his friend from basic training. Erik works as a transportation clerk in Long Binh. In his letter he gravely, judiciously analyzes a poem of O'Brien's, titled “Dharma.” He writes of other poets, including 20th-century modernist poet T.S. Eliot. Erik's letter quotes Eliot's famous poem The Waste Land: "April is the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain" (104). O'Brien's April in Vietnam has none of the England-in-springtime touches in Eliot's lines: "April went on without lilacs. Without rain" (104).
The platoon is supposed to go on night ambushes, as ordered by Colonel Daud. Sometimes they fake the ambushes, calling in phony coordinates to battalion headquarters. The coordinates are then showered with artillery fire, and the men get on the radio, calling for "a nonexistent situation report," which they then answer themselves: "Sit Rep is negative. Out" (105). Both officers and enlisted men collude in this subterfuge, deceiving Colonel Daud. Some of the officers say Colonel Daud is "a greenhorn, too damn gung-ho" (106).
Daud announces they will be sent to Pinkville, the area of hamlets also known as My Lai. They will be doing Combat Assault, helicoptering in to Pinkville. Daud tells them to buck up, admitting Pinkville is "a bad place," but comparing it to New York City, where a man can survive if he keeps his wits about him (107).
The soldiers watch a Korean dancer strip to melancholy 60s pop: "Hey Jude," by the Beatles, and "Homeward Bound," by Simon and Garfunkel. The time for the assault arrives and they helicopter in. There is no enemy fire at the LZ. They run through a village, My Khe, chasing Viet Cong and feeling elated at having survived this far. They feel that their lucky survival is "a mandate for aggressiveness," so they "[charge] like storm troopers through My Khe" (111).
The assault ends with two Vietnamese and one American dead. Later, they hear Colonel Daud has been killed by sappers (specially-trained North Vietnamese soldiers), and they celebrate by singing "Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead" (111).
Chapter 12 Summary: “Mori”
The soldiers gather around a wounded female Viet Cong guerilla. She has been shot, the bullet tearing "into her buttock and out through her groin" (112) She bleeds and moans. She won't let the men move her; they watch her helplessly.
They express desire and tenderness toward her. Some comment on how pretty she is; O'Brien, too, as narrator, describes her "lustrous" black hair (114). The man who shot her is tender and solicitous, stroking her hair, trying to keep the flies off her.
The soldiers call for a "dustoff helicopter," the Vietnam War equivalent of an ambulance Jeep (113). During the long wait, she moans and writhes, and the men watch. The medic who arrives expresses regret about their having shot a woman. The helicopter takes off, but the pilot soon radios to say she's dead, and to chide them for "making him risk his neck for a dead woman" (114).
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
Chapter 10 is one of the most beautiful but also most shocking in If I Die in a Combat Zone. The old man is being kind to the soldiers, even completely subservient. A lobbed milk carton is not fatal, but it's cruel. Milk is symbolically associated with nourishment and care, as in the phrase, "the milk of human kindness." It seems as though the old man's pitiable physical frailty, his blindness, and his subservience excite fury in the soldier.
The phrase "milk of human kindness" comes from Shakespeare's play Macbeth, in which Macbeth and his wife use cruelty and murder to advance their fortunes. Early in the play, Lady Macbeth expresses her fear that her husband, Macbeth, is "too full of the milk of human kindness" to be able to kill. Perhaps the soldiers of Alpha Company are also rejecting human kindness—and vulnerability, and frailty—in order to steel themselves for battle. Rather than appreciating the break from the brutality, the milk-carton-thrower wants to smash pitiable weakness in the face.
In Chapter 11, "Assault," O'Brien remarks that one of the Combat Assaults in Pinkville "ended with two dead enemy soldiers and one dead American, a fellow I clobbered in Ping Pong back in Chu Lai" (111). This is in keeping with O'Brien's low-key book, his collection of "war stories" that do not add up to a grand drama. In a war movie, the soldier slated to die would be introduced to the audience to garner sympathy. He would be shown to be a close friend of the protagonist, O'Brien. He would be an Iowa farm boy or a Brooklyn tough—a character. But in O'Brien's war story, the dead man is a nameless, unremarkable acquaintance, someone he once played Ping Pong with. This also prevents his death from being used as justification for American violence. The war-movie scheme would be to show the senselessly slaughtered friend, which then justifies O'Brien's berserk revenge violence.
The description of Alpha Company's violence in Pinkville is also unusual. None of the typical justifications for wartime violence are given: not the loss of close friends, not the frustration of being targeted by snipers. (Those elements do appear elsewhere in the book, in Chapter 13.) Instead, Alpha Company's violence springs from elation, from relief at having survived the terrifying helicopter landing in Pinkville.
In Chapter 12, "Mori," the soldiers attend to a dying woman who is a guerilla fighter. The soldiers are tender, stricken, even tearful, and the man who shot the guerilla fighter weeps. They treat this young woman differently than they do the old man in Chapter 10. They order a dust-off helicopter, an extravagance the pilot later scolds them for, considering she is "a dead woman" (114). The scene's tenderness and pity are marked by gender difference. The guerilla fighter's wounds are sexual; the bullet penetrated her buttock and groin, and she bleeds from her crotch. The men do not leer at her, but they do comment that she is pretty, and they are saddened and stricken by their inability to help her.
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