Courage

Tim O’Brien grapples with his emotions and his desires as he faces the difficult decision of whether or not he should go fight in a war for a cause he does not believe in. As he is sitting in the boat, he realizes that his escape to Canada is attainable. The weight of the decision he is about to make causes him to freeze. He confesses, “What embarasses me much more, and always will, is the paralysis that took my heart. A moral freeze: I couldn’t decide, I couldn’t act, I couldn’t comfort myself with even a pretense of modest human dignity” (pg. 54). This admission is so striking because the reaction he had was natural and human. One may even say it was the rational response for someone in his situation. After all, this is a decision that will ultimately decide the course of his life. However, O’Brien looks back on this moment with shame for not knowing exactly what he wanted, as if his lack of bravery to do the nearly impossible was to blame for the moment. It speaks to this idea that “...he had to be braver than he ever thought possible, but...he had not been so brave as he wanted to be” (pg. 147). This sentiment is reflected in many instances throughout the collect of short stories, that no matter how brave someone tries to be it will not be enough in their own eyes because the situation calls for more courage than should be possible in the situation they’re given. In many ways courage is defined as one step further than the soldiers could have realistically gone. For instance, O’Brien is stuck in this mentality that he lacked the bravery to run away to Canada resulting in his losing himself in the war when in reality it would have been nearly unfathomable for him to leave behind his entire life and run away from his responsibility in the draft. In hindsight he makes his predicament sound so simple, as if bravery was this magical thing that if he had possessed his life would have been so much better. This idea was also reflected in the story of Kiowa’s death. O’Brien blamed himself for his friend’s death, believing that had he been braver and withstood the scent and just held on that Kiowa would have lived. However, in the moment, O’Brien, too, was being pulled under and had he not let go he would have drowned himself. Yet still, he retains this mentality that it was his cowardice that caused him to release Kiowa’s boot.

The line between what is considered brave and cowardice is extremely blurred. O’Brien explains, “Sometimes the bravest thing on earth was to sit through the night and feel the cold; sometimes you were very brave up to a point and then beyond that point you were not so brave. In certain situations you could do incredible things, you could advance toward enemy fire, but in other situations, which were not nearly so bad, you had trouble keeping your eyes open. Sometimes, like that night in the shit field, the difference between courage and cowardice was something small and stupid” (pg. 141). It seems as though often whether an action was courage or cowardice is dependent on the outcome of the action. Had Kiowa survived that night in the shit field, O’Brien most likely would not have viewed the effect the stench had on him in the same way. The reason that he looks back at letting the scent of shit bother him so much with shame is because he blamed a meaningless death of a friend upon it. In retrospect it seemed like a small and stupid breach of courage yet at the time, he was drowning in the scent and most likely would not have survived himself had he not let Kiowa go. It is in minute moments such as these that these soldiers define true bravery through their emotional reactions to their experiences.