Walking the Wall

Following along the lines of my last post on violence is the idea of courage. I finished reading Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, which is an autobiography of his experiences in Vietnam. I would highly recommend reading his book of short stories (The Things They Carried) first, and then this autobiography because it illuminates the truths of the stories in an interesting way.

There are many things to focus on in this book–and I agree with the New York Times Book Review cover blurb calling it a “personal document of aching clarity…A beautiful, painful book.” But for the sake of this post, I thought O’Brien’s digging into the idea of courage starting in Chapter 16 to be particularily powerful. He writes:

Courage is nothing to laugh at, not if it is proper courage and exercised by men who know what they do is proper. Proper courage is wise courage. It’s acting wisely, acting wisely when fear would have a man act otherwise. It is the endurance of the soul in spite of fear–wisely. Plato, I recalled, wrote something like that. In the dialogue called Laches. (136)

He goes on through the next few chapters to show courage and lack of courage in various men and to question the concepts of courage that pop culture puts out–that sortof macho man run into the face of danger type courage. Later he writes:

For courage, according to Plato, is one of the four parts of virtue. It is there with temperance, justice, and wisdom, and all parts are necessary to make the sublime human being. In fact, Plato says, men without courage are men without temperance, justice or wisdom, just as without wisdom men are not truly courageous. Men must know what they do is courageous, they must know it is right, and that kind of knowledge is wisdom and nothing else. Which is why I know few brave men. (140)

I find his (and Plato’s) linking of temperance, justice, and wisdom with courage to be a profound distinction. It ties in with the ideas of violence sometimes being necessary in life–but possibly only when approaching it with temperance, justice, and wisdom?

Later in the book he asks, “Is a man once and for always a coward? Once and for always a hero?” Then he answers himself, “It is more likely that men act cowardly and, at other times, act with courage, each in different measure, each with varying consistency” (147).

Along with the ideas of courage go the idea of “being a man” more in the sense of being truly human:

I believe, therefore, that a man is mos a man when he tries to recognize and understand what is good–when he tries to ask in a reasonable way about things: Is it good? And I believe, finally, that a man cannot be fully a man until he acts in the pursuit of goodness. (56)

Right after he sums up this, he tells the army chaplain that he believes war is wrong and he should not fight in it–whereon the chaplain tells him he thinks he is disturbed, very disturbed.

It is a frightening world when acting in the pursuit of goodness is  disturbing. I think O’Brien has a good way to measure a thing–is it good? If so, than claim it and act on it.