‌Notes
“Speaking of Courage” was written in 1975 at the suggestion of Norman Bowker, who three years later hanged himself in the locker room of a YMCA in his hometown in central Iowa.
In the spring of 1975, near the time of Saigon’s final collapse, I received a long, disjointed letter in which Bowker described the problem of finding a meaningful use for his life after the war. He had worked briefly as an automotive parts salesman, a janitor, a car wash attendant, and a short-order cook at the local A&W fast-food franchise. None of these jobs, he said, had lasted more than ten weeks. He lived with his parents, who supported him, and who treated him with kindness and obvious love. At one point he had enrolled in the junior college in his hometown, but the course work, he said, seemed too abstract, too distant, with nothing real or tangible at stake, certainly not the stakes of a war. He dropped out after eight months. He spent his mornings in bed. In the afternoons he played pickup basketball at the Y, and then at night he drove around town in his father’s car, mostly alone, or with a six-pack of beer, cruising.
“The thing is,” he wrote, “there’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general. My life, I mean. It’s almost like I got killed over in Nam … Hard to describe. That night when Kiowa got wasted, I sort of sank down into the sewage with him … Feels like I’m still in deep shit.”
The letter covered seventeen handwritten pages, its tone jumping from self-pity to anger to irony to guilt to a kind of feigned indifference. He didn’t know what to feel. In the middle of the letter, for example, he reproached himself for complaining too much:
God, this is starting to sound like some jerkoff vet crying in his beer. Sorry about that. I’m no basket case—not even any bad dreams. And I don’t feel like anybody mistreats me or anything, except sometimes people act too nice, too polite, like they’re afraid they might ask the wrong question … But I shouldn’t bitch. One thing I hate—really hate—is all those whiner-vets. Guys sniveling about how they didn’t get any parades. Such absolute crap. I mean, who in his right mind wants a parade? Or getting his back clapped by a bunch of patriotic idiots who don’t know jack about what it feels like to kill people or get shot at or sleep
in the rain or watch your buddy go down underneath the mud? Who needs it?
Anyhow, I’m basically A-Okay. Home free!! So why not come down for a visit sometime and we’ll chase pussy and shoot the breeze and tell each other old war lies? A good long bull session, you know?
I felt it coming, and near the end of the letter it came. He explained that he had read my first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, which he liked except for the “bleeding-heart political parts.” For half a page he talked about how much the book had meant to him, how it brought back all kinds of memories, the villes and paddies and rivers, and how he recognized most of the characters, including himself, even though almost all of the names were changed. Then Bowker came straight out with it:
What you should do, Tim, is write a story about a guy who feels like he got zapped over in that shithole. A guy who can’t get his act together and just drives around town all day and can’t think of any damn place to go and doesn’t know how to get there anyway. This guy wants to talk about it, but he can’t … If you want, you can use the stuff in this letter. (But not my real name, okay?) I’d write it myself except I can’t ever find any words, if you know what I mean, and I can’t figure out what exactly to say.
Something about the field that night. The way Kiowa just disappeared into the crud. You were there—you can tell it.
Norman Bowker’s letter hit me hard. For years I’d felt a certain smugness about how easily I had made the shift from war to peace. A nice smooth glide
—no flashbacks or midnight sweats. The war was over, after all. And the thing to do was go on. So I took pride in sliding gracefully from Vietnam to graduate school, from Quang Ngai to Harvard, from one world to another. In ordinary conversation I never spoke much about the war, certainly not in detail, and yet ever since my return I had been talking about it virtually nonstop through my writing. Telling stories seemed a natural, inevitable process, like clearing the throat. Partly catharsis, partly communication, it was a way of grabbing people by the shirt and explaining exactly what had happened to me, how I’d allowed myself to get dragged into a wrong war, all the mistakes I’d made, all the terrible things I had seen and done.
I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don’t. Yet when I received
Norman Bowker’s letter, it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up others. You start sometimes with an incident that truly happened, like the night in the shit field, and you carry it forward by inventing incidents that did not in fact occur but that nonetheless help to clarify and explain.
In any case, Norman Bowker’s letter had an effect. It haunted me for more than a month, not the words so much as its desperation, and I resolved finally to take him up on his story suggestion. At the time I was at work on a new novel, Going After Cacciato, and one morning I sat down and began a chapter titled “Speaking of Courage.” The emotional core came directly from Bowker’s letter: the simple need to talk. To provide a dramatic frame, I collapsed events into a single time and place, a car circling a lake on a quiet afternoon in midsummer, using the lake as a nucleus around which the story would orbit. As he’d requested, I did not use Norman Bowker’s name, instead substituting the name of my novel’s main character, Paul Berlin. For the scenery I borrowed heavily from my own hometown. Wholesale thievery, in fact. I lifted up Worthington, Minnesota—the lake, the road, the causeway, the woman in pedal pushers, the junior college, the handsome houses and docks and boats and public parks—and carried it all a few hundred miles south and transplanted it onto the Iowa prairie.
The writing went quickly and easily. I drafted the piece in a week or two, fiddled with it for another week, then published it as a separate short story.
Almost immediately, though, there was a sense of failure. The details of Norman Bowker’s story were missing. In this original version, which I still conceived as part of the novel, I had been forced to omit the shit field and the rain and the death of Kiowa, replacing this material with events that better fit the book’s narrative. As a consequence I’d lost the natural counterpoint between the lake and the field. A metaphoric unity was broken. What the piece needed, and did not have, was the terrible killing power of that shit field.
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.
