And the Guilt Lives on

Throughout these stories we read about the guilt each of these soldiers carries with them. After Ted Lavendar was shot Lieutenant Jimmy Cross felt and enormous sense of guilt; he believed if he had not been so focused on Martha he could have saved Ted. On page 11 we read, “Lieutenant Cross gazed at the tunnel. But he was not there. He was buried with Martha under the white sand at the Jersey shore. They were pressed together, and the pebble in his mouth was her tongue. He was smiling. Vaguely, he was aware of how quiet the day was, the sullen paddies, yet he could not bring himself to worry about matters of security. He was beyond that.” It was only moments after this when Ted Lavendar was shot in the back of the head and died.

On page 16 we read, “…Lieutenant Cross found himself trembling….He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavendar was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war.” After digging his foxhole “he sat at the bottom…and wept. It went on for a long while.”

He decided then that in order to be the soldier he was responsible for being he had to forget about Martha. “On the morning after Ted Lavendar died, First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross crouched at the bottom of his foxhole and burned Martha’s letter. Then he burned the two photographs.” After fighting the rain “he realized it was only a gesture. Stupid, he thought. Sentimental, too, but mostly just stupid. Lavendar was dead. You couldn’t burn the blame.” He knew he would carry the feeling of guilt for Ted Lavendar’s death throughout the war and probably throughout his life.

In the Field, we read about two soldiers carrying guilt for the same death: the death of Kiowa. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross blames himself for not ignoring the orders and sending his men to higher ground. He was the one that kept them in what they later learned was a shitfield for a village. He constructed various versions of a letter he would send Kiowa’s father, in which he would accept responsibility for his son’s death, saying “my own fault.”

In the same story we meet an unidentified soldier searching through muck and water for a picture. “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.” He and Kiowa had been huddled up the night before and this soldier turned on his flashlight to show Kiowa a picture of his girlfriend. We can argue that the young soldier is Tim O’Brien who later reveals his guilt by taking Kiowa’s boots back to the paddy where he died the night the river overflowed.

Kenny Chesney recorded a song “Who You’d Be Today”. The lyrics of this song express the overall idea of what was left in the minds and hearts of soldiers that lost their friends, their fellow soldiers, in war. Whether they feel responsible for that person’s death or not it was someone they loved, someone they fought with, someone that never came home.  I would imagine many soldiers that come home from war wonder what their friends’ lives would have been like if they had come home too.