The Sniper and War

My reaction, when I first heard about the sniper, was twofold. One was too much was made of it. What he did may have had little to do with the army or the Persian Gulf War. But then another half of me reacts: what the hell did you expect? You send guys into combat and you teach them how to kill. You send them through basic training where you learn to degrade other people and you teach them marksmanship and bayoneting: what do you expect?

Those are my constant contradictory responses. I can't sort out my feelings myself. Basic training is very demeaning — they suck the humanity out of you and then replace it with killing stuff. You're taught to kill. "The spirit of the bayonet is to kill!" is the phrase you yell as you stick a bayonet into a sandbag in practice. All the language that you use during basic training is the language of death.

The capacity that you could do terrible things is awakened. You don't even imagine it until you are in the army or the military and you find that not only can you do such things but also that they're required of you if you go into combat. If you have a tendency for violence already and you're a little nuts, the killing seeps in. It's the price you pay for having a military. Lee Harvey Oswald was a former Marine. Charles Whitman, who shot people from a tower at the University of Texas, was a former Marine marksman. It's not as if this is a new story — it's the old story repeated. It's like our country has no memory.

I don't buy the premise to the question that vets are let down by the social safety net. I didn't feel let down by anything. There was a GI bill, I used it, I went to Harvard on it. I didn't feel proud of my service in Vietnam. I felt I had done the wrong thing. I didn't want any parades or tickertape or all the stuff that's been talked about so much. I was happy to put my blue jeans back on and get back into life. Killing was such a nasty business, war is such a nasty business, I didn't want to celebrate.

How does a veteran reintegrate into society? Essentially you have to relearn the lessons of your youth — lessons of civility and nonviolence. It's not overnight — it's step by step, argument by argument, re-teaching yourself that violence isn't the way you solve personal problems. That's not simple. If you get a guy who's unbalanced, I don't know if you're able to re-teach that kind of person once something in him has been awakened by the whole environment that encouraged death.

I've been through a war, I've been through basic training. I'm a gentle nice guy, I think, I was before, but it was hard becoming the person I had once been when it was over. Writing was a huge help. A lot of what happens after a war is cut off by a wall of silence, where you don't talk and you think that you're not articulate, and that you can't discuss things and you don't want to try. As a writer I was able to articulate, at least on paper, my sense of having been used, and my own sense of shame about making bad decisions in the first place about going to war.

I was disgusted to see this country transfixed by a sniper while a war's being planned in Iraq. Six months ago Osama Bin Laden was Public Enemy No.1, and after that Saddam Hussein, and all of a sudden all the attention is on a sniper in Washington. It is as if our sense of scale is gone, along with our memory — we can't remember who our villains are, we forget as soon as new ones pop up. Maybe the sniper story had such an impact because it was home. It's in your back yard. It's like America is blind to what's going on anywhere else — unless it's hurting my kids in Washington, D.C. who gives a shit about what's happening in the rest of the world? They could be dying by the thousands and we'll go on with our business with no fear or personal stake. I never fail to be stunned by our appetite for atrocity and violence.

Tim O'Brien served as an infantryman in Vietnam and his war novel "Going After Cacciato" won the 1979 National Book Award. His new novel "July, July" (Houghton Mifflin) was just released.