Dad’s Maybe Book. Tim O’Brien
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to myself.
Maybe a half hour later, Tad came toddling into my office. The boy’s lower lip was trembling. He looked at me with a combination of remorse, fear, and ferocious concentration.
“I’m really sorry,” he said, “but I have two heads.”
“What?” I said.
“Two heads,” said Tad.
“What?” I said.
“You asked why I did it,” said Tad, “and it’s because I have two heads. One head told me, ‘Daddy won’t like this.’ The other head said, ‘This is gonna be fun.’”
A number of thoughts came to me in a rush. My son was not the budding ax murderer I had envisioned only minutes earlier; my son was smart; my son apprehended the ambiguities of moral choice far better than any talking head on the Fox channel; my son would become a poet one day, or perhaps a psychiatrist, or perhaps need one.
That night, I moved with newfound respect to the boys’ bedroom for our usual storytelling session. As a writer, I consider it my responsibility to make up bedtime stories for the kids, little ten-minute tales to escort them into sleep, and that night I began my story this way: “Once upon a time, I actually knew a guy with two heads.”
“Really?” said Tad.
“Absolutely,” I said.
“What was his name?”
“His name,” I said, “was Daddy.”
Tad and his older brother Timmy fell very quiet. I could sense the boys shifting in the dark, fixing their attention on my neck and shoulders.
“Two actual heads?” said Timmy.
“At least. Sometimes more than two.”
“Didn’t it hurt?”
“Well, no. Hurt isn’t the word. But it made the world pretty complicated.”
Tad leaned toward me in the dark, perhaps a bit frightened, perhaps in search of head stumps. “So how did you talk?” he asked quietly. “How did you even think about stuff?”
“Good point,” I said. “Thinking wasn’t easy. That’s what I mean by complicated.”
“Boy, I’ll bet,” said Timmy.
And then, over the next twenty minutes or so, I told my sons the story of what had happened to me in the summer of 1968, the summer I was drafted, the summer I became a soldier. One of my heads—located, let’s say, atop my right shoulder—had been fiercely patriotic, loved its country, respected authority, respected tradition, and believed in such things as duty, sacrifice, and service. The other head—teetering precariously above my left shoulder—had also believed in these things, but at the same time found itself opposed to the war in Vietnam and wanted nothing to do with it, certainly not the killing part and more certainly not the dying part. I was twenty-one years old. I was terrified. And through the summer of 1968 those two heads endlessly confronted each other, challenging, mocking, debating, taunting, cussing, cackling, praying their contradictory prayers, invoking God, invoking the names of LBJ and Richard Nixon and Jane Fonda and Abbie Hoffman and Patrick Henry and Donald Duck. At times the two heads spoke softly and rationally. Other times the heads screamed the most hateful and outlandish obscenities at each other, much as people were screaming in the streets all across our republic during that red-hot summer.
By this point, both Tad and Timmy were asleep. Yet even then, for a long, long while, I lay there in the dark, flanked by these precious little boys, still telling and retelling the story—not aloud, of course—telling it in my thoughts, in the pit of my stomach—just as I have been telling it now for forty-some years and just as I will be telling it and telling it and telling it until I’m gone and cannot ever tell it again—those two heads yapping away across the decades, never shutting up, never at peace, still embittered, still unforgiving and unforgetful. Now and then, the first head will score some sterile rhetorical victory. Other times head number two wins the moment. Sometimes one head might say, “What a coward you were for going to that war,” and the other head will shake itself and say, “You did what your country asked you to do,” and the first head will let out a bitter chuckle and say, “Yeah, right, and what if my country asked me to blow up Toronto tomorrow? Am I obligated to do it? Do I saddle up and start killing Canadians?” and the head on my right shoulder will say, “Hey, man, that’s totally ridiculous. You live in a good and great country, a country that would never issue such an order,” and the other head will say, “What about the Mexican-American War? What about Manifest Destiny? What about the American Indian? What about three million dead Vietnamese? What about those weapons of mass destruction that never turned up?” and the first head will say, “Everybody makes mistakes,” and the other head will say, “Exactly my point,” and so on and on and on, until eventually one head might say to the other, “Come on, pal, I’m exhausted, let’s get some sleep,” and the first head will say, “Okay, but I shouldn’t have gone to that crummy war, I should’ve said no,” and the other head will say, “You were young, you were afraid,” and then off they go again, yapping until dawn, everything slithering back to everything else.
As I lie in the bedroom dark with Tad and Timmy—not only two nights ago but every night—I’m swamped by this ceaseless two-headed bewilderment. I feel so helpless. I feel so hapless. Right and wrong do not announce themselves to me as right and wrong, and if ever they were to do so, I would not know which, if either, to believe. Eat your broccoli, I’ll tell the kids, then instantly worry about becoming a broccoli tyrant. Are the vitamins worth the resentment? Who knows? Who knows for sure? Two heads can be a curse. Two heads can lead to late-night second-guessing, wee-hour remorse, endless speculation about prayers not prayed, deeds not done, words of sympathy or love or understanding never uttered. And one day, I’m almost (but never quite) certain, Timmy and Tad will also find themselves entangled in the fearful uncertainties of uncertainty. Should I marry Jane or should I marry Jill? Or should I dump them both and marry Phil? Should I keep plugging away at this hateful job or should I seek a brand-new future in Fiji? Should I march off to war or should I not? Part of being human—as opposed to being, say, a rattlesnake—is the awkward burden of carrying on our shoulders multiple heads, sometimes two, oftentimes many more. And while the load may be heavy, I nonetheless feel an exhilarating, almost explosive happiness to be witnessing the first stirrings of moral awareness in Timmy and Tad. Carrying one or two extra heads through life, however troublesome, however confusing and dispiriting, is to carry a little armor against the soul-killing, people-killing horrors of absolutism.
Mohamed Atta, the hijacker and final pilot of one of the airliners that struck the World Trade Center a few years ago, had but one head—a bonehead, at that—an absolutist of the most consummate and deadly sort. How, I wonder, can a human being be so sure of things? Custer, too. John Wilkes Booth, too. Brutus, too, and Jonathan Edwards, and hooded executioners, and schoolyard bullies, and Joseph Goebbels, and the churchgoing waitress in Tuscaloosa who refuses to deliver French fries to a hungry black man and his hungry children. The bizarre vanity of killer certainty scares me. And now as I watch my children sleep, I can’t help but fear that Timmy and Tad may someday become the bloody victims of zealous, self-righteous, I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong one-headedness. I also fear that they may become the perpetrators. Through some parenting blunder of my own—an ill-chosen word passing from my lips, an inappropriate chuckle at an inappropriate moment—I worry that I may somehow ignite an inextinguishable fuse of intolerance and hypocrisy in my children. I do not want Timmy and Tad ever to say, or ever to think, “I am so right, and you are so wrong, that I will kill you.”
After the events of recent years, I have come to fear that our own nation, as much as any other nation, is endangered by self-righteous, absolutist rhetoric that celebrates our glories while erasing our shortcomings and pooh-poohing our ethical and moral failures—torture, for example.
I love my children. I do not love all they do.
I love my country. I do not love all it does.
Surely any parent or any rational patriot can understand the endless