Leaving Lauren and her friends partying in a field behind a pub in southwest England, we move to a very different field, in the Vietnam War, where the mud is even worse than that endured by Chekhov’s soldiers in ‘Dreams’.
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is my favourite linked story collection, and one of the most effective of all fictions I know at conveying the experience of war.
The protagonist of ‘In The Field’ is an entire platoon, up to their thighs in excrement, in continuous heavy rain, searching for the body of one of their number, Kiowa.
“He was under the mud and water, folded in with the war, and their only thought was to find him and dig him out and then move on to someplace dry and warm.”
Their reluctant First Lieutenant, Jimmy Cross, is mentally composing, editing, and rewriting a sanitising letter to Kiowa’s father. He has been ordered to think of the men under his command as “interchangeable units of command”, but prefers to see them as human, which makes this more painful.
As is pointed out by one of the soldiers, the “shit field” is a metaphor for the war they are all moving through, or trapped in, like Kiowa, or floating on top of, like Cross does at the end, contrasting his stinking present to memories of a golf course.
“But they also felt a kind of giddiness, a secret joy, because they were alive, and because even the rain was preferable to being sucked under a shit field, and because it was all a matter of luck and happenstance.”
First published in Gentleman’s Quarterly, 1989. Collected in The Things They Carried, Penguin Books, 1991
A Personal Anthology 