Fields of Fire by James Webb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kids

About a third into Fields of Fire, it hits you: all these characters are children, big children, and children with guns but children nevertheless. The influence of Lord of the Flies is unmistakeable. The training of these Marines is aimed at creating not functioning adults but perfectly behaved children who are respectful and obedient, who speak only when spoken to, and who continuously grumble about taking revenge on their elders, but only among themselves. What they do on their own time is their business; the adults would rather not know.

The sociological glue which keeps them functional is not an ethos of foxhole camaraderie but the rules of the unsupervised playground. They are members of a gang. The first rule of gang membership is that only the gang matters. To be excluded from the playground gang means merely social isolation in the playground. Here it means injury and death. The opinion of other gang members about oneself is the crucial determinant of behaviour, - more important than fear of death, the need for shelter and food, and inhibitions about ruthless homicide.

The details of their existence emphasise their infantile status. They all receive nicknames upon arrival in combat. Not Stinky, Curly, or Four Eyes mocking their physical features but Wild Man, Snake, and Psycho reflecting their relative states of derangement. In addition to the usefulness of these names as a constant reminder of gang membership, they also serve paradoxically as a mechanism for dealing with the loss of comrades through injury and death since the names are transferable to replacements as required.

Like most boys, the Marines are greatly impressed by technology. The sights, sounds and smells of heavy artillery, fast aircraft, and automatic rifles (ours not theirs) are thrilling. The frustrations of pursuing an elusive enemy in unbearable physical conditions are mitigated by periodic displays which don’t have much effect on the enemy but momentarily boost morale. The standard response to these lethal pyrotechnic shows is “Get some!,” said with the enthusiasm of a ten year old pulling the wings off flies after receiving a beating from his father.

And this abuse is often very much what they had become accustomed to as young people. Many feel at home with it even as they resent it. Some because they have been brought up on the streets with violence as the norm. Others because they have been indoctrinated into a tradition of violent patriotism. Others because they naively allowed themselves to be manipulated by ‘the system.’ Their resentment is encouraged by the absent adults who understand that the Marines’ aggressiveness will be proportionate to their dissatisfaction.

These Marines are indeed “Zombie people, regurgitated by the gluttonous monster.” They have been ‘processed’ into children who are constantly on the edge of puerile rebellion. That they rarely go over that edge and kill their military masters is a tribute to the refinement of their training. Children are lost without their parents. Without parental direction and encouragement, they become a mob not a gang. And mobs are dangerous for their members as well as for everyone else. As I said: Lord of the Flies comes to mind.

The theme common to almost all war fiction, especially that of the American war in Vietnam, is resentment for lost youth. Some are resentful for being forced to go. Others for naively believing in the reasons they went voluntarily. Others for the lifelong guilt they suffer for the things they had to do. The only way, it seems, to assuage this resentment is to subject following generations to the same conditions they endured. Pitiful but true. What a species we are.

Postscript: Another GR contributor alerted me to the poetry of Randall Jarrell. Here is his poem ‘Losses,’ which, I think captures the reality of boys in war:

It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes-- and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us.
We died on the wrong page of the almanac,
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,
We blazed up on the lines we never saw.
We died like aunts or pets or foreigners.
(When we left high school nothing else had died
For us to figure we had died like.)

In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed
The ranges by the desert or the shore,
Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores--
And turned into replacements and woke up
One morning, over England, operational.

It wasn't different: but if we died
It was not an accident but a mistake
(But an easy one for anyone to make.)
We read our mail and counted up our missions--
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school--
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, 'Our casualties were low.'

They said, 'Here are the maps'; we burned the cities.

It was not dying --no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead,
And the cities said to me: 'Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?

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