Before he joined the Army, astronomy major Joe Haldeman had hoped to become a scientist. Combat duty in Vietnam left him with a bullet wound, a Purple Heart, and a burning desire to become a writer. The result has been 28 novels—heavily influenced by the war—including the award-winning The Forever War, one of the most widely read antiwar books of our time. Both his passion and his wry sense of humor show up in this essay.
“Answering the Call” is about people who joined the military and how the experience changed their lives. It certainly did change mine: I’m a writer, and the experience of combat gave me my first novel, War Year, and my most successful one, The Forever War. Many of my other books—28 in the past 40 years—are at least obliquely concerned with the experience of war. Not many people who are touched by combat will ever go through anything as dramatic, and sometimes traumatic as well—and if they’re writers, they will write about it.
I joined the Army only because I’d gotten my draft notice—that was 1967, the height of the Vietnam War—and the Army said that if I signed up, I could choose my branch of that service and still serve for only two years. I had a degree in physics and astronomy, so they suggested I choose the engineers, where I’d be some kind of a scientific assistant. I didn’t know that the kindly sergeant advising me got $15 for everyone he talked into signing that piece of paper.
I also didn’t know—and I should have—that if I’d been drafted, my ability to type would have been more important than my degree, and I probably would have spent two years stateside, typing forms. And they didn’t tell us that in time of war you can only sign up for a combat arm. So I became a combat engineer, and the closest I came to science was figuring out how much plastic explosive it would take to blow down a tree of a certain size—and doing that calculation with a pencil stub on the back of a C-ration box, crouching in a wet trench under enemy fire.
It wasn’t a good career move. In the 42 years since I left Vietnam, I haven’t had occasion to blow down a single tree. I haven’t dug a single trench or returned enemy fire or (my favorite) probed underneath any rotting corpses to see whether they were booby-trapped.
It’s conventional for a man in my situation, a combat veteran old enough to retire, to say something like “It was no fun, but I wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything.” That’s partly true, even though in a literal sense the expression is meaningless. You can’t trade experiences; you actually don’t even own them. But they can own you, and if you don’t think that is literally true, I’d like to take you on a trip to the place where I spent the afternoon today: the local VA hospital, a place both crowded and lonely.
Most of the patients there are like me, people who had been wounded. If we were to describe ourselves in a list, it would start out husband, maybe father or son, and go down through a list of professions and passions—professor and writer for me—and eventually come down to “veteran” and, as a footnote, disabled veteran.
But a lot of the people in that hospital, especially those my age and older, have a list that starts and ends with “disabled veteran.” That’s not unique to America, of course; if you have wars, you have these unfortunate by-products. And if you could invest in veterans’ hospitals, it would be a safe place to put your money.
For me, serving in the Army would have been life-altering even if there hadn’t been a war going on. It probably would have been a positive experience overall. Though I might have denied it at the time, I’d lived a very sheltered existence—I’d been a lot of places and done a lot of things in my 24 years, but they were places and things typical for an educated upper-middle-class white guy headed for a career in science. I didn’t really know how normal people lived; I’d spent all my life surrounded by books or happily cloistered in a laboratory or observatory. I’d never really worried about groceries or rent; if my part-time jobs didn’t cover everything, my parents would take up the slack with a check. And I didn’t have to worry about being drafted, since I was on track for a Ph.D. in physics, a specialty deemed valuable to the nation’s defense. That protective policy was about to change, though, just as I got my bachelor’s degree and headed for graduate school.
One “Greetings” letter from the Selective Service System put an end to my career track. Overnight, I was just another faceless, disposable body in a uniform. If some cretin high-school dropout ordered me to climb out of a trench and go die, I was supposed to do it without questioning his wisdom.
If Hollywood were doing the script for this little drama, the bookish pacifist kid would be headed for a sea change. He’d hang around with ordinary guys and learn some basic truths that you don’t learn in college. In the forge of combat he’d become complete and mature, and come home a better man.
To give Hollywood some credit, it also does the other script, where the man dies senselessly or comes home broken and bitter.
Most veterans fall somewhere in between those extremes. Service changed our lives without destroying them. In my case, the life difference was profound. I never went back to science. The bullet that drilled into my groin and took me out of combat also took me out of my comfortable career path. I had a story to tell—a story I had to tell—and after telling it, I realized that the only place I was really comfortable was behind a typewriter.
That metaphor has changed over the years; I’m behind a keyboard now, or a fountain pen when I’m being anachronistic. And I should be grateful to the draft board and the recruiting sergeant and the North Vietnamese soldier who put me flat on my back in a hospital in Tuy Hoa with a tablet and a pen. I scribbled out a 19-page letter to my wife explaining why she hadn’t heard from me in a couple of weeks, and in a way that was the first chapter of a series of novels about war and its effects on men and women.
A couple of years later, with the success of my first novel, War Year, I realized a perverse truth: I would have been a mediocre scientist, at best, but I was a pretty good writer. Good enough to make a living at it, and a life.
Might I have turned out to be a writer anyhow? I’d started writing in college, and had intended to keep doing short stories and poems while I concentrated most of my energies on physics and astronomy. But it wouldn’t have worked.
Every writer has one big story. He or she might write about everything under the sun and stars, but if you study a writer’s work over a lifetime you’ll find that the work revolves around and always keeps coming back to that big story. A passion for family or scholarship or ethnic identity; the one central narrative or trope that everything else grows on.
In my work, it always comes back to the jungle. Walking through the stillness with fear at your back but, paradoxically, the power of life and death in the chunk of metal in your hands. I’ve never been so weirdly alive, and everything I write is refracted through that lens of experience.
There’s also the undramatic truth that the dozens of people I met in uniform comprised a population of Americans I’d never known well, who I did have to know if I was going to write for a large audience. Before I was drafted, all I knew was science fiction and scientists: I was a geek among geeks. Afterward, I was at least a geek who had visited the outside world.
It may not be much of a job description, a stranger in an un-strange land. But it’s what a novelist is and does. For better or for worse, it was the Army and combat that let me go there.
I wrote two stories before I was drafted—required work for a writing course in college—and both of them sold to magazines. So I think I did have some native talent for writing. But I didn’t have that much to write about; I sort of recycled and reassembled parts of the thousands of stories I’d read as a kid. That’s usually what a writer does, especially a beginning writer, and most of us will admit it. It’s not dishonorable, but it’s rarely the source of powerful and lasting work.
The stuff that lasts comes from the writer’s own life, whether it’s Emily Dickinson’s butterflies or Ernest Hemingway’s bullet wounds. I’m sure I would have written without the experience of combat, some more stories along the lines of the two I wrote in college. But I don’t think they would have lasted. I didn’t yet have my one big story.
For that I needed the jungle.