Lazy Summer Days and Review of If I Die In A Combat Zone

Today was one of those lazy summer days. The weather was still a bit chilly, but the sun had come out, so there were students out in force on the lawns, some lazing about, some reading. An attempt at croquet was made, involving leisurely strolling about, languidly knocking the coloured balls about. So I took out the bottle of white wine that had been chilling in the fridge, and some glasses, and my file full of political theory notes, and brought them down to the lawns, and sat there sipping my wine, watching the others loll about, attempting to ponder the topics of justice, and equality, and political obligation and power. There is just something about summer days that seem to make everything else pointless in comparison.

Currently reading: If I Die In A Combat Zone by Tim O'Brien. It is an account of the author's time as a foot soldier in Vietnam, and it is marvellously lyrical account that is at once brutally real yet achingly beautiful. Certainly for me, as someone who has been conscripted, there is much I can identify with (though I never did see combat as he did.) One passage in particular stands out, as the author speaks of his struggles in deciding whether to allow himself to be conscripted: "But I submitted. All of the personal history, all the midnight conversations and books and beliefs and learning were crumpled by abstentation, exstinguished by forfeiture, by a sort of sleepwalking default. It was no decision, no chain of ideas or reasons that steered me into the war." Tim O'Brien is a definite master of evocating the minute details of the foot soldier's life in Vietnam - from the fear of stepping on landmines, the heat, night ambushes, indeterminable waits, he has a fine ear for dialogue, for the right mixture of description and self-reflection.

His book however is not a justification. As he himself says, he would have felt good to make this a moral lesson, a warning to his brother and others to say no to wars and other battles, but with his the lucid circumspection that is the hallmark of his book he notes: "can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories." This, Tim O'Brien certainly does very well indeed.