The best-ever war story

A war story popped into my head this morning as I was waking up and deciding to get out of bed.

In Dispatches, Michael Herr says this is the best war story ever: A five-man LRRP patrol left a 1st Cav base camp for a five-day patrol. One of the patrol members staggered back into the base camp after three days, but he died before he could tell what happened.

That is a pretty good war story, but it is not the best-ever war story. Admittedly, deciding which of millions of war stories is the best is completely subjective. There can be no objective determination of the best.

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien has a chapter entitled “How to Tell a Good War Story.” That means how a hearer should determine whether a war story is a good story or bad. A good war story, O’Brien says, does not have a moral. There is no lesson learned. There are words, as few as necessary to tell the story, then “BAM!” the story is done. And, O’Brien says, at the conclusion of a good war story, no one can say “What happened then?” There can be no questions.

Here is maybe the first war story I heard in Vietnam, probably in December 1966. An armored cavalry troop on a clearing operation near the 11th Armored Cavalry base camp ran into a Viet Cong bunker complex. ACAVs and a couple of supporting tanks returned fire, quickly taking out all bunkers but one. Viet Cong inside the one bunker continued firing. Then, an M48 tank moved up to the bunker and placed the muzzle of its 90mm main gun as close to the firing aperture as possible. The gunner fired a high explosive round through the aperture. In the words of an observing soldier, “When that HE went off, man there was pieces of gook and shit all over the place.” No moral, no lesson learned, no question of “What happened then?”

Not a bad war story.

But here is the best-ever war story: In the summer of 1968, Sgt. William Mumford, late of the 193d Light Infantry Brigade walked up to me at Fort Meade, Md., and said: “We set up ambush on this canal and just after midnight this boat came down the canal and this woman opened up with an AK. I wasted that bitch, man. I wasted her.” And he walked off.