Death and the Mystical Experience

Displacement and The Trauma Of War

After surviving war, the displacement felt by returning American Vietnam Veterans is both mental and physical, with many unable to fully return home. Through Andrew Lam's "Slingshot", Louise Erdrich's “The Red Convertible" and Karl Marlantes’ What it’s Like to Go to War, we witness how the trauma of war surpasses all bounds, leaving its veterans with a deep sense of lasting displacement. The effects of this alienation on their psyche can be serious and long-term, leaving them permanently detached from any sense of home or safety, features that had once been so familiar before going to war. The futility of returning home is symbolized in the broken urn carrying a father’s ashes, destroyed on the point of delivery, in Lam’s “Slingshot.” Yet, Marlantes gives a higher sense of mortality by linking death to holiness at the outset of What it is Like to Go to War. Death becomes a passageway to another world—a spiritual world—and perhaps the true home of the soul that leaves the traumatized body in this world. The returning Vietnam Veterans of these stories cannot return home to their earthly home—but they do leave this world for another home—one that has no end on the other side. These veterans of war are displaced from this world by the violence of war—their spirits can no longer be held in a place where the humanity has become inhuman, and thus they invariably seek release.

Tam’s “Slingshot” begins like an innocent story about mischievous children pretending to be killers with a slingshot. It unexpectedly morphs into a real life slap in the face about actual killers—soldiers in Vietnam—who killed and were killed, and it was no game. The father of the girl is brought home—or rather his ashes are brought home: he was one who knew the reality of violence, the reality of war, for he lost his life in Vietnam. Thus, what begins as a story about children pretending to kill with a slingshot becomes a horrific realization that killing is no pretend game: it is a fact of life, from which one cannot really ever escape or fully comprehend. That is why the story ends with the girl waving at the broken urn, over and over again, as though welcoming her father home, “unable to say a thing” (Lam). But what the girl is really doing is this: she is waving goodbye to her father from the other side of the grave. She is waving and waving, unable to do anything else because now the distance between them is too great to be bridged by anything physical.

This idea of being unable to return home from war is supported by Erdrich in “Red Convertible”—in which Stephan, a PoW is too traumatized to reconnect with his brother Marty, who tries to bond with Stephan over the red convertible that the brothers purchased before the war. Stephan ends up drowning in a river, and Marty rolls the car in after him, symbolizing the burial of something that is gone. In short, the living do not return from the war even if they look alive when they come back. The cry of Marty, “Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up!” (Erdrich) is symbolic of the inability of the past to reconnect with the present after the war puts people into a kind of zombie-like existence from which it is impossible to recover.

Marlantes shows the same idea in What It is Like to Go to War. Yet, he transcends the present by stating that “everything is touched by the holy when in the presence of death” as he watches a fish die (Marlantes 3). Marlantes describes this experience of watching death in these words: “In comes the spirit, out goes something holy, life perhaps, but I realized then that the ‘in’ and the ‘out’ are somehow the same thing…” (3). In other words, life and death are not really so disconnected; rather, death is a portal that takes one’s life to the other side of the grave, where the soul goes on to live, leaving on this side of the grave the mortal remains. In this sense, the stories about Vietnam veterans unable to return home are not actually about an inability to return home; rather, they are about an inability to remain here: these are souls that are called to the other side, for this world no longer can be called their home.

It is trauma in one sense that triggers this call—this insistence upon transferring from one place to another. For Stephen, for instance, the trauma of war and of being a prisoner of war, is what eventually triggers the separation of his spirit from this mortal place. No physical thing can have any bearing or claim to him—not his “home” nor the car that he and his brother purchased. Those things can do nothing for the spirit. The spirit has to escape and find its spiritual home. The water in which he drowns represents the spirit washing him away.

Marlantes states, “Many will argue there is nothing remotely spiritual in combat,” before arguing the point with the reader (7). His point is this: “Mystical or religious experiences have four common components: constant awareness of one’s own inevitable death, total focus on the present moment, the valuing of other people’s lives above one’s own, and being part of a larger religious community such as the Sangha, unmah, or church” (Marlantes 7). He then states, “All four of these exist in combat” (7). In other words, one’s platoon is like one’s church to which one belongs. One confronts death every day. One has to be totally focused on the moment because it is the difference between the continuation of life on this planet and the separation of body from soul that is called death. One has to value one’s platoon brother even more highly than one values one’s own life, because the platoon does not work without self-sacrifice. Marlantes does make one caveat, however, which is this: “The mystic sees heaven and the warrior sees hell” (8). Marlantes speaks from experience: he describes how he had a mystical experience at the age of 15 and how “both it and combat put me into a different relationship with ordinary life and eternity” (8). The different relationship is what this paper has been arguing is really going on in these stories: the veterans are not incapable of returning home—rather, they have a different relationship with the place that is called home: they can no longer be as connected to it as they once were.

For instance, Stephen’s Indian war dance just before drowning is a kind of spiritual act—a reflection of the fact that he is not who he is or at least was: he has changed and now it is time for him to go. Death by drowning separates spirit and flesh. The water is like a washing away of self, of past. The urn in “Slingshot” is another example of what is going on: it carries the ashes of the past, of the father—but it is not the father—it is only what is left behind once spirit has departed.

It is not necessarily a happy vision of spirituality—but the point that Marlantes makes is that combat and mysticism are not necessarily happy visions. He asks the reader, for example, to consider Calvary—the place where Christ was crucified, and a place that is memorialized by all Christians who wear a cross or hang a crucifix in their homes. It is a grisly scene—a place of supreme torture and pain—a place in which soul and body separate. Yet it is a place of incredible devotion, a scene in which suffering brings about a new awareness. Marlantes concludes that “combat is precisely such a situation” (8). Combat and war are likened to a mystical experience due to the heightened awareness and singularity of emotions that soldiers feel in the face of death. In fact, combat shifts one’s sense of time and space as well as one’s understanding of life and death. As soldiers grapple with fear, anticipation and courage, they are hyper-focused on the present moment instead of long-term outcomes or tactics. This experience distills life down to its most basic moments—an adrenaline-filled split-second when life is balanced on the brink of preservation or destruction—enabling them to understand more deeply the stark reality of mortality; some come out of this period with a greater respect for life while others feel a deep disenchantment or cynicism about mankind. Some do not come out at all—like the father, whose ashes are brought “home” in an urn—or like Stephan who returns “home” in one sense but in another has already taken flight for the other side.

Displacement is, therefore, not necessarily a bad thing although it can seem like it is to those who are only watching from outside the experience. Displacement is as natural as everything else: for placement is really only temporary, and it is awareness of this fact the Marlantes describes as the mystical or religious experience that is so often experienced in combat.