Courage

“The old truths are no longer true.  Right spills over into wrong.  Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery.  In war you lose sense of the definite.”

Another relationship left out in the quote, is the tension between courage and cowardice.  When Elroy Berdahl takes Tim across the Canadian border, Tim must decide between swimming to the shore and avoiding the draft or staying in the boat and going to Vietnam.  Many consider serving one’s country an act of true courage, but when Tim decides to stay on the boat; the reader only gets the impression of cowardice, because as Tim describes it, “[he] couldn’t make [himself] be brave” and submitted himself (59).  In this situation, the implications of each option have been reversed.  Standing up for his desires against the insults of everybody he knows (real and imagined) and choosing the “cowardly” act of abandoning his country is an act of true courage.  While the inability to face the criticism of patriotism and submitting to his “courageous” duty of serving his country is the mark of a coward. 

In contrast, the desire to willingly do the "brave thing" does not make one a hero either.  In Rat’s story about the transformation of Mary Anne, Mary Anne becomes one of the Green Berets, soldiers who crawl through the jungle in the cover of night and conduct dangerous stealth missions.  Mary Anne, however, is no heroine, she’s a druggie for “that mix of unnamed terror and unnamed pleasure that comes as the needle slips in and you know you’re risking something” (114).  Mary Anne’s lack of fear makes her less human and more animal-like, a change reflected in her changing appearance and decreasing care for hygiene.  Eventually consumed by the forest, Mary Anne becomes, quite literally, a being of nature who acts out of instinct rather than courage. 

Then, what are the criteria for courage?  Doing the “right” thing, as Tim eventually does, does not make one brave.  At the same time, someone who can do the “brave” thing, such as Mary Anne, does not appear to be human or courageous, just crazy.  In the end, courage must be a mixture of correct action and fear.  A courageous individual must have a certain degree of fear for what must be done but also a sense of courage/conviction in what must be done (unlike Tim who simply submits to his role).  The issue of true courage is one of the many ways the reader is put on-notice that they must withdraw any preconceived notions about the meanings associated with words in order to fully understand this book.