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Doing nothing might prevent doing stupid
Published 12:00pm Tuesday, March 6, 2007“Doing nothing is better than doing something really stupid.” Or so goes one rather popular but shallow analysis of human effort.
Mom had the opposite theorem: “Do something; you’ll feel better.” This was often uttered as a medical curative to our various ailments as we were growing up; as in, for example, when we were coming down with a cold, or something similar, and whining about it.
It may or may not have resulted in our feeling better—and it certainly stuck with me for life, as it became obvious that time was going to pass by at the same rate whether or not we were feeling good—but it got us out from under foot, out of whining range of our mother’s ears.
In the Army, there was quite often the opportunity to witness young soldiers testing both of the above theories. At Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, where I was stationed before I went to Vietnam, a young E-4 back from Nam refused to salute a couple of captains when he met them on a sidewalk coming back from the mess hall. His Article 15 was to commence in the morning of the next day, so he told me.
“So how come you didn’t salute them?” I asked him, really curious as to why he would reverse the above rule and actively do nothing when the nothing he was doing was really stupid.
He’d been in the Army more than two years; had been in Nam; and apparently considered everything now in this Army on this side of the world at this point in time after what he’d gone through over there as some kind of big empty joke.
“I didn’t feel like it” was his reply. Upon further quizzing, it turned out that he’d actually been an E-5, and had previously demonstrated similar behavior, again toward an officer. “Heck,” he said, “what I do here doesn’t have anything to do with reality.”
Apparently not to him, anyway. It didn’t seem a good time to point out that he had just sacrificed a couple hundred bucks in pay during the months he had left to serve because he didn’t feel like it. You can’t spend reality.
Maybe more to the point was his age: he wasn’t 20 years old yet.
So the doing nothing rule is now: Doing something is better than doing nothing when the nothing you’re doing is really stupid.
Except for one time when I was sitting on top of a weary sandbag bunker out on the perimeter of the combat base one afternoon, only hours away from this 24-hour duty being over. It was a glorious Vietnam afternoon, one of many if one were to consider only the weather, the weather, that is, during the dry season.
Vietnam was such an immeasurably fertile and beautiful place, where weeds could grow to six feet tall in a week, and vines could completely blot out a sandbag wall, were one to allow it.
I sat on the bunker, and thought about the above saying, in 1969, a lifetime ago, not thinking then that now, almost 40 years later, I would sit down and crank out 750 words to illustrate it more fully.
It was with relief that afternoon as I faced the afternoon sun, because I had managed to stay awake for the last 36 hours, the staying awake part necessary because the 18- and 19-year-olds with whom I shared this duty, with no apparent sense of their own vulnerability, would sleep on guard duty as well as not. That they did so not only in total disregard of the penalties involved were they caught but in denial of the risk to their — and my — survival was preposterously shortsighted.
At that moment, from out of the jungle about 25 meters in front of me emerged a young GI, his M-16 dangling from one hand, a soft cloth hat on his head, and a battle pack on his back. He walked toward me, up to the point where the elephant wire and Claymores stopped him, and asked me: “Hey. Where’s Quang Tri village?”
I pointed speechlessly off to the left, and thought to myself, “What the ####!” First, the village was somewhat famous for a couple of places where daughter-sans served alcohol and themselves to GI’s. Second, it was equally off-limits, some young carefree soldier having gotten his throat cut there recently.
But that’s begging the issue here, which was, you didn’t just walk out of a jungle in plain sight of a war being fought by 18- and 19-year-olds.
He was just as likely to have been shot by his own as not.
That’s assuming you should be wandering around alone in the first place.
A couple of minutes after turning back into the jungle, a huge small arms exchange broke out. It was easy to pick out the AK-47s from the M-16s. The AK was slower on automatic, and very choppy sounding.
Then all was silent.
Moral of the story: If we could stick to doing nothing instead of doing stupid, we would have been in neither Vietnam or Iraq.
